Pg. 69: Michael Shea's "The Extra"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: The Extra by Michael Shea.

About the book, from the publisher:

Books and films have skewered Hollywood's excesses, but none has ever portrayed one man's crazy vision of the future of big action/adventure films as The Extra does. As over-the-top as Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, as savagely dark as Robert Altman's The Player, and more violent than Rollerball, this is the story of the ultimate, so-insane-it-could-only-happen-in-Hollywood formula for success, a brave new way to bring the ultimate in excitement to the silver screen. Producer Val Margolian has found the motherlode of box-office gold with his new "live-death" films whose villains are extremely sophisticated, electronically controlled mechanical monsters. To give these live-action disaster films greater realism, he employs huge casts of extras, in addition to the stars. The large number of extras is important, because very few of them will survive the shoot.

It's all perfectly legal, with training for the extras and long, detailed contracts indemnifying the film company against liability for the extras' injury or death. But why would anyone be crazy enough to risk his or her life to be an extra in such a potentially deadly situation?

The extras do it because if they survive they'll be paid handsomely, and they can make even more if they destroy any of the animatronic monsters trying to stomp, chew, fry, or otherwise kill them. If they earn enough, they can move out of the Zoo--the vast slum that most of L.A. has become. They're fighting for a chance at a reasonable life. But first, they have to survive...

Read an excerpt from The Extra, and learn more about the book and author at Michael Shea's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Extra.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Howard Jones' "Blue and Gray Diplomacy"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations by Howard Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil.

Jones explores a number of themes, including the international economic and political dimensions of the war, the Norths attempts to block the South from winning foreign recognition as a nation, Napoleon III's meddling in the war and his attempt to restore French power in the New World, and the inability of Europeans to understand the interrelated nature of slavery and union, resulting in their tendency to interpret the war as a senseless struggle between a South too large and populous to have its independence denied and a North too obstinate to give up on the preservation of the Union. Most of all, Jones explores the horrible nature of a war that attracted outside involvement as much as it repelled it.

Written in a narrative style that relates the story as its participants saw it play out around them, Blue and Gray Diplomacy depicts the complex set of problems faced by policy makers from Richmond and Washington to London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.

Read more about Blue and Gray Diplomacy at the publisher's website.

Howard Jones is University Research Professor of History at the University of Alabama. His books include Mutiny on the Amistad, Death of a Generation, and The Bay of Pigs.

The Page 99 Test: The Bay of Pigs.

The Page 99 Test: Blue and Gray Diplomacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Susan Breen & Tino and Spencer

This weekend's featured trio at Coffee with a Canine: Susan Breen & Tino and Spencer.

Breen, on how they came together and the origin of the dogs' names:

I had a Golden Retriever growing up and knew I wanted one for my family. We got Tino from a breeder. Spencer, I have to confess, I saw in a pet store window. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him.

Tino is named for Tino Martinez, who was a first baseman for the Yankees at the time. Spencer is named for Shane Spencer, who was...[read on]

Susan Breen's novel, The Fiction Class, is the story of a woman's relationship with her ailing mother and the offbeat members of the creative writing workshop she leads. Among the praise for the novel:

“In this poignant, funny novel, a writing teacher, nearly 40 and single, is concerned not with romance or writing, but with her difficult, dying mother—until she teaches her mother to write.”
--MORE magazine, which named The Fiction Class a “Don’t Miss Book.”

“This is a delightful first novel written with genuine wit and personality.”
--Dennis Lythgoe, Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City, Utah)

Breen's short stories have been published by a number of literary magazines, among them American Literary Review and anderbo (which lists her story “Triplet” as an anderbo classic).

Visit Susan Breen's website and blog.

Writers Read: Susan Breen.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Susan Breen & Tino and Spencer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Donohoe's six best books

Amanda Donohoe played LA Law’s bisexual lawyer CJ Lamb on TV and appeared in such movies as The Madness of King George and Liar Liar.

She told Britain's Daily Express about her six best books. One title on the list:

His Dark Materials
by Phillip Pullman

I don’t think I’ve felt the same wow factor since I read The Chronicles Of Narnia as a child. I was obsessed with this and even threw the book across the room when he killed off a character I loved. It took me on totally unexpected and exhilarating flights of fancy.

Read about another book on Donohoe's list.

Also see: Forty favorite books: Philip Pullman.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Kristina Springer reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Kristina Springer, author of The Espressologist, her first novel, which was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in the fall of 2009.

