James Cambias

James L. Cambias writes science fiction and designs games. His new far-future science fiction political thriller is The Miranda Conspiracy.

Cambias's first novel, A Darkling Sea, was published by Tor Books in 2014, followed by Corsair in 2015. Baen Books released his third novel Arkad's World in 2019, and the urban fantasy The Initiate in 2020. In 2021 he began the "Billion Worlds" series of far-future adventures with The Godel Operation, followed by The Scarab Mission in 2023. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Shimmer, Nature, and several original anthologies; most recently in the collection Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms from Grim Oak Press. In March 2020 his story "Treatment Option" was adapted for audio by DUST Studios, starring Danny Trejo.

Cambias has written roleplaying game sourcebooks and adventures for Steve Jackson Games, Hero Games, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, and other publishers, and in 2003 he co-founded Zygote Games. Since 2015 he has been a member of the XPrize Foundation's Science Fiction Advisory Board, and in 2024 became a consultant for the Center for the Study of Space Crime, Piracy, and Governance. Originally from New Orleans, he was educated at the University of Chicago and lives in Massachusetts.

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

Lately I've been working my way through a big, dense, but fascinating book: The History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book includes the text of the original handwritten manuscript version of The Hobbit, with copious notes and commentary by Rateliff.

John Rateliff covers everything. There are notes on the physical manuscript itself — Tolkien apparently wrote a lot of his first draft on blank pages torn from student examination books (which suggests that an Oxford professor's salary in the 1920s didn't stretch very far). The color of the ink indicates when Tolkien took a break from the project and came back to it.

The book goes into the literary antecedents of the The Hobbit — everything from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle, and P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, to Beowulf, Norse Eddas, the legends of Sigurd, medieval romances, and the book of Job.

We also get a detailed discussion of how The Hobbit fits into Tolkien's evolving "legendarium" of Middle-Earth, and how both the book and all the off-stage lore changed over time. The story itself began as a series of bedtime stories for Tolkien's three sons, but he incorporated his own expanding mythology of elves, Valar, dragons, Silmarils, and the dark lord Morgoth; along with his invented languages and writing systems.

It's fascinating to see the changes between the outline, the first draft, the original published version, and the revised version Tolkien produced after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. At first, the wizard who recruits Bilbo to help the dwarves recover their treasure is named Bladorthin, while Gandalf is the chief of the dwarves, who later became Thorin. Bilbo was originally going to be the one who killed the dragon, even getting bathed in dragon's blood and becoming a Sigurd-like superhero.

And of course the Ring itself barely exists in the original. Bilbo's magic ring is just a ring of invisibility, nothing more. Only later, when Tolkien's publisher clamored for a sequel, did the idea arise of the One Ring and the other Rings of Power, and the need to resist temptation and destroy it.

As a writer, I found it utterly fascinating to get an inside look at the creative process of a true master. My respect for Tolkien's craft has gone up considerably — along with my respect for John Rateliff's scholarship. The History of the Hobbit is not exactly light reading (it's more than 900 pages!) but I recommend it heartily.

Visit James L. Cambias's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.

The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.

My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.

Q&A with James L. Cambias.

The Page 69 Test: The Godel Operation.

The Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy.

My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

E. J. Copperman

E.J. Copperman is the nom de plume for Jeff Cohen, writer of intentionally funny murder mysteries. As E.J., he is the author of the Haunted Guest house series, the Agent to the Paws series and the Jersey Girl Legal mysteries, as well as the Fran and Ken Stein mysteries. As Jeff, he is the author of the Double Feature and Aaron Tucker series; and he collaborates with himself on the Samuel Hoenig Asperger's mysteries.

Copperman's latest novel is Good Lieutenant.

Recently I asked Cohen about what he was reading. His reply:

When life starts piling on, I tend to look for a comfort read, something I’ve read before that will take my mind off… everything… and restore my general sense of humor. Most often, it is the book I’m re-re-re-rereading right now.

Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A Celebration of the Marx Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World, by Joe Adamson. Probably not what you were expecting is it?

