Interview: Gail Jones

Today in January Magazine, contributing editor Summer Block interviews Gail Jones, author of 2004’s Sixty Lights and, more recently, Sorry, which opens with the murder of a white anthropologist in Australia.

“The attack is witnessed by a white girl and her Aboriginal friend,” writes Block. “The Aboriginal girl takes the blame, while the white girl forgets the traumatic event, an allegory for Australia’s own troubled past concerning “the stolen generations” of Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their homes by the Australian government between 1910 and 1970.” Says Block:

The author of four novels that combine elements of photography, cinema and painting, Australian Gail Jones could well be considered a multimedia artist. Her literary work is highly visual, a carefully constructed montage of visceral images whose pacing owes much to her love of film.

The interview is here.

New this Week: Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

Though authors are frequently reluctant to talk about where they get their ideas, (“A post office box in Schenectady.”) when discussing his 11th novel, Skeletons at the Feast (Shaye Areheart Books), Chris Bohjalian (The Double Bind, Midwives) has been very forthcoming.

About a decade ago, a friend asked him to read his German grandmother’s newly translated diary. “Usually,” writes Bohjalian, “this sort of request is a novelist’s worst nightmare. Most family histories are dull as toast and badly written.”

But it was a good friend and, in any case, Bohjalian discovered much of the diary to be fascinating reading, including “passages that chronicled 1945 and Eva’s family’s arduous trek west ahead of the Soviet Army -- a journey that was always grueling and often terrifying.” But it didn’t move him to take up the pen.

Eight years later, however, “I read Max Hastings’s history of the last year of the war in Germany, Armageddon, and I was struck by how often the anecdotes in Hasting’s nonfiction account mirrored moments in that diary.” He asked to read that diary again and it was then “that I began to imagine a novel and started to research the period.”

Bohjalian is careful to let us know that Skeletons at the Feast is a fully fictionalized and wholly imagined work. Still it’s lovely hearing about the lightbulb moment for this novel that we’ll be hearing a lot about over the next couple of weeks.

Author Snapshot: Barbara Fister

Anyone who knows Barbara Fister even slightly is not in the least surprised to discover that her novels are smart, sophisticated and deeply concerned with the larger world. In many ways, all of those words -- smart, sophisticated, concerned -- describe the Madison-born and Minnesota-based author perfectly.

An academic librarian at a liberal arts college, on her own Web site, Fister says her “research interests are wide, not to say idiosyncratic, but they all have to do, one way or another, with how various media shape our understanding of the world.”

These interests -- and even passions – inform Fister’s work. “I’m particularly interested [in] the role of anxiety in the formation of social issues,” says Fister, “in life and in fiction.”

In her second novel, Fister says she is exploring “how anxiety becomes a device for the suppression of dissent in In the Wind.” The book draws parallels between the contemporary insouciance regarding civil liberties and the counterintelligence practices of the era around the Vietnam War. Fister herself tells us that she would “like to think I’m contributing my small part toward carrying on the feminist contribution to the PI genre.” And, sure: there’s that. But there’s so much more here, as well.


A Snapshot of Barbara Fister...

Born: Madison, Wisconsin
Resides: Rural Minnesota, US
Birthday: I’m 53. I’m not big on birthdays.
Web site: barbarafister.com


Please tell us about In the Wind.
The book draws on the resonance between the present state of our civil liberties and the excesses of law enforcement during the Vietnam War era.

A woman who has been working quietly in a church on Chicago’s West Side goes on the lam, accused of having killed an FBI agent in 1972, when she was a member of a radical offshoot of the American Indian Movement. The narrator of the story, Anni Koskinen, has recently resigned from the Chicago PD after getting on the wrong side of her fellow cops, and is not quite sure what to do with herself; her only job so far as newly licensed PI has been tracking down a teenage girl with bipolar disorder. By happenstance, Anni helps the fugitive escape, then gets involved in her defense -- which is tricky because her closest friend is not only an FBI agent himself, but the son of the murdered man. But even he is unhappy with the way the FBI is handling the case, and is troubled by the direction the bureau has been heading. Her investigation leads down some mean streets, up to the White Earth Reservation, into the past -- and, of course, into a whole lot of trouble. Which, when all’s said and done, is her business.

I had to reach for the smelling salts when Kris Nelscott, whose Smokey Dalton series is one I’ve long admired, read the book and said I was “Sara Paretsky’s heir apparent.” I’m sure Paretsky is too busy writing to think about heirs, but I like to think I’m contributing my small part toward carrying on the feminist contribution to the PI genre.

What’s on your nightstand?
A lovely big pile of books, including Minette Walter’s The Chameleon’s Shadow and Andrew Pyper’s Wildfire Season.

What inspires you?
I get my dander up about a lot of things, and writing is a good outlet. In the Wind was a therapeutic way to deal with my negative feelings about George Bush. It was strange, as I did research for the story, to read about counterintelligence practices exposed after Watergate; they’re identical to what’s going on today. When Chris Dodd read from the 1976 Church Committee hearings this past December on the floor of the Senate as he filibustered a bill sanctioning warrantless wiretapping, it sent chills up my spine. We’re in a weird time warp; the only thing missing is the outrage and the tear gas. That said, though my book has political themes, I try to play fair with the issues. Anything less would belittle the very real issues at stake, and straw men don’t make for very compelling characters in fiction.

What are you working on now?
My next book deals with the immigration debate and the aftermath of an exoneration. A black man who has spent 20 years in prison, convicted in a highly-publicized rape case, is released after his conviction is overturned. The woman who is raped wants to know who was really responsible -- especially once she discovers that several women have been attacked since in similar circumstances. Anni Koskinen starts to investigate just as another highly-charged crime is stirring passions in Chicago, when an undocumented alien is arrested for the murder of a young woman who had been missing for months. As with In the Wind, what really interests me is the way in which general social anxiety shapes the way people respond to crime, and how that anxiety is manipulated for various ends. While it sounds as if I’m on a soapbox, I’m not: I just think this stuff makes for compelling stories.