Her entry begins:

I really like chick lit type of books-- both young adult and adult so I tend to grab material in that area- light, fun, romance. Right now I'm re-reading Kristin Walker's A Match Made in High School. I read it in ARC format a year or so ago and it was laugh-out loud funny so now that's it's been recently released I was excited to read it again. It's a super cute story about a teenager named Fiona who is forced to partake in a marriage project with a guy who is so totally and completely opposite from her. It's hysterical and everyone needs a...[read on]

Among the praise for The Espressologist:

I expected [The Espressologist] to be cute, (I mean, just look at the cover!) but I didn’t expect it to be down right amazing! It’s about a teen girl who works as a barista at a fictional “Starbucks”-esque coffee shop and has a knack for match making customers and friends based on their favorite coffee drinks. Kristina Springer is a fantastic new storyteller who is going to do great things. The writing is engaging and charming and humorous.
–Jessica Brody, author of Love Under Cover and The Fidelity Files

“Frothy, not too sweet and full of strong character and delicious flavor. Jane is a barista at a coffee shop and makes the connection between people’s drink styles and their love interests. In the style of Jane Austen’s Emma, Jane can make matches for everyone but herself. This is a wonderful romantic book with a new twist on the matchmaking theme.”
–KIWI magazine

“Springer has created a lovable, naive young woman in Jane, and even those who don’t drink java will enjoy the frothy story.”
—School Library Journal

Learn more about Kristina Springer and her books at her website and blog, and become a Facebook fan of The Espressologist.

Writers Read: Kristina Springer.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 14 best books you missed in the noughties

One title from The Daily Beast's list of the 14 best books you missed in the last decade:

The New Frontier
by Darwyn Cooke

Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier is Big News among comic-book fans, but it hasn't made the same leap into mainstream respectability as, say, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen. Maybe it's because, on the surface, it's the stuff of geek heaven: a tale that overlaps Golden Age superheroes, like Superman, Wonderwoman and Batman, with their Silver Age counterparts, Green Lantern and The Flash. But its scope is more wide-ranging than all of them. Like your typical episode of Mad Men, The New Frontier is really about the 1950s/60s America in which it's set; a melting pot of hope and paranoia. Oh, and Cooke's retro artwork is a treat.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

K. Rooney's "For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs by Kathleen Rooney.

The entry begins:

The movie of my book would be animated. Since it is a collection of 11 individual essays, I am the only character who appears in each one. I would like to be played by...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Rooney's website.

The Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl.

Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney.

The Page 99 Test: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

My Book, The Movie: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jeffrey Edward Green's "The Eyes of the People"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship by Jeffrey Edward Green.

About the book, from the publisher:

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say.

The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time.

In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers-including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others-Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control.

The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century.

The Page 99 Test: The Eyes of the People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Mark Greaney's "The Gray Man"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Gray Man by Mark Greaney.

About the book, from the publisher:

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man—a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness.

Now, he is going to prove that for him, there’s no gray area between killing for a living—and killing to stay alive.

Read an excerpt from The Gray Man, and learn more about the book and author at Mark Greaney's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Gray Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Trysh Travis reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Trysh Travis, author of The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey.

Her entry begins:

Having spent the last 8 years reading and writing about 12-Step recovery, I decided to wind down from my research by doing a little reading about addiction. I started off with David and Nic Sheff’s father-son memoirs about crystal meth: Beautiful Boy and Tweak.

The younger Sheff became addicted to meth in college after being a run of the mill adolescent partier. His father’s book ponders whether his frankness about his own youthful drug use and his lackadaisical attitude towards his son’s drinking and pot smoking in high school created the conditions for Nic’s devastating dependence on harder drugs later on. The books raise some interesting questions about “permissive” parenting in post-‘60s America: both come down hard on Sheff pere for having gotten divorced and subjected fils to a joint custody arrangement that had him spending summers and holidays with his working mother. Both seem to agree that the father tried too hard to be his son’s friend, denying him a “normal” childhood even as he...[read on]

Among the praise for The Language of the Heart:

"Tracing the rise and diffusion of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program from subculture to pop culture, Travis provides an excellent history of the recovery movement. Destined to be a landmark in the field."
--Joan D. Hedrick, Trinity College

"Travis's understanding of the recovery movement has profound implications for several established academic disciplines as well as for the incipient cross-disciplinary field of alcohol and addiction studies."
--John W. Crowley, University of Alabama

Read an excerpt from The Language of the Heart, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Trysh Travis is Assistant Professor & Undergraduate Coordinator at the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida.

Writers Read: Trysh Travis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 unreliable narrators

Henry Sutton's novels include the critically acclaimed Gorleston and The Housesitter, and the newly released Get Me Out of Here. For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of novels with unreliable narrators.

One book on the list:

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)

It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he's in possession of a secret he doesn't even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.

Read about another novel on Sutton's list.

