What is Dennis Merrill reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Dennis Merrill, author of Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth Century Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and other books.

His entry begins:

Browsing the shelves of a Boulder, Colorado bookstore this summer, I was pleased to come across Greg Grandin’s new book Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. Grandin is one of our most gifted historians of America’s hemispheric empire – and Fordlandia is his finest work to date. It reconstructs Henry Ford’s doomed adventure deep within the Brazilian Amazon in the late 1920s to build a utopian urban metropolis. Ford imagined a community that some 100,000 souls might call home and where massive quantities of rubber would be cultivated and processed with factory-like efficiency. The undertaking at one and the same time would feed the Ford Automobile Company’s appetite for tires, undercut British Malaya’s monopoly on rubber, and export the American way of life – complete with tidy row houses, the latest in plumbing fixtures, and the prohibition of demon rum (this was after all the roaring twenties).

Fordlandia, as the industrial paradise was named, proved to be...[read on]

Dennis Merrill was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, received a doctorate in history from the University of Connecticut, and currently teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is the author of four books, including the seventh edition of Major Problems in American Foreign Relations. Among the praise for his most recent book, Negotiating Paradise:

"Merrill has written an important and persuasive book. Looking behind the beachfront resorts and casinos, he reveals how Latin Americans and Yankees engaged in a high-stakes contest over empire, profits, and national identity. Merrill offers cutting-edge ideas on international history and globalization with colorful material and superb storytelling."
--Christopher Endy, author of Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France

"Merrill makes a significant contribution by showing how tourism complemented the U.S. drive toward hegemony and empire in Latin America. His cultural approach puts this study in the vanguard of recent work in diplomatic history. An excellent book."
--Mark T. Gilderhus, Texas Christian University

Writers Read: Dennis Merrill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Lisa Patton's "Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter by Lisa Patton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Leelee Satterfield seemed to have it all: a gorgeous husband, two adorable daughters, and roots in the sunny city of Memphis, Tennessee. So when her husband gets the idea to uproot the family to run a quaint Vermont inn, Leelee is devastated…and her three best friends are outraged. But she’s loved Baker Satterfield since the tenth grade, how can she not indulge his dream? Plus, the glossy photos of bright autumn trees and smiling children in ski suits push her over the edge … after all, how much trouble can it really be?

But Leelee discovers pretty fast that there’s a truckload of things nobody tells you about Vermont until you live there: such as mud season, vampire flies, and the danger of ice sheets careening off roofs. Not to mention when her beloved Yorkie decides to pick New Year’s Eve to go to doggie heaven—she encounters one more New England oddity: frozen ground means you can’t bury your dead in the winter. And that Yankee idiosyncrasy just won’t do.

The inn they’ve bought also has its host of problems: an odor that no amount of potpourri can erase, tacky décor, and a staff of peculiar Vermonters whose personalities are as unique as the hippopotamus collection gracing the fireplace mantle. The whole operation is managed by Helga, a stern German woman who takes special delight in bullying Leelee for her southern gentility. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for Leelee to start wondering when to drag out the moving boxes again.

But when an unexpected hardship takes Leelee by surprise, she finds herself left alone with an inn to run, a mortgage to pay, and two daughters to raise. But this Southern belle won’t be run out of town so easily. Drawing on the Southern grit and inner strength she didn’t know she had, Leelee decides to turn around the Inn, her attitude and her life. In doing so, she makes friends with her neighbors, finds a little romance, and realizes there’s a lot more in common with Vermont than she first thought.

In this moving and comedic debut, Lisa Patton paints a hilarious portrait of life in Vermont as seen through the eyes of a southern belle readers won’t soon forget. A charming fish-out-of-water tale of one woman who learns to stand up for herself—in sandals and snow boots—against the odds.

Read an excerpt from Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter, and learn more about the book and author at Lisa Patton's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Drew Barrymore's best books

For The Week magazine, the actor Drew Barrymore named her six best books.

One title on her list:

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $16).

This is the book that, as a die-hard romantic, I remember making me cry the hardest. I loved falling in love with Hemingway’s novel as its hero falls in love with “Catherine.” I had to finish the book alone in the other room so that I could just let my emotions pour out. I cried so hard, and it is wonderful when someone can evoke that in your heart!

Read about another book on Barrymore's list.

A Farewell to Arms also appears on Jeffrey Hart's list of five books "essential to appreciating American literature of the 1920s" and among Atul Gawande's ten favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Jennifer K. Stuller & Giles and Wesley

This weekend's feature at Coffee with a canine: Jennifer K. Stuller & Giles and Wesley.

