Five best books about scandals

Henry E. Scott's Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, "America's Scandalous Scandal Magazine" was recently published by Pantheon.

He named his five favorite books on scandals for the Wall Street Journal. One book on the list:

The Informant
by Kurt Eichenwald

More than 5,000 book titles on Amazon include the word "scandal"—that says a lot about the theme's drawing power, but some of the best books on the subject are more subtly titled. Kurt Eichenwald's "The Informant" is a classic of corporate-scandal reportage, dissecting the 1990s price-fixing conspiracy by Archer Daniels Midland and overseas agricultural companies. The book reads like a John Grisham thriller as Eichenwald weaves the improbable story of Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive who became the FBI's secret source—and who turned out to be crooked, too. Who knew that a complex tale about an international plot to rig the prices of an animal-feed additive called lysine could be almost impossible to put down?

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Walter Greatshell reading?

Today's featured contributor at Writers Read: Walter Greatshell, author of Xombies: Apocalypticon and Xombies: Apocalypse Blues.

His entry begins:

Lately I've read two true accounts of 19th Century seafarers: White Jacket by Herman Melville, and Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. I don't know why I'm suddenly reading these things, which in the past I would have found pretty dry and technical, except that in recent years I've become much more interested in other authors' personal experiences, and how they record them. Maybe it has something to do with my growing awareness of my own mortality--eventually my writing will be all that's left to show who I was.

Melville was an ironic, literary guy, with a strongly-felt political agenda that comes through the material, while Dana was...[read on]

When not writing satirical horror novels, Walter Greatshell dabbles in freelance illustration (with an eye to creating dark children’s books, comics or graphic novels), humorous nonfiction (a throwback to his early days as a freelance journalist and arts critic), and stage acting (including in local productions of Oedipus Rex and Karel Capek’s R.U.R.).

Visit Walter Greatshell's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Xombies: Apocalypse Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Xombies: Apocalypticon.

Writers Read: Walter Greatshell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan Douglas's "Enlightened Sexism"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism's Work Is Done by Susan J. Douglas.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of Where the Girls Are, a sharp and irreverent critique of how women are portrayed in today’s popular culture

Women today are inundated with conflicting messages from the mass media: they must either be strong leaders in complete command or sex kittens obsessed with finding and pleasing a man. In Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas, one of America’s most entertaining and insightful cultural critics, takes readers on a spirited journey through the television programs, popular songs, movies, and news coverage of recent years, telling a story that is nothing less than the cultural biography of a new generation of American women.

Revisiting cultural touchstones from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Survivor to Desperate Housewives, Douglas uses wit and wisdom to expose these images of women as mere fantasies of female power, assuring women and girls that the battle for equality has been won, so there’s nothing wrong with resurrecting sexist stereotypes—all in good fun, of course. She shows that these portrayals not only distract us from the real-world challenges facing women today but also drive a wedge between baby-boom women and their “millennial” daughters.

In seeking to bridge this generation gap, Douglas makes the case for casting aside these retrograde messages, showing us how to decode the mixed messages that restrict the ambitions of women of all ages. And what makes Enlightened Sexism such a pleasure to read is Douglas’s unique voice, as she blends humor with insight and offers an empathetic and sisterly guide to the images so many women love and hate with equal measure.

Learn more about the book and author at the official Susan J. Douglas website.

Susan J. Douglas is the author of Where the Girls Are, The Mommy Myth, and other works of cultural history and criticism. She is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies and chair of the department at the University of Michigan, where she has taught since 1996.

The Page 99 Test: Enlightened Sexism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best women writing as men in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named a list of ten of the best women writing as men.

One book on the list:

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

The classic whodunit is narrated by Dr James Sheppard, who assists Poirot in investigating the mysterious deaths of Mrs Ferrars and Roger Ackroyd, the man who is expected to marry her. Why does Christie choose to write in the person of this minor character? Thereby hangs the tale...

Read about another book on the list.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is one of Lisa Scottoline's top 10 books about justice and appears on John Curran's top ten list of Agatha Christie mysteries.

See Mullan's list of ten of the best men writing as women in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Malena Watrous' "If You Follow Me"

This weekend's feature at the Page 69 Test: If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hoping to outpace her grief in the wake of her father's suicide, Marina has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. But in Japan, as she soon discovers, you can never really throw away your past ... or anything else, for that matter.

If You Follow Me is at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind of love story. Alive with vibrant and unforgettable characters—from an ambitious town matchmaker to a high school student-cum-rap artist wannabe with an addiction to self-tanning lotion—it guides readers over cultural bridges even as it celebrates the awkward, unlikely triumph of the human spirit.

Browse inside If You Follow Me, and learn more about the book and author at the official Malena Watrous website and blog.

Writers Read: Malena Watrous.

The Page 69 Test: If You Follow Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Dobbyn's "Frame Up," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Frame Up by John Dobbyn.

The entry begins:

My two primary characters are both criminal trial attorneys who were unwillingly thrown together in the first novel, Neon Dragon, and developed such a bond that by the end of that adventure in the inner-not-so-sanctum of the Boston Chinese tong they left their Boston firm and formed a two person partnership. The second novel takes them into the midst of a collision between the Boston mafia and a Russian organized crime group over stolen and forged art.

Michael is twenty-seven years old. He is a former prosecutor turned defense counsel who keeps to a true path on behalf of his clients, his profession, his partner, and himself - even when he has to bluff and lie to do it. He epitomizes John Wayne's definition of "courage." It is "being scared to death, and saddling up anyway."

The closest resemblance to type casting that I can come, knowing Michael inside and out, is my favorite Boston actor...[read on]

Learn more about the Devlin and Knight legal thrillers, Neon Dragon and Frame Up, at John Dobbyn's website.

John F. Dobbyn is a Professor of Law at Villanova Law School and the author of numerous legal books and short fiction. A native of Boston, he received his J.D. from Boston College Law School and LL.M. from Harvard Law School. He practiced law at Burns & Levinson in Boston before going into teaching.

My Book, The Movie: Frame Up.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Chelle Cordero reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Chelle Cordero, author of Common Bond, Tangled Hearts and other books and stories.

Her entry begins:

I admit, I have several “name” authors I enjoy reading (Dean Koontz, Faye Kellerman, Patricia Cornwell) but since I have been on the published author side, I’ve been made aware that there are a lot of enjoyable books from indie authors and publishers. I do tend to favor titles and authors from my publisher’s line-up (Vanilla Heart Publishing) and have read some really good stories from Charmaine Gordon, Smoky Trudeau, Sandy Nicks, Malcolm Campbell and L. E. Harvey. I favor VHP but don’t limit my reading…

I just finished a book by...[read on]

Chelle Cordero's romance novels include Bartlett’s Rule, Forgotten, Within the Law, Courage of the Heart, Hostage Heart, A Chaunce of Riches, and Common Bond, Tangled Hearts. Her murder-mystery thriller, Final Sin, was published in May 2009.

Visit Chelle Cordero's website and blog.

Writers Read: Chelle Cordero.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Khalil Gibran Muhammad's "The Condemnation of Blackness"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.

Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites—liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners—as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”?

The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Learn more about The Condemnation of Blackness at the Harvard University Press website.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Assistant Professor of History, Indiana University.

The Page 99 Test: The Condemnation of Blackness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Sonya Chung & Pax

This weekend's featured duo at Coffee with a Canine: Sonya Chung and Pax.

Chung, on how she and Pax were united:

Pax came from a Rottweiller rescue organization in eastern WA state, he was about 5 months old. He lived with a foster family for a long time; because he’s a mixed breed and doesn’t look like a “real” Rottweiller, no one wanted him. Can you imagine? The foster mom said that he and his sister were the only two escapees from a farm that went bankrupt; the farmer shot all the dogs. Pax and Jasmyn were found wandering in the woods. Jasmyn was adopted by a lovely woman who...[read on]

Chung's first novel, Long for This World, has just been released by Scribner. It’s the story of a female war photographer who is forced to take a break from her workaholic life to face her own emotional and relational life. The novel spans the globe — New York, Korea, Darfur, Iraq, Syria — but is essentially an intimate family story.

Among the early praise for Long for This World:

“An intricately structured and powerfully resonant portrait of lives lived at the crossroads of culture, and a family torn between the old world and the new, Long for This World marks a powerful debut from a young writer of great talent and promise.”
–Kate Walbert, National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of Women

Visit Sonya Chung's website and become a Facebook fan of her work.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Sonya Chung and Pax.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lorraine Adams' best books

Lorraine Adams was educated at Princeton University and was a graduate fellow at Columbia University, where she received a master’s degree in literature. A staff writer for the Washington Post for 11 years, she won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Her new novel is The Room and the Chair.

Adams named her six best books for The Week magazine. One book on her list:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigeria’s Biafran civil war is the subject of Adichie’s 2006 novel, a patient and intimate portrait of lives disrupted by atrocity and armed conflict. I was impressed by its poise: Adichie demonstrates just how convincingly a woman can write about war.

Read about another book on Adams' list.

Learn about the book that changed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's life.

See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's list of her favorite contemporary short-story collections.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Adam Haslett's "Union Atlantic"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett.

About the book, from the publisher:

The eagerly anticipated debut novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist You Are Not a Stranger Here: a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century.

At the heart of Union Atlantic lies a test of wills between a young banker, Doug Fanning, and a retired schoolteacher, Charlotte Graves, whose two dogs have begun to speak to her. When Doug builds an ostentatious mansion on land that Charlotte's grandfather donated to the town of Finden, Massachusetts, she determines to oust him in court. As a senior manager of Union Atlantic bank, a major financial conglomerate, Doug is embroiled in the company's struggle to remain afloat. It is Charlotte's brother, Henry Graves, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, who must keep a watchful eye on Union Atlantic and the entire financial system. Drawn into Doug and Charlotte's intensifying conflict is Nate Fuller, a troubled high-school senior who unwittingly stirs powerful emotions in each of them.

Irresistibly complex, imaginative, and witty, Union Atlantic is a singular work of fiction that is sure to be read and reread long after it causes a sensation this spring.

Read an excerpt from Union Atlantic, and learn more about the book and author at Adam Haslett's website.

Adam Haslett is the author of You Are Not A Stranger Here, a short story collection, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and won the PEN/Winship Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Zoetrope, and Best American Short Stories as well as National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts.

The Page 69 Test: Union Atlantic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 wicked clerics

Paul Murray's first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread prize in 2003. The Irish writer has just published his second novel, Skippy Dies.

For the Guardian, he named a ten best list of the worst fictional clergymen.

One cleric on the list:

William Collins in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Mr Collins is one of Austen's most brilliant creations, and his proposal to Elizabeth Bennet is a comic tour de force. After setting out his reasons — good example to his flock; vague sense of altruism; really though because his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, has told him to — he assures Elizabeth of the violence of his affections. When she refuses him, he refuses, in turn, to believe her, pointing out that this is probably the only chance she will get. Two days later, he proposes to, and is accepted by, her more calculating friend Charlotte.

Read about another cleric on the list.

Pride and Prejudice also appears on John Mullan's list of ten great novels with terrible original titles, Luke Leitch's top ten list of the most successful literary sequels ever, and is one of the top ten works of literature according to Norman Mailer. Richard Price has never read it, but it is the book Mary Gordon cares most about sharing with her children.

The Page 99 Test: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Japonica Brown-Saracino's "A Neighborhood That Never Changes"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity by Japonica Brown-Saracino.

About the book, from the publisher:

Newcomers to older neighborhoods are usually perceived as destructive, tearing down everything that made the place special and attractive. But as A Neighborhood That Never Changes demonstrates, many gentrifiers seek to preserve the authentic local flavor of their new homes, rather than ruthlessly remake them. Drawing on ethnographic research in four distinct communities—the Chicago neighborhoods of Andersonville and Argyle and the New England towns of Provincetown and Dresden—Japonica Brown-Saracino paints a colorful portrait of how residents new and old, from wealthy gay homeowners to Portuguese fishermen, think about gentrification.

The new breed of gentrifiers, Brown-Saracino finds, exhibits an acute self-consciousness about their role in the process and works to minimize gentrification’s risks for certain longtime residents. In an era of rapid change, they cherish the unique and fragile, whether a dilapidated house, a two-hundred-year-old landscape, or the presence of people deeply rooted in the place they live. Contesting many long-standing assumptions about gentrification, Brown-Saracino’s absorbing study reveals the unexpected ways beliefs about authenticity, place, and change play out in the social, political, and economic lives of very different neighborhoods.

Learn more about A Neighborhood That Never Changes at the University of Chicago Press website.

Japonica Brown-Saracino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. In August she will join the faculty of Boston University. She is the author of articles on gentrification, culture, and ethnography and is the editor of a forthcoming book, The Gentrification Debates (Routledge 2010).

The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Dexter Palmer reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Dexter Palmer, author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion.

His entry begins:

Recently I finished The Bascombe Novels by Richard Ford, a collection of three novels that includes The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. I picked it up because I’m trying to read fiction that’s outside my comfort zone—when it comes to late-twentieth-century writing I tend to prefer postmodernist comedies like Thomas Pynchon’s novels, and I wanted a change of pace. I really enjoyed Ford’s trilogy, perhaps even more than I liked John Updike’s similar project with the character of Rabbit Angstrom—taken together, the three novels are a master class in dynamic character development. Over time the character of Frank Bascombe, sportswriter turned real-estate agent, comes to seem almost like a real person, due to all the carefully chosen details that Ford uses to depict Bascombe’s habits and thoughts, as well as the endearingly meandering interior monologues that capture Bascombe’s attempts to...[read on]

Among the early praise for The Dream of Perpetual Motion:

“Palmer’s dazzling debut explodes with energy and invention on every page.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An intoxicatingly ambitious debut novel that somehow seems to encapsulate everything the author believes about everything…. A novel of ideas that holds together like a dream.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“[A] gorgeously surreal first novel… part farce, part act of willed convergence—an attempt to blur the lines between our reality and the fantastic imagined world.”
—Matthew Shaer, Bookforum

“Tender and sui generis: a steampunk The Tempest with the grim and rippling beauty of a fairy tale. Dexter Palmer is an ambitious writer, with vast reach toward the exploration of big ideas, among them what it means to create, the limits of the human body, and the uses and inadequacies of language. The marvelous kicker being, of course, that he has the moxie to do so in prose that sings.”
—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton

“A strange, passionate, enthralling first novel, a novel which is itself a kind of perpetual motion machine—constantly turning, giving off more energy than it receives, its movement at once beautiful and counterintuitive.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, New York Times bestselling author of The Brief History of the Dead

Writers Read: Dexter Palmer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books on Percy Bysshe Shelley

In 2005 Julian Roach named a top list of books about Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Guardian.

One title on the list:

Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes

Thirty years and more now since the last definitive, indispensable - and so forth - biography of Shelley appeared. In the ordinary succession of things, you'd expect a big new book from someone, somewhere, would by now have been brought to market with much trumpeting as the new definitive, indispensible and so forth bees-knees job. Don't go down to Waterstone's with the sleeping bag to wait for it: Richard Holmes is likely to be the only serious claimant to the title for at least as long again as he has been already. The acknowledged legislator. His colon may be entirely ignored.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Carrie Jones & Tala

Today's featured couple at Coffee with a Canine: Carrie Jones & Tala.

Jones, on how she and Tala were united:

We met in Western Maine. She was rolling around on the grass, drooling. It was love at first...[read on]

Carrie Jones graduated from Vermont College’s MFA program for writing. She has edited newspapers and poetry journals and has won awards from the Maine Press Association and also been awarded the Martin Dibner Fellowship as well as a Maine Literary Award.

Her books include Girl, Hero, Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape), Tips on Having a Gay (Ex) Boyfriend, and Need.

Visit Carrie Jones' website and LiveJournal.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Carrie Jones & Tala.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nancy Martin's "Our Lady of Immaculate Deception"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Our Lady of Immaculate Deception by Nancy Martin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Big truck, big dog, big hair. Bad attitude.

Roxy Abruzzo, bestseller Nancy Martin’s latest creation, is a loud-mouthed, sexy, independent-minded niece of a Pittsburgh Mafia boss trying to go (mostly) straight. She’d like to stay completely out of her uncle Carmine’s shady business dealings, though he's trying to reel her in. She'd like to concentrate on the architectural salvage business she runs mostly on the up and up for a tidy profit. She'd like to keep her rebellious teenage daughter on the straight and narrow. But Roxy knows where all the good intentions in the world usually lead, and when she can’t help herself from tucking away an ancient Greek statue that's not really hers, she pays for it by getting caught up in the chaos surrounding the sordid murder of the statue’s former owner, heir to a billion-dollar Pittsburgh steel fortune.

Of course, she has plenty of help getting in and out of trouble, including her sidekick “Nooch” Santonucci, too dumb to say no to whatever Roxy wants to do and strong enough to do it; her widowed aunt Loretta, a lawyer whose big hair and short skirts are as big a help to her in court as her brains; and Patrick Flynn, ex-marine, professional chef, and former high school flame, fresh from Afghanistan to torture Roxy, just like old times.

With her wicked sense of humor and a devilishly clever new series premise, author of the beloved Blackbird Sisters mysteries Nancy Martin has crafted another mystery destined to be a bestseller.

Read an excerpt from Our Lady of Immaculate Deception, and visit Nancy Martin's website and blog.

Nancy Martin is the author of nearly 50 pop fiction novels including the Blackbird Sisters Mystery Series. She serves on the board of Sisters in Crime and received the 2009 Romantic Times magazine Lifetime Achievement award for mystery writing. Our Lady of Immaculate Deception has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. One blurb calls the book “a good time in a bad neighborhood.”

The Page 69 Test: Our Lady of Immaculate Deception.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Timothy Stanley's "Kennedy vs. Carter"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul by Timothy Stanley.

About the book, from the publisher:

The late Edward Kennedy’s liberal credentials were unimpeachable, and perhaps never as much on display as when he challenged incumbent Jimmy Carter for the presidency. Most accounts of modern U.S. politics view Ronald Reagan’s landslide election in 1980 as a conservative realignment of the American public—and Kennedy’s defeat in the Democratic primaries as the last hurrah of New Deal liberalism. Now an astute observer of the American scene reexamines those primary battles to contend that Kennedy’s insurgent campaign was more popular than historians have presumed and was defeated only by historical accident and not by its perceived radicalism.

Timothy Stanley takes a new look at how Jimmy Carter alienated his own supporters, why Ted Kennedy ran against him, what the Kennedy campaign has to say about America in the 1970s, and whether or not the 1980 election really was a turning point in electoral history. He tells the story of a struggle for the soul for a party bitterly divided over how to respond to economic decline, cultural upheaval, and humiliation overseas. And in the telling, he offers both a comprehensive narrative of the primaries and a joint biography of the two men who struggled for their party’s leadership.

