Madeleine Dunnigan

Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA at New York University. While there she was awarded a GRI Fellowship in Paris.

Dunnigan's new novel is Jean.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern

I'm ashamed to say I had read none of McGahern's work until I picked up his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun. Set in County Leitrim, Ireland, it tells the story of Joe and Kate Ruttledge who have moved from busy London to this rural idyll, giving up their literary lives in order to run a farm. This novel unfurls with slow, quiet precision; days are measured by the change in seasons; lives are rituals of repetition; relationships demarcated by patterns of conversation. It has some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature I have ever read, it is also extremely funny. Nothing happens and everything happens: birth, death, love, change.

Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano

I am a huge fan of all of Modiano's works. Most are set in post-Occupation steeped Paris and present themselves like detective novels, yet refuse to resolve the central mystery. Such Fine Boys is set in and around Valvert, a boarding school just outside of Paris, and shares many themes with Modiano's other works. Characters seem tethered to the world by frail strings, often these snap and they float away. Shady figures loom at the periphery; people disappear; others go mad. The novel is structured around vignettes that tell the stories of the school's pupils. At the novel's centre the school remains a halcyon place; a memory of a better time when the boys were safe and protected from the strange and hostile world.

From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant

I adore Mavis Gallant's short stories. There is something so expansive about them. In one story the reader can travel decades; and yet her iron-fisted hold on the narrative retains an emotional tension that sustains to the very end. This collection of short stories is set in a faded post-war Europe with figures who are all slightly disaffected and separate from society. We meet a hotelier on the French Riviera, an English family waiting for a father to die, a Jewish refugee who makes a living playing German soldiers in films. Rich, lustrous and textured, each story feels like a novel in itself.

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

Every year for Christmas my sister buys me a new Janice Hallett novel. This is my holiday treat. I have always loved detective fiction of any kind, and Janice Hallett's innovative books – written not in straightforward prose but presented as a 'dossier' of text messages, emails, posters and signs, clues which the reader herself can piece together – are such fun. This year's novel, The Killer Question, is a murder set around a pub quiz team in rural England. It's juicy and silly and sinister, all in one!

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

The Page 69 Test: Jean.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome:

Visiting Berlin in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mark Twain found himself in a restaurant in which everyone seemed to go mad. Dozens of university students, raising their sabres, suddenly shot to their feet. “There was an excited whisper at our table,” Twain reported. Everyone stomped and clapped and banged their beer mugs. A little man with long hair and an “Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could have touched him with my hands - Mommsen! - think of it!”

Theodor Mommsen, the historian of the Roman Republic, was not just famous; he was considered a very great man. It was generally agreed, among the literate public on both sides of the Atlantic, that, as one prominent scholar put it, “There is probably no other instance in the history of scholarship in which one man has established so complete an ascendancy in a great department of learning.” And this when learning, serious learning, was more respected than it had been before or would be again. Born in 1817, Mommsen had studied Roman law and antiquities as a university student and then, in 1843, received a grant from the Danish government for a journey to Italy that would prove decisive for his later career. He studied Roman inscriptions - the words and phrases, the language, on Roman medals and Roman buildings - and became the leading authority in the field. In 1848, a professor of civil law at Leipzig, he supported the monarchy over the Republicans in the attempted revolution of that year, and then, when the reaction came, opposed the measures taken against those who had been involved in the revolt. Dismissed from his position, he found asylum in Switzerland where from 1854 to 1856 he wrote his monumental History of Rome.

Because Mommsen was not only German but a German professor, the first thought of an American reader is that his History of Rome must be dull as dust, largely unintelligible, and full of unimportant facts and endless arguments about matters no one cared about at the time and no one wants to hear about now, the kind of dreary monologue that makes you wonder if you will ever find the patience to get through even half of it’s nearly twenty-five hundred pages. And then you open the first volume and before you have finished reading the first page you realize what a fool you have been to have waited this long to read what in every sense is a classic. and that there is every possibility that whatever you thought you knew about Roman history, the history before Rome became an empire and freedom vanished from the world, is quite probably wrong. Cicero, who you thought a deeply intelligent public servant who tried to warn Rome about the danger of ambitious men, is for Mommsen little more than a journalist who only wrote what he thought others wanted to hear; Julius Caesar, who you thought wanted absolute power, is for Mommsen a perfect human being.

Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Mommsen wrote what should have been entitled The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic. He traces, and tries to explain, the movement of Rome from a single city to the sovereignty of all of Italy, and from there to the sovereignty of all the countries of the Mediterranean. These were not two successive parts of a single development, the gradual unfolding of an imperial ambition: “The Romans achieved the sovereignty of Italy, because they strove for it; the hegemony - and the sovereignty which grew out of it - over the territories of the Mediterranean was to a certain extent thrown into the hands of the Romans by the force of circumstances without intention on their part to acquire it.”

The question of course is why? Why did the Romans strive for the sovereignty of Italy? What drove them to rule more than themselves in their own city, the way the Athenians or the Spartans had done in Greece? Mommsen insists it was the difference in character, the difference in what the Romans and the Greeks thought important, or, more precisely, how the Romans and the Greeks thought about themselves. The Romans did not think about themselves at all: they were Romans and nothing more. There was a “total want of individuality in the Italian and especially the Roman character, as contrasted with the boundless variety, lineal, local, and personal, of Hellenism.” We “nowhere encounter a distinct individual figure.” It was “not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy propagated from generation to generation in the senate….” The Romans were forced into a single type, a uniform identity. Under “the rigid discipline of its moral police all the idiosyncrasies of human character were extinguished. Rome reached a greatness such as no other state of antiquity attained; but she dearly purchased her greatness at the sacrifice of the graceful variety, of the easy abandon, and of the inward freedom on Hellenic life.”

After a series of war that reinforced belief in the martial virtues, Rome obtained control of all of Italy, but instead of acting as an occupying power, the Roman senate understood “that the only means of giving permanence to despotism is moderation on the part of the despots.” The dependent communities were given Roman citizenship or were allowed to enjoy their own communal constitutions, and with “a clear-sightedness and magnanimity unparalleled in history, waived the most dangerous of all the rights of government, the right of taxing its subjects.”

It is seldom noted how the simple facts of geography can change the history of the world. Sicily lies less than a mile from the mainland of Italy. When Carthage, which had become a great power, invaded the island, Rome understood that it would have to fight a war which must ultimately end either in its own destruction or the annihilation of Carthage. The size of the forces involved was at times staggering. In the spring of 258 B.C., the Romans with 330 ships containing 100,000 men in crews and a landing party of 40,000 met off the coast of Libya a Carthaginian fleet of 350 vessels with approximately the same number of men. Three hundred thousand sailors and soldiers were brought into action. The Carthaginians lost four times as many ships as the Romans, but the war was only beginning and each side would suffer far greater losses before it was over.

The losses were far greater on land. At the Battle of Cannae in which Hannibal secured a victory which threatened the very existence of Rome, it was slaughter. “Never, perhaps, has an army of such size been annihilated on the field of battle so completely, and with so little loss to its antagonist, as was the Roman army at Cannae.” While Hannibal lost 6,000 men, only 6,000 of the 76,000 Romans who took to the field survived. The rules of war were different then. A city under siege by the Romans held out until “almost all who were capable of bearing arms had fallen in the struggle before the walls; a large portion of the inhabitants fell by their own hand after the capitulation - the mercy of the victor consisted in allowing the Abydenes the term of three days to die voluntarily.” Publius Scipio, who led the fight, and eventually won the war against Hannibal, compelled a town to surrender and turn over the 400 young men who had led the resistance. By his order their hands were cut off.

Hannibal and Scipio died the same year. When Hannibal was born, “Rome was contending with doubtful success for the possession of Sicily; when he died Rome was ‘mistress of the world.’” Publius Scipio, who more than anyone else brought this about, died bitter at the way he had been treated. He had added to the empire Spain, Africa and Asia. “His proud spirit, his belief that he was different from and better than, other man, gave offense to many, and not without reason.”

After Carthage was defeated, after Rome was everywhere triumphant, Cato, who understood how much depended on the continued maintenance of Roman discipline, wondered what “would happen to Rome when she should no longer have any state to fear?” The answer was not long in coming. There was now an empire to govern, and playing “the part of governors demoralized the Roman ruling class with fearful rapidity.” Few governors returned with “clean hands: and veterans came home “wealthy men.” War became a “traffic in plunder.” Everything was now about money, and the division between rich and poor grew greater and became dangerous. “The often used and often abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applied nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic….” Rome was the center of an empire, and the most important city in the world. Everyone who wanted to be known, known and admired, wanted to live there and be part of it. As residence became more desirable, Rome became more and more expensive. Money, “and nothing but money, became the watchword for high and low.” The constant, and increasing, quest for wealth changed the Roman character. The patriotic ardor which at one point in the Carthaginian war led some of Rome’s citizens to provide on their own two hundred ships and sixty thousand sailors, an action Mommsen thought unprecedented in history, had all but vanished.