Tell us about your process.
I’m what someone at Crimespace evocatively called a “fog walker.” I can’t map out a story in advance, I have to discover it as I go groping along. I’m sure it would be more efficient to work from an outline, but I just can’t do it. If I can see two or three scenes ahead, I’m doing well. Thank god for word processors.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
There’s a cat trying to climb into my lap. He’s jealous of all the time my laptop spends there.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was in fifth grade I wrote a story about a horse that was a whole eight pages long. I was very impressed with myself.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I would be reading them. (Which I do, anyway.) I have a job I like quite a bit -- as an academic librarian and college teacher. I enjoy writing fiction, but I fit it in when I can. I feel a little guilty saying this, because I know how many people’s fondest desires are caught up in the identity “writer.” For me, it’s something I love to do, but it’s not who I am.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
That’s a very interesting question, actually. You’d think it would be when my agent closed the deal on my first book, in a preempt the day after he put it on the market. But that was both unreal and fraught with anxiety. I hate having my hands shake every time the phone rings. It may sound corny, but my happiest moments are when I write a scene that really works. There’s no anxiety involved, no regrets, no ambition to be someone other than who I am; just pure satisfaction.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being a writer?
Hmm, I’m beginning to visualize Gabriel Byrne sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room asking me these questions as he tents his hands in front of him. “Being a writer” is a phrase that makes me oddly nervous. I guess I’m only comfortable with it as a verb: to write, not as a descriptive noun: a writer. I write. That’s easy.

What’s the most difficult? Avoiding the hype and hysteria about how to market yourself. I see so much unhappiness among people who act like stage mothers to their inner child. That’s no way to treat a kid.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
I don’t get many questions about it; not that many people know I write mysteries.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Read any good books lately?

What question would you like never to be asked again?
What do you think of my book trailer? (Or any other marketing topic.) Look, Doc, I’ll level with you: I think capitalism, which celebrates greed as a virtue and separates us all into winners and losers, like some cosmic American Idol show, appeals to our worst nature and fosters intolerance and inequality. Too much bad energy is generated around books as product and authors as brands, and none of it actually benefits readers. It’s gotten so bad that writers go on discussion lists to chide people for checking books out of libraries. It would be much more beneficial to think about developing a healthy book culture than to focus so much on selling ourselves. I think my inner librarian is coming out.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
Well, quite a few people know this, since I wrote about it in an article that got picked up at Slashdot (“News for Nerds”), but I’m a self-disclosed anarchist librarian -- which is not an oxymoron. In reality, libraries are a model of anarchist philosophy. They are full of ideas that coexist side by side, even though they disagree with one another. You may think we’re creating order, but actually we put all those books together so they can have a good brawl. No single authority gets to decide which answers are the right ones. Anyone who comes in the door gets to make up his or her own mind. When it comes to crime fiction, two of Ranganathan’s laws of library science, first laid out in 1931, provide a model of tolerance: every reader his book, every book, its reader. Forget the bestseller lists and the hype -- just be open-minded, look for the unusual voices that speak to you, find the right match, and all will be well.

Is our time up already? I must say, I feel much better. This therapy seems to be working.

Review: Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff. Says Leach:

Reading Our Story Begins was often painful, reminding me as it did Wolff’s fellow travelers, Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus, those masters of domestic disaster. Our Story was especially reminiscent of Carver, who mined a similar geographic landscape and counted Wolff as a friend. Not to say that Wolff copies either man; rather, that the three make their business the pain and bewilderment arising between ordinary people, often families. Wolff’s people, like Dubus’ and Carver’s, lead largely unhappy lives of struggle and fear. Some are strapped for cash, while others are plain in over their heads. The stories investigate what they hide in life’s interstices, and what happens when things snap.

The full review is here.

Author Snapshot: Sandra Ruttan

Titian hair. A deceptively sweet smile. Arms akimbo. Mystery writer and journalist Sandra Ruttan manages these disparate things easily, seemingly without contradiction.

I say this about Sandra Ruttan the author, but it could all be easily translated to what works about her fiction: Sandra Ruttan looks at things from a connected distance. She assesses dispassionately, beautifully, and with a frighteningly delicate care. And then she brings us along.

With her second novel, What Burns Within (Dorchester), just a few days from publication, the editor of Spinetingler magazine and the heft behind At Central Booking contemplates the path that led her to this place... just remember, please, not to call her Susan.

Crimespree Magazine said this author is “talented in the way that a natural musician is talented, making all the notes seem effortless.” We agree, and hold our breath to see what’s next.


A Snapshot of Sandra Ruttan...

Please tell us about your new novel, What Burns Within.
When I was a baby, my mother was walking in Toronto, with my two-year-old sister by the hand and me in her arms. She lost her grip on my sister, and they got separated. A stranger picked my sister up and took her to a police station. Things like that make you realize it’s down to luck. Anyone could have found my sister, but the person who did was a responsible citizen.

The opening scene for What Burns Within came from there. The book was inspired by a real moment in my life, when I realized that anyone could know I was home alone, but saying more would be a bit of a spoiler. That feeling of vulnerability was the seed, and I started to think about how so many people are at risk, every day, without even realizing it, just like that situation with my sister.

When I worked in education it was my responsibility to anticipate danger and protect the children when we did field trips, and once you start writing crime fiction it isn’t hard to imagine the many ways a person can harm another. It made me think about what could have happened all those years ago.

My ex-husband is also a firefighter, so the three main crimes in What Burns Within -- rape, child abductions and arson -- all came out of personal experience. In the book, three RCMP officers who have a history end up working together when their investigations collide and their personal history may get in the way, with devastating consequences.

What’s on your nightstand?
I’m in the midst of moving and packing, so I don't have a nightstand at the moment. But the books I’m keeping in my suitcase are Paying For It by Tony Black and Russell D. McLean’s The Good son.

What inspires you?
News stories, bits of conversation, personal experiences... everything, in other words.

I was on a plane recently, flying from Dallas to Baltimore, and I ended up sitting beside a woman who does national educational testing in the US. By the end of the flight I had her contact information, a resource Web site link and a new book idea. I do keep an ideas file, but it’s more about technical research and contact information, because I find news stories are sometimes taken down or blocked after a certain period of time. I don’t usually look at anything in the file, unless I need to do research, or get in touch with someone. I just wait to see if the idea takes root and starts growing.

What are you working on now?
A stand-alone book I don't want to say too much about, but it isn’t a police procedural. Although a criminal investigation is a part of the book, the focus is on relationships and the things that happen to a person that shape their life and their choices, and how it leaves their life in ruins.

I am also working on the third book in the Nolan, Hart and Tain series... and in that book readers will finally get the full scoop on the investigation the three were working when they met. It’s a story with intersecting timelines when the past finally catches up with the present.