The Killer Inside Me is also one of Alex Barclay's top 10 psychological thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Cressy's "Dangerous Talk"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England by David Cressy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dangerous Talk examines the "lewd, ungracious, detestable, opprobrious, and rebellious-sounding" speech of ordinary men and women who spoke scornfully of kings and queens. Eavesdropping on lost conversations, it reveals the expressions that got people into trouble, and follows the fate of some of the offenders. Introducing stories and characters previously unknown to history, David Cressy explores the contested zones where private words had public consequence. Though "words were but wind," as the proverb had it, malicious tongues caused social damage, seditious words challenged political authority, and treasonous speech imperiled the crown.

Royal regimes from the house of Plantagenet to the house of Hanover coped variously with "crimes of the tongue" and found ways to monitor talk they deemed dangerous. Their response involved policing and surveillance, judicial intervention, political propaganda, and the crafting of new law. In early Tudor times to speak ill of the monarch could risk execution. By the end of the Stuart era similar words could be dismissed with a shrug. This book traces the development of free speech across five centuries of popular political culture, and shows how scandalous, seditious and treasonable talk finally gained protection as "the birthright of an Englishman." The lively and accessible work of a prize-winning social historian, it offers fresh insight into pre-modern society, the politics of language, and the social impact of the law.

Read more about Dangerous Talk at the Oxford University Press website, and learn more about David Cressy and his scholarship at his faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Dangerous Talk.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Roger Smith's "Wake Up Dead"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

An amphetamine-fueled thriller about a bombshell American widow on the run in Cape Town’s violent badlands—from a writer being compared to George Pelecanos and Richard Price

A split-second decision with no second chance: get it wrong and you wake up dead.

On a blowtorch-hot night in Cape Town, American ex-model Roxy Palmer and her gunrunner husband, Joe, are carjacked, leaving Joe lying in a pool of blood. As the carjackers make their getaway, Roxy makes a fateful choice that changes her life forever.

Disco and Godwynn, the ghetto gangbangers who sped away in Joe’s convertible, will stop at nothing to track her down. Billy Afrika, a mixed-race ex-cop turned mercenary, won’t let her out of his sight because Joe owed him a chunk of money. And remorselessly hunting them all is Piper, a love-crazed psychopath determined to renew his vows with his jailhouse “wife,” Disco.

As these desperate lives collide and old debts are settled in blood, Roxy is caught in a wave of escalating violence in the beautiful and brutal African seaport. With savage plotting and breakneck suspense that ends in a shattering cataclysm of violence, Wake Up Dead confirms Roger Smith as one of the world’s best new thriller writers.

Watch the trailer for Wake Up Dead and read an excerpt from the novel.

Learn more about the book and author at Roger Smith's website.

Read about Roger Smith's top 10 crime novels.

The Page 69 Test: Mixed Blood.

The Page 69 Test: Wake Up Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ted Conover: six favorite road books

Ted Conover’s new book is The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.

For The Week magazine, he named six favorite road books. One title on the list:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac wrote this novel in the same year that The Catcher in the Rye was published, and some of the language feels as dated. But there is no purer expression in American culture of the energy and glory of road travel, of the possibility of transcendence through movement.

Read about another book on Conover's list.

Also see: John Leland's favorite road books and the Page 69 Test: John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of ‘On the Road’ (They’re Not What You Think).

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alan Allport's "Demobbed"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two by Alan Allport.

About the book, from the publisher:

What happened when millions of British servicemen were “demobbed”—demobilized—after World War II? Most had been absent for years, and the joy of arrival was often clouded with ambivalence, regrets, and fears. Returning soldiers faced both practical and psychological problems, from reasserting their place in the family home to rejoining a much-altered labor force. Civilians worried that their homecoming heroes had been barbarized by their experiences and would bring crime and violence back from the battlefield. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, newspapers, reports, novels, and films, Alan Allport illuminates the darker side of the homecoming experience for ex-servicemen, their families, and society at large—a gripping story that’s in danger of being lost to national memory.

Learn more about Demobbed and the author at the Yale University Press website and Alan Allport's website.

Alan Allport is a postdoctoral lecturer at Princeton University.

The Page 99 Test: Demobbed.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is John McFetridge reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: John McFetridge, author of the crime novels Dirty Sweet, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and the newly released Let It Ride [Canadian title: Swap].

His entry begins:

To get ready for James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, I read the first two books in the Underworld trilogy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. I love Ellroy’s writing, the staccato prose style fits the characters and the situations perfectly, draws me into the action completely. I also really like the way he mixes the real characters with the fictional and how he expects the reader to know the background of what’s going on (I had to look an awful lot of it up). I’m just about to start Blood’s a Rover ...[read on]

View the trailer for Let It Ride.

Among the early praise for Let It Ride/Swap:

"...an eye-opener... It’s high time we all stopped thinking of Toronto as a nice city."
—National Post

"He's a class act, and he's creating fictional classics — maybe even that great urban literature of Toronto the critics now and then long for."
—Joan Barfoot, London Free Press

"The pacing is hell on wheels -- sharp and bloody, with dialogue to match.... Authentic and riveting."
—Don Graves, The Hamilton Spectator

See McFetridge's Author Snapshot at January Magazine.

The Page 69 Test: Dirty Sweet.

The Page 69 Test: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

John McFetridge lives in Toronto and works as a staff writer for the TV cop show The Bridge, airing on CBS this fall. Learn more about the author and his work at John McFetridge's website and blog.

Writers Read: John McFetridge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best unfinished literary works

For the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best unfinished literary works.

One entry on the list:

The Trial by Franz Kafka

We are not used to thinking of Kafka's most famous novel as incomplete because he gave it one of the most justly famous final chapters in all fiction. "'Wie ein Hund,' sagte er ..." But in fact the novel was a collection of unfinished manuscript sections whose destruction Kafka ordered at his death.

Read about another book on the list.

The Trial is also one of Sam Taylor's top 10 books about forgetting.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Stephen Tuck's "We Ain't What We Ought To Be"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: We Ain't What We Ought To Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama by Stephen Tuck.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this exciting revisionist history, Stephen Tuck traces the black freedom struggle in all its diversity, from the first years of freedom during the Civil War to President Obama’s inauguration. As it moves from popular culture to high politics, from the Deep South to New England, the West Coast, and abroad, Tuck weaves gripping stories of ordinary black people—as well as celebrated figures—into the sweep of racial protest and social change. The drama unfolds from an armed march of longshoremen in post–Civil War Baltimore to Booker T. Washington’s founding of Tuskegee Institute; from the race riots following Jack Johnson’s “fight of the century” to Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus; and from the rise of hip hop to the journey of a black Louisiana grandmother to plead with the Tokyo directors of a multinational company to stop the dumping of toxic waste near her home.

We Ain’t What We Ought To Be rejects the traditional narrative that identifies the Southern non-violent civil rights movement as the focal point of the black freedom struggle. Instead, it explores the dynamic relationships between those seeking new freedoms and those looking to preserve racial hierarchies, and between grassroots activists and national leaders. As Tuck shows, strategies were ultimately contingent on the power of activists to protest amidst shifting economic and political circumstances in the U.S. and abroad. This book captures an extraordinary journey that speaks to all Americans—both past and future.

Learn more about We Ain't What We Ought To Be at the Harvard University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: We Ain't What We Ought To Be.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Joyce and Jim Lavene & Rudi

Today's feature at Coffee with a Canine: Joyce and Jim Lavene & Rudi.

Joyce Lavene, on how Rudi got his name and they were united, and how Rudi gets along with Quincy the cat:

We got him last Monday from the Stanly County Animal Rescue people. He was abandoned in the park. He's still a little nervous when we take him outside but he's adapting.
...
His name is short for either Rudolph the red nosed reindeer or ex-Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich. We're not sure about that yet.
...
Quincy ignores him for the most part. Rudi likes to run up to him and make little growling noises. It's become...[read on]

Joyce and Jim Lavene are really two people who write together, not just one disguising herself with two names. They have had over 40 books published, including the recently released Ghastly Glass from their Renaissance Faire Mystery series.

View the Ghastly Glass trailer, and learn more about the authors and their work at Joyce and Jim Lavene's website and the Carolina Conspiracy blog.

My Book, The Movie: Ghastly Glass.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Joyce and Jim Lavene & Rudi.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Elly Griffiths' "The Crossing Places"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths.

About the book, from the publisher:

When she's not digging up bones or other ancient objects, quirky, tart-tongued archaeologist Ruth Galloway lives happily alone in a remote area called Saltmarsh near Norfolk, land that was sacred to its Iron Age inhabitants - not quite earth, not quite sea.

When a child's bones are found on a desolate beach nearby, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson calls Galloway for help. Nelson thinks he has found the remains of Lucy Downey, a little girl who went missing ten years ago. Since her disappearance he has been receiving bizarre letters about her, letters with references to ritual and sacrifice.

The bones actually turn out to be two thousand years old, but Ruth is soon drawn into the Lucy Downey case and into the mind of the letter writer, who seems to have both archaeological knowledge and eerie psychic powers. Then another child goes missing and the hunt is on to find her. As the letter writer moves closer and the windswept Norfolk landscape exerts its power, Ruth finds herself in completely new territory - and in serious danger.

THE CROSSING PLACES marks the beginning of a captivating new crime series featuring an irresistible heroine.

Read an excerpt from The Crossing Places, and learn more about the book and author at Elly Griffiths' website.

The Crossing Places, the first Ruth Galloway novel, is new in US bookstores; the second, The Janus Stone, has just been released in the UK.

The Page 69 Test: The Crossing Places.

--Marshal Zeringue