Margarita Engle's "The Lightning Dreamer," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Lightning Dreamer by Margarita Engle.

The entry begins:

As a Cuban-American poet, I love writing novels in verse about the island’s history. I feel most inspired when I am writing about someone who was far ahead of his/her own time, yet has been forgotten by history. My newest book is a biographical novel in verse about Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, one of the world’s earliest feminist/abolitionist writers. Celebrated during her lifetime, she is now practically unknown outside of Cuba, and deserves to be re-discovered. Unlike male abolitionists in Latin America, Avellaneda--also known by her childhood nickname, Tula--paired her pro-emancipation stance with a daring campaign against arranged marriage, which she viewed as the marketing of teenage girls.

Tula’s real life was as dramatic as her works of fiction. After refusing an arranged marriage, the young author was sent to a country estate as punishment for hysteria. There, she met the real people who inspired her interracial romance novel, Sab, which was published eleven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and was far more influential in Europe.

For a movie version of The Lightning Dreamer, I would choose...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Margarita Engle's website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Margarita Engle & Maggi and Chance.

My Book, The Movie: The Lightning Dreamer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free book: "Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots"

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away two copies (ie, one copy each to two winners) of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer.

HOW TO ENTER: (1) send an email to:

(2) In the subject line, type Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.

(3) Include your name (or alias or whatever you wish to be called if I email you to tell you you've won the book) in the body of the email.

[I will not sell or share your email address; nor will I be in touch with you unless it is to tell you you have won the book.  I promise.]

Contest closes on Tuesday, April 30th.

Only one entry per person, please.

Winner must have a US mailing address.

Learn more about Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.

Visit Jessica Soffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is James Thompson reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: James Thompson, author of Helsinki Blood.

His entry begins:

I’m researching my novel in progress, so these all get lumped together, a small library of tarot reading and magick. I’ll list them by level of difficulty:

Tarot for Beginners: A Practical Guide to Reading the Cards
Barbara Moore

Tarot Basics
Janet Boyer

The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
Arthur Edward Waite, Matthew Vossler, Pamela Colman Smith, Matthew Vossler, Pamela Colman Smith

The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites & Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order (Llewellyn's Golden Dawn)
Israel Regardie

Grimoire of Aleister Crowley
Rodney Orpheus, Lon Milo Duquette, Cathryn Orchard

I began studying the occult a decade ago, from an academic standpoint, while working on...[read on]

About Helsinki Blood, from the publisher:

A missing woman too unimportant to raise alarms . . . criminal masterminds too powerful to pursue. And when the system fails, Inspector Kari Vaara must dispense his own brand of justice.

Kari Vaara is recovering from the physical and emotional toll of solving the Lisbet Söderlund case when he’s approached with a plea: an Estonian woman begs him to find her daughter, Loviise, a young woman with Down syndrome who was promised work and a better life in Finland ... and has since disappeared.

One more missing girl is a drop in the barrel for a police department that is understaffed and overburdened, but for Kari, the case is personal: it’s a chance for redemption, to help the victims his failed black-ops unit was intended to save, and to prove to his estranged wife, Kate, that he’s still the man he once was. His search will lead him from the glittering world of Helsinki’s high-class clubs to the darkest circles of Finland’s underground trade in trafficked women ... and straight into the path of Loviise’s captors, who may be some of the most untouchable people in the country.

As Kari works his new case, a past one comes back to haunt him when powerful enemies return to settle unfinished business. In a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, he is propelled toward a reckoning in which the stakes are life or death ... and only the victors will be left standing.

Learn more about the book and author at James Thompson's website and blog. Helsinki Blood is the fourth novel in the Inspector Vaara series.

The Page 69 Test: Snow Angels.

The Page 69 Test: Helsinki White.

Writers Read: James Thompson (April 2012).

My Book, The Movie: Helsinki White.

Writers Read: James Thompson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alex Sayf Cummings's "Democracy of Sound"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century by Alex Sayf Cummings.

About the book, from the publisher:

It was a time when music fans copied and traded recordings without permission. An outraged music industry pushed Congress to pass anti-piracy legislation. Yes, that time is now; it was also the era of Napster in the 1990s, of cassette tapes in the 1970s, of reel-to-reel tapes in the 1950s, even the phonograph epoch of the 1930s. Piracy, it turns out, is as old as recorded music itself.