Tell us about your process.
I usually write in the morning, and in the afternoon, and evening. When I’m working on a book I work seven days a week. I don’t pre-plot, so I keep paper and a pen beside my bed and often write illegible notes in the middle of the night, in the dark. I’m obsessive. That said, I do most of my work on the computer, and it’s almost always entirely freeform, minimal pre-plotting. With What Burns Within, the only thing I knew for sure was the last scene of the book.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Right this moment, an air hockey table, a plastic child-sized chair, a Hogwarts-designed playroom, my nephew Athaniel talking on the phone to his friend, my two-year-old nephew Dashiell grooving to Tom Waits...

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
As a child, from the time I read The Call of the Wild and The Chronicles of Narnia... I guess around the age of seven.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Working with children with speech delays, or other special needs.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
There are three moments tied for this spot. One was when I got my Publishers Weekly review and they said, “The child abduction and sex crime aspects of the story are handled without exploitation or kid gloves.” Although I’m dealing with heavy subjects, I don’t just do that to manipulate the reader, and I was pleased the reviewer sensed that I wasn’t trying to exploit the crimes in the book for shock value.

The second moment was when Sean Chercover phoned me after reading The Frailty of the Flesh, the second Nolan, Hart and Tain book [coming November 2008 from Dorchester]. Sean told me he had tears running down his face. I knew then that the book had the strong emotional impact for others that it had for me.

The third was when my boyfriend made a remark about Craig Nolan. It was an off-hand thing, but Brian completely understood the character and sensed where I was ultimately going with him. Since we’d never discussed the character or my long-range plans, it was a great moment. It’s very rewarding when someone gets what you’re trying to do with your work, though it probably speaks to what a close reader Brian is more than anything.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
The evolution of ideas. I have so many ideas it would take me ten years to write them all if I started on them right now, and I’d be scared to think of how many new ideas I’d develop before I finished the current list.

What’s the most difficult?
The politics, all the expectations people start putting on you, what you can and can’t blog about, can and can’t say in an interview, review, etc. Some seem to think you should stop being a person and just be a product. If I wanted that, wouldn’t I have set my sights on Hollywood? The pay is better. It seems the best way to survive is to be nothing but a smile, have no strong opinion about anything, never take a stand. And that runs counter to my nature. I don’t do wishy-washy.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where my ideas come from, I guess, but I don’t mind. Usually something interesting sparked them, and that’s why I wrote the story.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
What’s the worst piece of writing advice you ever received.

What question would you like never to be asked again?
I appreciate any interest in my work and will answer pretty much any question, but I guess if there’s one question that drives me mental it’s one I get asked in life regularly, not in interviews. For the record I am not related to Susan Ruttan. I don’t know her, I was not on L.A. Law and I don’t find it funny when people call me Susan.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I’m sure a few people know that as a child, I had recurring nightmares about Hamburglar.

Author Snapshot: Shanna Swendson

We join the Texas-based author previously known as Samantha Carter at a beautiful moment in her career: Don’t Hex With Texas (Ballantine Books), the fourth novel in her widely acclaimed Enchanted, Inc. series is appearing in bookstores right now and the reviews that have been heralding the way have been sunny and enthusiastic. Last fall, the first book in the series, Enchanted, Inc., has been optioned for film by Universal's Strike Entertainment.

The Enchanted, Inc. books are… well… enchanting. And certainly charming. A small town Texas girl pulls up stakes and moves to the big smoke where she gets a job with a mysterious company called MSI, Inc. Magical high-jinx follow. In a review of Don’t Hex With Texas, Booklist said the Enchanted, Inc. books comprised “one of the best romantic-fantasy series being written today.”


A Snapshot of... Shanna Swendson

Born: Fort Sill, Oklahoma
Reside: Irving, Texas
Birthday: August 7
Web site: shannaswendson.com


Please tell us about your most recent book.
Don’t Hex With Texas is the fourth book in my Enchanted, Inc. series about an entirely unmagical woman who works for a magical corporation.

In this one, the action moves to Katie Chandler’s home town, which means that for a change, she’s not the fish out of water. I had a lot of fun making odd magical stuff happen in a small Texas town.

What’s on your nightstand?
A towering pile of partially read books that I’ll get back to someday and read, books that need to be reshelved that’s someday going to topple and kill me, a telephone, alarm clock, earplugs (I have noisy neighbors) and a flashlight (it’s thunderstorm season).

But if you mean what am I reading now, well, I just started reading Pyramids by Terry Pratchett, but it’s on the floor by my bed instead of on my nightstand because the nightstand is where books go to die (or wait to be re-shelved).

What inspires you?
Just about everything inspires me. I like playing games of what-if, taking things too literally, fixing things that I feel were done wrong in another story, trying to see what I can get away with. Most of my story ideas seem to come from me being a brat.

What are you working on now?
I just started playing with a new idea, and I’m way too early in the process to have the slightest idea of whether or not it will go anywhere, so I’m a little hesitant to talk about it.

Tell us about your process.
My process seems to change with each book. Each one has its own rhythm. I write on a computer (because if I wrote by hand, I’d never be able to read it), and usually in the late afternoon or at night. I seem to have the worst of both worlds between plotting or writing free-form -- I can’t get very far without plotting everything out, but then I don’t really seem to know what the book is about until I’ve written it, and then I have to do a lot of revising. I usually write enough to get a feel for it -- as little as five pages, as many as 60 -- then do some brainstorming, plotting, character development, that sort of thing. Then I write a very, very rough, fast draft. And then I take it all apart and put it back together again. My first draft usually takes about a month, and then revisions can take up to six months.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
If I look straight ahead, I look out the glass doors onto a balcony that overlooks a little lawn area, the major street beyond that, and then the buildings across the street. The signal lights at the intersection are blinking red thanks to a storm last night, so the traffic flow is fairly entertaining as people unexpectedly encounter a four-way stop and aren’t sure what to do. If I look any other direction, I see a terribly messy office that I really do plan to clean someday.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I think my very first inkling that writing was fun came in fourth grade when we were supposed to write a paragraph describing a picture and I found myself writing a whole short story. I first started really thinking about writing as a career when I was about 12. I figured out then that if I wrote down the stories I made up in my head, I’d have a book, and it was around that age that I looked up “publishers” in the phone book. But as I didn’t live in New York, I didn’t find any.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I have no idea. I keep thinking of things I could do as a fallback career, and none of them hold much appeal for me -- or else they somehow come back to writing. I suppose if I got truly desperate I could go back to doing marketing and public relations work, which was my career before I started writing full-time, but I dread the thought of that. I’m fascinated by psychology and have thought that might be something to pursue, but then I’d still probably end up writing psychology books. I guess if I can’t make this writing thing work, I’m doomed.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
A few days before the release of the first book in my series, I got a copy of the review Charles deLint wrote in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he raved about the book and about how original my concept was. He was one of the writers I’d looked to as an example in writing contemporary fantasy, and I love his work, so seeing one of my role models praising my work and really getting what I was trying to say was overwhelming. I burst into tears when I read it and spent the rest of the day shaking.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Coming up with story ideas is probably the easiest thing. Just about everything I see or do gives me some fragment of idea. I doubt I’ll ever run out of things to write because I have a huge backlog of ideas.

