Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author, a writing professor, and she holds a PhD in English literature, a background that, as it turns out, was ideal for writing her new standalone, The Dark Library, the story of a woman still menaced by her dead father whose rare book collection holds the secrets she needs to escape him.

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

As always, my nightstand and my electronic reading implements are full of stuff I'm reading. I'm just not a one-book-at-a-time reader.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, because I have one of those minds that never stops, and that's not always a good thing. The Tao Te Ching doesn't help me achieve mental stillness, because nothing has done that yet, but it nudges me in the right direction. So does Le Guin's incandescent prose.

Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World, because I'm leading a meeting of a local (Valley Cottage, New York) book group that's reading it. It's Agatha Christie-esque, and anybody who knows me will know that I'm predisposed to like that, but it also has a speculative dystopian vibe, and that combination is really fun.

James Sallis' Drive, because I'm leading a online book group for The Center for Fiction that will discuss it in this fall. I read it when it came out and have taught it more than once, but it's a challenging text, so I'm brushing up on it. It's a short, intense read that reads like a bloody and violent poem. It's also a master class in the use of point of view, Just to keep readers on their toes, Sallis sliced up the text and rearranged it, which is disorienting in a delicious way.

Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," also because I'm leading a Center for Fiction book group that's reading it. (Join us!) I chose this short story because it, too, exploits the possibilities of a narrator who is unreliable but, in this case, is unintentionally so.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (June 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Library.

--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 Remarkable Edmund Burke:

It is a mark of how much has changed, how words have changed their meaning, that Edmund Burke who, more than anyone else in the 18th century, defined what conservatism meant, has next to nothing in common with those who call themselves conservatives today. Today’s conservatives think government the enemy of liberty, and public spending at best a necessary evil; Burke thought liberty impossible without government, and public spending better than the expenditures of private wealth. When government spends on public projects, “The poorest man feels his own importance and dignity in it.” When the rich spend on themselves, it “makes the man of humbler rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and degrades and vilifies his condition.”

This may seem to suggest that Burke wanted to narrow, if not eliminate, the difference between rich and poor. That was the last thing he wanted. Give everyone an equal share in the wealth of the country, you might end up with a reasonably prosperous middle-class, but you would not have the landed aristocracy of 18th century England, the kind of “gentlemen” able to run a country. If this sounds decidedly undemocratic, it is; and Burke makes no apologies. Liberty requires more than individual rights and majority rule. Libery without wisdom and without virtue “is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Liberty requires order, and order depends upon the existence of what both Burke and Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy.” Without this aristocracy, “there is no nation.” But what, exactly, beyond the wealth of the the landed aristocracy of England, makes one a member of this “natural aristocracy?” Burke tells us, tells us in a single sentence, a single sentence that would shock to the limits, which I confess are not very great, of every law school teacher teaching legal writing who fails to understand that brevity of expression reflects, too often, only the paucity of thought; a single sentence that fills up all but two lines of a full page of Burke’s twelve volume Collected Works:

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to make a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that your are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

Who, today, writes like this? Who, today, wants to? Who, today, taught first by radio and television, taught now by social media on electronic devices - and soon to be taught by artificial intelligence that, though we had not thought very much before, we will not have to think at all - would even think it worth the effort to try? And still, despite that, we cannot quite rid ourselves of the sense, the suspicion, that we are missing something, that the world has become a poorer place; that if, by some miracle, someone would once again write, and speak, like Edmund Burke, there would be reason to hope that the future might be better than what we are forced to hear in the dismal rhetoric of the present. It is not impossible, precisely because Burke was not impossible. He was not, himself, the product of the kind of background he described in that magnificent single endless sentence that manages somehow to seem too short. Edmund Burke was not the titled heir of an English aristocrat; Edmund Burke was the son of an Irish lawyer.

Biographies have been written about Burke; British and European histories are filled with his name. But perhaps the most interesting, and most incisive, thing written about him is the article on his life in the once famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the edition that brought together the greatest scholars of the age to write about what, some of them, had studied all their lives. John Morley, who had led some of the most prestigious literary reviews in London when literary reviews were read by everyone in public life; who had, in 1904, written the definitive biography of William Gladstone, and who had himself served in Parliament, describes Burke’s life, especially his early life, in a way only someone can who has led a life with something like the same experience.

Burke graduated from Trinity College in Ireland, but, Morley writes, “His knowledge of Greek and Latin was never thorough…. He could quote Homer and Pindar, and he had read Aristotle. Like others going through the conventional course of instruction, he kept a place in his memory for the various charms of Virgil and Horace, of Tacitus and Ovid, but the master whose page by night and day he turned with devout hand was…Cicero.” Burke left college, “with no great stock of well-ordered knowledge.”

The reader can decide for himself the comparative merits of what Burke learned and what is taught in a university today. If, as Morley suggests, Burke had something less that what might have been expected from his Trinity education, this was not a misfortune: “He neither received the benefits nor suffered the drawbacks of systematic intellectual discipline.” He had the same freedom from the limitations of formal training when he studied law. “Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law.”

Burke’s political career began in 1765 when he became private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the British prime minister. A year later, he became a member of the House of Commons, and gave his first speech the same day that the great William Pitt gave his last. The House of Commons, Thomas Macaulay would later write, “was in doubt to which of them the palm of eloquence should be assigned. It was indeed a splendid sunset and a splendid dawn.” What did Burke do, besides give a maiden speech no one who heard it ever forgot? “The first session I was in Parliament, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commercial, financial, constitutional, and foreign interest of Great Britain and its empire.” Just what we today expect from a newly elected member of Congress, or the United States Senate.

Burke could talk, Burke could write. He was considered, Macaulay reports, “as the only match in conversation for Dr. Johnson.” His speeches on America, speeches in which he defended the right of Americans to insist that only they could tax themselves, “will last as long as the English language.” Everyone who heard him speak, everyone who read what he wrote, agreed that there was no one like him. Morley called him “one of the greatest names in political literature,” whose “writing is magnificent, because he knew so much, thought so comprehensively, and felt so strongly.” Everyone agreed that Edmund Burke was a very great man; and everyone who said that, insisted that when it came to the French Revolution, Edmund Burke simply had no idea what he was talking about.

We think of the French Revolution as a great event, the end of king’s tyranny and the beginning of the ‘rights of man,’ the belief that everyone, every citizen, has the equal right to decide who should govern, and the terms and conditions under which those who govern will be allowed to act. What seems to us a commonplace, the foundation of political liberty, was, for Burke, the beginning of the end, the false doctrine of those who know nothing of what liberty requires. Everything, “our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.” They “kept learning in existence,” learning that “enlarged their ideas and furnished their minds,” and this learning kept liberty alive.

The French Revolution meant that, “the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisticators, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.” There is nothing left of tradition, nothing left of the feeling of obligation one generation owes to another; laws, instead of honored because handed down from one age to the next, “are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests.” With the French Revolution, the country will become a “nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter.”

What produced this demand that everyone have an equal right to govern themselves? “A false philosophy passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge, which in the last two centuries either did not exist at all, or existed solidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused, weakened, and perverted.” In other words, the Enlightenment, with its promise that everyone, if taught properly, could learn to think for themselves, and the philosophy of Rousseau, with its insistence that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains,” and that the only legitimate government is one people construct for themselves. Burke insists that nothing like this is possible.

We are not born free; we do not choose our country, any more than we choose our parents. We learn the ways of the world in the place, the nation, in which we come into existence; we learn our morals before we have the use of reason. The real social contract is not an agreement about who should rule and who should obey; the real social contract is a partnership “in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfections;” a partnership, moreover, “not only between those who are living, but those who are dead, and those are to be born.” Those who speak of new beginnings, who insist that the past has nothing to teach, that it is nothing but a regrettable record of irrational prejudice and violent oppression, understand nothing of the real nature of things: that instead of progress, there has been a decline; that instead of greater freedom, there is now, because of the French Revolution, the greater slavery of lowered horizons and regimented minds.

Everyone agrees that Burke was wrong about the French Revolution, wrong when he insisted that it was “the deepest, the most craftily devised, the best combined and the most extensive design that was ever carried on, since the beginning of the world, against all property, all order, all religion, all law, and all real freedom.” Still, it might give us pause to remember that John Morley, after declaring at the beginning of his article on Burke that he was wrong to insist that the Revolution was not necessary, that reform had been possible, writes at the end of that same article that events in France confirmed “Burke’s sagacity and foresight.” And it might give us reason to wonder whether this, or any other, republic, can survive without a class of men and women educated in the best of what the past has to teach: ancient philosophy and both ancient and modern history - the liberal arts education that formed the natural aristocracy that both Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Burke thought essential to the preservation of freedom, and to which the works of Edmund Burke have become such a valuable addition.

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.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Alterman

Liz Alterman lives in New Jersey with her husband, three sons, and two cats. She spends most days repeatedly microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms.

Alterman's new novel is Claire Casey's Had Enough.

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

This past month I’ve been focusing on non-fiction. I was very fortunate to receive an advance reader copy of Rebecca Bloom’s insightful When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need, which is a fantastic resource for anyone navigating the complexities of our healthcare system. Filled with practical strategies, hard-won wisdom, and eye-opening anecdotes, this is a must-read for those with an illness and anyone who supports them.

I listened to Happy to Help by Amy Wilson. As someone who has a difficult time saying “no,” I found this relatable and empowering. A trained actor, Wilson does a wonderful job bringing “characters” to life in this essay collection which also explores the way women are frequently dismissed when seeking a proper diagnosis, underscoring the need for Bloom’s When Women Get Sick.

Whenever I’m between books, I return to Ann Patchett. This month, I listened to Truth & Beauty, which offers a heartbreaking and diary-like look at Patchett’s friendship with author and poet Lucy Grealy, who wrote the critically-acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face. Grealy undergoes countless surgeries to restore her jaw after losing part of it to cancer as a child. Without intending to, I've been immersed in stories that illuminate how truly flawed our healthcare system is. (Again, see Bloom's book.) As devastating as Truth & Beauty is, it also brims with love and a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how two writers approach their craft very differently.

I recommend all of these.

Visit Liz Alterman's website.

Q&A with Liz Alterman.

My Book, The Movie: The Perfect Neighborhood.

The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Neighborhood.

The Page 69 Test: The House on Cold Creek Lane.

My Book, The Movie: The House on Cold Creek Lane.

Writers Read: Liz Alterman (August 2024).

My Book, The Movie: Claire Casey's Had Enough.

The Page 69 Test: Claire Casey's Had Enough.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Stevens

The son of two librarians, Mark Stevens was raised in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and has worked as a reporter, as a national television news producer, and in public relations. The Fireballer (2023) was named Best Baseball Novel by Twin Bill literary magazine and named a Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine. His novel Antler Dust was a Denver Post bestseller in 2007 and 2009. Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award (2012, 2015, and 2016, respectively), which Trapline won. Trapline also won the Colorado Authors League Award for Best Genre Fiction.

Stevens’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and Denver Noir. In both 2016 and 2023, Stevens was named Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. He hosts a regular podcast for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and has served as president of the Rocky Mountain chapter for Mystery Writers of America.

His new novel is No Lie Lasts Forever.

Recently I asked Stevens about what he was reading. The author's reply:

Deep Fury by David Freed

The latest entry in the Cordell Logan series is smooth, witty, and a joy to read. Logan is a former government assassin turned flight instructor. He’s a wannabe Buddha. His student pilots learn in a Cessna 172 called the Ruptured Duck. He’s a burrito aficionado. He lives in a converted garage apartment in a seaside California town called Rancho Bonito. with his “orange blimp” of a cat named Kiddiot. The case here involves a dead guy who literally fell out of the sky. It’s Logan’s old wingman from his U.S. Air Force days. The plot moves from the obvious (drug cartels) into something more interesting and a tad more complex about government and military technology. What you get with Cordell Logan is a jaded but-still-willing-to-help worldview and, in Deep Fury, a story engine that purrs like the Ruptured Duck’s engine, thrumming along with “nary a hiccup.”

Better to Beg by Kristi MacKenzie

You won’t soon forget Viv and Hux. Or their fights as their band The Deserters makes its way cross-country on an epic journey to, well, one of the best endings you’ll come across. This is the story of a rowdy rock band. There will be a drugs. It’s the voices that drive Better to Beg. Back and forth from Hux to Viv we go and it’s rarely convivial. Viv is the grown-up (and that’s a relative term) and Hux is the delinquent subadult. Hux isn’t good with time or money. Viv tries to lay down the law after a show in Boston. Sitting in an alley after dumpster-diving for some scraps, Hux doesn’t care too much that the band is broke. He wants to cultivate a “myth” like Ziggy Stardust or Captain Beefheart. “All art must be the presence of craft, not the reminder of labor,” he tries to explain to Viv. “They only want the finished product.” Viv wants a record deal. Hux wants to work on his rowdy, drug-fueled reputation. What can I say about the ending other than it’s one of the most well-earned, perfect moments I’ve read in a long time. Art, myth, identity … and the power of story. Despite themselves and because of who they are, Hux and Viv are legends. So it starts, so it goes.

Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes

This highly detailed biography, told with a calm style, follows Reed step by step through high school and college as he endures electroshock therapy, absorbs the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, forms bands, listens to jazz, listens to doo-wop, explores the avant-garde arts community, and befriends Andy Warhol. “Aesthetically,” writes Hermes, “Warhol surely confirmed, and likely amplified, Reed’s notions about finding beauty in the ugly, banal, reviled, and despised, just as he mirrored Reed’s taste for repetition, noise, distortion, cultural provocation, and periodic arcs toward transcendence.”

Reed turned himself inside out for art and music. And he frequently did it for cultural provocation. He struggled with commercialism, but commercialism ultimately bailed him out. He struggled with professional jealousy and envy, but was ultimately revered. A terrific portrait of an inimitable artistic force.

Visit Mark Stevens's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer.

Q&A with Mark Stevens.

My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nev March

Author Nev March is the first Indian-born writer to win Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America’s Award for Best First Crime Fiction. Her debut novel Murder in Old Bombay was an Edgar and Anthony finalist.

March’s books deal with issues of identity, race and moral boundaries. Her sequel, Peril at the Exposition is set at the 1893 World’s Fair, during a time of conflict that planted the seeds of today’s red-blue political divide. In Captain Jim and Lady Diana’s third adventure The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret they face a strange, otherworldly foe who causes Jim to question the nature of justice. In the newly released The Silversmith’s Puzzle, Captain Jim and Diana race back to colonial India to rescue Diana’s beloved brother Adi, who is accused of murder.

Recently I asked March about what she was reading. The author's reply:

The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery by Anuradha Kumar

I picked up this book because of the premise. I knew Mark Twain had visited Bombay in the 1890s, since that’s the period I write about. This was a charming romp through Bombay with fun and unexpected characters! Young American Consul Henry Baker and his trusty manservant Abdul meet a bewildering array of Indian and English characters. When the famous writer Mark Twain goes missing, Henry must rely on Maya, a green eyed Anglo Indian woman, and a strange magician, to investigate and rescue the great man. In enjoyed this unexpectedly fun tale with lovely atmospheric detail. Felt like I was there, back in the narrow gullies watching hawkers and tamashas of roving actors on the streets. It had some nice surprises, and a couple of poignant moments set in a splendid backdrop.

In Search of Amrit Kaur: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World by Livia Manera Sambuy, Todd Portnowitz (Translator)

Did Amrit Kaur sell her priceless emerald necklace to save a Jewish family from the holocaust? This was a poignant story of a lost princess and early feminist. This book was part of my research for my next novel and held enormous fascination. The interwoven investigative and historical passages are painful and engrossing. Add to this an emotional layer: parallel stories of two daughters estranged from their mothers, and the ways we come to terms with the tears in our hearts. I had no idea that the Sikh Raja, Amrit Kaur’s father was such a Francophile! His palace in Pumjab is a mini Versailles! It was an eye opener to know that this early feminist had her heart broken when her husband took a second wife (Raja’s often did). She was so disappointed she went to Europe and when it was time to return, she absconded with a pair of American friends! The passages of her deprivations in a Paris prison during WW2 brought me to tears.

Beast and Man in India A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People by John Lockwood Kipling

Published in 1904, by the father of Rudyard Kipling, this little book contains more than the details of horse breeds and the often-comical sayings about animals. These sayings reveal a great deal about the late nineteenth century in India under the British Raj. It also inadvertently describes the bigotry and attitudes of the British administrative class towards Indians (Orientals, as they are called in the book.) In part funny, engaging and cringy, this honest little book was written to amuse members of the British public who were curious about their largest colony, India. While it shows a keen interest in the animals and customs of Indians, sadly, now, it reflects far more than the author ever intended, his own arrogance and disdain for Indians.

Next on my list: Canary in the Coal Mine by Charles Salzberg

Why did I pick it up? I attended CrimeConn, the crimewriters conference recently and met Charles Salzberg. He moderated a brilliant panel devoted to the justice system—it included folks that worked within it, some that help inmates reintegrate into society, and some that were impacted by the justice system (read, lived through imprisonment). The book is a hardboiled mystery, and I like to mix up my reading, so will take this on the plane when I travel next week. The premise intrigued me: A NY city PI who suffers from anger management issues and insomnia is hired by a beautiful woman to find her husband, dead or alive.

Visit Nev March's website.

Q&A with Nev March.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Old Bombay.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Old Bombay.

Writers Read: Nev March (October 2022).

The Page 69 Test: The Silversmith's Puzzle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shirley Russak Wachtel

Shirley Russak Wachtel is the author of A Castle in Brooklyn. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Wachtel holds a doctor of letters degree from Drew University and for the past thirty-five years has taught English literature at Middlesex College in Edison, New Jersey. Her podcast, EXTRAordinary People, features inspiring individuals who have overcome obstacles to make a difference. The mother of three grown sons and grandmother to three precocious granddaughters, she currently resides in East Brunswick, New Jersey, with her husband, Arthur.

Wachtel's new novel is The Baker of Lost Memories.

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

I have been an avid reader since I was eight years old. Whether I’m sitting in my backyard, waiting in a doctor’s office, or just before drifting off to sleep, I always have a book in hand. Like the stories I write, I am drawn to tales about people and relationships. My love for books goes beyond the stories so that I never borrow books but buy each book so that it occupies a coveted space in my library. Every few weeks, I rotate the genres, moving from classics to nonfiction and popular fiction.

I recently reread Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play about a small town in New England which takes us through the lives of ordinary people as they raise their families, find love, and endure loss. This play touched me as it showed that there is beauty in even the mundane. I made sure to see the latest rendition of this play on Broadway shortly after I read it.

The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon sheds light on individuals in American history who made significant contributions to our country, but whose names we may not know. One woman, Clara Brown, comes to mind. As a slave, Clara was separated from her young daughter and searched for her in the ensuing years. Once emancipated, Clara worked for others, then established her own cooking and laundering business before becoming a millionaire and philanthropist in Colorado. At age 82, she and her daughter were finally reunited. Each of the vignettes in McMahon’s book are just as compelling and inspiring as this one.

As soon as Lynda Cohen Loigman’s The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern came out, I knew I had to read it. I have been a fan of her work since The Two-Family House, for she writes of the people I know, the Jews of Brooklyn who face struggles as they build their lives. In her latest book, we meet a retired pharmacist who relocates to a senior community in Florida where she is shocked to meet the man who deserted her sixty years earlier. We learn what happened through a series of flashbacks. Adding extra spice to the story is magical realism, a technique I use in my latest book.

Visit Shirley Wachtel's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Castle in Brooklyn.

My Book, The Movie: A Castle in Brooklyn.

Q&A with Shirley Russak Wachtel.

My Book, The Movie: The Baker of Lost Memories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Buccola

Allison Buccola is the author of The Ascent and Catch Her When She Falls.

She has a JD from the University of Chicago and lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and their two young children.

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

I just finished reading The Felons’ Ball by Polly Stewart, which was great. It’s about a family who made their fortune running moonshine. They now make their money in legitimate ways, but every year they host a huge party called the Felons’ Ball, and this year something goes terribly wrong. Stewart really knows how to conjure a setting, and her description of this small Southern townimmediately drew me in. So much of this book is set on the water—on houseboats and motorboats and dock bars—and the specter of the family’s past hangs over everything.

And I’m currently reading Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall, which also has rich, immersive setting: an English farming village in the 1960’s. I didn’t know much about the plot going into it—I had heard it described as a love triangle with some mystery elements—but it’s a much more beautiful story than I was expecting. The setting and the two love interests (a steady, loyal farmer and the narrator’s first love who rocketed to fame as an author) remind me, in some ways, of Tom Lake—but it’s much more fraught, with the relationships woven into a mystery. I’m really enjoying it!

Visit Allison Buccola's website.

Q&A with Allison Buccola.

The Page 69 Test: Catch Her When She Falls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha M. Bailey

Samantha M. Bailey is the USA Today and #1 international bestselling author of Woman on the Edge, optioned for series adaptation, Watch Out for Her, shortlisted for Canada Reads 2025, A Friend in the Dark, an Amazon Charts bestseller, and the newly released Hello, Juliet. Her novels have sold in twelve countries. She lives in Toronto, where she can usually be found tapping away at her computer or curled up on her couch with a book.

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

At ThrillerFest 2024, I was so happy to chat with my fellow Canadian author, Mailan Doquang. Mailan and I had connected on social media, but meeting in person is always such a fulfilling experience. I hadn’t yet had the chance to read her acclaimed debut, Blood Rubies, so I was very excited when she asked if I’d blurb the second book in the series, Ceylon Sapphires. It was a resounding yes, but I had no idea how exceptional a read it would be. Mailan is an architectural historian turned thriller writer, and her expertise and skill are on full display in this slick and dazzling novel. The feverish pace never lets up as the savvy Rune Sarasin cleverly attempts to outwit every player in a zero-sum game for her life. Action-packed and captivating, this stunning, globe-spanning suspense is one of the most exciting books I've ever read. It’s out June 3.

Visit Samantha M. Bailey's website.

Q&A with Samantha M. Bailey.

Writers Read: Samantha M. Bailey (April 2024).

--Marshal Zeringue

Jesse Browner

Jesse Browner is the author of the novels The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here?

He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City.

Browner's new novel is Sing to Me.

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

You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue. This is already my second read. My hands-down favorite book of 2024. It reinvents the story of Hernán Cortés’ first week in Tenochtitlan and his meeting with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma – probably one of the most fateful encounters in world history, as the future of the entire New World hung on its outcome. Yet Enrigue treats it with irreverence, irony, broad (almost slapstick) humor and compassion for all its protagonists. For me, You Dreamed of Empires is the ideal model of the historical novel, adhering to the few known facts yet freely acknowledging that all history is, first and foremost, an elaborate work of fiction.

Writers Read: Jesse Browner (January 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Vidich

Paul Vidich's seventh and newest novel is The Poet's Game. His previous novel, Beirut Station: Two Lives of a Spy, was selected by CrimeReads as one of the best espionage novels of 2023. Vidich's debut novel, An Honorable Man, was selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top 10 Mystery and Thriller in 2016. It was followed by The Good Assassin. His third novel, The Coldest Warrior, was widely praised in England and America, earning strong reviews from The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted for the UK’s Staunch Prize and chosen as a Notable Selection of 2020 by CrimeReads.

Recently I asked Vidich about what he was reading. The author's reply:

I am fascinated by the different paths that espionage fiction has taken in the England, where is began with Erskine Childers and Eric Ambler in the early 20 th century, and its American expression, which didn’t emerge until the 1960’s with Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry. There are interesting differences between English and American spy fiction and to understand the differences, I recently began to reread early American spy fiction classics, Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn and Robert Littell’s The Amateur.

McCarry, a CIA intelligence officer before he turned to writing novels, reimagines the assassination of JFK as an act of revenge for America’s killing of South Vietnam’s president Diem in 1963. McCarry’s protagonist, Paul Christopher, is a weary anti-Bond figure who pursues his theory against the advice of agency’s higher-ups, and finds himself out in the cold. It’s a fine novel with an interesting premise, and what makes it stand out is McCarry’s empathy for his protagonist’s loneliness, which borders on loveless despair.

Robert Littell’s protagonist in The Amateur is also an agency employee who goes out into the cold to exact personal revenge for the murder of his fiancé, also an agency employee, by terrorists affiliated with the KGB. Littell gives his protagonist the urgency of an amateur motivated by revenge, but his sardonic sense of humor adds needed humanity to the assassin he becomes.

Visit Paul Vidich's website.

Q&A with Paul Vidich.

My Book, The Movie: The Mercenary.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercenary.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (January 2022).

The Page 69 Test: The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (October 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Beirut Station.

The Page 69 Test: Beirut Station.

--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 Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot:

In December of l875, Henry James published a review of the French writer Honoré de Balzac that ran nearly seventeen thousand words. The review can be found in the Library of America’s edition entitled, Henry James: European Writers and The Prefaces. It should be read by anyone with a serious interest in Balzac, and a serious concern with how far the 21st century has fallen below the literary standards, and perhaps not just the literary standards, of the 19th century.

One of the great, if least noticed, differences between what was written then and what is written now, is that writers devoted their lives to what they did. Born in 1799, Balzac spent three years working in a lawyer’s office, the necessary apprenticeship to practice law in France, and then, over the protests of his family, decided to become a writer, and before he was thirty he had written a number of unreadable novels which left him as impoverished as he had been when he started. He learned from his failures, and instead of narrowing, broadened the scope of his ambition. He would write a series of novels that would together describe the human condition, that is to say, the human comedy, the world as it really existed, or at least that part of the world known as Paris. The best of these novels is Père Goriot, a novel Henry James considered among “the few greatest novels we possess.”

Père Goriot begins with nothing of what is usually considered action, nothing that immediately captures the reader’s attention, nothing that creates a sense of mystery or adventure or even anticipation. It opens with the description of a place, a boarding house where no one would live if they could afford something better. Everything about it is dismal.

“In the whole of Paris there is no district more hideous, and none, we must add, more unknown.” The boarding house is four stories high, and of a “squalid appearance,” every squalid detail of which is described. The boarders have their meals on “a long table covered with oilcloth so greasy that a playful diner can autograph it with his finger.” It is a place of poverty, “pinched, concentrated, threadbare poverty,” a place “where all hope and eagerness have been extinguished.”

This goes on for pages, one grim, depressing detail after another. And it is all quite deliberate. “The place in which an event occurred,” explains Henry James, was in Balzac’s view, “of equal moment with the event itself; it was part of the action; it was not a thing to take or to leave, or to be vaguely and gracefully indicated; it imposed itself; it had a part to play; and need to be made as definite as anything else.” It is the same thing with persons as with things. Madame Vauguen, who owns and runs the boarding house, is introduced in a way that make you feel, not that you know her as well, or better, than anyone you have actually met, but someone you would immediately recognize if you happened to see her on the street:

“The apartment is in all its lustre at the moment when, toward seven o’clock in the morning, Madame Vauguen’s cat precedes his mistress, jumping on the side- boards, smelling at the milk contained in several basins covered with plates, and giving forth his matutinal purr. Presently the widow appears, decked out in her tulle cap, under which hangs a crooked band of false hair; as she walks she drags along her wrinkled slippers. Her little plump elderly face, from the middle of which protrudes a nose like a parrot’s beak; her little fat dimpled hands, her whole person, rounded like a church-rat, the waist of her gown, too tight for its contents, which flaps over it, are all in harmony with this room, where misfortune seems to ooze, where speculation lurks in corners, and of which Madame Vauguen inhales the warm, fetid air without being nauseated.”

Among the seven residents of this dreary, unfortunate place are an old man, Goriot, and a young student, Eugene de Rastignac. Goriot has lived there for years, “a kind of automaton, shabbily dressed,” who always has in his hand a “yellow, ivory knobbed cane.” Everyone laughed at him, but, beneath the laughter, was a doubt, a question, a mystery about who he was, and why he was sometimes visited by beautiful women much younger than himself.

Eugene is a recent arrival from the provinces, a distant relative of a countess, Madame de Beauseant, through whom he discovers that the women seen with Goriot are his two daughters, and that while he lives on not much more than forty francs per month, he had once been wealthy enough to have given each of them between four and five hundred thousand francs so they could “be happy and marry well.” Hearing this, Eugene thinks Goriot “sublime!” for the sacrifices he has made. The truth is more prosaic, more ‘real,’ and, from the point of view of character, disappointing. During the Revolution, when famine was imminent, Goriot bought immense quantities of flour and, when it became scarce and people were starving, sold it at ten times the price he paid for it. This was thought only shrewd business, until, after Napoleon was banished and the Bourbons came back, a flour merchant became, for his daughters and their rich and titled husbands, an embarrassment. He went into “voluntary exile,” and when “he saw that his daughters were happy, he realized he had done the right thing.”

The only explanation for this astonishing generosity and self-effacement is that, after his wife, with whom he had been very much in love, died “the instinct of fatherhood developed in Goriot to the point of madness.” And even that explanation may be too charitable. His daughters are married to men with the only things any woman in Paris cares about: money and position; he lives in the penniless monotony of a single darkened room. Eugene lives there as well, but only for the time being, until he gains the success he knows he deserves; the success, he is advised by Madame de Beauseant, that only a woman can help him achieve.

“If women think you clever and talented, the men will think the same,” she tells him. The women, however, are only interested in themselves, and the men are even worse. “You shall really find out how corrupt the women are here, and how desperately vain the men.” Eugene needs a woman who is young, rich, and fashionable. She has someone in mind: Madame de Nucingen, who happens to be Goriot’s daughter, Delphine. Madame de Beauseant has something Madame de Nucingen desperately desires. She “would lick the dirt all the way from the Rue Saint-Lazare to the Rue de Grenelle, to be allowed into my drawing room,” she explains. An introduction into this, the highest circle of Parisian society, will give Eugene everything he wants. “If you introduce her to me, you’ll be her little favorite, she’ll worship you. Love her afterward, if you can; if not, just make use of her.”

Eugene learns quickly. He sees the world as it is: law and morality powerless against wealth, and success the only criterion. He is determined to become “a clever lawyer and a man of fashion,” but decides to postpone his studies to have fifteen months to learn “how to manage women, and perhaps land a fortune.” To land a fortune, however, requires money. Another resident of the boarding house, Vautrin, who is actually an escaped convict, but one with access to the “enormous resources” of the “Ten Thousand Society,” an association of major thieves, will arrange a dowery for Eugene of a million francs, in other words a marriage with a rich woman, in exchange for a one-fifth commission. “Principles,” he tells Eugene, “don’t exist, only events. Laws don’t exist, only circumstances.” At the bottom of every great fortune there is always a crime.

With his looks, his youth, his apparent wealth, Eugene becomes suddenly irresistible. Goriot’s daughter, Delphine, falls madly in love with him; or, rather, falls in love with what she thinks everyone thinks about him: that he has the power to introduce whomever he likes into the only society everyone she knows would give anything to join.

“No one has been as willing to introduce me to this society,” she tells him. “I expect you’re thinking I’m petty and shallow and frivolous, like any other Parisian woman; but do remember that I’m willing to give you everything, and if I’m now more anxious than ever to be received in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it’s because you’re there.”

Delphine is getting ready to go to a ball, but her father, Goriot, is dying, and Eugene objects.

“But, madam, your father -”

“Please don’t try to teach me my duty to my father,” she interjects. “Not another word, Eugene.”

Eugene knows that, if necessary, she would march over her father’s body to go to the ball, but he has not “the boldness to find fault with her, nor the temerity to offend her, nor the strength to leave her.” And all because, to his surprise, he has fallen in love with her. “A love for which they were both long prepared, had increased by what normally kills love: its gratification. Now that he had possessed her, Eugene realized that before then he had only desired her; he had begun to love her only now that she was his.”

After he had dressed for the ball, she asks him how her father is. “Extremely ill,” he tells her. “If you wish to give me a proof of your love, we will hurry over to see him.”

“So we will,” she replies. “But after the ball.”

But she does not go to visit her father, nor does her sister. As Goriot lays dying, he understands finally that his daughters “both have hearts of stone,” and that they “are vile and criminal!”

At the burial, two carriages drive up. One of them bore the arms of Delphine’s husband, the other the arms of her sister’s husband. Both are empty. They follow the procession to the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. Eugene, alone, walks to the topmost part of the graveyard and looks down at Paris, gazing “almost avidly on the space between the columns of the Place Vendome and the cupola of Les Invalides. There lived the world into which he had wished to penetrate.”

We expect that, having seen the corruption and the vanity, the arrogance and the ingratitude, of the Parisians he had come to know so well, Eugene will now realize what a mistake it had been to have wanted to be a part of it. But Honoré de Balzac was not interested in telling stories that teach a lesson; he had something more difficult in mind: to describe in all its glorious imperfections the world he saw all around him and then created in his own marvelously powerful mind. Eugene does not turn his back on Paris, he is determined to conquer it.

“Now I’m ready for you!” he cries. As the “first move in the challenge he was flinging at society, he went back to dine with Madame de Nucingen.”

Père Goriot may seem an absurdity, a l9th century melodrama in which a young man without means sets out to conquer the world, and an old man who learns only too late that all his sacrifices, instead of earning the love of his daughters, has earned only their contempt. But then what was it that held our attention; what made us, with each page we turned, want to keep reading? If it was not the story, what was it? Henry James has the answer, an answer that, once we hear it, makes us think we knew it all along: It isn’t the story that held us, it was the story teller. The greatest thing in Balzac is Balzac himself.

“The real, for his imagination, had an authority that it has never had for any other. He is one of the finest of artists and one of the coarsest.”

In what only seems on the surface a contradiction, James can write of him that, “He was a very bad writer, and yet unquestionably he was a very great writer.” Why was he great? “He believed he was almost as creative as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history were swept away the ‘Comedie Humaine’ would be a perfectly adequate substitute for them.” It is a judgment even less subject to doubt now than when it was written a hundred fifty years ago.

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.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph G. Peterson

Joseph G. Peterson is the author of several works of fiction and poetry. He grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, and his MA. from Roosevelt University. The Des Plaines River and the forest preserves surrounding it winds through the town of Wheeling, and through the imaginary territory of many of his books. He currently lives with his family in the Chicago neighborhood, Hyde Park, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

Peterson's new novel is The Perturbation of O.

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

I read fiction, poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. The following are my most recent obsessions.

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is the book that I'm recommending that everyone read. It tells the story of his father's imprisonment in a Japanese labor camp where his father was subjected to slave labor. It was a notorious labor camp where prisoners were expected to die. Flanagan's father didn't have long to live when a fellow prisoner of Flanagan's father noticed a white flash of light on the horizon at mid-morning. That flash of light would lead to the release of Flanagan's father from the slave camp, and his survival which led ultimately to the birth of Richard Flanagan. The flash of light on the horizon was the bomb going off over Hiroshima. Question 7 is structured in some ways like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 as the parallelism of the titles suggests, and it grapples with several important moral questions chief among them these two questions: 1) While Flanagan's father survived and Flanagan was therefore born, there were thousands upon thousands of innocent victims of the atomic bomb blast who did not survive, nor were their potential children or their children. What burden does this place on survivors like Richard Flanagan. 2) If a story written by HG Wells can inspire a scientist to imagine and then realize how to achieve an atomic chain reaction, then what burden does this place on HG Wells and the scientist when those imaginings are turned into the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima?

Lately, I've been reading War and The Iliad and primarily I am re-reading Simone Weil's 'The Iliad or the Poem of Force' which the editors of the volume rightly describe as Weil's "inspired" reading of the Iliad. It's hard to imagine a more primary and profound reading of the Iliad than Weil's. Indeed, one can almost read it as an essential translation of the poem. Weil's conception of the subjugating power of force to convert that person upon whom force is released into "an object" and the corrupting power of force to convert that person deploying the force into "an object" and the conjoining of the two persons as "victims of force" leads her to think clearly about the nature of war, of hubris, of the in-human condition of human bondage, and into the meaning of karma. As Weil states in her essay, the Biblical injunction, "He who uses the sword shall perish of the sword" was greatly preceded by the lesson of force provided by the Iliad. Weil's essay exposes the fundamental truth of the Iliad, which in turn exposes a fundamental truth about the use of force, which in turn exposes the primary power of art to deliver powerful concepts of truth about the conditions of life that we are subject to.

Reading War and The Iliad reminds me of another remarkable translation of the Iliad called War Music by Christopher Logue. This sparse, almost Spartan, rendition of the poem written in the contemporary idiom of modern warfare brings the insights of the Iliad to bear on our contemporary condition of war just as beautiful as this rendition of the Iliad in the contemporary idiom of our era of war brings insight to bear on Homer's Iliad.

Finally, but most happily, I have been reading Edward L. Shaughnessey's translation of The Classic of Poetry which collects the oldest written and rhymed poetry in the world. The poems are so ancient that the reader needs some assimilation into the poetry, but the introduction by Shaughnessey who in addition to being the translator is the premier scholar of the poetry helps to place the poetry into context. Once the reader does assimilate to these poems which are called "aires" it's easy to see the song-like structure of the poems and to feel the remarkable beauty of the poetry, which accounts for why they have been read continuously since they were first collected.

Visit Joseph G. Peterson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beautiful Piece.

--Marshal Zeringue