In Democracy of Sound, Alex Sayf Cummings uncovers the little-known history of music piracy and its sweeping effects on the definition of copyright in the United States. When copyright emerged, only visual material such as books and maps were thought to deserve protection; even musical compositions were not included until 1831. Once a performance could be captured on a wax cylinder or vinyl disc, profound questions arose over the meaning of intellectual property. Is only a written composition defined as a piece of art? If a singer performs a different interpretation of a song, is it a new and distinct work? Such questions have only grown more pressing with the rise of sampling and other forms of musical pastiche. Indeed, music has become the prime battleground between piracy and copyright. It is compact, making it easy to copy. And it is highly social, shared or traded through social networks--often networks that arise around music itself. But such networks also pose a counter-argument: as channels for copying and sharing sounds, they were instrumental in nourishing hip-hop and other new forms of music central to American culture today. Piracy is not always a bad thing.

An insightful and often entertaining look at the history of music piracy, Democracy of Sound offers invaluable background to one of the hot-button issues involving creativity and the law.

Learn more about Democracy of Sound at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Democracy of Sound.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable novels with sporting themes

Chad Harbach's novel is The Art of Fielding.

One of five top novels with sporting themes that he discussed with Alec Ash for The Browser:

You’ve chosen two books by DeLillo – the second is Underworld.

This is DeLillo’s big, thick novel which ranges over several decades of American history. It’s a book about waste, about trash, about what society sweeps under the rug. But it begins with a long overture set in perhaps the most famous professional baseball game of all time – “The Shot Heard Round The World,” the famous home run hit by Bobby Thomson in 1951. It’s an incredibly virtuosic piece of writing, that section. DeLillo becomes the Emersonian eyeball that is able to circulate not only through the game but through all the various spectators, and he paints a vivid picture of the scene in a beautiful, sinuous sort of way.

Don DeLillo understands sport better than most as a very American enactment of the religious impulse. He understands sport as an American ritual and religion, with moments of collective catharsis or hysteria. In another of his books, Mao II, there’s an amazing scene at the beginning in which a big and powerful cult has a mass marriage ceremony at Yankee stadium. He sees sport as a locus of American belief in a way that seems to me very true.

Read about another novel Harbach tagged at The Browser.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Conaway's "Nose," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Nose by James Conaway.

The entry begins:

When Nose is made into a film I'd like to see Alec Baldwin as Craven-Jones (if he can master an English accent) and...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at James Conaway's blog.

Writers Read: James Conaway.

My Book, The Movie: Nose.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free books

Book giveaways currently underway:

From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble by Ann B. Ross.

Dangerous Convictions: What's Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress by Tom Allen.

In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist by Pete Jordan.

One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea by Dana Becker.

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide by Michael Kardos.

The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn.

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss.

Constance Harding's (Rather) Startling Year by Ceri Radford.

Escape Theory by Margaux Froley.

Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough.

No purchase necessary.  No registration required.  Simply send an email for each book [click on the title(s) for the address] you'd like to win.  Deadlines vary.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Paula Champa reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Paula Champa, author of The Afterlife of Emerson Tang.

Her entry begins:

When I’m working on a piece of writing, nearly everything I read is related to the current project. Now that I’ve finished a long work and am free to roam, I’m excited to turn to a waiting stack of both classic and contemporary fiction, from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot to Alice Hoffman’s The Red Garden. First, though, I pushed everything aside to read musician Neil Young’s fascinating memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. The book was recommended to me by one of my sisters after she kept finding coincidental connections between some of the passion-projects Young is involved in —his ongoing work to develop an eco-friendly vehicle, the Linc-Volt, as well as an exhaustive effort to archive his artistic output in music and film — with the passions of the main character in my new novel (who is archiving a collection of modernist photography and is secretly involved in the development of a new, clean forms of transportation). I’m a child of the ‘60s and 70s and a fan of Young’s music, so I expected to be...[read on]

About  The Afterlife of Emerson Tang, from the publisher:

A beloved car becomes a piece of us—a way back into our histories or forward into our destinies. For Emerson Tang, the only son of a prominent New England family, that car is a 1954 Beacon. A collector—of art and experience—Emerson keeps his prized possession safely stored away. But when his health begins to fail, his archivist and caretaker is approached by a secretive French painter determined to buy the Beacon at any cost. They discover that the Beacon has been compromised and that its importance reaches far beyond Emerson’s own history.

Soon they run into another who shares their obsession: the heir to the ruined Beacon Motor Company, who is determined to restore his grandfather’s legacy. These four become unlikely adventurers, united in their aim to reunite the Beacon’s original body and engine, pitted against one another in their quest to claim it. Each new clue takes one closer to triumph, but also takes these characters, each grieving a deep loss, toward finding missing pieces of their own lives.

A fast-paced ride through the twentieth century—to modernism, fascism, and industrialism, to Manhattan, a German zeppelin, a famed concours in Pebble Beach, and a road race in Italy—The Afterlife of Emerson Tang takes us deep into our complicated automotive romance. A novel of strangers connected across time, through a car that is so much more than a car, it asks us what should be preserved, what memories to trust, and whether or not some of the legacies we hold most dear—including that grand contraption, the automobile—can be made new again.