What’s the most difficult?
The most difficult thing is releasing my baby over to other people and realizing that once I’ve written the book, I have very little control over it. I may get to make suggestions, but ultimately, I can’t control where the books are shelved, how they’re distributed and how people can find out about them.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
When’s the next book coming out?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Can we please pay you large sums of money to write something for us?

What question would like never to be asked again?
For frequency and futility: Why aren’t your books shelved as fantasy? (Not that I don’t think that’s a brilliant idea. I’ve been politely suggesting it for a while now, but questions about where/how my books can be found are best directed to the publisher or bookseller since I have no control over that.)

For making me deeply uncomfortable: Can you read my manuscript and critique it/recommend it to your editor or agent/give me an endorsement blurb? (I’m not a very good critiquer, I have a reading backlog so you might get a faster response just submitting your work to agents or publishers without my recommendation, and I only take blurb requests that come through editors or agents because I only give blurbs for books when I enthusiastically recommend them, and I’m a huge weenie so I never want to have to tell someone directly that I didn’t like her book enough to give it a blurb. It’s hard enough telling an agent or editor that it’s not for me. I guess the weenie thing also applies to critiques or giving referrals. I don’t want to have to tell anyone I don’t like it.)

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I’m not sure there is anything that no one knows that I’m willing to share. That’s a hazard of blogging regularly for years. If I wanted to tell it, I already have. My readers already know about my crippling shyness in the presence of people I admire, my huge crush on a local TV anchorman, my telephone phobia, my aversion to bananas and my extreme levels of geekiness. What more could I tell?

Author Snapshot: Daniel Kalla

When you meet him he is quiet, articulate, soft-spoken. An emergency physician, he is certainly hard-working: though that just goes with the territory. And then, beginning with his debut novel, 2005’s Pandemic, you read his work and discover unplumbed depths of the type that fuel that very best high tech thrillers. And the type that cause the more gentle souls among us to lose sleep.

Though perhaps it is no longer fair to call these depths “unplumbed.” Kalla has been plumbing just fine, thank you penning a novel a year and sometimes more since Pandemic, each bringing still more readers to the talented doctor’s fanbase. The latest -- the fifth -- is Cold Plague, reuniting us again with Pandemic’s Dr. Noah Haldane, and introducing a plot that feels like Al Gore meets Michael Crichton: planet saving pathos gone somehow desperately wrong.

A Snapshot of ... Daniel Kalla

Born: Vancouver, Canada
Resides: Vancouver, Canada
Birthday: May 4th, 1966
Web site: danielkalla.com

Please tell us about Cold Plague, your most recent book.
Pristine water -- millions of years old and untouched by pollution -- is discovered miles under the Antarctic ice. Meanwhile, a cluster of new cases of mad cow disease explode in a rural France. Dr. Noah Haldane -- the hero of Pandemic -- and his team are urgently summoned. Noah recognizes the deadliness of the protein responsible for mad cow disease and its human equivalent. It is the prion that kills with the ferocity of a virus, but he suspects factors other than nature have ignited its spread among people and animals of France.

Facing a spate of disappearances and unexplained deaths, he uncovers a conspiracy that stretches from Moscow to Beverly Hills, and from the North to the South Pole. And he recognizes that the scientific find of the century: a body of water the size of Lake Michigan buried under Antarctic ice might hold the key to a microscopic Jurassic Park.

What’s on your nightstand?
Lamb by Christopher Moore and A Short History Of Almost Everything by Bill Bryson.

What inspires you?
My family. My work. My work-outs. Reading. Writing. Walking. The world in general. Essentially, anyone and anything can inspire me, but inspiration is a fickle and elusive state. I don’t do well at all when I’m actively looking for it.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a “big” book. I use the term because it has a large cast and covers over a hundred years from the turn of the 20th century to the present. It’s my first non-thriller. I’m trying to capture a bit of an “epic” feel. Hospital tells story of a fictional West Coast Mayo Clinic, the Alfredson, which is careening toward a major crisis along with the characters who live and work inside it. The story centers around two families -- the Alfredsons who funded and still control the place, and the McGraths who have always been its medical leaders -- and their often-times adversarial and destructive relationship.

Tell us about your process.
I work on a computer. I have world-class bad penmanship, even for a doctor, which says a lot! Once I have an idea, I write from a very loose two to 10 page outline, which I never consult once I start writing the manuscript. If I have something to say, I can write anywhere and anytime I’m near a computer. And if I don’t, it’s just a complete and utter waste of time... but I never seem to learn that lesson!

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Chaos. I’m in my office. Pictures, discs, papers, magazines, books, wires, computer equipments, three or four boxes that might possibly contain body parts. I really ought to clean this place up!

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was six years old and taking my first violin lesson.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?

Not playing violin (see above)!

I have the luxury of a day job working as an emergency room physician, which I still enjoy, especially since I work at a teaching hospital and I have the pleasure of mentoring medical students and residents. I suppose I would be doing more of the same, and possibly some work in medical administration. Come to think of it, I better keep writing!

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
It’s a tie between: 1) Hearing from my agent that an editor at Tor-Forge in New York wanted to publish my novel, and 2) receiving a letter of endorsement (with quotable praise for two of my novels) from one of my literary childhood heroes, Nelson DeMille.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Don’t know about easiest, but my favorite part is hitting what I call “the point of engagement” in a story. By that I mean the point in a new manuscript when I know most of the main characters and have a rough idea of what has to happen next. Generally, the writing flows much faster for me after that. It’s always fun from that point because I never know how it’s going to end. And it’s fun to find out.