The rich had all the advantages, but the poor still had the vote. The rich wanted power; the poor wanted to be entertained. The ability to supply that entertainment became “practically a qualification for holding the highest offices in the state.” As was almost inevitable, the size and splendor of the entertainment offered “became gradually the standard by which the electorate measured the fitness of the candidates for the consulship.” Politics became the prerogative of the wealthy, and entertainment the opiate of the masses, which like any addiction became constantly a greater need. In l86 B.C., gladiatorial games gained admission to Rome. Twenty years later, in the Triumphal Games, the first Greek flute players gave a performance. It failed to please, and the musicians were ordered to fight - to box - with each other “instead of playing, upon which the delight knew no bounds.”

The populace - the ‘People of Rome’ - “was a great lord and desired as such to receive attention.” They crowded in to watch first wild animals, then human beings, forced to fight to the death, and did it in such numbers that the sale of programs listing the names and specialities of the participants became a lucrative business. And then, finally, the gladiatorial games “which revealed, at the same time that they fostered, the worst demoralization of the ancient world,” took the last step, the “horrible innovation,” by which the crowd, the Roman citizenry that had once been more than willing, eager, to sacrifice themselves for the safety and glory of Rome, decided whether those vanquished in the arena should live or die.

The Roman citizen, once trained to the military discipline of the camp, had now become little more than an urban mob, depending on the state for what it needed to live, and drawn to any demagogue who promised more of what it wanted. Gladiators gave them the vicarious pleasure of violence, blood, and death; actors and dancing girls, which had become two of the highest paid professions in Rome, gave them other ways to amuse themselves without any effort of their own. This corruption, this loss of ancient discipline and order, had, however, one advantage: It made possible the emergence of an individual who might, through his own extraordinary gifts, attract the support of the poor and with that support end the dominance of the privileged rich. The corruption of the Roman republic brought Julius Caesar to power and in the guise of democracy gave Rome an emperor.

Mommsen has nothing but praise for what Caesar was and for what Caesar did. He was, not only in politics, but “in the department of language also the greatest master of his time.” In his treatise on the Gallic war, “there is diffused a bright serenity, a simple charm, which are no less unique in literature than Caesar is in history.” Something similar could be said about Theodor Mommsen. He has written a history that teaches as much about the present as it does about the past, the way in which a republic becomes first a nation then an empire, and how, what was a commonwealth of common effort and shared sacrifice becomes one “composed of millionaires and beggars,” ready to fall under the spell of anyone who promises to give them more of what they think they want. Mommsen’s History of Rome tells us how all of this might be avoided.

Anyone fortune enough to read this great work will understand what Mark Twain felt that evening, long ago, in Berlin: “I could have touched him with my hands - Mommsen! - think of it!”

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Hagstrom

Amy Hagstrom is the author of The Wild Between Us and Smoke Season. She is a writer and editor with two decades of experience in the travel and outdoor industry, recognized as an O Magazine Insider and previous columnist and feature writer at Travel Oregon, US News, and Huff Post. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Whitworth University. A lifelong outdoors enthusiast, she served as a volunteer EMT with her local county search and rescue unit before launching her travel writing career.

After raising three children in the Pacific Northwest, Hagstrom traded the Cascade, Siskiyou, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges for The Berkshires, making her home in Western Massachusetts with her wife.

Hagstrom's new novel is Now That I Know You by Heart.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I am, like many writers, a voracious reader, and my choices in reading material seem to reflect my writing style…in that I write—and read—a variety of genres. I stick with fiction, primarily, and I lean toward upmarket, book club-type fiction, character-driven suspense, and mystery. My only ‘must’: I have to truly like and be ready to root for the protagonist.

Currently, I’m tackling my ‘meatiest’ writing project yet, and it would appear that my current reading list reflects this. I just finished Wally Lamb’s The River is Waiting, which I found to be a phenomenal character study of human nature at its best and worst (set primarily in the men’s prison system in the U.S.). I also tackled Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which I believe is arguably the best book of fiction in the 21st century so far. Timely, relevant, heart-wrenching, and redeeming (ultimately, though Kingsolver certainly makes you wait for it).

I work on my property and walk my dog a lot, so I find myself listening to a lot of books as well. I am currently listening to The Wedding People by Alison Espach, which holds me captivated with its infusion of humor, relatability, and charm. I am also a sucker for a good cozy mystery, and have been listening to the full body of work by Louise Penny. The Black Wolf did not disappoint.