First, it helps to be a fan of the bros, and I am a sterling example thereof. Seeing Horse Feathers for the first time when I was in high school (just after the earth cooled) changed my life and my thinking permanently, and I’m grateful for that. But even beyond the exhaustive research that was clearly done in the preparation for this thick non-fiction book, which is extensive, is the writing. For me, it’s written exactly as it should be: admiring without being reverent, funny without being a collection of jokes, informative without being dry.

Consider the first paragraph of the book, after a series of quote about the Marx Brothers, ending with one from Arthur Sheekman, stating that there has never been a book about humor written by a funny writer:

Rational people are sometimes very nice, but they tend to be frightfully dull when they try to explain things like what makes us laugh. Arthur Sheekman is one of the Marx Brothers’ better writers, and he should know. Some day he must write a book on the subject, and then his statement wouldn’t be true anymore, and then he wouldn't know, and we’d be back where we started.

It goes on like that for 484 pages, because yes, I have read the footnotes more than once, and I love almost every word of it.

I’m not sure what I’ll read next, but if things go on as they are (personally and in the world), it will be something I’ll be using to make myself feel better. Maybe another of the Slough House books by Mick Herron. Few things are as satisfying as Jackson Lamb being sarcastic.

Visit E. J. Copperman's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Thrill of the Haunt.

Writers Read: E. J. Copperman (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Thrill of the Haunt.

My Book, The Movie: Ukulele of Death.

The Page 69 Test: Ukulele of Death.

Q&A with E. J. Copperman.

The Page 69 Test: Same Difference.

--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 Tocqueville’s America and Ours:

On April 23, 1794, Chretien Guillaume De Lamoignon De Malesherbes, better known as Lamoignon-Malesherbes, seventy-three years old, counsel to Louis XVI in the trial that condemned the king to death, watched helplessly while his daughter, his son-in-law, and all their children were, one by one, guillotined in front of a howling mob of Parisians. Only then was he allowed to meet his own death by the same method. Not all of his grandchildren were murdered; one of them survived to become the mother of Alexis Henri Charles Maurice Clerel, Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy In America, the most important book on American democracy ever written. The French Revolution made the equal rights of every one a new religion and made democracy the only legitimate form of government. Everyone was equal, no one was more important than anyone else; everything had to be decided by the majority, whatever the effect on the rights of the minority. The problem was how to prevent a majority, made up almost always of the ignorant and the poor, from following someone who appealed to their sense of grievance and resentment, their demand that those above them should be brought down to their own level? How, in other words, protect against the “democratic despotism” Tocqueville considered the greatest threat to liberty the world had ever seen? He thought he might find the answer in America.

The America Tocqueville discovered in the 1830s bears a striking, and sometimes almost eerie, resemblance to the America of the present day. Change the name of the president we have now and Tocqueville becomes a contemporary writer:

“General Jackson is supposed to wish to establish a dictatorship in the United States.” And he has almost done it. President Jackson “keeps his position and his popularity by daily flattery of those passions,” i.e. the passions for equality. He is “the majority’s slave;” he yields to its “intentions, desires, and half-revealed instincts or rather he anticipates and forestalls them.” Worse yet, “he tramples his personal enemies underfoot wherever he finds them, with an ease impossible to any previous President; on his own responsibility he adopts measures which no one else would have dared attempt; sometimes he even treats the national representatives with a sort of disdain that is almost insulting; he refuses to sanction laws of Congress and often fails to answer that important body.”

What saved America, even at this early point in its existence, was its past. Two things had happened which made the American experiment in democracy possible. The first was the character of the people who first arrived in New England. “All the immigrants…belonged to the well-to-do classes at home,” and were well-educated. They had not come to the New World “to better their position or accumulate wealth; in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile they hoped for the triumph of an idea.” They created a democracy made up of citizens who, because of the “provision for public education,” were able to read the Bible, with the interesting, and perhaps unprecedented result that, in America it is “religion that leads to enlightenment and the observance of divine laws which leads men to liberty.”

