What is Dan Josefson reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Dan Josefson, author of That’s Not a Feeling.

His entry begins:

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

There’s an intensity to this book that is both frightening and fascinating—it tells too much, is too opinionated, and then it lurches back and places everything in a balanced, almost cosmic perspective. I worry a bit whether the narrator and author are being too dismissive, too cruel to the main character. But then I wonder whether this book doesn’t work like Don Quixote or Pnin, where the character is elevated by surviving her unfair treatment at the hands of the author. Either way, this book is unique and, I suspect, unforgettable. I’m enjoying arguing with myself about it almost as much as...[read on]

About That’s Not a Feeling, from the publisher:

Benjamin arrives with his parents for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a therapeutic boarding school tucked away in upstate New York. Suddenly, his parents are gone and Benjamin learns that he is there to stay. Sixteen years old, a two-time failed suicide, Benjamin must navigate his way through a new world of morning meds, popped privileges, candor meetings and cartoon brunches--all run by adults who themselves have yet to really come of age.

The only person who comprehends the school's many rules and rituals is Aubrey, the founder and headmaster. Fragile, brilliant, and prone to rage, he is as likely to use his authority to reward students as to punish them. But when Aubrey falls ill, life at the school begins to unravel. Benjamin has no one to rely on but the other students, especially Tidbit, an intriguing but untrustworthy girl with a "self-afflicting personality." More and more, Benjamin thinks about running away from Roaring Orchards--but he feels an equal need to know just what it is he would be leaving behind.

Learn more about the book and author at Dan Josefson's website.

The Page 69 Test: That's Not a Feeling.

My Book, The Movie: That’s Not a Feeling.

Writers Read: Dan Josefson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books with overweight protagonists

Jami Attenberg's new novel is The Middlesteins.

Jonathan Franzen (author of Freedom) says: “The Middlesteins had me from its very first pages, but it wasn’t until its final pages that I fully appreciated the range of Attenberg’s sympathy and the artistry of her storytelling.”

At The Week magazine Attenberg named her six favorite books with overweight protagonists.  One title on the list:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

This novel rocked me when it came out. Oscar is an overweight Dominican kid from Paterson, N.J., who is obsessed with comic books and science fiction. Though he lives a life of the mind initially, he ends up leading an epic adventure. This book is about being a hero.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also appears among Brooke Hauser's six top books about immigrants, Sara Gruen's six favorite books, Paste magazine's list of the ten best debut novels of the decade (2000-2009), and The Millions' best books of fiction of the millenium. The novel is one of Matthew Kaminski's five favorite novels about immigrants in America and is a book that made a difference to Zoë Saldana.

The Page 99 Test: Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lucia McMahon's "Mere Equals"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic by Lucia McMahon.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon's archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women’s experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the "mere equals" of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Americans grappled with the competing issues of women’s intellectual equality and sexual difference.

In the new nation, a pioneering society, pushing westward and unmooring itself from established institutions, often enlisted women’s labor outside the home and in areas that we would deem public. Yet, as a matter of law, women lacked most rights of citizenship and this subordination was authorized by an ideology of sexual difference. What women and men said about education, how they valued it, and how they used it to place themselves and others within social hierarchies is a highly useful way to understand the ongoing negotiation between equality and difference. In public documents, “difference” overwhelmed “equality,” because the formal exclusion of women from political activity and from economic parity required justification. McMahon tracks the ways in which this public disparity took hold in private communications. By the 1830s, separate and gendered spheres were firmly in place. This was the social and political heritage with which women’s rights activists would contend for the rest of the century.

Learn more about Mere Equals at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Mere Equals.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Joshilyn Jackson's "A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson.

About the book, from the publisher:

When a long-hidden grave is unearthed in the backyard, headstrong young Mosey Slocumb is determined to investigate. What she learns could cost her family everything…

Every fifteen years, trouble comes after the Slocumb women. Now, as their youngest turns fifteen, a whole new kind of commotion is chasing all three generations. Mosey’s desperate to know who used their yard as a make-shift cemetery, and why. The oldest, forty-five year old Ginny, fights to protect Mosey from the truth, a fight that could cost Ginny the love of her life. Between them is Liza, silenced by a stroke, with the answers trapped inside her. To survive Liza’s secrets and Mosey’s insistent adventures, Ginny must learn to trust the love that braids the strands of their past—and stop at nothing to defend their future.