Learn more about the book and author at Paula Champa's website.

Writers Read: Paula Champa.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Anne Latowsky's "Emperor of the World"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800-1229 by Anne A. Latowsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

Charlemagne never traveled farther east than Italy, but by the mid-tenth century a story had begun to circulate about the friendly alliances that the emperor had forged while visiting Jerusalem and Constantinople. This story gained wide currency throughout the Middle Ages, appearing frequently in chronicles, histories, imperial decrees, and hagiographies—even in stained-glass windows and vernacular verse and prose. In Emperor of the World, Anne A. Latowsky traces the curious history of this myth, revealing how the memory of the Frankish Emperor was manipulated to shape the institutions of kingship and empire in the High Middle Ages.

The legend incorporates apocalyptic themes such as the succession of world monarchies at the End of Days and the prophecy of the Last Roman Emperor. Charlemagne's apocryphal journey to the East increasingly resembled the eschatological final journey of the Last Emperor, who was expected to end his reign in Jerusalem after reuniting the Roman Empire prior to the Last Judgment. Instead of relinquishing his imperial dignity and handing the rule of a united Christendom over to God as predicted, this Charlemagne returns to the West to commence his reign. Latowsky finds that the writers who incorporated this legend did so to support, or in certain cases to criticize, the imperial pretentions of the regimes under which they wrote. New versions of the myth would resurface at times of transition and during periods marked by strong assertions of Roman-style imperial authority and conflict with the papacy, most notably during the reigns of Henry IV and Frederick Barbarossa. Latowsky removes Charlemagne’s encounters with the East from their long-presumed Crusading context and shows how a story that began as a rhetorical commonplace of imperial praise evolved over the centuries as an expression of Christian Roman universalism.

Learn more about Emperor of the World at the Cornell University Press website.

Anne Latowsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages at the University of South Florida.

The Page 99 Test: Emperor of the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable works of accidental theology

Christian Wiman's books include Every Riven Thing, winner of the Ambassador Book Award in poetry, and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. His new book is My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

In an interview with Christianity Today, he said: "I read a lot of theology, even though I am almost always frustrated by it. Thomas Merton once said that trying "to solve the problem of God" is like trying to see your own eyes. No doubt that's part of it. There is something absurd about formulating faith, systematizing God. I am usually more moved—and more moved toward God—by what one might call accidental theology, the best of which is often art, sometimes even determinedly secular art."

One of Wiman's five top works of accidental theology, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

Indivisible
by Fanny Howe (2000)

In a better world, Fanny Howe's masterpiece, "Indivisible," would be as well known as the works of Marilynne Robinson or Cormac McCarthy (to name two other novelists who could easily be on this list). The book is almost impossible to classify. It is a complex and propulsive story first: The narrator, a spiritual autodidact in extreme turmoil, locks her husband in a closet on the first page, and we don't learn why until the last chapter. It is literary criticism, studded with brain-shaking observations like this one, of Henry Adams: "He was an atheist but in the spirit of one who wants to protect God from himself." ("Himself" here is Adams.) Best of all, though, is the book's fusion of prayer and poetry, dangerous madness and redemptive mysticism: "I don't like the word 'worship' ... because it is idolatrous to separate yourself from God like that."

Read about another book on Wiman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sean Ferrell's "Man in the Empty Suit"

This weekend's feature at the Page 69 Test: Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Say you're a time traveler and you've already toured the entirety of human history. After a while, the outside world might lose a little of its luster. That's why this time traveler celebrates his birthday partying with himself. Every year, he travels to an abandoned hotel in New York City in 2071, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and drinks twelve-year-old Scotch (lots of it) with all the other versions of who he has been and who he will be. Sure, the party is the same year after year, but at least it's one party where he can really, well, be himself.

The year he turns 39, though, the party takes a stressful turn for the worse. Before he even makes it into the grand ballroom for a drink he encounters the body of his forty-year-old self, dead of a gunshot wound to the head. As the older versions of himself at the party point out, the onus is on him to figure out what went wrong--he has one year to stop himself from being murdered, or they're all goners. As he follows clues that he may or may not have willingly left for himself, he discovers rampant paranoia and suspicion among his younger selves, and a frightening conspiracy among the Elders. Most complicated of all is a haunting woman possibly named Lily who turns up at the party this year, the first person besides himself he's ever seen at the party. For the first time, he has something to lose. Here's hoping he can save some version of his own life.

Learn more about the book and author at Sean Ferrell's website.

The Page 69 Test: Man in the Empty Suit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Findlay's 6 best books

Deborah Findlay is an English actor whose film appearances include The End of the Affair (1999), Vanity Fair (2004), and Truly Madly Deeply (1990).

