Q&A with Rachel Peterson

From my Q&A with Rachel Peterson, author of Killing Sadie:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Now this is a juicy question! The title of Killing Sadie is, at first glance, a pretty obvious summary of the novel. But just like our unreliable teenage narrators and the twisty lies they tell to the police and themselves, nothing is quite as straightforward as it seems. The title is designed to pull readers in immediately with what happened. But the truly unexpected and shocking question that matters most as readers dive into the world of Sadie Cooper is … why.

What's in a name?

The names I choose for our cast of characters in Killing Sadie are...[read on]

Visit Rachel Peterson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Killing Sadie.

Writers Read: Rachel Peterson.

Q&A with Rachel Peterson.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jon St. Denis reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jon St. Denis, author of Killer Art: A Novel.

His entry begins:

I am spending the summer months in Hong Kong as usual and while here I always try to fill in some of my many blank spots in Chinese history and culture. This summer I am finally digging into a book I have long been looking forward to reading, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt.

This is a great read, filled with a legion of characters on the British, American, and Chinese sides of what became a deciding event in the creation of modern China.

At the time, the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, China was the fourth- largest empire in world history, a respected and wealthy land under the Qing (the ‘Q’ is pronounced like ‘ch’) dynasty. However, by the early nineteenth century, that Empire...[read on]

About Killer Art, from the publisher:

A pair of newbie academics find themselves reluctant sleuths and even more reluctant targets when a fellow professor turns up dead.

When art professor Vika Chen discovers the strangled body of Professor McGuire in a campus art studio, she becomes the prime suspect in a murder connected to an exhibition exposing AI-generated art.

Since local law enforcement fails to find any optional leads, Vika and her partner, journalism professor Sam Worthing, take the investigation into their own hands. Vika, who until recently worked as a curator at MoMA, and Sam, a former crime reporter for the New York Times, find themselves uniquely suited for the job.

Much to the chagrin of the police chief, the pair’s investigation pinpoints multiple suspects who might have felt threatened by the exhibition. But the stakes become deadly when someone tries to run Vika off the road.

As more bodies pile up, Vika and Sam uncover a collage of secrets that someone would kill to keep buried.

Visit Jon St. Denis's website.

The Page 69 Test: Killer Art.

Writers Read: Jon St. Denis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that inspired Emily Wilson’s translation of the "Odyssey"

Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has published four books on ancient literature, philosophy and translation, an edited volume on tragedy, and many essays and articles, as well as verse translations of Seneca, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer.

For Vogue Wilson tagged five books that aided her translation of the Odyssey. One title on her list:

War Music by Christopher Logue

Logue was a jack-of-all-trades who knew no Greek, and yet managed to create a pretty amazing set of poetic riffs on the Iliad, designed in the first instance for oral performance on the radio. I read this (like [A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K.] Le Guin) at a formative age, and Logue helped inform my sense of what I might be able to do to evoke the energy of Homeric similes and a sense of the specifically Homeric sublime, without the padding and verbosity that have plagued many twentieth and twenty-first century translations.

Read about another book on Wilson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Carol Lin's "When News Breaks"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: When News Breaks: A Memoir of Love and War by Carol Lin.

About the book, from the publisher:

CNN anchor Carol Lin is at the height of her career after becoming the first network journalist to break the news of the 9/11 attacks.

A month later, she finds herself in the crosshairs of a Taliban sniper along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, a stark reminder of the sacrifices she made to succeed in a white-centric, male-dominated journalism career. For Lin, breaking news and the defining split second when lives change is a drug—and a love that her traditional Chinese mother warned would never love her back. But when devastating news breaks apart her own life, Lin is forced to question a career that demands everything, a marriage marked by infidelity and cancer, and the sacrifices required to become the mother her daughter needs her to be.

Told with fierce wit and candor, When News Breaks is the story of a woman who has been places and seen things but still has to discover who she really is behind the headlines.

Visit Carol Lin's website.

The Page 99 Test: When News Breaks.

--Marshal Zeringue