Learn more about the book and author at Joshilyn Jackson's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.

My Book, The Movie: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.

Writers Read: Joshilyn Jackson (July 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Backseat Saints.

The Page 69 Test: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Giveaway: "The Stockholm Octavo"

Ecco and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of Karen Engelmann's new novel, The Stockholm Octavo.

A brief description and some early praise for the book:

“Delicious….Mysterious, appealing, and memorable….Readers will delight in staying up half the night enchanted.”
—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and Abundance

“Scandal, conspiracy, mystery, and a hint of magic....[A] spectacular debut.”
—Eleanor Brown, author of The Weird Sisters

One man’s fortune holds the key to a nation’s fate in this sensational debut novel set in 18th century Sweden. The Stockholm Octavo by exciting newcomer Karen Engelmann transports readers to a colorful Scandinavian world of intrigue and magic in a dazzling golden age of high art, music, and opulent fashion. A masterwork of historical fiction in the vein of Patrick Suskind’s classic novel, Perfume, Karen Engelmann’s The Stockholm Octavo is mysterious and romantic—as magical and enthralling as The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern—and features a brilliant and unforgettable cast of extraordinary characters.

Learn more about The Stockholm Octavo.

HOW TO ENTER: Visit the Campaign for the American Reader Facebook page and "like" the post for The Stockholm Octavo. Contest closes on Thursday, October 25th.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Douglas Smith reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy.

His entry begins:

If there is one book, or series, that is, I would want everyone to pick up and read it would have to be the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn. Acerbic, witty, unflinchingly honest and simultaneously heartrending and hilarious, St. Aubyn’s books—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and At Last, published in the US earlier this year—are without doubt one of the great...[read on]

About Former People, from the publisher:

Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries’-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia.

Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called “former people” and “class enemies”—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on.

Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia’s most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.

Watch the trailer for Former People, and learn more about the book and author at Douglas Smith's website.

The Page 99 Test: Former People.

Writers Read: Douglas Smith.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best "library" books

Adam Lancaster is the UK's SLA School Librarian of the Year 2012.

At the Guardian he named a top ten list of "books that are set in libraries or have set his library alight," including:

There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar is a comic genius. He is the reason so many young people in our school read. Not only have they been enthralled by Holes but they also have access to a whole range of other fantastic books by Sachar and, for me, Boy in the Girl's Bathroom is one of the best with its mixture of humour and heartfelt moments. Bradley has no friends, but that's how he prefers it - that is until a new counsellor starts at the school. Bradley begins to realise that there are different ways to live your life if only you have a bit of self-belief and an amazing amount of courage – something a lot of young people need to remember!

Read about another book on the list.

There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom is one of James Dawson's top 10 books to get you through high school.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michael Neiberg's "The Blood of Free Men"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 by Michael S. Neiberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the Allies struggled inland from Normandy in August of 1944, the fate of Paris hung in the balance. Other jewels of Europe—sites like Warsaw, Antwerp, and Monte Cassino—were, or would soon be, reduced to rubble during attempts to liberate them. But Paris endured, thanks to a fractious cast of characters, from Resistance cells to Free French operatives to an unlikely assortment of diplomats, Allied generals, and governmental officials. Their efforts, and those of the German forces fighting to maintain control of the city, would shape the course of the battle for Europe and color popular memory of the conflict for generations to come. In The Blood of Free Men, celebrated historian Michael Neiberg deftly tracks the forces vying for Paris, providing a revealing new look at the city’s dramatic and triumphant resistance against the Nazis. The salvation of Paris was not a foregone conclusion, Neiberg shows, and the liberation was a chaotic operation that could have easily ended in the city’s ruin. The Allies were intent on bypassing Paris so as to strike the heart of the Third Reich in Germany, and the French themselves were deeply divided; feuding political cells fought for control of the Resistance within Paris, as did Charles de Gaulle and his Free French Forces outside the city. Although many of Paris’s citizens initially chose a tenuous stability over outright resistance to the German occupation, they were forced to act when the approaching fighting pushed the city to the brink of starvation. In a desperate bid to save their city, ordinary Parisians took to the streets, and through a combination of valiant fighting, shrewd diplomacy, and last-minute aid from the Allies, managed to save the City of Lights. A groundbreaking, arresting narrative of the liberation, The Blood of Free Men tells the full story of one of the war’s defining moments, when a tortured city and its inhabitants narrowly survived the deadliest conflict in human history.