The second thing that protected America from the “natural vice” of democracy, laws which make the actions of the people “ever prompter and more irresistible,” was the adoption of the American Constitution and the period of Federalist rule that lasted until the election of Andrew Jackson. This, Tocqueville insists, was “one of the luckiest circumstances attending the birth of the great American Union.” The Framers of the American Constitution, wanted to “restrain liberty against its self-destruction,” which meant limiting, so far as possible, the direct election of members of the government. Those “who consider universal suffrage as a guarantee of the excellence of the resulting choice suffer under a complete delusion.” Members of the House of Representatives, elected directly by the people, are at best mediocre, unable to string together two coherent sentences. Members of the Senate, who were then selected by the state legislatures, are, on the other hand, “eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and noted statesmen.”

The method by which the President is chosen shows how difficult it is to keep in place those restraints necessary to prevent democratic despotism. The electoral college was supposed to act as an ad hoc parliament, a parliament elected for only one purpose: to deliberate among themselves about who was best qualified by temperament and training to serve as the nation’s chief executive. For Tocqueville, and for most of the nation’s Founders, ambition for the office, ambition for any office, was thought a disqualification. Those who sought power should never be given it. It was a grand idea, a way to find someone as high-minded, as highly principled, as ‘great souled’ to use Aristotle’s expression, as George Washington; it was too far beyond the reach of the generation that came after Washington to make it work. Instead of a school of statesmen, the electoral college became, in Tocqueville’s view, a gathering of “dummies” who simply cast their ballots for candidates they had promised in advance to support.

The best protection against the “omnipotence of the majority,” was the law itself, the lawyers who practiced it and the judges who based their decisions upon it. Lawyers, from their study, acquire habits of order and an “instinctive love for a regular concatenation of ideas,” which leads them “naturally” to oppose the “ill-considered passions of democracy.” Conservative by habit, their respect for precedent, the settled opinions of the past, makes them value laws, not because they are good, but because they are old. This is why American lawyers are the “American aristocracy.” This aristocracy is headed by the Supreme Court, the most powerful judicial authority ever constituted. Justices, nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate for life, should be extremely well-qualified, men of “education and integrity,” statesmen able to confront any obstacles to the laws. If they were not, if the Court was composed by “rash or corrupt men,” the country “would be threatened by anarchy or civil war.”

The greatest danger to democracy, however, is not the structure of government; it is democracy itself, the effect it has on the manners and morals of a people. What do people look up to, what do they honor, what do they think important; what thought or idea comes to dominate, and define, their lives? In every age there is “some peculiar and predominating element which controls all the rest.” Equality is the “distinctive characteristic” of the Democratic age. People want equality with freedom, but if they can’t have it, they will take equality in slavery; they “will not endure aristocracy.” The danger is real. “If citizens, attaining equality, were to remain ignorant and coarse, it would be difficult to foresee any limit to the stupid excesses into which their selfishness might lead them, and no one could foretell into what shameful troubles they might plunge themselves….”

While equality is the distinctive characteristic of democracy, a “passion for well-being” is “the most striking and unalterable characteristic of democratic ages.” Men have “a taste for easy success and immediate pleasures.” They have “lively yet indolent ambitions; “they are moved by a “breathless cupidity” that “perpetually distracts the mind … from the pleasures of the imagination and the labors of the intellect and urges it on to nothing but the pursuit of wealth.” The darting speed of a quick, superficial mind is at a premium, while slow, deep thought is excessively undervalued.” The only thing Americans are really interested in is themselves, not what they have done in the past, but what they hope to do in the future. It is not a future filled with great deeds and glory. “No men are less dreamers than the citizens of democracies.” They have “the mental habits of the industrial and trading classes;” they are “calculating and realistic.” The love of money is “either the chief or a secondary motive at the bottom of everything the Americans do.”

The more alike everyone becomes, “the weaker each feels in the face of all.” Mistrusting their own judgment, everyone starts to believe that he “must be wrong when the majority hold the opposite view.” Majority opinion becomes the common opinion of the country, and, inevitably, “a sort of religion, with the majority as its prophet.” As public opinion “becomes more and more mistress of the world,” the majority gives the individual a supply of “ready made opinions,” with the result, Tocqueville insists, that there is “no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”

What can be done to prevent the loss of all standards, to prevent everyone from becoming part of the crowd, driven by their passions for equality and well-being, to surrender everything to a popular leader who, as an ancient writer described him, “becomes great through the people’s having authority in all matters, and through having authority themselves over the opinions of the people, since the multitude is persuaded by them?” What is to prevent, in other words, that “democratic despotism” Tocqueville was so concerned about? In chapter seventeen of the second book, the central chapter of Democracy In America, a chapter entitled “Why In Ages of Equality It Is Important To Set Distant Goals For Human Endeavors,” he suggests part of the answer.

When religion was the dominant force in the lives of men, great things were done, things that lasted. It took more than a hundred years to build some of the most famous French cathedrals. “In thinking of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in this.” Religion, however, has “lost its sway over men’s minds…everything in the moral world seem doubtful and uncertain,” which makes it even more important, and more necessary, to teach that “nothing of lasting value is achieved without trouble.” How is this to be done when the love of comfort “has become the dominant national taste?” The answer is education, “for the age of blind sacrifice and instinctive virtues is already long past, and I see a time approaching in which freedom, public peace, and social stability will not be able to last without education.”

Tocqueville does not leave it with the simple statement that democracy requires an educated citizenry. What kind of education do the citizens of a democracy require? In chapter fifteen, entitled “Why The Study of Greek and Latin Literature Is Peculiarly Useful in Democratic Societies,” he argues that “No other literature puts in bolder relief just those qualities democratic writers tend to lack, and therefore no other literature is better to be studied at such times.” Despite this, instead of the classics, he insists that for most people in a democracy education “should be scientific, commercial and industrial, rather than literary.” Greek and Latin should be taught only to “those who are destined by nature or fate to adopt a literary career or to cultivate such tastes.” These are the people who will understand what greatness means, and knowing that, will be able to help protect democracy against its own worst instincts.

Democracy, as Tocqueville understood, allows everyone to live in whatever way they wish. Those who, instead of following the crowd, want to try to understand the world around them, can do so. In a memoir he never intended to make public, he confessed that the truth is so “precious and rare that once I have found it, I do not want to risk it in the hazard of an argument; I feel it is like a light that might be put out by waving it to and fro. And as to getting on good terms with people, I could not do so in any general or systematic fashion, for there are so few whom I recognize. Whenever there is nothing in a man’s thoughts or feelings that strikes me, I, so to speak, do not see him.” They are “like so many cliches. I respect them, for they make the world, but they bore me profoundly.”

Had he written this same thing in something he meant to publish, he might have written, more cautiously, what certain of the Greek and Latin authors he so much admired had written, that there are three kinds of human beings: a few who can understand things on their own, a few more who can understand things when they are explained, and the rest of us, unable to understand anything in the way we should. Tocqueville, who had the great good fortune to understand things on his own, had the generosity of mind to spend much of his life trying to explain to others what it is worthwhile knowing, not just about democracy and how to save it, but how those of us who live in a democracy should try to live.

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.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Chance

Megan Chance is the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of more than twenty novels, including A Dangerous Education, A Splendid Ruin, Bone River, and An Inconvenient Wife. She and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Chance's new novel is Glamorous Notions.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Chance's reply:

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Okay, this book … There’s so much to be said about it that can’t really be said without spoiling it, but I can tell you this: it’s set in the early 1960s in the Dutch countryside, which has finally recovered from WWII. The story deals with Isabel and her brother’s fiancée, Eva, who comes to stay at their family house—where only Isabel currently lives—while the brother is on a long business trip. Eva and Isabel try to get along, but they just don’t like one another, and Isabel is paranoid and suspicious. As their relationship grows and changes, we begin to see that though the land is healed, the scars from the war may still be there in other, more psychological and emotional ways.

This book is beautiful and subtle and heart-wrenching. It’s a love story, and a story about obsession, and it is a book I simply can’t forget. Provocative, sensual, compelling, yes. It’s all those things, plus it taught me something about the war that I didn’t know, though really it’s not about WWII so much as it is about the fact that wars never really end. They lodge themselves in our bodies and our minds, changing our chemistry in ways perhaps both good and bad but always forever.

Just a stunning novel. Read it.

Visit Megan Chance's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Splendid Ruin.

The Page 69 Test: A Splendid Ruin.

Q&A with Megan Chance.

The Page 69 Test: A Dangerous Education.

My Book, The Movie: A Dangerous Education.

Writers Read: Megan Chance (February 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

James Byrne

James Byrne is the pseudonym for an author who has worked for more than twenty years as a journalist and in politics. A native of the Pacific Northwest, he lives in Portland, Oregon.

Byrne's new Dez Limerick thriller is Chain Reaction.

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

I shouldn’t read mysteries and thrillers when I’m in a first-draft mode — as I am now — so I’m re-reading Wind, Sand and Stars by aviator, novelist, journalist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It’s a collection of the most amazing stories about the earliest days of aviation. He writes about flying over hostile tribes in North Africa and the treacherous Andes Mountains in South America, delivering the mail in the 1930s. His prose style is beautiful and lyrical, and his descriptions are elegant.

Although he’s most famous for The Little Prince, it’s his aviation writing that mesmerizes me.

Adding to his mystique: The greatest writer to ever focus on the adventure of flying disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944 while flying off the coast of occupied France.

Visit James Byrne's website.

Q&A with James Byrne.

The Page 69 Test: Deadlock.

My Book, The Movie: Deadlock.

--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 The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles:

When Paul Bowles was ten years old his family bought a piano and he did what any ten year old would have done: studied music theory, sight-singing and piano technique, and then wrote “LeCarre: An Opera in Nine Chapters.” It was a story that any ten year old would think to compose: the tangled affair of two men who exchange wives. The private New York school he attended decided that the young Paul Bowles was perhaps not quite normal for his age and moved him from the fourth to the sixth grade. It might have been better had they simply sent him off to graduate school, though, if they had, it would have been difficult to know exactly what university he should be sent and what he should study. Music was not his only interest, or his only accomplishment. When he was fifteen, he wrote his first crime story, saw Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Carnegie Hall, and displayed considerable, not to say prodigious, talent as a painter.

It would take a dozen pages to list the musical compositions of Paul Bowles and more pages than that to describe the sometimes discordant events of his personal life. His marriage, in which he and his wife often lived separately, and sometimes with other people, could only be described in a novel, one something like the one he wrote himself, a novel that, it is fair to say, could only have been written by a great musician. The Sheltering Sky is music set to English prose.

The story, on the surface, is simple enough, and even, again on the surface, a little absurd. A young couple travel with a friend across North Africa, moving from one remote village to another across the arid, blindingly hot Sahara. An epidemic is raging across North Africa. The husband, named Port, gets typhoid and dies. His wife, Kit, wandering off into the desert, is picked up by a caravan, sleeps with the Arab leader, is made part of his harem, and then escapes. That is all there is, an adventure story without much adventure. There are no battles, no rescues, and no happy endings. There is not much, really, in the way of an ending at all; nothing but a vast feeling of sadness and regret. It is, if you will, like the ending of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a few dying notes in the distance that somehow seem to hint, and perhaps more than hint, at a new beginning, a beginning that gives a different, and a deeper, meaning to what you have just heard, or, in this case, what you have just read.

Begin at the beginning, begin with the title: The Sheltering Sky. There is a difference between Moslems and Christians, a difference in the way Moslems and Christians live, the culture, or more adequately, the horizon within which people take their bearings, what they look to when they try to define who and what they are. But, Bowles reminds us, there is another horizon, a horizon that everyone, Moslem, Christian, Hindu, Jew, or any other religion or nationality, share, the horizon that encircles and shelters us all — the sky, with the sun and the moon and the stars we gaze at at night. In the ancient understanding, this, what we see above us, was the inside of a covering that included within it the visible and only universe. Modern science removed this shelter and left us with nothing, no heaven, no hell; nothing but life and death, an earthbound existence in which life reproduces itself, and death repeats itself, over and over again.

The Sheltering Sky, though not a long book, is divided into three parts or books. The first book is called ‘Tea in the Sahara.’ The young married couple, Port and Kit, cross the Atlantic for the first time since 1939. The war has just ended and they intend to keep as far as possible from the places touched by it, which is why they have come to North Africa. They do not come as tourists; they come as travelers. A tourist hurries home after a few weeks or months; a traveler, “belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over a period of years, from one part of the earth to another.” A second difference follows from the first. A tourist “accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler who compares it with others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” There was one element in particular that Port was eager to reject: “the war was one face of the mechanized age he wanted to forget.”