One of her six best books, as told to the Daily Express:

The Six Wives Of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

This is very readable and puts things into perspective. For example, Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon for ages and was very fond of her. If she’d given him a son he wouldn’t have gone on to do everything he did.

She describes Anne Boleyn as very studious and interested in politics. It is fascinating.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Amy Shearn reading?

Today's featured contributor at Writers Read: Amy Shearn, author of The Mermaid of Brooklyn.

Part of her entry:

When I was revising my novel I was also in the process of moving and also, you know, rearing my two small and very time-consuming children, and I just got so busy and found myself so tired all the time that this terrible thing happened: I had a reading drought. I’ve always thought of myself as a reader first, maybe before even a human, so this was truly catastrophic. I felt miserable and too inside my head all the time. Then some friends and I started a slow-readers’ book group, giving ourselves forgiving windows of time in which to finish books, even though we all were formerly voracious readers and felt that it shouldn’t take us months to finish a novel but there you had it. This book group saved me, and jumpstarted my reading for pleasure again.

Our first book was Girl Reading, a lovely and unusual novel from British writer Katie Ward. It’s really more of a linked story collection (not to quibble), all about the imagined stories behind famous images of girls and women reading. It’s one of those books that reminds you of...[read on]

About The Mermaid of Brooklyn, from the publisher:

SOMETIMES ALL YOU NEED IN LIFE IS A FABULOUS PAIR OF SHOES—AND A LITTLE HELP FROM A MERMAID.

Formerly an up-and-coming magazine editor, Jenny Lipkin is now your average, stretched-too-thin Brooklyn mom, tackling the challenges of raising two children in a cramped Park Slope walk-up. All she really wants is to survive the sweltering New York summer with a shred of sanity intact. But when her husband, Harry, vanishes one evening, Jenny reaches her breaking point. And in a moment of despair, a split-second decision changes her life forever.

Pulled from the brink by an unexpected ally, Jenny is forced to rethink her ideas about success, motherhood, romance, and relationships. But confronting her inner demons is no easy task....

Learn more about the book and author at Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Stuart Banner's "The Baseball Trust"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption by Stuart Banner.

About the book, from the publisher:

The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority of Americans have only the vaguest sense of what antitrust law is, most know one thing about it-that baseball is exempt.

In The Baseball Trust, legal historian Stuart Banner illuminates the series of court rulings that resulted in one of the most curious features of our legal system-baseball's exemption from antitrust law. A serious baseball fan, Banner provides a thoroughly entertaining history of the game as seen through the prism of an extraordinary series of courtroom battles, ranging from 1890 to the present. The book looks at such pivotal cases as the 1922 Supreme Court case which held that federal antitrust laws did not apply to baseball; the 1972 Flood v. Kuhn decision that declared that baseball is exempt even from state antitrust laws; and several cases from the 1950s, one involving boxing and the other football, that made clear that the exemption is only for baseball, not for sports in general. Banner reveals that for all the well-documented foibles of major league owners, baseball has consistently received and followed antitrust advice from leading lawyers, shrewd legal advice that eventually won for baseball a protected legal status enjoyed by no other industry in America.

As Banner tells this fascinating story, he also provides an important reminder of the path-dependent nature of the American legal system. At each step, judges and legislators made decisions that were perfectly sensible when considered one at a time, but that in total yielded an outcome-baseball's exemption from antitrust law-that makes no sense at all.

Learn more about The Baseball Trust at the Oxford University Press website.

Stuart Banner is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. His publications include American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own, Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On, and Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska.

The Page 99 Test: Who Owns the Sky?.

The Page 99 Test: The Baseball Trust.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 teen twin books

Penelope Bush is the author of Alice in Time, Diary of a Lottery Winner's Daughter, and, more recently, Me, Myself, Milly, which explores the dynamic between two identical twin sisters.

One of her top ten teen twin books, as told to the Guardian:

Linked by Imogen Howson

15-year-old Elissa has been haunted for years by pain and fear; emotions that don't seem to have anything to do with her or her otherwise untroubled life. This futuristic thriller is set in a world where twins don't exist, at least not legally, and when Elissa discovers that she was born a twin she sets out to find her sibling only to discover that her sister, or "spare" as the authorities have labelled her, has been living a very different existence. Can Elissa save her, against all the odds, or is her twin so damaged she is beyond help? Dubbed as The Bourne Identity meets Inception this YA thriller will appeal to older readers and fans of the Hunger Games and will be available in August [June in the US].

Read about another book on the list.

