Mirta Ojito's "Deeper than the Ocean," the movie

New from My Book, The Movie: Deeper than the Ocean by Mirta Ojito.

The entry begins:

Oooh, I love this question! I’m a huge movie fan.

I didn’t think about actors when I was writing the book, but I did have images that inspired me. For example, for the two protagonists — Mara Denis and Catalina Quintana — I had pictures of what I wanted them to look like. With the picture of Mara, I cheated a bit. I used a photo of me circa 1992 that a friend took during a trip to Mexico. I was much younger then than the character I was writing about -a slightly cynical, deeply wounded journalist, who lost the love of her life at young age and was left alone caring for their child, a boy named Dylan. What I liked about the picture was that, in it, I look pensive and troubled, just like I imagined Mara to be.

The perfect actress for this role would be Juliette Binoche. Few actresses can convey as much inner turmoil as she does with the muscles of her face. It is a face that telegraphs pain and acceptance equally. And that is the Mara I created, a woman intent on unearthing a family secret so that she can understand her own life and conquer her fears.

The other protagonist is more complicated because she ages in the book. She is Catalina Quintana, the great grandmother Mara is looking for, and the keeper of a secret that haunted her family for generations. For inspiration I found a picture of a young woman with flowing red curly hair, which fit the description of the character, and kept it on my desk during the long years of writing. Two actresses would have to play her.

For the young, easily impressed, impulsive and stubborn Catalina, I’d say someone like Emma Stone, who looks far younger than her 36 years. For the older, resilient, strong but profoundly damaged Catalina...[read on]

Visit Mirta Ojito's website.

My Book, The Movie: Deeper than the Ocean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Derek Edyvane's "The Politics of Politeness"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Politics of Politeness: Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life by Derek Edyvane.

About the book, from the publisher:

Politeness is political. It is easy to disregard our everyday, street-level interactions and the politeness, or impoliteness, by which they are marked, but those interactions determine the quality of the social atmosphere we inhabit, and democracies cannot flourish without an atmosphere congenial to their ends. We must therefore enlarge our understanding of citizenship to encompass the democracy of everyday living, and we must learn to think politically about the dilemmas of politeness it presents.

The Politics of Politeness develops the first sustained account of 'ordinary citizenship'. Arguing for the political significance of everyday urban interactions, Edyvane proposes an interpretation of politeness as civility and as a key political practice for democracies. Against recent conceptualisations of polite civility as a 'communicative' virtue, the book elaborates an innovative 'ceremonial' account that takes seriously the ritual-like character of polite interaction, and its embeddedness in a larger civilisational discourse.

Drawing on an eclectic range of sources from empirical ethnography to novels and TV shows, the book offers a new perspective on familiar dilemmas of everyday politeness. What should you do when codes of manners embarrassingly clash? Should you say something when a shop assistant slights another customer, or should you mind your own business? How should you finesse awkward encounters with beggars and vagrants? And is there ever any place for rudeness in polite society? By treating these dilemmas as political problems, as problems of democratic citizenship, we gain fresh insight into them: into why they matter, and how to navigate them more wisely.

Learn more about The Politics of Politeness at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Politics of Politeness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five fresh literary takes on classic creatures

Leah Rachel von Essen is an editor, writer, and book reviewer. She is a copyeditor and fact-checker at Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as a contributing editor, Adult Books, for American Library Association’s magazine Booklist. She writes regularly for Chicago Review of Books and is a senior contributor at Book Riot.

At Book Riot she tagged five "stories [that] put an exciting new spin on the classic creature horror we all think we know, from vampires and zombies to sirens." One title on the list:

Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin

Saratov’s Syndrome is a fairly new problem for the world when Mia’s mother contracts it. Her mom now needs blood to survive, and she doesn’t trust the centers where vampires are being institutionalized, surveilled, and supported. So Mia becomes her mother’s support system instead, drawing blood so her mom can survive. She barely questions it for 13 years, giving her mom everything she has—her time, her social life, her ambitions. But then she meets a girl who makes her feel some kind of way, and she starts to wonder how long she can give her mother everything she has.

Read about another book on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Night's Edge.

--Marshal Zeringue