Stuller is a writer, critic, scholar, pop culture herstorian, book author, and public speaker. Her work appears in publications as diverse as Geek Monthly and Bitch to Washington CEO and the Encyclopedia of Gender and Society (SAGE Publications). Her first book, Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology (I.B. Tauris) is a comprehensive history, critique, and reference guide examining feminist history and potential within popular culture and will be available in January 2010.

Stuller on Giles and Wesley and...Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

I was insistent on naming our first dog Giles after the character Rupert Giles from television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And since Hubby went along with the choice I was insistent on naming our first dog Giles after the character Rupert Giles from television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And since Hubby went along with the choice he got to name the second one. We ran through names like "Bowie" (after David), Duncan Idaho (from Dune), and Xander (also from Buffy). But then he was emailed pictures from our breeder and forwarded them to me. I saw the little guy and thought “Oh my God – he's totally a Wesley!” (as in Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, a colleague of Rupert Giles, and a name neither one of us had ever brought up as a possibility). I decided not to say anything, because I wanted to be fair to the Hubby. It was his turn. But he came home from work that evening, asked if I'd seen the photos and said:

“What if we named him Wesley?”

And we knew we had to! Our little Watchers!

(And for you Buffy and Angel fans out there, we couldn’t have guessed it at the time we named them, but Giles is quite the gentleman and Wesley is a rogue demon hunter.)

Read more about Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology.

Visit Jennifer K. Stuller's website and blog.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Jennifer K. Stuller & Giles and Wesley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas Pegelow Kaplan's "The Language of Nazi Genocide"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry by Thomas Pegelow Kaplan.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the Nazi genocide of European Jews, words preceded, accompanied, and made mass murder possible. Using a multilayered approach to connect official language to everyday life, historian Thomas Pegelow Kaplan analyzes the role of language in genocide. This study seeks to comprehend how the perpetrators constructed difference, race, and their perceived enemies; how Nazi agencies communicated to the public through the nation's press; and how Germans of Jewish ancestry received, contested, and struggled for survival and self against remarkable odds. The Language of Nazi Genocide covers the historical periods of the late Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and early postwar Germany. However, by addressing the architecture of conceptual separation between groups and the means by which social aggression is disseminated, this study offers a model for comparative studies of linguistic violence, hate speech, and genocide in the modern world.

Read an excerpt from The Language of Nazi Genocide, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Davidson College and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam.

The Page 99 Test: The Language of Nazi Genocide.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Saundra Mitchell reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Saundra Mitchell, author of the debut novel, Shadowed Summer.

Her entry begins:

I'm forever reading, constantly reading, collecting words and phrases from just about anywhere. I love quiescently frozen dairy treats and effective anticaries dentifrices. I love finding out that the emphasis in duodenum is on the DE not the DU, and that quay is key and quinoa is keenwah and that if you drink pop and stand on line, you're probably from New York.

But I have to be reminded that words are tools. Beyond their resonance and etymology, they have a purpose. That's why I'm enjoying Jon Skovron's Struts & Frets right now. Books about musicians are guaranteed to have lyrics, but the narrative voice in this novel is...[read on]

A screenwriter and author, Saundra Mitchell penned the screenplays for the Fresh Films and Girls in the Director's Chair short film series. Her short story "Ready to Wear" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her first feature film, Revenge Ends, debuted on the festival circuit in 2008.

Shadowed Summer, Mitchell's debut novel, was released by Delacorte Press earlier this year. Among the praise for the novel:

This heady mix of ghost story and mystery, drenched in the languid, humid atmosphere of a small Louisiana town, should appeal to the core audience of the Twilight series: adolescent girls who like a little sexiness in their ghostly pursuers. Ennui can get people into all sorts of trouble, and the kind of blank summer days staring down 14-year-old Iris and her friends lead them to casting spells in the town cemetery. A masculine whisper in Iris' ear shoots them into true ghost-hunting, with a Ouija board indicating that the whisperer belongs to the town's only mystery, a 17-year-old boy who disappeared almost 20 years ago. Mitchell skillfully segues from gothic romance to prosaic mystery as the friends examine microfiche records and question the boy's relatives and friends. As the ghost becomes increasingly insistent that his mystery be solved, Iris discovers unnerving connections to her own family. Highly atmospheric, with pulse-pounding suspense and an elegiac ending.
--Booklist

Visit Saundra Mitchell's website and blog.