Stanley’s comprehensive research draws on more than a dozen archives as well as interviews with nearly thirty key historical players—including George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Mike Dukakis—and also makes creative use of polling data to recreate the ebb and flow of the election season. What emerges is not only the story of a campaign but also a revisionist history of a misunderstood decade—one most often defined by religious reawakening, chronic inflation, and the tax revolt that revived Republican fortunes. Yet Kennedy’s crusade to rebuild the ailing New Deal coalition of ethnic minorities, blue-collar conservatives, and firebrand liberals was popular enough to suggest that Americans were neither liberal nor conservative but, instead, anxious, angry, and desperate for leadership from any direction.

Kennedy vs. Carter provides a unique analysis of how support shifted from Carter to Reagan right up to election day, with Reagan elected largely because he was not the unpopular incumbent. By showing how Kennedy was a far more popular politician than orthodox historiography has suggested, Stanley argues for a more nuanced understanding of what really determines political outcomes and a greater appreciation for the enduring popularity of American liberalism.

Learn more about Kennedy vs. Carter at the publisher's website.

Timothy Stanley is Leverhulme Research Fellow, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and coauthor of The End of Politics: Triangulation, Realignment and the Battle for the Centre Ground.

The Page 99 Test: Kennedy vs. Carter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig McDonald's "Print the Legend," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Print the Legend by Craig McDonald.

The entry begins:

Like many novelists, I’ve had my intoxicating near-brushes with film adaptation.

Based solely on its description in a Publishers Lunch announcement, my debut novel, Head Games, attracted quite a bit of film interest. My own secret choice to play my continuing character Hector Lassiter in that novel, bizarrely enough, asked my publisher for a look at the novel. My vision of Hector Lassiter almost came to me.

Like most novelists who get Hollywood nibbles, my chance to have my first-choice actor portray my ongoing character didn’t bite firmly enough to be reeled in.

Print the Legend, my third novel, again features crime novelist Hector Lassiter, who is popularly known as the “man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.”

Print the Legend explores the death of Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho, in the summer of 1961, and raises questions regarding the possibility that Hem’s death was something other than an act of suicide. The novel also explores J. Edgar Hoover’s crazed and too-often destructive surveillance of key American writers, including not just Hemingway, but Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Dorothy Parker, among many others.

Hector Lassiter has centered two previous novels, both of which dropped Hector on to famous film sets: Head Games found Hector visiting the set of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Toros & Torsos placed Hector on the set of The Lady From Shanghai. Because my novels tend to spread over decades and to dart in and out of time, they present certain challenges in casting. In Toros & Toros, we variously encounter 35-, 37-, 47-, 59- and 61-year-old Hector.

Print the Legend, on the other hand, is set largely in the mid-to-late 1960s. Hector’s age ranges from 65 to 72 through this novel. I’ve long established that Hector bears a strong resemblance to actor...[read on]

Read more about Print the Legend, and learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website and blog.

Read "The Story Behind the Story: Print the Legend, by Craig McDonald," at The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: Toros & Torsos.

The Page 69 Test: Head Games.

The Page 69 Test: Print the Legend.

My Book, The Movie: Print the Legend.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about Ireland

Frank Delaney's novel Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show was recently published by Random House.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of books on Ireland. One title on the list:

Ulysses
by James Joyce
1922

Try it again—be patient, and this time you'll finish. And this time "Ulysses" will repay the effort. Inside these nearly 300,000 words, written by the great, semi-blind Modernist, lies a spiritual trove. Joyce's tenet—in the particular lies the universal—captures two beliefs that could power the world: that there is no such thing as a person too unimportant for art's focus; and that love of fellow man, with its attendant forgiveness, does indeed conquer all. Reading about the urban peregrinations of the unaudacious Leopold Bloom on a single June day in 1904, you will encounter the English language in its widest variety, from the street patois of Edwardian Dublin to sentences and paragraphs as classically beautiful and vivacious as Mozart's notes.

Read about another book on Delaney's list.

Ulysses also made John Mullan's lists of the ten of the best parodies, ten of the best visits to the lavatory, and ten of the best vegetables in literature. Unsurprisingly, it appears on Frank Delaney's top ten list of Irish novels.

--Marshal Zeringue