Learn more about The Blood of Free Men at the Basic Books website.

Neiberg is professor of history in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of numerous books on warfare in the twentieth century, including Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I.

The Page 99 Test: Dance of the Furies.

Writers Read: Michael S. Neiberg (May 2011).

The Page 99 Test: The Blood of Free Men.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Josefson's "That’s Not a Feeling," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: That’s Not a Feeling by Dan Josefson.

The entry begins:

That’s Not a Feeling is set on the grounds of a strange, therapeutic boarding school named Roaring Orchards, where things are slowly coming apart at the seams. There are lots and lots of characters, but I’ll try to cast only the most important of them.

The narrator, Benjamin, is a bit of a cipher: he observes, and reports, and quietly seethes. Sometimes not so quietly. Initially I was thinking of a young Bud Court for this role, but I think Paul Dano might be a better choice. Benjamin’s friend Tidbit is smart, unpredictable, and only marginally honest. I could see Lena...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Dan Josefson's website.

The Page 69 Test: That's Not a Feeling.

My Book, The Movie: That’s Not a Feeling.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Joan Wickersham reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Joan Wickersham, author of The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story.

Her entry begins:

Right now I’m reading a big Hungarian novel: The Book of Fathers, by Miklos Vamos. It’s a family chronicle – it begins around 1700, and each chapter is the story of the firstborn son of that generation – but “family chronicle” is too docile a description for a book that has this particular mixed flavor of character study, folktale, magical realism, humor, and sobering (sometimes terrible) glimpses of what is going on in Hungary during the character’s lifetime.

This book is wonderful. But for me, reading it is also an attempt to...[read on]

About The News from Spain, from the publisher:

From the author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index, a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding, much less controlling, it.

In these seven beautifully wrought variations on a theme, a series of characters trace and retrace eternal yet ever-changing patterns of love and longing, connection and loss. The stories range over centuries and continents—from eighteenth-century Vienna, where Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte are collaborating on their operas, to America in the 1940s, where a love triangle unfolds among a doctor, a journalist, and the president’s wife. A race-car driver’s widow, a nursing-home resident and her daughter, a paralyzed dancer married to a famous choreographer—all feel the overwhelming force of passion and renunciation. With uncanny emotional exactitude, Wickersham shows how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart, or in our own; how we continually try to explain others and to console ourselves; and how love, like storytelling, is ultimately a work of the imagination.

Visit Joan Wickersham's website.

Writers Read: Joan Wickersham (January 2009).

Writers Read: Joan Wickersham.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best narrators in literature

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels The Interloper and Panorama City.

One book (and an alternate, "a sort of spiritual cousin") on his ten best list of narrators in literature, as told to Publishers Weekly:

Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Another child narrator, so inflected with the language and perspective of a kid that the novel is often assigned to kids themselves, most of whom fail to see beyond Holden's puerile litmus of phony/not-phony. The power lies in the book's structure (pitting dying nobly against living humbly, at one point), and in reading it from an adult's perspective. Having already lost some innocence, we grown-ups understand the significance of Holden's position better than he ever could. (Alternate: Elaine, Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood)

Read about another entry on the list.

The Catcher In The Rye appears on A.E. Hotchner's list of five favorite coming-of-age tales, Jay McInerney's list of five essential New York novels, Woody Allen's top five books list, Patrick Ness's top 10 list of "unsuitable" books for teenagers, David Ulin's six favorite books list, Nicholas Royle's list of the top ten writers on the telephone, TIME magazine's list of the top ten books you were forced to read in school, Tony Parsons' list of the top ten troubled males in fiction, Dan Rhodes' top ten list of short books, and Sarah Ebner's top 25 list of boarding school books; it is one of Sophie Thompson's six best books. Upon rereading, the novel disappointed Khaled Hosseini, Mary Gordon, and Laura Lippman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sten Rynning's "NATO in Afghanistan"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: NATO in Afghanistan: The Liberal Disconnect by Sten Rynning.

About the book, from the publisher:

The war in Afghanistan has run for more than a decade, and NATO has become increasingly central to it. In this book, Sten Rynning examines NATO's role in the campaign and the difficult diplomacy involved in fighting a war by alliance. He explores the history of the war and its changing momentum, and explains how NATO at first faltered but then improved its operations to become a critical enabler for the U.S. surge of 2009. However, he also uncovers a serious and enduring problem for NATO in the shape of a disconnect between high liberal hopes for the new Afghanistan and a lack of realism about the military campaign prosecuted to bring it about.

He concludes that, while NATO has made it to the point in Afghanistan where the war no longer has the potential to break it, the alliance is, at the same time, losing its own struggle to define itself as a vigorous and relevant entity on the world stage. To move forward, he argues, NATO allies must recover their common purpose as a Western alliance, and he outlines options for change.

Learn more about NATO in Afghanistan at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: NATO in Afghanistan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jerome Charyn's "Under the Eye of God"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn.

About the book, from the publisher:

After decades of madness in the Bronx, Isaac Sidel visits the craziest state in the country

Isaac Sidel is too popular to be America’s vice president. Once the New York Police Department commissioner, he became the most beloved mayor in the city’s history—famous for his refusal to surrender his Glock, and for his habit of disappearing for months at a time to fight crime at street level. So when baseball czar J. Michael Storm asks Sidel to join him on the election’s Democratic ticket, the two wild men romp to an unprecedented landslide. But as the president-elect’s mandate goes off the rails—threatened by corruption, sex, and God knows what else—he tires of being overshadowed by Sidel, and dispatches him to a place from which tough politicians seldom return: Texas.

In the Lone Star state, Sidel confronts rogue astrologers, accusations of pedophilia, and a dimwitted assassin who doesn’t know when to take an easy shot. If this Bronx bomber doesn’t watch his step, he risks making vice-presidential history by getting killed on the job.

Learn more about the book and author at Jerome Charyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Wendy Welch reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Wendy Welch, author of The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book.

Her entry begins:

I just finished Jael McHenry's The Kitchen Daughter. I enjoyed the sense of character she created, the terse first-person narrator who sees the world a little differently. The stranger elements of the plot (the main character conjures ghosts with her cooking) just added charm to a very human story--of people trying to get over grief, trying to get on with life, trying to get past old hurts. A pleasant story, it had turns, twists...[read on]

About Welch's new book, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, from the publisher:

An inspiring true story about losing your place, finding your purpose, and building a community one book at a time.

Wendy Welch and her husband had always dreamed of owning a bookstore, so when they left their high-octane jobs for a simpler life in an Appalachian coal town, they seized an unexpected opportunity to pursue their dream. The only problems? A declining U.S. economy, a small town with no industry, and the advent of the e-book. They also had no idea how to run a bookstore. Against all odds, but with optimism, the help of their Virginian mountain community, and an abiding love for books, they succeeded in establishing more than a thriving business - they built a community.

The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap is the little bookstore that could: how two people, two cats, two dogs, and thirty-eight thousand books helped a small town find its heart. It is a story about people and books, and how together they create community.

Visit Wendy Welch's blog.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Wendy Welch & Zora and Bert.

Writers Read: Wendy Welch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 literary parodies

D.J. Taylor is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. His novels include Derby Day (2011), At the Chime of a City Clock (2010), Ask Alice (2009) and Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006).

His new book is What You Didn't Miss, "a hilarious collection of literary lampoons and an alternative history of modern English literature" culled from the popular Private Eye column of the same name.

One of Taylor's top ten literary parodies, as told to the Guardian:

Max Beerbohm on Henry James

"The Mote in the Middle Distance", from Beerbohm's collection A Christmas Garland (1912) is possibly the last word on the tortured syntax of the Master's late-period syntax: "The consciousness of dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to outline the figures on what she had called his 'horizon', between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality somewhat intimidating."

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see: Ten of the best parodies in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Douglas Smith's "Former People"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith.

About Former People, from the publisher:

Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries’-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia.

Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called “former people” and “class enemies”—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on.

Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia’s most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.

Watch the trailer, and learn more about the book and author at Douglas Smith's website.

The Page 69 Test:  The Pearl.

The Page 99 Test: Former People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Read's "Human Game," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Human Game by Simon Read.

The entry begins:

Naturally, my opinion is biased, but I think Human Game would make an interesting film in that the book is a non-fiction follow up to the events depicted in the 1963 Steve McQueen classic The Great Escape. The movie, of course, ends with fifty of the recaptured POWs being gunned down by the Gestapo. Human Game details the three-year manhunt by the Royal Air Force to track down the Gestapo gunmen responsible for the murders.

The story’s central character is Frank McKenna, a 38-year-old Squadron Leader charged with bringing the killers to justice. In civilian life, McKenna had been a detective with the Blackpool police, so he was already a skilled investigator by the time he arrived in Germany to start the hunt in September 1945. I think Christian Bale would make a great McKenna. McKenna took an obsessive approach to his work, something I feel Bale does with his acting. For Wing Commander Wilfred Bowes, McKenna’s blunt and tough-minded superior...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Simon Read's website.

The Page 69 Test: In the Dark.

My Book, The Movie: In the Dark.

The Page 69 Test: War of Words.

My Book, The Movie: Human Game.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Amy McNamara reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Amy McNamara, author of Lovely, Dark and Deep.

Her entry begins:

I'm reading a new chapbook of poems called Meridian by Kathleen Jesme. The poems are about loss—the slow leaving and death of her mother, the loss of her father years before, the inevitable loss of self we all cycle toward just by being alive. The poems are made of musical lyric lines, "one snow fell/down inside/ the other, two flocks/of gulls alighting/on a white beach" and lines written in a more narrative voice reorienting us in the world of objects much the way one experiences the very mode of being the poems describe—marvelous, terrifying, everyday, and...[read on]

About Lovely, Dark and Deep, from the publisher:

A resonant debut novel about retreating from the world after losing everything—and the connections that force you to rejoin it.

Since the night of the crash, Wren Wells has been running away. Though she lived through the accident that killed her boyfriend Patrick, the girl she used to be didn’t survive. Instead of heading off to college as planned, Wren retreats to her father’s studio in the far-north woods of Maine. Somewhere she can be alone.

Then she meets Cal Owen. Dealing with his own troubles, Cal’s hiding out too. When the chemistry between them threatens to pull Wren from her hard-won isolation, Wren has to choose: risk opening her broken heart to the world again, or join the ghosts who haunt her.

Visit Amy McNamara's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

McNamara has an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Lovely, Dark and Deep is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Writers Read: Amy McNamara.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten most dysfunctional families in literature

Jami Attenberg's new novel is The Middlesteins.

At Publishers Weekly she named a top ten list of dysfunctional families in literature, including:

A Game of Thrones/The Lannister family.

The Lannisters, a rich and powerful dynasty in this absurdly popular fantasy series, lead the juiciest of lives, rife with incest, murder, pillaging, sabotage, betrayal. I would not recommend messing with them.

Read about another entry on the list.

Visit Jami Attenberg's website and blog.

Also see--Simon Mason's top ten fictional families.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Timothy F. Murphy's "Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children by Timothy F. Murphy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Parents routinely turn to prenatal testing to screen for genetic or chromosomal disorders or to learn their child’s sex. What if they could use similar prenatal interventions to learn (or change) their child’s sexual orientation? Bioethicists have debated the moral implications of this still-hypothetical possibility for several decades. Some commentators fear that any scientific efforts to understand the origins of homosexuality could mean the end of gay and lesbian people, if parents shy away from having homosexual children. Others defend parents’ rights to choose the traits of their children in general and see no reason to treat sexual orientation differently. In this book, Timothy Murphy traces the controversy over prenatal selection of sexual orientation, offering a critical review of the literature and presenting his own argument in favor of parents’ reproductive liberty.

Arguing against commentators who want to restrict the scientific study of sexual orientation or technologies that emerge from that study, Murphy proposes a defense of parents’ right to choose. This, he argues, is the only view that helps protect children from hurtful family environments, that is consistent with the increasing powers of prenatal interventions, and that respects human futures as something other than accidents of the genetic lottery.

Learn more about Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children at Timothy F. Murphy's website.

The Page 99 Test: Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children.

--Marshal Zeringue