Writers Read: Saundra Mitchell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 cultural journeys

Susheila Nasta is the editor and founder of Wasafiri magazine, which marks its 25th anniversary this month. "Wasafiri," the Kiswahili word for travellers, captures the magazine's vision to focus on writing as a form of "cultural travelling."

For the Guardian, she named a top ten list of "books that take her on a globe-spanning, literary adventure." One title on the list:

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Pecola Breedlove is an 11-year-old black girl growing up in Ohio in the 1940s who longs to have the blue eyes she thinks will transform her tragically torn life. Narrated from a variety of perspectives - black and white - Morrison's first book is a poetic evocation of how Pecola attempts to rise above the frames of the myopic culture of whiteness that define her. An intimate African-American classic which looks forward to Morrison's award-winning novel, Beloved.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Belinda Acosta's "Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz by Belinda Acosta.

The entry begins:

What a fun project, imaging Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz as a movie. I asked some friends for their suggestions and there were a couple of great ones, but in the end, this is my dream list of who would play the major characters in Damas, as a movie.

First, Ana Ruiz: I had a lot of difficulty with this until my good friend Maribel Sosa reminded me of Talisa Soto. “She's got that soft look, she's thin, but curvy, she has those eyes, and even that dark little patch of skin,” Mari e-mailed me. “In most pictures she has straight hair and looking very va-va-va-voom, but sometimes she looks so gentle and fragile but ultimately has that don't f**k with me thing.” I couldn’t agree more. Check her out. I think she would make a perfect Ana.

Casting young people is always difficult for me, and I found this especially true when it came to Carmen, Ana’s difficult teenager, full of spit and vinegar, angry over her parents’ separation. Since...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website and Belinda Acosta's blog.

My Book, The Movie: Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sharon Fiffer's "Scary Stuff"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Scary Stuff by Sharon Fiffer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Antique picker Jane Wheel has always loved old stuff, from vintage salt and pepper shakers to other families’ old photos and orphaned Bakelite buttons, and she can’t really explain why. But she makes a living out of it, searching high and low at estate sales and antique shops and reselling her finds to other collectors. At least, it’s half a living---she makes the other half as an associate to a private detective, because she’s just as talented at digging up secrets as antiques.

While visiting her brother for the first time in years, Jane’s fascinated by a story of mistaken identity: On three occasions, someone has accused him of swindling them on eBay, only to realize he’s not the right guy. Even though he doesn’t see the point, she wants to look into it. Then back at home one of her parents’ friends is attacked, leading Jane to vow to get to the bottom of things.

Out of nowhere, Jane suddenly has two cases, both edging a little too close to her loved ones for comfort, because one thing’s for sure---whenever family gets wrapped up in your personal business, it’s bound to be some scary stuff.

Read an excerpt from Scary Stuff, and learn more about the book and author at Sharon Fiffer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Scary Stuff.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Judith Giesberg's "Army at Home"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front by Judith Giesberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom the home front was a battlefield of its own.

Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials.

At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how Americas Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.

Learn more about Army at Home at the publisher's website.

Judith Giesberg is assistant professor of history at Villanova University and author of Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition.

The Page 99 Test: Army at Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten graphic novels

One title from Lev Grossman's top ten graphic novels list at Time magazine:

Art Spiegelman's father Vladek was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. When Spiegelman told his father's story in Maus, he depicted all the Jews as mice and all the Nazis as cats. Strangely, the cartoonish conceit doesn't trivialize the story, it makes it viscerally real — it strips away our practiced indifference to an all too familiar story. Those mice are more human than most people. Alongside his father's tale Spiegelman lovingly but honestly depicts his own relationship with his father, who has aged into a difficult, prickly, fearful man. Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992, a landmark event in the history of the medium — its sheer power forced the mainstream world to take comics seriously.

Read about another book on Grossman's list.

Maus also appears on Danny Fingeroth's top 10 list of graphic novels, Meg Rosoff's top 10 list of adult books for teenagers, and Malorie Blackman's top ten list of graphic novels for teenagers.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Malinda Lo reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Malinda Lo, author of the YA novel Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella.

Her entry begins:

One of the books I've recently read that has stuck with me is Fire by Kristin Cashore. This is a companion novel to her first novel, Graceling, which has been a big hit in young adult fiction in general and in the fantasy genre as well. Fire is in many ways a totally different book than Graceling, but it is also another exploration of the idea that a woman could be monstrous. In Graceling, the monstrous woman is a killer; in Fire, she is monstrously beautiful.