Port and Kit are not traveling alone, A friend of theirs, Tunner, has come with them. Kit is married to Port, but Tunner is “astonishingly handsome, as the girls often told him, in his late Paramount way.” But he has not much depth. “Usually there was very little expression on his smooth face.” This “suggested a bland contentment,” but the reason for that contentment is as devastating a critique of American self-satisfaction as has ever been written. Tunner was “an essentially simple individual, irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp.”

Tunner might be perfectly content with himself and with the world around him, but Kit was dissatisfied with everything, including especially herself. Small, “with blonde hair and an olive complexion,” she was saved “from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze,” an intensity so great that when she looks at you, there was a “piercing, questioning violence” in her eyes. There is a struggle raging within her between “reason and atavism.” She lived always with the expectation of disaster; she saw in everything an omen of impending catastrophe. A feeling of doom pervaded her every daytime thought and her every nighttime dream. When she looked around her, she could only lament that, “The people of each country get more like the people of every country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture — nothing, nothing.”

Port, her husband, shares this sense of things coming undone, of a world that has lost its way. “Europe,” he declares with almost angry conviction, “has destroyed the whole world.” The only protection left from utter destruction is the sky itself. “I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.” When Kit asks him what is behind the sky, he replies, “Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.” And then he tells her that they are both afraid of the same thing. “We’ve never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We’re hanging on to the outside for all we’re worth, convinced we’re going to fall off at the next bump.”

Port and Kit had not been in love for a long time. She could never rid herself of the terror that was “always with her,” and he could never “break out of the cage into which he had shut himself, the cage he had built long ago to save himself from love.” So they drifted along, and, after a while, forgot about time. “One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.” And nothing did.

In Book Two, “The Earth’s Sharp Edge,” the scene shifts from the movement across North Africa to a stationary place. Lieutenant d’Armagnac, the commander of the French military post of You Noura, has, after two years, lost his enthusiasm for the natives. “About the time he had grown tired of his half-dozen mistresses,” he stopped thinking about the Arabs and took them “for granted.” He was mainly concerned with the epidemic spreading across North Africa. Port and Kit arrive by train. Tunner has been left to travel with an old woman and her depraved and dishonest son in their enormous Mercedes motor car. Port has become quite ill, but this village, “without any visible sign of European influence,” is what they had hoped to find. It had the “unexpected quality of being complete which dissipated the feeling of chaos.”

Chaos, for Port and Kit and those after the war who tried to grasp the essential meaning of things, had become the overwhelming, inescapable condition of the modern, Western, world, the complete absence of any defining purpose, any singular method of measuring, determining, the relative significance of things. Without an agreed upon way of life, the world had become nothing more than an empty search for no one quite knew what. It was no accident that existentialism became the rage, the belief that it did not matter what you believed, so long as you believed in something. It did not matter what you decided, so long as you were willing to make a commitment.

Port’s illness became severe. He had typhoid and there was no question but that he was dying. He tells Kit: “There are so many things I want to say. I don’t know what they are. I’ve forgotten them all.” Words vanish from his mind, and that clarifies his thought. Dying, at the end, he understood meant to “Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.”

Port is dead, and Kit is left to decide on her own what to do. it is not what anyone, in the comfort of their middle-class existence, would expect or even think possible. She does not stay to arrange for her husband’s burial; she does not even bother to let anyone — the local authorities, their family and friends in America — know that he has died. She simply leaves. She packs a small bag and walks out of the village into the desert. There is no sadness, no regret, no mourning; the only feeling she has is, strangely enough, or perhaps not so strange after all, the thrill of being free. “Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it.” She had “found it again, the joy of being.”

Lieutenant d’Armagnac drew his own conclusions. He thought she had left her husband to die alone. Worse yet, she had created a problem. “Death from typhoid was one thing,” but “the disappearance of a white woman in the desert was another.” Quite another. In Book Three, “The Sky,” the world is turned upside down. It is now not the question of how Europe, the West, has changed the Moslem world; it is how the Moslem world changes someone from the West, an American woman who suddenly finds herself free of all the restrains of her country and her past.

A woman wanders into the desert and after a few hours sees in the distance an Arab caravan, but instead of describing a woman, a woman whose husband has just died, as worried about what might happen, Bowles does something quite astonishing. He writes about a woman who suddenly discovers what, until now, has been hidden from her, hidden by the sky that has so long sheltered her from confronting who, beneath all that her civilization has taught her, she really is. She sees two men on their camels leading the procession. “Even as she saw these two men she knew that she would accompany them, and the certainty gave her an unexpected sense of power; instead of feeling the omens, she now would make them, be them herself.”

The first night she is with them, Belqassim, the leader, takes her. “In his behavior there was a perfect balance between gentleness and violence that gave her particular delight. The moon came up but she did not see it.” When Belqassim is finished with her, the other man takes her. She complains to Belqassim, but without anger or remorse. She was anything but distressed. She was instead, “happy for a while, floating on the surface of time, conscious of making the gestures of love only after she had discovered herself in the act of making them.” And then Bowles adds a line that puts everything in perspective, and places the ultimate lesson waiting to be learned somewhere the other side of the sheltering sky: “Since the beginning of all things each motion had been waiting to be born, and at last was coming into existence.”

After the caravan had reached home, Belqassim makes Kit part of his household. A prisoner in her room, she lives “solely for those few fiery hours spent each day beside Belqassim.” One day, going through the things in her valise — a lipstick, a compact — they seem to her “like the fascinating and mysterious objects left by a vanished civilization.” Eventually, realizing that Belqassim is not unique, and that anyone “even faintly resembling” him, “would please her quite as much,” she escapes. But where can she go? If she goes back to the West, the Americans will discover what she had done and make her try to explain herself, and that, she knows, will destroy her. She remembers what Port had told her, “that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above.”

Taken to the American consulate in a city on the shore of the Mediterranean and left in a cab outside the hotel where, she is told, Tunner may be waiting, she disappears. A streetcar, heading toward the dockyard through shabby buildings and dimly lighted streets, stops at the edge of the Arab quarter. It is “the end of the line.”

And the end of the music only Paul Bowles could have turned into words.

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.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sam Wiebe

Sam Wiebe is an award-winning and best-selling author of Pacific Northwest crime fiction.

His Wakeland series includes Invisible Dead, Cut You Down, Hell and Gone, Sunset and Jericho, and the upcoming Wrath of Exiles. The series has been praised for its authenticity and social realism. He’s also the author of Ocean Drive, Last of the Independents, Never Going Back, and A Lonesome Place for Dying under the pen name Nolan Chase.

Recently I asked Wiebe about what he was reading. His reply:

My last read of 2024 was Nicholas Nickleby, the novel Dickens started in the middle of writing Oliver Twist. It’s better (and less antisemitic) than Twist, but not as compelling as his latter masterpieces. What’s remarkable is that two years after Nickleby came out, the corrupt and brutal ‘Yorkshire schools’ the book takes aim against were nearly all out of business. Amazing to think a novel could have such an effect on the world.

Valancourt reissues a lot of great horror fiction, and I’ve also been reading their first two volumes of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, edited by Tara Moore and Allen Grove. Each volume has some standout tales.

Visit Sam Wiebe's website.

My Book, The Movie: Invisible Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Invisible Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Cut You Down.

Q&A with Sam Wiebe.

The Page 69 Test: Hell and Gone.

Writers Read: Sam Wiebe (March 2022).

My Book, The Movie: Hell and Gone.

My Book, The Movie: Sunset and Jericho.

Writers Read: Sam Wiebe (April 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Sunset and Jericho.

The Page 69 Test: Ocean Drive.

My Book, The Movie: Ocean Drive.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clay McLeod Chapman

Clay McLeod Chapman is the author of novels What Kind of Mother, Ghost Eaters, Whisper Down the Lane, The Remaking, and miss corpus, story collections nothing untoward, commencement, and rest area, as well as The Tribe middlegrade series: Homeroom Headhunters, Camp Cannibal, and Academic Assassins.

His new novel is Wake Up and Open Your Eyes.

Recently I asked Chapman about what he was reading. His reply:

Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson

Evenson is known for his economy. Within his stories, there's never a sentence that feels unnecessary. There's no fat to his fiction. It's all lean, efficient and effective and profoundly unnerving. His most recent collection expands upon this at such an exponential rate, which may be due to the fact that there's just as much scifi here as horror. Explorations of liminality, autonomy and parenthood run throughout. The minimalism within each sentence ended up creating a chasm in my imagination, where there was so much space -- dark, black space -- to fill in the Hemmingway gaps. I feel like these stories are portholes into other worlds and Evenson truly introduced me to a whole new universe of things to be afraid of.

Visit Clay McLeod Chapman's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Remaking.

The Page 69 Test: The Remaking.

My Book, The Movie: Whisper Down the Lane.

Q&A with Clay McLeod Chapman.

The Page 69 Test: Whisper Down the Lane.

Writers Read: Clay McLeod Chapman (September 2022).

The Page 69 Test: What Kind of Mother.

Writers Read: Clay McLeod Chapman (September 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Cannell

Michael Cannell is the author of five non-fiction books, most recently Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation. His previous books are A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc., Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit, and I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism.

Cannell has worked as a reporter for Time and an editor for The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications.

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

Some years ago a book editor took me to lunch at a Midtown Manhattan sushi restaurant. Over miso soup and tuna rolls, I proposed a complicated structure for the book he had hired me to write. His response was this: I don’t care what structure you employ, as long as you ask yourself what the characters want at the start of each chapter. It was the best advice I ever received.

I write in a style know as narrative non-fiction. I’m a journalist. I tell true stories drawn from history. I fabricate nothing. Nor do I exaggerate or embellish. My books may, however, read like fiction, at least I hope they do, because I borrow techniques found in novels. Among other things, I try to impart my subjects’ feelings and motivations — their inner lives — as my editor suggested.

Where might you observe the most skillful examples of character development? I direct you to Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn, the story of a small-town Irish girl who emigrates to New York in 1951. Toibin is a master of subterranean emotions, of plumbing the complicated depths of feeling and motivations even as the surface of the story remains almost still.

Visit Michael T. Cannell's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Limit.

The Page 99 Test: The Limit.

My Book, The Movie: Incendiary.

My Book, The Movie: A Brotherhood Betrayed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meryl Gordon

Meryl Gordon is an award-winning journalist and tenured NYU journalism professor. She is the author of four biographies; two have been New York Times bestsellers. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times.

A native of Rochester, New York and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Gordon has worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, TV and radio reporter. She has covered a wide array of topics including national politics, influential New Yorkers, police and courts, economics and business, fashion, food, celebrities, pioneering women and book reviews. She is based in New York City.

Gordon's new book is The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta, Washington's Most Famous Hostess.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Gordon's reply:

Since I am a biographer, people expect me to read a lot of biographies and sometimes I do, to see how other authors frame their subjects and deal with the ambiguities. But for pleasure, I’m much more likely to read novels, mysteries, fantasy and books recommended by friends.

A few high points of this year: Martin MacInnes’ stunning novel In Ascension. Riveting, beautifully-written futuristic book, kept me up late at night, made me think. Satisfying ending, which rarely seems to happen.

Ian Rankin’s latest in the Inspector Rebus series: Midnight and Blue. I am addicted to this series, and in this new book, the writer is in top form.

My favorite book gifts to friends continues to be Rachel Joyce’s trilogy, beginning with The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. So surprising, so meaningful, so fascinating to hear the same story from the perspective of three characters. Reminder of how we all experience life in different ways.

My reading has taken a different turn since the July death of my husband, political columnist Walter Shapiro. Another widow recommended, How to Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies, by Therese Rando. I initially resisted the suggestion but ultimately found the book to be tremendously helpful. It made me understand that I wasn’t going crazy, that a lot of my reactions are normal.

I also rediscovered the work of Anne Lamott, especially Traveling Mercies. She is so wise and honest and even funny at times, writing about loss and grief and healing. A comforting companion on life’s journey.

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon (October 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: The Woman Who Knew Everyone.

--Marshal Zeringue