Also see John Mullan's list of ten of the best identical twins in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

D. A. Mishani's "The Missing File," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Missing File by D. A. Mishani.

The entry begins:

The setting of The Missing File is my Israeli home town, Holon, but it was written far away from there. I wrote my first detective novel, in which a teenage boy goes missing, in a small peaceful village in England during a long and very cold winter. And I think it was that cold weather, unfamiliar to an Israeli used to short warm winters, which made me look in Iceland, of all places, for the right music to listen to while writing.

That's how I discovered two musicians – young Cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir and composer and pianist Ólafur Arnalds. Their albums were the soundtrack of writing The Missing File and the first fantasy of how "The Missing File: the movie" would look like, or to be exact, would sound.

Their music is haunting. Guðnadóttir's cello is emerging from depth, as if from dark forests, and leaves you with an unsettling sense of fear, exactly like good crime novels do. Arnalds's piano is just as haunting, full of sadness and hope, as if reminiscent of a better world that once existed.

This was the first thing I knew (or imagined) about the adaptation of The Missing File. It should open with Arnald's "Lost Song", which would accompany my detective, Inspector Avraham Avraham's search for the missing boy, and would end with Guðnadóttir's "Unveiled", which erupts like a cry with the movie's last scenes, as the solution of the investigation is revealed.

The fact that my fantasy of the cinematic adaptation of the novel starts with the soundtrack is not coincidental. Although books fill my life in many ways - I not only write but also teach literature – I always thought cinema's advantage over the novel wasn't the moving true-image (a good novel can be just as descriptive) but the use of music.

Since one of my favorite cinematic moments is the final scene of David Fincher's Fight Club - the couple (Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter) hold hands while the whole world collapses to the sound of the Pixies singing "Where is my mind?" - I thought Fincher would be the perfect director for my novel, which also ends with a new couple facing a tragedy (Fincher also directed a great realistic thriller – Zodiac - and lately The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). But what about Martin...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at D. A. Mishani's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Missing File.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free books

Book giveaways currently underway:

From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble by Ann B. Ross.

Dangerous Convictions: What's Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress by Tom Allen.

In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist by Pete Jordan.

One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea by Dana Becker.

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide by Michael Kardos.

The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn.

Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman.

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss.

Constance Harding's (Rather) Startling Year by Ceri Radford.

Escape Theory by Margaux Froley.

Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough.

No purchase necessary.  No registration required.  Simply send an email for each book [click on the title(s) for the address] you'd like to win.  Deadlines vary.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Deborah Cohen reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Deborah Cohen, author of Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain.

Her entry begins:

I’m on sabbatical and between books, so plumbing the depths of disorganized reading. I’m spending some part of the day idling in travelers’ accounts of the nineteenth-century Argentine and more of it re-reading Agatha Christie’s greatest hits in order to figure out what people in Peoria (or Bremen) loved about her.

Amidst it all, though, there’s one book I keep coming back to: Lisa Cohen (no relation!)’s All We Know: Three Lives...[read on]

About Family Secrets, from the publisher:

We live today in a culture of full disclosure, where tell-all memoirs top the best-seller lists, transparency is lauded, and privacy seems imperiled. But how did we get here?

Exploring scores of previously sealed records, Family Secrets offers a sweeping account of how shame--and the relationship between secrecy and openness--has changed over the last two centuries in Britain. Deborah Cohen uses detailed sketches of individual families as the basis for comparing different sorts of social stigma. She takes readers inside an Edinburgh town house, where a genteel maiden frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip, a darkening shadow that might betray the girl's Eurasian heritage; to a Liverpool railway platform, where a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption; to a town in the Cotswolds, where a queer vicar brings to his bank vault a diary--sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment--that chronicles his sexual longings. Cohen explores what families in the past chose to keep secret and why. She excavates the tangled history of privacy and secrecy to explain why privacy is now viewed as a hallowed right while secrets are condemned as destructive.

In delving into the dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets explores the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors.

Learn more about the book and author at Deborah Cohen's website.

Writers Read: Deborah Cohen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Marcus Anthony Hunter's "Black Citymakers"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Black Citymakers: How "The Philadelphia Negro" Changed Urban America by Marcus Anthony Hunter.

About the book, from the publisher:

W.E.B. DuBois immortalized Philadelphia's Black Seventh Ward neighborhood, one of America's oldest urban black communities, in his 1899 sociological study The Philadelphia Negro. In the century after DuBois's study, however, the district has been transformed into a largely white upper middle class neighborhood.

Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward, documenting a century of banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led anti-urban renewal mobilization, and post-Civil Rights political change from the perspective of the Black Seventh Warders. Drawing on historical, political, and sociological research, Marcus Hunter argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere casualties of the large scale social and political changes that altered urban dynamics across the nation after World War II. Instead, Hunter shows that black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intra-racial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. These Philadelphians were not victims forced from their homes - they were citymakers and agents of urban change.