I found Fire to be quieter than Graceling, but also more...[read on]

Malinda Lo was born in China and moved to the United States as a child. She grew up in Colorado and has since lived in Boston, New York, London, Beijing, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She is the former managing editor of AfterEllen.com, the largest entertainment news website for lesbians and bisexual women. In 2006, Malinda was awarded the Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for Excellence in LGBT Journalism by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and has master’s degrees from Harvard and Stanford universities.

Visit Malinda Lo's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Malinda Lo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Brian Clegg & Goldie

The current featured duo at Coffee with a Canine: Brian Clegg and Goldie.

Brian Clegg is the author of A Brief History of Infinity, The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon, Light Years: The Extraordinary Story of Mankind’s Fascination with Light, Upgrade Me: Our Search for Human 2.0, and Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe. He holds a physics degree from Cambridge and has written regular columns, features, and reviews for numerous magazines. He also edits the www.popularscience.co.uk website.

One exchange from the Q & A:

Does [Goldie] have any influence on your writing?

Absolutely. I would recommend any writer to get a dog, because it’s very tempting to spend all your time in front of the keyboard, but having a dog means you have to go out for walks, and I get most of my best ideas on these dog walks. One of my books, Upgrade Me, was conceived in its entirety on a dog walk, and opens with a mention of taking Goldie out. I noticed how much easier she found it walking through a cold field with sharp thistles and nettles than I would without protective clothing, and it started me thinking about how we use different technologies to upgrade the basic human capabilities – the subject of the book.[read on]

Among the early praise for Clegg's Before the Big Bang:

"Clegg follows the footsteps of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way. He shares his predecessors’ enthusiasm, eloquence and ability to explain complex ideas but provides a bonus by covering startling developments of the past decade. Anyone looking for an introduction to or a refresher course in cosmology need look no further."
--Kirkus, starred review

Follow Brian Clegg at http://www.twitter.com/brianclegg, and visit his website and blog.

Writers Read: Brian Clegg.

Coffee with a Canine: Brian Clegg and Goldie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Norb Vonnegut's "Top Producer"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Top Producer by Norb Vonnegut.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a world that moves as fast as finance does, top producers have to think three steps ahead and make snap decisions. Theirs is a blurred version of reality, one that conceals moves as much as it rewards the bold ones. All too easily, scams can be disguised as success; plotting can be mistaken for killer instincts. And as Grove O’Rourke finds out, “Nothing obscures vulnerability like success. Nothing that is, except for friendships.”

But this book isn’t about stocks and bonds—it’s about people. About Grove O’Rourke, top producer at the investment firm of Sachs, Kidder, and Carnegie, and about his best friend, Charlie Kelemen, whose spectacular murder is carried out in front of hundreds of horrified party-goers at the opening of the novel. It’s about Charlie’s widow, who comes to Grove for help after her husband’s death, even though she’s hiding a dark secret. And it’s about how money—vast sums of money—can cover up even the most glaring imperfections in relationships, and fool everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

With the ease of someone who has lived in the world of top producers, Norb Vonnegut has crafted a sharp, dark thriller that will make you think—and then double-check your investments.

Read an excerpt from Top Producer, and learn more about the book and author at Norb Vonnegut's website and blog.

Top Producer made SmartMoney's list of the Seven Best Fall Reads.

The Page 69 Test: Top Producer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books of fiction of the millenium

The Millions assembled a panel to determine the best books of fiction of the last ten years. "It’s a bit early, of course, to pass definitive judgment on the literary legacy of the ’00s, or how it stacks up against that of the 1930s, or 1850s," goes the introduction. "Who knows what will be read 50 years from now? But, with the end of the decade just a few months away, it seemed to us [to be] a good time to pause and take stock...."

One book to make the Top 20:

#11: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

Read about another book on the list.

See Junot Díaz's most important books and the Page 99 Test: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mitch Horowitz's "Occult America"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Occult America by Mitch Horowitz.

About the book, from the publisher:

It touched lives as disparate as those of Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, and Mary Todd Lincoln—who once convinced her husband, Abe, to host a séance in the White House. Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this “hidden wisdom” transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.

Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history.

From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board, Occult America briskly sweeps from the nation’s earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:

•The spirit medium who became America’s first female religious leader in 1776
•The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith
•The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age
•The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey
•The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great Depression

Here, too, are America’s homegrown religious movements, from transcendentalism to spiritualism to Christian Science to the positive-thinking philosophy that continues to exert such a powerful pull on the public today. A feast for believers in alternative spirituality, an eye-opener for anyone curious about the unknown byroads of American history, Occult America is an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe.

Learn more about the book and author at Mitch Horowitz's website.

Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin. He has written for Esopus, Parabola, Fortean Times, and Science of Mind.

The Page 99 Test: Occult America.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Wendy Rouse Jorae reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Wendy Rouse Jorae, author of The Children of Chinatown: Growing up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850-1920.

Her entry begins:

I enjoy reading non-fiction history books because truth truly is stranger than fiction. One of the most interesting books I have read in the last few years is Mary Ting Yi Lui’s The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Lui’s book unfolds like a mystery novel as she details the murder of Elsie Sigel, a white middle-class missionary woman working in New York’s early twentieth century Chinatown. What is most compelling is Lui’s analysis of...[read on]

Read more about The Children of Chinatown.

Among the early praise for the book:

"Jorae's efforts to reconstruct children's lived experiences in multiple arenas add an important dimension to the study of the Chinese in San Francisco."
--Colleen Fong, California State University, East Bay

"Jorae breaks new ground in Chinese American history with her sustained analysis of children and family life among Chinese immigrants during the exclusion period. Addressing four overlapping parties who each had a stake in using the children of Chinatown for their own agenda, she constructs her analysis with sophistication and solid evidence."
--K. Scott Wong, Williams College

Writers Read: Wendy Rouse Jorae.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gail Carriger's "Soulless," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Soulless by Gail Carriger.

The entry begins:

Soulless is a comedic take on the urban fantasy genre set in Victorian London. With that kind of elevator pitch, you can probably guess I'd skip Hollywood and take less money if I could sell it to the BBC as a mini series. I'd settle for a fist-full of unknowns so long as it came out as well as their Cranford adaptation, but my assignment is to cast my ideal film, so here were go...

Our Intrepid Heroine

Alexia Tarabotti, London's only preternatural, is an Italian-looking spinster with no soul, a big mouth and, quite frankly, even bigger nose. Visually, I modeled her off of Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, but Sabrina seems a little too regal for the role. Perhaps Claudia Black might be better suited to running around whacking obstreperous vampires willy-nilly with a parasol, but that girl's gotta eat about ten cream teas first, then we'll talk.

Werewolves of Note

For our hero, an oversized scruffy Scottish werewolf, I'm going to deviate from the expected--Gerard Butler--and pick...[read on]

Learn more about Soulless and its author at Gail Carriger's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Soulless.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best green stories in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best green stories in literature.

One novel on his list:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

To make us green, novelists have invented dystopias. Atwood's is one of the most recent and most powerful, and describes the world after a catastrophe wrought by genetic engineering and global warming. Our dreams of progress produce apocalypse.

Read about another book on Mullan's list.

Oryx and Crake also appears on Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ivy Pochoda's "The Art of Disappearing"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda.

About the book, from the publisher:

How do you know if love is real or just an illusion?

When Mel Snow meets the talented magician Toby Warring in a dusty roadside bar, she is instantly drawn to the brilliant performer whose hands can effortlessly pull stray saltshakers and poker chips from thin air and conjure castles out of the desert sands. Just two days later they are married, beginning their life together in the shadow of Las Vegas, where Toby hopes to make it big. Mel knows that magicians are a dime a dozen, but Toby is different—his magic is real.

As Toby’s renown grows and Mel falls more and more in love with his wonderments, she starts to realize that Toby's powers are as unstable as they are dazzling. She learns that he once made his assistant disappear completely, and couldn’t bring her back. And then, just as Mel becomes convinced that his magic is dangerous, a trick goes terribly awry during his Strip debut.

Exiled from the stage, Mel and Toby flee the lights of Las Vegas for the streets of Amsterdam where a cabal of old-time magicians, real magicians like Toby, try to rescue him from his despair. But he’s haunted by the trick that failed, and obsessed with using his powers to right his mistakes, leaving Mel to wonder if the love they share is genuine or merely a fantasy, conjured up by a lost magician looking to save himself from being alone.

Ivy Pochoda’s spellbinding and cinematic storytelling seamlessly fuses timeless magic to modern-day passion. Haunting and beautiful, The Art of Disappearing is an imaginative and captivating love story destined to enchant readers for years to come.

Read excerpts from The Art of Disappearing, and learn more about the book and author at Ivy Pochoda's website.

Ivy Pochoda graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Classical Greek and English. She was a champion squash player and a six-time member of the United States Women's National Squash Team.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Disappearing.

--Marshal Zeringue