What’s the most difficult?
Reviewing the final proofs. I have a desperately short attention span and, besides, I’m a terrible proof reader. Inevitably, when those final pages come back to me to review before the book is moved into its final draft phase, I have trouble reading the novel again as I’m usually immersed in a new manuscript. It’s an important step, but one I can never get excited about.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Being a practicing physician, father of two girls, and writer, I get asked by everyone -- and I mean everyone -- “Where do you find the time to write?”

What question would like never to be asked again?
Being a practicing physician, father of two girls, and writer, I get asked by everyone -- and I mean everyone -- “Where do you find the time to write?”

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
With so little time on your hands, how do you manage to write such engaging stories? (Hey, a guy can dream!)

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I don’t like rabbits. Never have. Never will.

New This Month: The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan

Padma Viswasathan’s debut novel is deceptively quiet and quietly brilliant. It pads in on little cat feet and rips you along. You don’t realize you’re on an epic journey in the midst of a generational saga until you’re well along and it’s far, far too late to turn back. Not that you’d want to. Not that you even could.

Inspired by the author’s own family history, we join Sivakami in a village in India in 1892, the year of her marriage to the healer, Hanumarathnam. She is ten.

She is neither tall nor short for her age, but she will not grow much more. Her shoulders are narrow but appear solid, as though the blades are fused to protect her heart from the back. She carries herself with attractive stiffness: her shoulders straight and always aligned. She looks capable of bearing great burdens, not as though born to a yoke but perhaps born with a yoke within her.

Sivakami is of the Brahmin caste as, of course, is her husband. And so when, as the astrologers forecast, her husband is dead by the time she is 18, leaving her with two young children to care for, she must take up the life of a widow, secluding herself most of the time, shaving her head and leaving the affluent and attractive young widow with a wardrobe of only two plain white saris and a future that will be seen mostly from within her own home. It’s the course her upbringing has set out for her and she doesn’t balk. She faces it squarely and begins to forge her way through the rest of her life.

Were you to only read these few lines, it would be possible to believe that this is the story of a woman’s oppression, but The Toss of A Lemon (Random House) is hardly that; never that. And is, in fact, so, so much more.

What astonishes here is Viswasathan’s virtuosity. In The Toss of A Lemon, we join India at a time of great social and political upheaval. Nevertheless, we experience this only at a distance. The way, in fact, Sivakami might experience it. Our concerns are more immediate, more domestic, though never more mundane. The marriage of a daughter, a granddaughter. The obedience of a son-in-law. The disturbingly progressive thoughts of a son. These concern Sivakami exclusively and, with her as our proxy, they are all that concern us, as well.

The Toss of A Lemon is astonishing. Brilliant. Beautiful. I learned a great deal about 20th century India that I did not know before. That’s secondary, of course. Like the very best novels, at its core, The Toss of A Lemon teaches us about ourselves.

Review: The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu. Says Leach:

The Corpse Walker is comprised of 27 stories of Chinese life told by those living “on the bottom rung.” The notion of a “bottom rung” is anathema to Communist Chinese, who insist everyone lives prosperously thanks to the Party. Liao, who collected these tales orally over several years, demonstrates this is far from the case. We hear from 27 people, including a professional mourner, a human trafficker, a public restroom attendant, a composer, a teacher and a retired party official. Their stories are a near-identical recitation of horrors: starvation, arrests, beatings, denunciations by neighbors, friends, and relatives at the endless “speak bitterness” meetings held by party officials. We hear about the famine that left people killing their youngest daughters and eating them, correctly observing that the children would have starved anyway. We hear from the mortuary worker who prepared many bodies for cremation, bodies missing chunks of flesh consumed by villagers so crazed with hunger they were willing eat of deceased neighbors. We hear from the retired party official, who witnessed peasants eating white clay, falling ill, and ingesting tung oil as a curative. We read of wholesale destruction of temples and ancient religious statuary.

Liao intends to inform as well as sicken us. He succeeds, but at a cost, for the book ultimately collapses beneath the weight of its message.

The full review is here.

New in Paper: Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

In case you missed all the hoopla when Horan’s debut novel was released in hardcover last year -- and there was a lot of it -- Ballantine dropped the paperback a couple of days ago. I feel a little odd offering up additional buzz about Loving Frank, a book that’s had swarms written about it, but it really is wonderful: still worth talking about, but now easier to bring to the beach or hide at work.

What we have here is a skillfully fictionalized retelling of the relationship between mega-architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the woman who was probably the love of the arrogant architect’s life, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Horan’s treatment is elegant enough that those of us without an intimate knowledge of the relationship will have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. It doesn’t matter. Here’s what does: Loving Frank transports.

Review: Keeper and Kid by Edward Hardy

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Tony Buchsbaum reviews Keeper and Kid by Edward Hardy. Says Buchsbaum:

Keeper is Jim Keeper, divorced, mid-30s and now wonderfully enmeshed in a fruitful relationship with Leah and a career path that leaves a bit to be desired. His life is just perfect right about now. His divorce was bad enough that he knows that he’ll never marry again, just to avoid having to divorce again (maybe). But Leah, a workaholic on the fast track, seems fine with that. Everything’s just ducky, in fact, until Keeper’s ex, Cynthia, dies. Leaving him their dog. Who turns out to be dead, too.

Which is when Keeper learns he has a three-year-old son. With no mother, the kid -- Leo -- is moving into Daddy’s house. Except Daddy didn’t ever expect to be a parent ... and it isn’t even his house.

Now, before you call me a spoiler, the jacket tells you all this (well, pretty much). And anyway, it’s from here that Keeper and Kid finds itself, its characters, its voice and its undeniable beauty. See, this is a book that seems to be about transformation, but is really about revelation. Leo, the monkey wrench, is tossed into the motor of Keeper’s life -- and seems to foul everything up. His relationships, his work, his home, his bank account...

The full review is here.

New Last Week: Succubus in the City by Nina Harper

“When you’re a single, hard-working woman in New York City, it’s hard enough to find a good man,” this from the PR material. “When you’re a succubus, you’ve got a completely different problem altogether!” We can only imagine.

Succubus in the City (Del Rey) by Nina Harper, a third generation Manhattanite, is meant to be the first book in a new series. The premise is silly, but the writing is sharp, and the story is engaging even if it is absurd. Think Carrie Bradshaw (without some of the intellectualizing) meets Elvira (with lower still morality) and you’re kinda close.

Unlike a lot of what protagonist Lily consumes, Succubus in the City is empty calories, meant to amuse rather than enlighten. Sometimes that’s enough.

Review: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. Says Leach:

And Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is the literary equivalent of Château d’Yquem. For those of us worrying as the greats age -- Atwood, Oates, Roth -- wondering who might fill the gap, Lahiri is cause for hope. She gives strength to those of us quietly waiting for the pomo moment, with its eponymously named characters, drawings, and blank pages, to pass, for she need not resort to their trickery. Hers are perfectly placed words lining themselves into elegant sentences whose subject matter: family, mothers and daughters, assimilation, alcoholism, children, marital love -- touch us all.

Lahiri’s Bengali heritage informs her work, communicating worlds through the smallest of details. Saris fight slacks, a mother’s accumulated gold, intended for a future daughter-in-law, is lost to that most American of addictions, alcoholism. Food is a lush battleground of dals, rice, chocoris, bitter melon and Darjeeling tea. The drinking of tea or coffee represents more than taste; one is tradition; the other, cultural abandonment.

The full review is here.

New This Week: The Road from La Cueva by Sheila Ortego

Sheila Ortego’s debut novel is interesting on several levels. Ortego holds a doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico and she has taught Southwestern literature, women’s literature and women’s studies at several institutes of higher learning. She is currently the president of Santa Fe Community College, the first woman to hold that post. So, clearly, she is someone who has spent time exploring the intellectual side of making words that move hearts.

On the other hand, Ortego is a poet and she was recently invited to join the Live Poets Society in Santa Fe.

Both of these facets of Ortego’s life path are well represented in The Road from La Cueva (Sunstone Press) where we meet Ana Howland, a woman at a violent emotional crossroad in her life. Ana is faced with choices, some of which are hidden from her by a controlling husband and a habit of personal repression. None of this is particularly new ground, but Ortego’s sharp eye and delicate tread make it a vibrant journey of discovery. The Road from La Cueva is slender, but engaging and entirely memorable.

New Today: Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock is Cinderella. The bio in Knockemstiff, his debut collection -- published today by Doubleday -- tells that story. Among other things, it says Pollack “dropped out of high school to work in a meatpacking plant and then spent over thirty years employed in a paper mill in southern Ohio.”

What it doesn’t say: the title of this much ballyhooed new collection, is also the name of the southern Ohio town where Pollock came to maturity. What else it doesn’t say: no one -- but no one -- has served up the midwest like this. Donald Ray Pollock makes Jonathan Franzen look like Judy Blume.

Here is the thing that startles: in the very moment of Pollock’s debut, the American economy is foundering, the dollar is staggering, the housing market feels as though it may never fully recover. And just as we put to bed this era of real stone countertops and stainless steel appliances, here comes an author to remind us where we’re really from. And more. Pollock’s arrival feels ordained. Mark my words: you will be hearing more from this author. And mark another set: when you’re done reading, it’s possible you’ll want a shower.

Review: The Ghost by Robert Harris

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Tony Buchsbaum reviews The Ghost by Robert Harris. Says Buchsbaum:

There’s something interesting about writers who write about writing. Robert Harris (Fatherland, Enigma) has done just that with his latest novel, The Ghost. For those expecting Harris’ usual brainy thriller, this might not be the book for you, but if you’re into crisp, clean writing by an author at peak performance, then by all means jump in.

I was completely absorbed by The Ghost, which is, from the look of things, about a ghostwriter writing in the first person about doing his job. That this particular ghostwriter remains unnamed is a cheeky bit of fun. That he’s hired to write the memoirs of Great Britain’s ex-Prime Minister after the first ghostwriter is found dead is the switch that turns this story on.

The full review is here.

New Today: Blind Fall by Christopher Rice

Thrillers are sexy. By now, everyone knows that. And, just in case you weren’t sure, there’s a newish organization ready to pounce and set you straight. Not sure where a book fits? Call it a thriller and those in the know will be certain to stand in the right line to buy the thrilling book.

The problem, of course, is that the plan is flawed from the get go. Christopher Rice’s lovely new Blind Fall is the perfect example. It’s not a thriller by any but the loosest definition. Yet it’s a great book with strong, memorable characters. More: young Rice has, once again, illustrated that he is a writer with something to say and the chops to say it well.

In Rice’s fourth novel we meet Iraq veteran John Houck who, upon returning stateside, discovers that his old captain has been horribly slain. He quickly discovers that his captain was gay and that the man’s partner may be the killer’s next target.

Despite all these thrillerish trappings – an ex-military protagonist, killers, targets and so on -- the most engaging aspects of Blind Fall have more to do with the book’s human elements -- notably homophobia and the morality of war.

Here’s hoping that with Rice’s next effort, he won’t feel tempted by the call of the faddish thriller. Rice’s vision is true and his pen is strong, he doesn’t need some of the gimmicks he’s delivered to us here.

Review: You Must Be This Happy to Enter by Elizabeth Crane

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews You Must Be This Happy to Enter by Elizabeth Crane. Says Leach:

I had a mixed reaction to this book. Few writers today are offering stories with titles like “Sally (Featuring: Lollipop the Rainbow Unicorn)” or admitting, in the press materials enclosed with the book, that she wanted to focus on happiness, which, as literary topics go, is not too cool.

Crane’s characters, to borrow Emily Dickinson’s term, are slant. Really, really slant. Take “Betty the Zombie,” a woman bitten by a zombie in a Minnesota Fabrics store. Betty’s zombiedom leads her to begin eating the neighbor’s pets, and in one case, a small child. In an effort to break this disconcerting habit (and not gobble husband Ed), Betty agrees to participate in a reality television show housing troubled women who work intensively with life coaches. Despite her disintegrating body and garbled zombie speech, Betty discovers her inner crafter, works through her zombie issues, and gets her very own reality telelvision show.

The full review is here.

Review: The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro. Says Leach:

I’ve always envied people like Alice Munro, who can trace their lineages, who know their family names -- Laidlaw, in this case. By reading Church histories, Munro found ancestors dating back to 1799. Possessed of a whitewashed Jewish name, an Ellis Island name, I can only go back to 1899, when my mother’s grandparents emigrated from Romania to Montreal. The rest -- names, birthplaces, the fate of those left behind -- is forever unknown.

Not so Munro’s family, who emigrated to Canada. A splinter group settled in America, specifically Joliet, Illinois, but only briefly. Few records remain.

So Munro took history and mingled it with imagination, fleshing out her ancestry, peopling the book with oft-told family stories. She is likely the only one who could parse truth from fiction, but that’s fine. More important is how good these stories are, how they evoke the pioneer life of Canadians, which is neatly excised from all American histories of colonialization and immigration.

The full review is here.

Sitting Pretty

Caroline Adderson’s Sitting Practice was released to wide acclaim in Canada back in 2003. The book won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the 2004 VanCity Book Prize. Though Adderson has seen three books published in Canada since -- 2006’s Pleased to Meet You (Thomas Allen) and two books for children in 2007 -- Very Serious Children (Scholastic) and I, Bruno (Orca) -- Shambhala’s US publication of Sitting Practice in early March should bring Adderson’s work to a wider audience.

When it was first published in 2003, novelist Margaret Gunning reviewed Sitting Practice for January Magazine:

Caroline Adderson's first novel, A History of Forgetting, was a stunner, combining such unlikely elements as the loneliness of a gay hairdresser watching his partner's mind rot from dementia and the bizarre desire of a young woman to make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. It shouldn't have worked, but grabbed viscerally due to sheer writerly skill, not to mention the kind of nerve that pushes an author to take emotional risks.

Adderson's sophomore effort, Sitting Practice, is a fine freestanding novel, even if it suffers a bit in comparison to the raw impact of the first one. It's a solidly good book, well worth reading for the consistently fine writing and the quirky humanness of its main characters.

You can find that review in its entirety here.

Author Snapshot: Sandra Gulland

Sandra Gulland’s many fans have had a long wait. It has been nearly eight years since the publication of The Last Great Dance on Earth, the final installment in Gulland’s acclaimed Josephine Bonaparte trilogy.

But the wait is over now or -- for some readers -- nearly so. Gulland’s most recent book, Mistress of the Sun was published this month in Canada by HarperCollins and will be published in the US in June by Touchstone Fireside. Other international markets will follow. Gulland’s readership is not only enthusiastic, it’s very far-flung.

Mistress of the Sun introduces us to Louise de la Vallière, the unlikely mistress of Louis XIV, who in 17th century France, was known as The Sun King, the book she was only beginning to research when we spoke with Gulland last in 2001.
“It is easy to escape into [Sandra Gulland’s] world and not want to return,” says Margaret George (Helen of Troy), another January Magazine interview alumna.

We agree.


A Snapshot of Sandra Gulland…
Born: Miami, Florida
resides: Sandra Gulland and her husband live half the year near Killaloe, Ontario, Canada, and half in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Birthday: November 3, 1944
Web site: sandragulland.com


January Magazine: Please tell us about your most recent book.

Sandra Gulland: Mistress of the Sun: sigh. I can’t believe it’s out. A year ago, I didn’t think the novel would ever be finished. But it is, and I'm pleased.

It’s the story of Louise de la Vallière, the Sun King’s mistress -- a woman of silent power, is how my French translator so beautifully described her. It’s set in mid-17th century France. (Versailles, Paris, Fontainebleau . . . ) It’s a passionate and tragic story, yet victorious. It has something of a fable-like quality, I think.

Louise intrigued me. She was devout, yet the King’s official mistress. She was unsophisticated, a rather timid young woman by Court society standards, yet she was an aggressive horsewoman and hunter. She was unambitious, entirely disinterested in power or wealth, yet she was partner to one of the most powerful (and charismatic) (and handsome!) kings in history.

Entwined with their love affair is the story of magical Versailles -- and entwined with the story of Louise is the story of a magical horse. Mistress of the Sun is very much a story of what people are willing to do, the pacts they are willing to make -- with evil, with the Devil -- in order to save a life ... or take a life.

What’s on your nightstand?

Three Junes, by Julia Glass. Friends have raved about this novel. It’s in the line-up.

Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama. This was a gift from a friend, an Obama fan. I’ve only read the introduction so far: what a fine writer he is. I’m a fan now, too.

From Where you Dream, by Robert Olen Butler. I read this book two years ago, and noted that Chapter 5, “A Writer Prepares,” would be a good chapter to revisit when I was ready to begin a new novel. And it is.

What inspires you?

A great novel. Historical research. Books on writing.

What are you working on now?

I’m not sure yet. Well, that’s not exactly right. I’m mulling, and a story -- characters, scenes -- are beginning to form. I feel somewhat uneasy about it because it is not the subject I had planned to write about next, and it would not be an easy story to tell. It’s possible that the protagonist will be male: that alone would be a challenge.

The one thing I do know for sure is that my next novel (and the next, and the next) will be set in the court of the Sun King, the world of Mistress of the Sun. Seventeenth-century France is a period rich in story.

Tell us about your process.

Many writers hate “pen or pencil” questions, but I love them. I love being asked, and I love listening to what other writers have to say.

I begin writing early in the morning, usually before dawn. When I’m deep into a draft, I will organize my work space the night before: set up the coffee pot, clear the desk, make notes about the scene to come.

I used to plunge right in, but now I find that I simply can’t resist the lure of the Internet, so as I’m drinking my mug of coffee, I’ll check my email, Readerville.com, Facebook and now -- groan -- even MySpace before I begin. I’m not sure this is a good thing, but it’s the way it is.

I can't imagine writing without a computer. I bought the first Mac -- that sweet, ugly little box (only 128K) -- with writing in mind. Now I work on a Mac laptop, usually stretched out on a bed or couch, the computer on my lap and my notes spread all around me.

I must not be distracted by household noises, so often I have headphones on. The music must be instrumental and somewhat hypnotic. For Mistress of the Sun I listened to Gregorian chants, and, for the sheer joy and energy of their music, [legendary Puerto Vallartan musical duo] Willy & Lobo.

In terms of plotting, I try to have something of a story thought through before I begin, but my plan inevitably derails as I begin to write. I often return to plot analysis between drafts, when I’m trying to figure out why the story isn’t working. I like the dream-storming technique that Butler talks about in From Where We Dream: it’s something between outlining and just jumping in.

My first draft is usually long and thin. It lacks reality, detail, shape. I thicken and cut. (I love Ariel Gore’s description of the drafting stages in How to be a Famous Author Before You’re Dead: lather, rinse, lather, rinse.) I print out, edit, revise; print out, edit, revise: many, many times over.

When I’ve taken the novel as far as I can, I turn to editors and readers, an army of them.
When, finally, it’s nearing completion -- just before production, in fact -- I arrange to have a book club or two read and discuss it. This can lead to rather drastic last-minute changes -- an opening chapter rewritten, a chapter cut.

Then, when I’m too exhausted to even think of changing another word, off it goes, and the promotion cycle begins ... and mulling about the next book.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?

I’m stretched out on a daybed with my laptop on my lap. By my side is a wireless mouse, set on Will Self’s Psycho Geography for a mouse pad. I’m facing an antique bookshelf filled with books, small photos and artwork in frames set here and there (my children, an Escher eye, a painting of a wounded angel, a primitive etching). Some books are stacked on their sides, yet to be shelved -- new purchases, books loaned out and returned, advance reader copies of Mistress of the Sun.

To my left, alongside the daybed, is a long wooden coffee table also stacked with books -- research texts, various novels, a big picturebook on Charles II, and, pride of place, the Canadian hardcover edition of Mistress of the Sun.

Across the room is my L-shaped desk with papers piled up: papers to file, notes on essays (blogs now) I’m thinking of writing, papers to sort.

Above the computer stand is a bulletin board: family photos, phone number reminders on Post-It notes, and various images that were important to me while writing Mistress of the Sun: a gloomy circus scene, an etching of a theatrical event in the gardens of Versailles, an image of a white horse. Now that the book is out, it’s time for me to take these images down, I realize, leave an empty space in which to pin new images. (I’m curious: what will they be?)

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Wanting to be a writer has been a fairly constant longing for me, but I can’t recall when it began. In my teens I wanted to be a painter. When I moved to Canada in my 20s, my first year was spent teaching in an Inuit community in northern Labrador. That year I read all of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series. I also read the diaries of Anais Nin and, most importantly, Virginia Wolf's A Room of One’s Own. I think it was at this time that I seriously began to want to be a writer.

After that year I moved to Toronto and became a book editor, which was as close to writing as I could get and get paid. Life was busy (as life is): I told myself that I would write my own books -- “some day.” When I turned 40, I realized that I wasn’t going to live forever and that “some day” might well be “never” if I didn’t actually sit down and write. And so I did.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?

I have a strong need to create, but I’m not sure that it has to be expressed in story form. Perhaps I’d return to painting.

I’ve often thought that in another life I’d be an architect ... or a clown.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?

Writers often say that there is nothing quite like the feeling of holding their first published book in their hands. I’ll never forget that moment myself. I drove into town (population 600: you get the picture) to pick up a parcel at the post office. Once back in my car, I nervously opened it: a hardcover book -- The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. -- with my name on it.

It was almost too much to bear. Quickly, I slipped the book under the newspapers and magazines stacked in the passenger seat. As I went about my chores -- the bank, the market, the hardware store, the pharmacy -- I would now and again peek under the newspapers and magazines. It was still there.

As soon as I got home, I put the book -- my book! -- on a shelf, just to see how it looked side-by-side with the novels I loved so much. I’d always thought that all I wanted was to have a book published, but the moment I saw that book on the shelf, spine out, I upped the ante. At that moment I longed to see a shelf full of books with my name on them.

I don’t know if I will live long enough to achieve this goal: it took eight years of hard, constant writing to finish Mistress of the Sun. When the Canadian edition arrived by courier, it was, yet again: A Moment. I took the parcel into the kitchen. My husband hovered as I nervously cut open the wrapping. And there it was, in my hands: one of the most beautiful books I’d ever seen. I ran my hands over the gold embossed letters in wonder.

Even now I keep looking over at it, set upon the coffee table along with other beautiful books: It’s still there.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?

The isolation: I like solitude. A writer must.

What’s the most difficult?

Organizing my research, taking notes. I also find that a certain stage of the writing process can be boring: after I’ve written a draft on computer, I print it out and edit the hard copy. Then comes the task of typing those changes onto the computer file. When the changes are mechanical, it’s tedious.

But these are easy compared to what I consider to be the most difficult thing about being a writer, which is the constant frustration of trying to carve out periods of isolation and silence in the midst of a busy, noisy and tempting life.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?

With historical fiction -- and biographical historical fiction in particular -- readers often want to know what parts of the novel are fact, and what fiction.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?

“What were the challenges in writing this novel?”

What question would you like never to be asked again?

I dread being asked: In what year did...? When was ... born? How old was ... when he/she died? (Fill in the blanks.)

In short: factual historical questions, especially about a subject I researched over a decade ago. I do not have a good memory for dates, numerical facts. I’m a writer: I write things down! But that doesn’t mean they stay in my head.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.

When I’m nearing the completion of a novel, I become paranoid about my health. Invariably I become convinced I have some serious and life-threatening disease that will prevent me from finishing. I’ve come to see it as a somewhat amusing sign that the book is almost done.

New This Week: My Liar by Rachel Cline

Rachel Cline brings a journeyman’s eye and a poet’s heart to My Liar (Random House), her second novel after 2004’s highly acclaimed What to Keep.

The Los Angeles film community provides the backdrop for My Liar, and though this community is well rendered (it’s a world this author once inhabited) it really is just the setting. The real meat here comes through the relationships between women: the complex connections, the competitions and self-definitions. Cline serves it all up with pathos and heart and great dollops of dark humor.

A side note here: the science geeks in our readership may well be aware of the work of this author’s maternal parent. Barbara Lovett Cline is the author of The Questioners: Physicists and the Quantum Theory (1965), more recently retitled to Men Who Made a New Physics: Physicists and the Quantum Theory. Rachel Cline writes beautifully about her mother and their relationship on her Web site here.

New Today: Pavel & I by Dan Vyleta

Though this is the first we’ve heard of newcomer Dan Vyleta, he attacks Pavel & I (Bloomsbury) with such a gritty majesty, it’s impossible to think this will be his last.

Vyletta’s biography alone sets the tone: he holds a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge, lives in Edmonton, Alberta and is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the 1960s. He understands, he knows, he sees, he wants peace. None of that is what Pavel & I is about, but it sets the stage.

Vyleta’s gorgeous debut takes place in occupied Berlin in 1946. Pavel Richter is a decommissioned soldier who is ill -- perhaps dieing -- from a kidney infection that he’s been unable to treat. The infection, as well as the unexpected arrival of a corpse in his apartment, set in motion a series of events and introductions that push our story towards disaster.

Review: The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Cherie Thiessen reviews The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa. Says Thiessen:

The three pithy works contained in this new publication are as sleek and muscular as Jun, the young diver in the first story. He’s the oldest child at the Light House, an orphanage run by Aya’s parents, who are also church leaders. Aya is the narrator; she’s the only one who’s not an orphan, although she has often wished she were: