James Benn

James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II series, historical mysteries set within the Allied High Command during the Second World War. The series began with Billy Boyle, which takes place in England and Norway in 1942.

Benn's new novel, A Bitter Wind, is the twentieth installment of the Billy Boyle series.

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

Re-reading, actually. More than three decades ago I read Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There by Philip P. Hallie. It tells the true story of a French village during the Second World War, and how the residents came together to save thousands of Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. I never forgot that story and have recommended the book many times. But it was only recently that I decided to look into Le Chambon as a setting for a future Billy Boyle WWII mystery novel, so a re-read is in order. I’m excited about this possibility and hope I can do it justice.

The basic facts are that in one small French town in Nazi-occupied France, some 4,000 Jews were taken in and sheltered by a group of Huguenot Christians, who understood from their own history the threat of persecution. From 1940 until Liberation in 1944, the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon joined in what can be called a conspiracy of goodness. Risking all, the village literally doubled itself, giving sanctuary to some three or four thousand people who were escaping from the Vichy authorities and the Nazi regime. They organized themselves to forge identification and ration cards and to help refugees escape into neutral Switzerland.

The author, a professor of philosophy, was a decorated Army veteran of WWII. After years of research into the Holocaust and the roots of human and institutional cruelty, he had been overcome with a deep personal despair that seemed to exclude the possibility that goodness and right could still exist.

At the height of his depression, Hallie stumbled across the miracle of Le Chambon. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is a deep and moving exploration of the renewal of spirit and optimism that Hallie found in the bravery of this small village of French Hugenots who had the courage and moral certainty to face evil and to resist it.

Learn more about the Billy Boyle WWII Mystery Series at James R. Benn's website.

The Page 99 Test: The First Wave.

The Page 69 Test: Evil for Evil.

The Page 69 Test: Rag and Bone.

My Book, The Movie: Death's Door.

The Page 69 Test: The White Ghost.

The Page 69 Test: Blue Madonna.

Writers Read: James R. Benn (September 2016).

Q&A with James R. Benn.

The Page 69 Test: Proud Sorrows.

The Page 69 Test: The Phantom Patrol.

Writers Read: James R. Benn (September 2024).

The Page 69 Test: A Bitter Wind.

--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 Leo Strauss's The City And Man:

The question that used to be put with monotonous regularity to authors was: what book would you choose to have with you if you were marooned on a desert island. One author, a well- known woman who was not immodest about her own literary achievements, insisted that instead of something someone else had written, she would choose to have a paper and pen and write for herself what she would then get to read. With far greater cause for modesty, but with perhaps a better understanding of what life on a desert island really meant, I replied when asked: “Any book with the title: How to Build a Boat.”

This was not fair of me. I should have have taken that question more seriously, imagined that I was never going to get off the island, and that the only book I had to read would have to be one worth reading over and over again. It is a choice that requires more thought than might at first be expected. War and Peace, for example, may well be the greatest novel ever written, but how many times could you read it before the words began to lose all meaning. Plutarch’s Lives, the comparison of famous Greeks and Romans, would allow you to debate with yourself which was the greater: Cicero or Demosthenes, Caesar or Alcibiades, but that would be to devote your life to the outlines of what other people did or tried to do. And how you read it, what you gained from it, would depend on what you had read before.

This is the issue that goes unnoticed. Which one book would you wish to be your only companion depends on what you had you read before, how you had spent your life, or that part of it you had devoted to reading. Did you read to be entertained; reading, for example, mysteries in which the main attraction was the feeling of suspense as you were led through the search for the person or persons responsible for the crime that had been committed until, at the end, you discovered, and were surprised to discover, who the guilty party really was? But, having discovered that, would you really want to read it a second time, much less read it over and over again until your last, dying day? If, on the other hand, you had read to learn, read to study the serious things that attempt to discover what it means to be a human being; if you had studied with close attention the works of Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides; if, that is to say, you had spent years reading the great books that constitute the beginning, and the basis, of Western thought, read them so often that at the bare mention of a phrase in one of their classic works, you remembered, if not the exact words, the main thought expressed on the page, the book you would want, the book you would need, is a book few people have even heard of: The City And Man, written in l962 by Leo Strauss.

Two sentences, the first paragraph of the Introduction, tell you immediately that this is unlike anything you have ever read:

“It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.”

The first time I read The City And Man I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago where I had gone to study under Leo Strauss. At the beginning of my first year, enrolled in his seminar on Plato’s Gorgias, I told him I did not think I was getting everything from my reading that I thought I should. He looked at me, nodded and said he would have to think about it. And he did. The next week, in the middle of his commentary on some passage in the dialogue, he suddenly stopped, looked straight at me in the crowd of seventy or more students in a room that could comfortably seat half that number, and said: “So, you see, you have to read, not just what is written, but what isn’t written,” and then immediately went back to what he had been saying to the class.

Little though I knew it, that remark went to the heart of what Leo Strauss discovered about the way some of the greatest writers wrote. In Persecution And The Art of Writing, he explained that because people tend to remember mainly the beginning and the end of a speech or discourse, someone who wants to speak or write of important but dangerous things, might mention, that is to say hide, them somewhere in the forgettable middle. Is that the reason why Plato is in the middle of The City and Man? The first chapter is “On Aristotle’s Politics,’ the second is “On Plato’s Republic,” the third is “On Thucydides’ War Of The Peloponnesians And The Athenians.” Aristotle came after Plato. Did Leo Strauss put Plato in the middle to remind us that Plato is central to everything Strauss thought important about ancient thought?

Whatever the reason, Strauss begins with Aristotle, and Aristotle makes very clear how different the ancient understanding is from our own.

“For Aristotle, political philosophy is primarily and ultimately the quest for that political order which is best according to nature everywhere and, we may add, always.” For Aristotle, “the best life is the life devoted to understanding or contemplation as distinguished from the practical or political life.”

Plato and Aristotle both agree on this. There is a natural inequality among human beings, an inequality that pervades all of nature. There are beings of different rank, and each of us is made up of different, and unequal, parts. “In man the soul is by nature the ruler of the body and the mind is the ruling part of the soul. It is on the basis of this that thoughtful men are said to be the rulers of the thoughtless ones. It is obvious that an equalitarianism which appeals from the inequality regarding the mind to the equality regarding breathing and digestion does not meet the issue.” But this equality is precisely what modern democracy insists upon. For Plato and Aristotle, for ancient political philosophy altogether, the question was primarily and ultimately the political order that was best according to nature always and everywhere. The city - what today we would call, not the state or society, but the country - exists for the practice of virtue, primarily moral virtue; in other words, it exists for the sake of human excellence. And that, in turn, requires liberal education.

No one sees things this way anymore. Instead of democracy understood as the rule of the poor, who, because they lack leisure, meant rule of the uneducated, and therefore, Aristotle was certain, opposition to philosophy, modern democracy “presupposes a fundamental harmony between philosophy and the people, a harmony brought about by universal enlightenment, or by philosophy (science) relieving man’s estate through inventions and discoveries recognizable as salutary by all, or by both means.” The “natural harmony between the whole and the human mind” was replaced by Bacon and Hobbes, Machiavelli and Locke, with a new understanding in which human passion, especially the desire for life, decided what was important; human reason, in the form of modern science, became the means by which to accomplish what the passions required. One man might be more intelligent than another, but everyone was equal in their right to live. Preservation, not human excellence, became the dominant consideration.

Plato and Aristotle thought that because some were better educated and more capable than others to rule with an eye to the common good rather than to their own individual interests, aristocracy, the rule of the best, was far superior to a democracy in which everyone, every citizen, had an equal voice. Athens, after all, was a democracy, and Athens had put Socrates on trial and sentenced him to death because he did not believe what everyone in Athens was expected to believe. But Athens also fought a war with Sparta, a war that lasted twenty-seven years, a war that, among other things, raised the question whether a democracy that was also an empire could conduct a war, the greatest war there had ever been, to a successful conclusion. Thucydides, the Athenian who wrote the history of that war, a history meant to be a possession for all time, was able to write it because, like Plato and Aristotle, he understood that human nature, like nature altogether, never changes and, because of that, what happened in that war held a lesson for anyone who would take the time to read it with the care it deserved.

The central episode, the most important event, in the Peloponnesian war was the Sicilian expedition, the attempt to expand the Athenian empire beyond anything anyone had imagined. Pericles had warned that the one thing that could cost Athens the war was an attempt to increase the size of the empire before the war had ended, but Pericles had died. His nephew, Alcibiades, driven by dreams of glory, insisted that Athens had either to expand or risk losing what it had acquired. The Athenians loved Alcibiades, but feared he might become a tyrant. They insisted that the cautious and conservative Nicias, who had advised against the expedition, be in joint command. Before the expedition sailed, the Hermes statues, religious icons that were placed in front of most of Athens’ homes, were destroyed and Alcibiades was accused of having profaned the sacred mysteries. He was allowed to sail with the expedition, but was then called back to stand trial. Because trial meant certain death, Alcibiades went to Sparta where he thought to help defeat Athens, and then to Persia where he convinced the King to play Athens and Sparta off against each other. Convincing the Athenians that he could get the Persian King to take their side, they called him back to Athens where he gave them what Thucydides thought the best government they had ever had.

The Sicilian expedition ended in disaster. The Athenian fleet was destroyed and nearly all the Athenian soldiers were killed. Pericles’ warning proved tragically correct. The attempt to expand the empire had ended in catastrophe. Pericles was a better, a more far-sighted, statesman than the brash adventurer Alcibiades could ever have been. Or was he? Thomas Hobbes, who translated Thucydides’ history called him “the most politic historiographer that ever writ.” Hobbes explained that “the narrative doth secretly instruct the reader.” And as to what that means, he refers to an ancient author of a Roman history: “Marcellinus saith, he was obscure on purpose; that the common people might not understand him. And not unlikely; for a wise man should not write (though in words understood by all men) but wise men only should be able to commend him.”

Leo Strauss, one of those wise men able to commend, that is, able to grasp the real intention of what Thucydides wrote, could see beneath the surface of things. Pericles had warned that the only way Athens could lose the war was if Athens attempted to expand its empire. But, as Strauss, who had once instructed a young graduate student that it is important to read not only what is written, but what is not written, remarks: “Thucydides never says that Pericles’s views were always sound.” Thucydides, read with care, leaves no doubt that, had Alcibiades been left in charge, the Sicilian expedition would have been victorious.

The City And Man, read with care, reveals how the world was once understood, and how the world can be understood again. Removing the barriers created by the modern attempt to impose an artificial manmade order on the world, the attempt to conquer nature by modern science, we can begin to grasp what Leo Strauss meant when he wrote that man is the “microcosm” of the world and that “there is a natural harmony between the whole and the human mind.” Philosophy, as understood by Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, is not the acquisition, but the quest, for wisdom, a search that never ends, but a search that with each reading of The City And Man seems to get just a little bit closer to the always elusive truth.

Leo Strauss taught me how to read, but he also taught me how to write. Perhaps more importantly, he gave me something to write about. I wrote about him, or rather, what he might have been like if, instead of being born in Germany where he studied philosophy mathematics and natural science before leaving that country in 1932, he had been born in the United States, and become a judge, a judge who had studied classics in school. Leopold Rifkin is one of the central characters in The Defense. There is a scene, early in the novel, in which Rifkin engages in a brief dialogue with Joseph Antonelli, the defense attorney. Rifkin gets Antonelli to agree to the utterly improbable conclusion that if he knows one of his clients is guilty, the best thing he can do for him is make sure he is convicted so he can receive the correction he needs. Far from original, the dialogue follows closely part of a dialogue in Plato’s Gorgias. It is a permissible form of plagiarism, especially when the author had the great good fortune to have known, and studied under, the wise and generous Leo Strauss.

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; Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised.

--Marshal Zeringue

Francesca Catlow

Francesca Catlow writes bestselling fiction filled with passionate love stories that feature flawed, and sometimes broken, characters as they face a crossroads in their life. She often explores heartbreaking themes while also whisking readers off to beautiful locations.

Catlow loves to travel. Born and raised in the heart of Suffolk, England, she has travelled extensively in Europe with her French husband and, more recently, their two children. In 2024 she relocated to France where she spends her days dreaming up stories and her evenings sitting in her garden relaxing with her family.

In 2023 Catlow was a finalist for the prestigious Kindle Storyteller Award, and was nominated for an Innovation Award for her work with libraries in Suffolk.

Her new novel is Under a Greek Sky.

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

Currently I’m reading In Another Life by Imogen Clark. This book was chosen by me to be in September’s book box for Gaia’s Library. In Another Life is a fabulous book to launch the project as it's packed with family struggles and tons of mystery to keep everyone hooked. I want to celebrate female authors in women's fiction and romance and so created Gaia's Library. Each month subscribers are sent a box of goodies that compliment that month's book and I interview the author in a podcast at the end of the month with readers’ questions! I'm a big advocate for women's stories and I'd highly recommend picking up any of Imogen's books.

Visit Francesca Catlow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sonora Reyes

Born and raised in Arizona, Sonora Reyes is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School, The Luis Ortega Survival Club, The Broposal, and The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar. They also have contributed short stories to the anthologies Transmogrify! and For the Rest of Us.

They write fiction celebrating queer and Mexican stories in a variety of genres, with current projects in both kidlit and adult categories.

Recently I asked the author about what they were reading. Reyes's reply:

I've gotten to read a few books from my favorite authors recently! I keep adding new authors to my list of auto-buys, and I'm not mad about it!

I adored Nav's Foolproof Guide to Falling in Love by Jessica Lewis. It was the perfect rom com to get me out of my head in a dark time. Sometimes I just want to forget about my own problems and scream about two fictional characters who couldn't be more clueless about their feelings for each other. I can't wait for the spinoff, Hallie's Rules for a Recovering Romantic, which comes out next year! I will read anything Jessica Lewis writes, from horror to rom coms, she hasn't let me down so far!

Another auto-buy author for me is Alechia Dow, and I had the privilege of reading her next release early to blurb it! Until the Clock Strikes Midnight was my favorite book I've read this year. With a bipolar fairy godmother and a broody misfortune who have to fight over the fate of a queer bookstore owner, I could not put it down. The entire time I was reading, I just kept thinking to myself, "this is the perfect book." It really healed something in my little bipolar heart to see a character with this illness portrayed with such tenderness.

Lastly, I also got to read an early copy of Aiden Thomas's next book, Cemetery Boys 2: Espíritu. If you haven't read Cemetery Boys yet, this is your chance before the sequel comes out! Aiden Thomas is one of my all time favorite authors. Every story has so much love and care weaved into each character, and this one was no exception. It was so nice returning to such beloved characters and seeing them grow even further. It's truly such a joy!

Visit Sonora Reyes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kitty Zeldis

Kitty Zeldis is the pseudonym for a novelist and non-fiction writer of books for adults and children. She is the author of Not Our Kind and The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.

Zeldis's new novel, One of Them, is "a story of secrets, friendship, and betrayal about two young women at Vassar in the years after World War II, a powerful and moving tale of prejudice and pride that echoes the cultural and social issues of today."

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

I’ve just finished with When Women Ruled Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow. It’s a portrait of three major department stores in New York City—Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor and Bendel’s—and the women responsible for their respective successes. The glory days of the American department store are, alas, over, but this book makes them live again. I enjoyed it so much that I’m about to start Nancy MacDonell’s Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City and the Birth of American Fashion. It looks like it will cover similar territory but from a slightly different angle. I’m very interested in fashion and since department stores and fashion are closely linked, both of these books are right up my (sartorial) alley.

Visit Kitty Zeldis's website

My Book, The Movie: Not Our Kind.

Writers Read: Kitty Zeldis (December 2018).

Coffee with a Canine: Kitty Zeldis & Dottie.

The Page 69 Test: Not Our Kind.

The Page 69 Test: The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights.

My Book, The Movie: One of Them.

Q&A with Kitty Zeldis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Bryant Klagmann

Jessica Bryant Klagmann grew up climbing mountains, paddling rivers, and scampering through the woods of New Hampshire. She studied writing there and in Fairbanks, Alaska, before falling in love with northern New Mexico. Klagmann is the author of the novel This Impossible Brightness, and when she isn’t writing, she can be found illustrating, trail running, or teaching her two kids the fine art of scampering.

Klagmann's new novel is North of the Sunlit River.

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

Right now, I’m reading Weyward by Emilia Hart and Dear Writer by Maggie Smith, and listening to Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. I’m branching out a little on the first two, because I don’t read a lot of historical fiction or fantasy, and I haven’t read a book of writing advice in a long time, but I’m enjoying both a lot so far. I’ve read Arctic Dreams before, but it’s such a gorgeous book, it felt like a good way to head into the launch of North of the Sunlit River, which takes place in the Arctic.

Over the past summer, I read truer to my reading tastes. I love naturalist nonfiction and so I picked up The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which was lovely and enlightening. And then, something that’s been inspiring me lately and that I’m trying to learn from as a writer, is more experimental speculative or magical realism work, so I read Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, and It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken. They all give you a sense that the speculative elements could be read as happening on a literal level or, perhaps, only in the characters’ minds, and I find it such an impressive feat when I writer can pull this off without a definitive answer.

Visit Jessica Bryant Klagmann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Colt

Peter Colt is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island with a BA in Political Science. Colt was a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq as an Army Civil Affairs officer. He is currently a police officer in Providence, Rhode Island. He is married to his long suffering wife with whom he is raising two sons.

He enjoys, kayaking and camping and tries to get on the local rivers and ponds as often as he reasonably can. Colt is also an avid cook, a hobby which manages to find its way into his novels. He is a proud member of both the Mystery Writers of America and The Pawtuxet Athletic Club.

He is the author of the Tommy Kelly mysteries, Cold Island (2025). He also wrote the Andy Roark series of books, The Off-Islander (2019) and Back Bay Blues (2020) and Death at Fort Devens (2022), The Ambassador (2023), The Judge (2024) and The Banker (2025). He has also published short stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

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

I just finished Mark Bowden's excellent Hue 1968. It is an excellent history of the Battle for Hue City during the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War. Bowden, a journalist, not a historian does a fantastic job of telling the history of what was one of, if not the bloodiest battle of the Vietnam War. The advantage that Bowden brings to the book is his having interviewed numerous people, Marines, soldiers, Vietcong, North Vietnamese Army soldiers, Vietnamese and American civilians who were all directly involved in the battle. In doing so he creates a very balanced and nuanced portrait of the battle. I have been reading books about the Vietnam war for the last thirty-five + years and this is among the finest of them. I would say that it ranks up there with Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy or Hell in a Very Small Place. It is a must for anyone interested in the Vietnam War or military history in general.

I am also reading Amor Towles Table for Two. Towles writes beautifully and this collection of short stories makes me wish that I had his talent. From the first story, set in Soviet era Moscow, the reader is drawn into the very rich tapestry of Towles storytelling. I have been reading it but was seduced away by Bowden's excellent book about Hue.

I should also add that both books ended up with me because of two very different friendships. Hue 1968 was a gift from a good friend and mentor who served in Vietnam in 1968. Though not in that battle it offered insight into his experiences in Vietnam. Table for Two was recommended by an old and dear friend. She dated a good friend and one time roommate of mine in the late 1990's. One of the stories in the book reminded her very much, of us in that time and place. I love books but books with a personal connection, all the more so.

Visit Peter Colt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (June 2022).

My Book, The Movie: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Judge.

My Book, The Movie: The Judge.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (May 2024).

Writers Read: Peter Colt (March 2025).

My Book, The Movie: The Banker.

The Page 69 Test: The Banker.

The Page 69 Test: Cold Island.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ken Jaworowski

Ken Jaworowski is an editor at The New York Times. He graduated from Shippensburg University and the University of Pennsylvania. He grew up in Philadelphia, where he was an amateur boxer, and has had plays produced in New York and Europe. He lives in New Jersey with his family.

Jaworowski's new novel is What About the Bodies.

Reacently I asked the author about what he was reading. Jaworowski's reply:

I'm going to bend the rules here and tell you not what I've been reading, but what I've been rereading. Lately, I've been knee-deep in several projects, including preparing my new thriller, What About the Bodies, for its Sept. 2 publication. When I get this busy, I find myself revisiting old favorites rather than devoting myself to a new book that I won't be able to give my full attention to. So here are three that I've been picking up and paging through for a third or fourth (or more) time.

The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham

This is the book that changed my life. In the first few years after I'd gotten out of college, I did little but chase money and material success, and wonder why I was so miserable. Then I read this story of a soldier devastated by his experiences during World War I, and how he later struggles to find his place in an unforgiving world. Its messages moved me deeply.

Benediction by Kent Haruf

The quiet, ordinary people who populate Haruf's stories can make you grin or break your heart. The most affecting character in this novel is the dying Dad Lewis. Haruf doesn't pander to the reader by sugarcoating his situations, and here we find Dad Lewis looking back on a life of regrets, most notably that of his relationship with his son, who he pushed away and now longs to see.

Clockers by Richard Price

A masterpiece of crime fiction, Clockers follows Strike, a drug dealer, and Rocco, a detective, whose lives intertwine in the tough, fictional town of Dempsy, New Jersey. Price writes some of the sharpest dialogue in any genre, and his characters are multifaceted and entirely human. The novel, first published in 1992, remains both clear-eyed and compassionate, and full of the dark energy that pulses through a city’s streets.

Visit Ken Jaworowski's website.

Q&A with Ken Jaworowski.

The Page 69 Test: What About the Bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

David McGlynn

David McGlynn's books include the memoirs One Day You'll Thank Me and A Door in the Ocean, and the story collection The End of the Straight and Narrow. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The American Scholar. He teaches at Lawrence University and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

McGlynn's debut novel is Everything We Could Do.

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

Everything We Could Do is set in a hospital -- specifically within a small, locked unit inside the hospital. In the neonatal intensive care unit, the premature infants spend weeks and months on end inside climate and temperature controlled incubators, technically called Isolettes. The story's setting is a kind of Russian doll: tiny humans inside of pods inside of pods inside of pods. The people in the story, accordingly, struggle with isolation but also form deep, deep bonds with their other pod mates. A close friend, who teaches Russian literature, quipped that the story is like "Tolstoy in space."

In the course of writing Everything We Could Do, I spent a lot of time diving into books about hospitals as well as stories set in remote places. I grew sort of addicted to them, and several of those books I've read multiple times, cover to cover. The best example is Michael Ruhlman's Walk on Water: The Miracle of Saving Children's Lives. Walk on Water is a nonfiction book written more than 20 years ago, that's set in a pediatric heart surgery center in Cleveland. The doctor at the center of the story is among the most proficient and accomplished surgeons in the world at repairing congenital heart defects in newborn and very small children. But the book is about the surgical center, not just one guy. The stories Ruhlman tell are incredibly harrowing -- with as much drama unfolding in the OR as the best action movies -- and yet the book is tender, precise, and technical. It was the book that got me excited about writing a hospital novel, and whenever I pick it up, I lose several hours reading around in it.

A few weeks ago, I spent two extremely pleasurable weeks reading Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's new novel, Elita. I've read Lunstrum for years, since her first book came out, but this book shines above the rest. It's set on a small island in Puget Sound in the 1950s, where a feral child -- a young woman -- is found naked in the woods near a state prison. She can't speak, so she can't say how she got there or how she managed to survive, and it falls to an academic psychologist, Bernadette, to try to solve the mystery. The women who populate the novel are often up against the destructive whims and demands of men, and so must fight to be believed and taken seriously even while fighting for a helpless child. The writing is moody and lyrical and so beautiful. I'm also extremely proud that Elita and Everything We Could Do share a press (TriQuarterly Books). Elita, especially, is evidence that some of the best books lurk among the smaller houses. The diamonds are in the remote corners.

Finally, I am currently reading Michael Deagler's novel, Early Sobrieties. It's a debut book, a first novel, and it also won the PEN / Hemingway Award. The narrator and main character is a young guy who is recently sober. The world seems intent on trying to get him to drink again and to haul him back into darkness, even while he's clawing his way toward goodness and light. But this tension is hilarious. Deagler takes off on hipsters, gentrification, cheesesteaks (Early Sobrieties is set in Philadelphia), and so many more topics. The pieces tumble around and lock together in a way I find so joyful and true and satisfying.

Visit David McGlynn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Barber

Kathleen Barber is the author of Truth Be Told (2017, originally published as Are You Sleeping), which was adapted into a series on AppleTV+ by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine media company, and Follow Me (2020). A graduate of the University of Illinois and Northwestern University School of Law, she now lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and children.

Barber's new novel is Both Things Are True.

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

One of the upsides of being an author is getting to read new books before they're released! I just finished reading an early copy of Lyn Liao Butler's The Deadly Book Club, which is about the murder of a high-profile bookstagrammer and the other bookstagrammers-slash-frenemies who are all suspects. It's dishy and a lot of fun!

I also just started an early copy of Michelle Maryk's debut, The Found Object Society, which is delightfully creepy and hooked me from the very first page.

I read across genres, although my favorite genres are suspense and romantic comedy — probably not a huge surprise, as those are the genres I write! The Deadly Book Club and The Found Object Society are on the suspense end of the spectrum, and on the romance side, I just finished Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan. I love her books, and this one (about a screenwriter who starts a romance with the celebrity cast in her movie) was just so fun.

It also set me off on a normal people-celebrity romance book kick: I'm in the middle of Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman (about a journalist reconnecting with a celebrity she interviewed years ago) and have Square Waves by Alexandra Romanoff (a companion novel to Big Fan, which is about political strategist who starts a romance with a former boy band member) high on my TBR.

Visit Kathleen Barber's website.

The Page 69 Test: Follow Me.

Writers Read: Kathleen Barber (March 2020).

12 Yoga Questions with Kathleen Barber.

The Page 69 Test: Both Things Are True.

My Book, The Movie: Both Things Are True.

Q&A with Kathleen Barber.

--Marshal Zeringue