Visit Amy Hagstrom's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Wild Between Us.

Q&A with Amy Hagstrom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nina McConigley

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others.

McConigley's new novel is How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I am reading two books right now at once. One is the background for a new writing project I am just starting, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe. I haven’t written a lot of historical fiction, but this is connected to family ancestry, and so I am doing a deep dive to understand the slave trade and convicts in Australia. Especially women convicts. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history and place is. And how we are so taught the history of where we are from, and not the rest of the world.

I also just reread Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. I am so curious about how characters get past the colonial past of their homeland with life in the United States. Can that ever happen? I also love first-person point- of-view books narrated by young women.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Born in Chicago and now a resident of Vancouver Island, Canada, Andromeda Romano-Lax worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction. Her first novel, The Spanish Bow, was translated into eleven languages and chosen as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, BookSense pick, and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of the Year. Her next four novels, The Detour, Behave (an Amazon Book of the Month), Plum Rains (winner of the Sunburst Award), and Annie and the Wolves (a Booklist Top 10 Historical Fiction Book of the Year) reflect her diverse interest in the arts, history, science, and technology, as well as her love of travel and her time spent living abroad. Starting with The Deepest Lake (a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick and Amazon Book of the Month) and continuing with her new novel, What Boys Learn, Romano-Lax has swerved into the world of suspense fiction, although she continues to write historical and speculative fiction as well.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

On my nightstand are two novels that defy easy genre categorization, as many of my favorites do. New Zealander Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt is a slow burn alternate history that takes us into a world where no one won World War II and where sickly orphans are being kept in group homes and isolated from the public for reasons we don’t understand at first. I love Chidgey’s ethically nuanced fiction, empathetic characterization, and unique angles on historical events. She pulls me back toward historical fiction, a genre I love most when authors take risks, avoid sentimentality, and play with what we think we know about the world.

Gilly Macmillan’s The Burning Library. Inspired by an ancient manuscript that intrigued the author, this smart new thriller melds cryptography, conspiracies, dark academia, and a race against time in a novel that pits one fictional women’s sect against another. A departure for Macmillan, whose suspense novels usually follow clever but more expected plotlines, this unexpected page-turner somehow manages to be both stark—throats are slit with abandon—and at the same time, oddly cozy. Maybe it’s the UK setting? I’m finding it just escapist enough for light holiday reading.

Visit Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelli Stanley

A critically-acclaimed, bestselling author of crime fiction, Kelli Stanley is the author of the award-winning Miranda Corbie historical noir series (City of Dragons, City of Secrets, City of Ghosts, City of Sharks), featuring "one of crime's most arresting heroines" (Library Journal), private investigator Miranda Corbie, and set in 1940 San Francisco.

Stanley also writes an award-winning, highly-praised series set in Roman Britain (Nox Dormienda; The Curse-Maker).

Her newest novel, The Reckoning, is a first-in-series mystery-thriller set in Northern California's "Emerald Triangle" in 1985.

Recently I asked Stanley about what she was reading. Her reply:

Well, because I’m on a deadline to finish the second Renata novel, I can’t read fiction. That’s a huge frustration for me, because I’d like to start plunging into Cara Black’s Huguette and James L’Etoile’s Illusion of Truth and Rhys Bowen’s Silent as the Grave, to name a few.

I make it a practice to avoid reading current fiction while I’m actively writing (as opposed to researching) a book, because I’m afraid that I’ll unconsciously start imitating it. So….

Non-fiction is my getaway, and I’m currently reading a delightful book by Jane Austen scholar Devoney Looser. Devoney is a critic and professor (her course on Austen on “Great Courses” truly is a great course) and the book is a gem.

The title is Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, and it’s one of several I’m devouring to commemorate the 250th birthday of one of my favorite writers. I’ve been an Austen devotee since I was about fourteen—way before Colin Firth took a bath with his clothes on—and her genius never fails to awe and inspire me. Devoney’s book examines just how un-“cozy” Jane Austen was, as a person and as a writer, and I find it a fascinating and provocative read. I recommend it!