Black Citymakers explores a century of socioeconomic, cultural, and political history in the Black Seventh Ward, creating a new understanding of the political agency of black residents, leaders and activists in twentieth century urban change.

Learn more about Black Citymakers at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Black Citymakers.

--Marshal Zeringue

20 essential books about what's next in human evolution

Annalee Newitz at io9 came up with a list of twenty essential books about the next step in human evolution.

One entry on the list:

The Nanotech Quartet, by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Like [Linda] Nagata's novel [The Bohr Maker], the four books in Goonan's celebrated Nanotech Quartet focus on how humanity changes after strong nanotechnology allows us to reshape ourselves and the landscape using complicated programs. As a result, our cities become massive life forms, with buildings that grow like flowers. And humans are all too vulnerable to computer viruses that treat everything as data, including our bodies and minds.

Read about another novel on the list.

Writers Read: Kathleen Ann Goonan (August 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Lisa Black's "Blunt Impact"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Blunt Impact by Lisa Black.

About Blunt Impact, from the publisher:

Forensic scientist Theresa MacLean is puzzled by the questionable death of a female construction worker at a Cleveland building site. A witness to the death - a young girl nicknamed Ghost - may be able to help. Ghost says the woman was pushed by someone she can only identify as the Shadow Man. Soon Theresa finds herself in a race against time to protect Ghost from an unknown killer before he is able to find the little girl and silence her for good.

Learn more about the book and author at Lisa Black's website.

Black's previous Theresa MacLean novels include Trail of Blood and Defensive Wounds.

My Book, The Movie: Trail of Blood.

The Page 69 Test: Trail of Blood.

Writers Read: Lisa Black (September 2010).

My Book, The Movie: Defensive Wounds.

The Page 69 Test: Defensive Wounds.

Writers Read: Lisa Black (October 2011).

Writers Read: Lisa Black.

My Book, The Movie: Blunt Impact.

The Page 69 Test: Blunt Impact.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free book: "From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha"

The University of Chicago Press and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

HOW TO ENTER: (1) send an email to this address:

(2) In the subject line, type From Stone to Flesh.

(3) Include your name (or alias or whatever you wish to be called if I email you to tell you you've won the book) in the body of the email.

[I will not sell or share your email address; nor will I be in touch with you unless it is to tell you you have won the book.  I promise.]

Contest closes on Friday, April 26th.

Only one entry per person, please.

Winner must have a US mailing address.

Read more about From Stone to Flesh at The University of Chicago Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaux Froley's "Escape Theory," the TV show

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Escape Theory by Margaux Froley.

The entry begins:

I always imagined Escape Theory as a TV show while I wrote it. Since that's more of my background, that's where my head goes more easily. The first five chapters or so of the book would be almost the pilot episode, with a few adjustments along the way. While I was writing the early drafts of Escape Theory, The Killing was in its first season on AMC, so tonally I was heavily influenced by The Killing. In terms of actors, I imagined people like Dave Franco as Hutch and Lily...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Margaux Froley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Escape Theory.

My Book, The Movie: Escape Theory.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jeanine Cummins reading?

Today's featured contributor at Writers Read: Jeanine Cummins, author of The Crooked Branch.

Her entry begins:

I recently picked up Mary Beth Keane’s Fever, and it is a remarkable book – a thoughtful historical novel about the Irish American immigrant known as “Typhoid Mary.” Keane has done an astonishing job of recreating the detail and texture of New York City in the early nineteen hundreds, but even more impressive to me is how the author has managed to get inside the mind of Mary Mallon. In this telling, Mary Mallon is an entirely...[read on]

About The Crooked Branch, from the publisher:

From the national bestselling and highly acclaimed author of The Outside Boy comes the deeply moving story of two mothers—witty, self-deprecating Majella, who is shocked by her entry into motherhood in modern-day New York, and her ancestor, tough and terrified Ginny Doyle, whose battles are more fundamental: she must keep her young family alive during Ireland’s Great Famine.

After the birth of her daughter Emma, the usually resilient Majella finds herself feeling isolated and exhausted. Then, at her childhood home in Queens, Majella discovers the diary of her maternal ancestor Ginny—and is shocked to read a story of murder in her family history.

With the famine upon her, Ginny Doyle fled from Ireland to America, but not all of her family made it. What happened during those harrowing years, and why does Ginny call herself a killer? Is Majella genetically fated to be a bad mother, despite the fierce tenderness she feels for her baby? Determined to uncover the truth of her heritage and her own identity, Majella sets out to explore Ginny’s past—and discovers surprising truths about her family and ultimately, herself.

Learn more about the book and author at Jeanine Cummins's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Crooked Branch.

My Book, The Movie: The Crooked Branch.

Writers Read: Jeanine Cummins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Monte Reel's "Between Man and Beast"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World by Storm by Monte Reel.

About the book, from the publisher:

The unbelievably riveting adventure of an unlikely young explorer who emerged from the jungles of Africa with evidence of a mysterious, still mythical beast—the gorilla—only to stumble straight into the center of the biggest debate of the day: Darwin's theory of evolution

In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster. When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time—the evolution debate, racial discourse, the growth of Christian fundamentalism—and helped push each to unprecedented intensities. He experienced instant celebrity, but with that fame came whispers—about his past, his credibility, and his very identity—which would haunt the young man. Grand in scope, immediate in detail, and propulsively readable, Between Man and Beast brilliantly combines Du Chaillu's personal journey with the epic tale of a world hovering on the sharp edge of transformation.

Learn more about the book and author at Monte Reel's website.

The Page 99 Test: Between Man and Beast.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free book: "Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble"

Viking and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble by Ann B. Ross.

HOW TO ENTER: (1) send an email to this address:

(2) In the subject line, type Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble.

(3) Include your name (or alias or whatever you wish to be called if I email you to tell you you've won the book) in the body of the email.

[I will not sell or share your email address; nor will I be in touch with you unless it is to tell you you have won the book.  I promise.]

Contest closes on Friday, April 26th.

Only one entry per person, please.

Winner must have a US mailing address.

Read more about  Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble at Ann B. Ross's Miss Julia website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books set in Paris

Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books' City-Lit series, featuring writing on cities including Berlin, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Venice and Dublin.

For the Guardian, in 2011 he named ten of the best books set in Paris, including:

Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), 1831

As a visitor it's almost impossible not to see the splendid Notre-Dame Cathedral through the eyes of Victor Hugo and his creation Quasimodo.

"When, after groping your way lengthily up the gloomy spiral staircase, which rises vertically up through the thick wall of the bell towers, you abruptly emerged at last on to one of the two lofty platforms, flooded with air and daylight, a beautiful panorama unfolded itself …"
• Ile de la Cité, 4th arrondissement

Read about another novel on the list.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame appears among Jessica Duchen's top ten literary Gypsies and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best cathedrals in literature and ten of the best bells in literature.

Also see: Wai Chee Dimock's five top books on Hemingway in Paris and the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on Americans in Paris.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Robert J. Sawyer's "Red Planet Blues"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Alex Lomax is the one and only private eye working the mean streets of New Klondike, the Martian frontier town that sprang up forty years ago after Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly discovered fossils on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, where anything can be synthesized, the remains of alien life are the most valuable of all collectibles, so shiploads of desperate treasure hunters stampeded to Mars in the Great Martian Fossil Rush.

Trying to make an honest buck in a dishonest world, Lomax tracks down killers and kidnappers among the failed prospectors, corrupt cops, and a growing population of transfers—lucky stiffs who, after striking paleontological gold, upload their minds into immortal android bodies. But when he uncovers clues to solving the decades-old murders of Weingarten and O’Reilly, along with a journal that may lead to their legendary mother lode of Martian fossils, God only knows what he’ll dig up...

Learn more about the book and author at Robert J. Sawyer's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Wake.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Watch.

The Page 69 Test:: WWW: Wonder.

Writers Read: Robert Sawyer (April 2011).

The Page 69 Test: Triggers.

The Page 69 Test: Red Planet Blues.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free books

Book giveaways currently underway:

Dangerous Convictions: What's Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress by Tom Allen.

In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist by Pete Jordan.

One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea by Dana Becker.

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide by Michael Kardos.

Once Upon a Flock: Life with My Soulful Chickens by Lauren Scheuer.

The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn.

Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman.

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss.

Constance Harding's (Rather) Startling Year by Ceri Radford.

A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt--And Why They Shouldn't by William B. Irvine.

Escape Theory by Margaux Froley.

Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough.

No purchase necessary.  No registration required.  Simply send an email for each book [click on the title(s) for the address] you'd like to win.  Deadlines vary.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is James Conaway reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: James Conaway, author of Nose.

His entry begins:

I'm reading contemporary British fiction right now, probably because I'm working on a prequel to Nose, set in the late 'seventies, when the young wine critic, Clyde Craven-Jones, first comes to California and gets involved with a near-defunct wine-making family possibly bound for greatness, a kind of far-side of Downton Abbey. But I'm having serious trouble getting through Martin Amis's work, whose prose seems overly weighted with London low-life colloquialisms and is in no way elegant. Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth starts...[read on]

About Nose, from the publisher:

In a gorgeous wine valley in northern California, the economic downturn has put a number of dreams on hold. But not so for wine critic Clyde Craven-Jones, a man whose ego nearly surpasses his substantial girth. During a routine tasting in advance of his eponymous publication’s new issue, he blindly samples a selection of Cabernets. To his confounded delight, he discovers one bottle worthy of his highest score (a 20, on the Craven-Jones-on- Wine scale), an accolade he’s never before awarded.

But the bottle has no origin, no one seems to know how it appeared on his doorstep—and that's a problem for a critic who’s supposed to know everything. An investigation into the mystery Cabernet commences, led by the Clyde’s wife, Claire, and a couple of underdogs—one a determined throw-back to ancient viticulture, the other a wine-stained, Pygmalion-esque scribbler—who by wit and luck rise on incoming tides of money, notoriety, and, yes, love.

The stage is set for this true theater of the varietals—where the reader joins the local vinous glitterati and subterranean enthusiasts hanging out in a seedy bar called the Glass Act. Soon Clyde Craven-Jones finds himself in a compromised position in a fermentation tank, a prominent family finds its internal squabble a public scandal, and a lowly vintner seeks redemption for a decades-old wrongdoing. James Conaway's Nose is a witty, delectable, and fast-paced novel that, like a good Cabernet, only grows truly enjoyable once opened.

Learn more about the book and author at James Conway's blog.

Writers Read: James Conaway.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Clive Emsley's "Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Tests: Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914 by Clive Emsley.

About the book, from the publisher:

The belief that crime declines at the beginning of major wars, as young men are drawn into the armed forces, and increases with the restoration of peace, as brutalised veterans are released on to a labour market reorganising for peace, has a long pedigree in Britain. But it has rarely been examined critically and scarcely at all for the period of the two world wars of the twentieth century. This is the first serious investigation of criminal offending by members of the British armed forces both during and immediately after these wars. Its particular focus is the two world wars but, recognising the concerns and the problems voiced in recent years about veterans of the Falklands, the Gulf wars, and the campaign in Afghanistan, Clive Emsley concludes his narrative in the present.

Learn more about Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Tests: Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top novels about newspapers

For the Telegraph (U.K.), Sameer Rahim and Felicity Capon came up with ten great novels about newspapers, including:

The Ghost by Robert Harris (2007)

Robert Harris is a great thriller writer and a great newspaper man. (His books on the coverage of the Falklands War and the Sunday Times Hitler diaries fiasco are well worth reading.) His novel The Ghost, about a Blair-like ex-Prime Minister, combined both interests. Though it satirises modern political culture, it is also harsh on the media that connives with it. When the unnamed hack writing the ex-PM’s memoirs looks up two works on his subject – one “an early hagiography”, another “a recent hatchet job” – he finds the same person wrote them.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Bob Greene's five best books about writing for the newspaper.

The Ghost appears on Michael Dobbs's list of five great fictional prime ministers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Interview: Rawi Hage

Writer and professor Ray Taras interviewed author Rawi Hage about his new novel, Carnival.

The opening exchanges of the Q & A:

Taras: Was a “carnival city” necessary in order for you to narrate the stories you did in this novel? How indispensable is this location for the events you describe to take place?

Hage: Places are very conflicting to me, and my narrators often clash with the places they inhabit. I have an antagonistic relationship with cities. I maneuver better in cities and have always lived in them. And my characters are shaped by cities. Nature is not only foreign to them but even menacing. I criticize cities but I can’t get away from them.

Taras: One early review of Carnival speculates that the city described is New Orleans. Is that the case or is it somewhere else?

Hage: It is somewhere...[read on]

Read the complete interview.

Read more about Carnival at the W.W. Norton website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeanine Cummins's "The Crooked Branch," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins.

The entry begins:

When my memoir, A Rip in Heaven, came out in 2004, the publication generated a lot of film-rights interest , but I didn’t feel comfortable selling the movie option. I have no such qualms about my new novel, The Crooked Branch. I would love to see a film adaptation of this book. Here is my dream cast:

Majella – this is the contemporary female lead. Majella is a feisty, successful, thoroughly modern woman, who is struggling to find her way after the birth of her first daughter. Majella has a dark sense of humor and a potty-mouth, which are not the most agreeable characteristics for a new mama with a tiny, helpless, adorable little baby. So I think her character has to be played by someone who is incredibly likable no matter what, like Jennifer Garner, who, as far as I can tell, can do no wrong.

Ginny – this character is Majella’s ancestor, who is living during the famine years of the 1840s in western Ireland. I think it’s important for this woman to be played by an Irish actress. Ginny’s character is pretty naturally sympathetic, given her dire circumstances, and the impossible choices she faces, in trying to keep her children alive during the worst years of the potato famine. The part of Ginny should be played by someone who can perform acrobatics of nuance without evening opening her mouth. Someone like...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Jeanine Cummins's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Crooked Branch.

My Book, The Movie: The Crooked Branch.

--Marshal Zeringue