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Van Jensen

Van Jensen is an acclaimed novelist, screenwriter, and comic book writer. Godfall, his debut novel, is in development as a TV series with Academy Award winner Ron Howard attached to direct. Jensen began his career as a newspaper crime reporter, then broke into comic books and graphic novels as the writer of ARCA (IDW), Two Dead (Gallery 13), and Tear Us Apart (Dark Horse). Jensen has written world-renowned characters, including Superman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Godzilla, and James Bond. He has served as a Comic Book Ambassador for the U.S. State Department, teaching refugee children to tell their stories through comics. He lives in Atlanta.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Jensen's reply:

The book I've read that stuck with me lately is The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

A jilted husband follows his wife and her new paramour to Mexico, seeking revenge, or at least to reclaim his Ford Torino. The book is about exactly that, but not really that at all. It's a shaggy travelogue, a picaresque character study, an anthology of broken and insane oddballs, an ode to adventure, or perhaps a warning of the dangers of adventure. Mostly, it's funny as hell and endlessly surprising. This is Kerouac with a healthy dash of Pynchon.

Visit Van Jensen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gabriella Saab

Gabriella Saab is the author of The Last Checkmate and Daughters of Victory. She graduated from Mississippi State University with a bachelor of business administration in marketing and lives in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, where she works as a barre instructor. She is of Lebanese heritage and is one of the co-hosts of @hfchitchat on Twitter, a recurring monthly chat and community celebrating the love of reading and writing historical fiction.

Saab's new novel is The Star Society.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I recently finished Book of Forbidden Words by Louise Fein, a fascinating novel about an encrypted manuscript which takes readers from 1500s England and France to McCarthy’s America in the 1950s. It was sobering and riveting with excellent research, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Historical fiction is always my favorite, and I haven’t read much set in the 1500s, so that storyline was particularly interesting to me.

I also listen to a lot of audiobooks. I just finished a fun series on Audible called Mistletoe Murders, which is an Audible exclusive by Ken Cuperus following a Christmas store owner who turns into her small town’s best mystery-solver every time a murder occurs. As her past unfolds, we learn more about her past, and she’s not simply a Christmas store owner. The audiobooks are full-cast, and it’s been so fun to follow these characters through the various episodes. Growing up, Nancy Drew was one of my favorite series, and this feels like a grown-up, cozy mystery Nancy Drew with a dash of murder.

Next, I’ll be starting My Fair Frauds by Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne, narrated by Megan Trout. This is a Gilded Age caper where a con woman and a swindler team up for a takedown. I love this author duo and can’t wait to read their latest work! Gilded Age New York is one of my favorite settings, so I’m excited to immerse myself in the opulence, drama, and fun that will certainly follow our heroines.

Visit Gabriella Saab's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Star Society.

Q&A with Gabriella Saab.

My Book, The Movie: The Star Society.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Bernet

Katie Bernet is the author of Beth Is Dead, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. She’s an award-winning creative director and a long-standing member of the DFW Writer’s Workshop. As the oldest of three sisters, she’s a diehard fan of Little Women.

Recently I asked Bernet about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a “high concept” novel, so I’ve been reading books that have well-defined, grabby premises. In the young adult space, I just finished reading Kill Creatures by Rory Power which is a murder mystery written from the perspective of the killer—chilling, clever, and horribly believable. I just started reading Let’s Split Up by Bill Wood which was pitched as Scream meets Scooby Doo and totally delivers on both the horror and the quirky group dynamics.

In the adult space, I just finished reading Sky Daddy by Kate Folk about a woman who is attracted to planes, and I was shocked by how much I empathized with the main character. I just started reading Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake, a satire about a sorority that practices cannibalism. Highly recommend all four of these.

Visit Katie Bernet's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beth Is Dead.

My Book, The Movie: Beth Is Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacquelyn Stolos

Jacquelyn Stolos grew up in Derry, New Hampshire. She loves tromping through the forest and reading good books.

Asterwood is her first novel for children.

Stolos holds an MFA in fiction from NYU, where she was a Writers in the Public School Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in Joyland and No Tokens. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Recently I asked Stolos about what she was reading. Her reply:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

No one needs me to say that LeGuin is a master of fantasy that deftly tackles social and existential questions. I returned to this classic to remind myself of everything that's possible in children's literature. The archipelago of Earthsea is the most vivid place I've ever been, the action gripping to the point of it being unfair. Prickly, arrogant Ged is a singular protagonist. The engineering of this world's magic, with its Taoist principles, is sublime. LeGuin's small, subtle moves--like Vetch offering Ged trust right after his darkest failure of character--radiate out into the collective soul. If I could write with a fraction of LeGuin's guts, for only a moment-- the story starts off running at word one and blazes forward without self-consciousness or apology--well, my gosh, I don't know. I might fall off my desk chair and die.

Visit Jacquelyn Stolos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue