Kelsey Day

Kelsey Day is a young adult author and queer Appalachian poet. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Orion Magazine, Freeman’s and more.

The Spiral Key is their first novel for young readers.

I recently asked Day about what they were reading. Their reply:

Right now I’m midway through a book called I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane. It’s a literary speculative novel in which wrongdoers are marked for their crimes with extra shadows. Every character’s interaction(s) with the “justice” system physically marksthem with a new shadow, and each shadow further ostracizes them from the privileged class.

The book is about surveillance and the justice system, but even more it’s about grief and motherhood. The narrator’s wife died in childbirth, and their kid was born with two shadows. The reader follows the narrator through spirals of grief and rage, with the tense hum of dystopia in the background.

I love books like this, that place us in a speculative environment while focusing on the ordinary ache of human life. There’s a YA book called The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness that does something similar. It’s set in a world full of supernatural disasters and “chosen ones” who valiantly fight off the threats—but those heroic stories operate in the background of the story. The main characters of the book are ordinary teenagers who live in the heroes’ wake.

This style of dystopia writing is super inspiring to my own work. My debut novel, The Spiral Key, is about a teenage girl getting locked into a virtual reality that’s controlled by her ex-best friend—and though it’s a techno-thriller about the dangers of VR and AI, it’s also ultimately focused on the relationship between these two girls.

Visit Kelsey Day's website.

Q&A with Kelsey Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

Isabel Booth

Isabel Booth is the pen name of Karen Jewell, a former trial attorney and now a writer. She holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master’s in Business Administration, and a Juris Doctorate degree. When she’s not writing she loves to read, travel, and cook dinner for friends. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband.

Booth's new novel is Then He Was Gone.

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

I belong to two neighborhood book clubs. Both meet this week and I’ve been reading like mad the past few days to be prepared. When you see the first selection, you’ll understand why.

All the Colors of the Dark, by Chris Whitaker

595 pages! I found it engrossing to the end. This is a missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, and a love story. Set in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, the novel centers around Joseph “Patch” Macauley and his friend Saint. Thirteen-year-old Patch, born with one eye and fancying himself a pirate, saves a girl from being kidnapped and he is taken instead. This sets off a complex, decades-long story of trauma and obsession, loss, hope, lasting friendships, and love. The ending is a treasure because it has twists and turns that I didn’t see coming but don’t feel contrived.

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp is 72 when this novel begins, outspoken, intelligent, and set in her ways. She is a retired attorney, divorced and living alone, and has recently discovered that she is going blind. The story of her life is told through letters and emails she sends to, and the replies she receives from, family, friends, former colleagues, and literary icons. The correspondence explores themes of loss and regret, estrangement and forgiveness, and a lifetime of grief and guilt over the death of one of her sons at the age of eight. Those are always powerful themes, but what really made the novel work for me was its look at the possibility of change late in life, and the exchanges that reveal her prickly character that are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

Visit Isabel Booth's website.

My Book, The Movie: Then He Was Gone.

Q&A with Isabel Booth.

The Page 69 Test: Then He Was Gone.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danielle Girard

Danielle Girard is the USA Today and Amazon #1 bestselling author of sixteen novels, including the Annabelle Schwartzman Series, Chasing Darkness, and The Rookie Club series. Her books have won the Barry Award, the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, and White Out was in the top 100 bestselling e-books of 2020. In addition, two of her titles have been optioned for screen.

Girard's new novel is Pinky Swear.

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

My Friends by Fredrik Backman.

I’m in awe with the way Backman portrays friendship and emotion with such remarkable tenderness and authenticity. His characters reveal love, loyalty, guilt, and forgiveness through subtle gestures and shared silences. Backman captures the fragility of human connection, showing how friendships endure through vulnerability, miscommunication, and unwavering compassion. When I’m working on my own books, I like to read Backman and remind myself how much power there is in what isn’t said and how much depth can be accomplished with such economy.

Visit Danielle Girard's website.

Writers Read: Danielle Girard (August 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Expose.

The Page 69 Test: Expose.

The Page 69 Test: White Out.

Q&A with Danielle Girard.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen E. Olson

Karen E. Olson, author of An Inconvenient Wife, is the winner of the Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award and a Shamus Award finalist. She is the author of the Annie Seymour mysteries, the Tattoo Shop mysteries, and the Black Hat thrillers. Olson was a longtime editor, both in newspapers and at Yale. She lives in North Haven, Connecticut.

Olson's new novel is A Defiant Woman.

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

The Tudors are clearly top my non-fiction subjects—and while my new novels are re- tellings, I like to loosely base my plots on actual Tudor history. It was for this reason that I recently picked up Nicola Tallis’s Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey. Tallis’s easy narrative is more novel-like than a dry biography of the young woman who was officially queen for nine days after Edward VI died, casting aside his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession in favor of his cousin—who did have a direct line to the throne as her grandmother was Henry VIII’s youngest sister Mary. Jane, who was a scholar and a linguist rivaling her cousin Elizabeth, was first a reluctant bride when her father conspired with the Duke of Northumberland to marry her to his son—and then was a reluctant queen in the plot that would put both her and her husband on the throne. But no matter how reluctant she was, Jane did attempt to rise to the occasion only to be struck down by her much more powerful and popular cousin Mary Tudor. Tallis’s recounting of Jane’s upbringing through to her fate on the block is a worthy read for anyone interested in the Tudors.

As for fiction, I balanced out my Tudor obsession with a remarkable crime novel called The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer. I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this book, as I stumbled across it and thought it might be interesting. Who knew there was an illegal egg trade in the UK? Two braided timelines, one set in the 1920s and one today, tell the story of the mysterious and rare Metland egg, coveted by collectors—enough so that murder is not a step too far to obtain it. The author’s note at the end of the book is just as fascinating as her fictional story, because she explains that it is based on a real one. Two months after finishing this book, I find myself still thinking about it and the incredibly well drawn characters who inhabit it.

Visit Karen E. Olson's website.

The Page 69 Test: An Inconvenient Wife.

Q&A with Karen E. Olson.

The Page 69 Test: A Defiant Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marina Evans

Marina Evans is a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader who graduated from Southern Methodist University with degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing. During her time with the Cowboys, she cheered under her maiden name/nickname, Rena Morelli. She lives in Arizona now but thinks about her days in short-shorts often.

Death of a Cheerleader (UK title) and The Cheerleader (U.S. title) is her debut thriller.

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

I’m so happy to answer this question; I love talking up other authors!

First on my list is Saltwater by Katy Hays. I’m half-Italian and love everything Italian, so when I read the book blurb I was sold. It’s a sultry, seductive mystery set on the cliffs of Capri involving three key things: a valuable necklace that’s been passed down for generations, dishy family drama, and a decades’ old crime. Think Succession on a stunning Mediterranean island!

Next on my TBR list is The Burning Library by Gilly Macmillan. I adore all of Macmillan’s books; she has a distinctively sinister writing style. In this story set on Scotland’s frigid Western Isles, a body of woman is discovered on the shore. From there, the cast of characters get tangled in a complicated web that quickly spins out of control. There’s a deadly rivalry. A chilling secret. And only one woman who can decipher the truth. A brilliant premise!

Visit Marina Evans's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cheerleader.

Q&A with Marina Evans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ahmad Saber

Ahmad Saber is a young adult author who grew up on an all-girls college campus next to a massive fort in Pakistan. He now lives in Canada, and loves Broadway (favorite show = Phantom), travel (favorite place = 4-way tie between NYC, Seoul, Paris, and Melbourne), and Taylor Swift (favorite album = folklore) He's also a self-professed Chocolate Chip Cookie Connoisseur and has crowned New York's Culture Espresso’s as the best in the world.

Ramin Abbas has MAJOR Questions is his debut novel and is based in part on his own lived experience, exploring the inherent challenges of being queer and Muslim, and the struggle to reconcile faith with sexuality.

Saber is also a medical doctor specializing in rheumatology.

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

I must admit I am a relatively new reader, and I know this is not typical for many writers. After all, we know that in order to be a writer, you have to be a reader first. However growing up, I never had the chance to explore the reader within me, so now I have a huge backlog of classics to catch up on! I am overjoyed to have discovered the world of books (and not so overjoyed that I’m a “slow” reader.)

Nevertheless, as I gradually form my reading tastes, I already know I like YA literature (Hello, John Green!) and horror (hello, Stephen King!) the best, so I will give examples from each for my recent/current reads.

For YA, I recently read Emiko Jean’s Tokyo Ever After and as a lover of all things Japan, I loved this book. It hit the spot between a feel-good coming-of-age with romance, and a fun exploration of Japanese culture from an “outsider’s” point of view.

I also read Crystal Maldonado’s The Fall of Whit Rivera and had simply picked it up for wanting fall vibes in book form. I really enjoyed the sweet romance in the book, and Whit’s battle with self-acceptance including her polycystic ovary syndrome. And then there’s Crystal’s beautiful writing, which I’ve been a fan of since Fat Chance, Charlie Vega.

Lastly, I just knocked off a classic on my YA TBR: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. And my gosh, what a read! Definitely pulled on all the heart strings, and I felt this was the YA equivalent of Call Me By Your Name. I could clearly see why the book is such a powerhouse in queer literature.

For horror, I’m about 30 to 40% of the way into Ascension by Nicholas Binge, and truly creeped out. The book is about a tall mountain that has appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and no one knows why. Throw in people developing schizophrenia-like syndromes by climbing it, and discovering RNA-based life forms, and you’re in for a thrilling read! I’m thoroughly enjoying it and can’t wait to finish reading it.

And that is just a snapshot from my TBR!

And if I can add a book to your TBR–not only because I’m the author and thus very biased–but because I truly believe this is a fun book that’ll also leave you thinking: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

Visit Ahmad Saber's website.

The Page 69 Test: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

My Book, The Movie: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sherry Rankin

Sherry Rankin grew up in New Jersey where she became an early and avid reader of mystery fiction. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and currently lives in Abilene, Texas where she has taught writing and literature at a local university for twenty years.

Her novel, Strange Fire, was shortlisted for the 2017 Daniel Goldsmith First Novel Prize and won the 2017 CWA Debut Dagger Award.

Her debut thriller, The Killing Plains, was published by Thomas & Mercer as a super lead title in February 2025.

Rankin's new novel is The Dark Below.

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

I tend to read less for information than for the emotions books evoke—which makes me a devoted re-reader. For every new book I read, I probably reread ten.

I’ve just finished rereading Jane Harper’s The Lost Man. I’m always struck by her ability to make landscape feel like a living presence, as well as by her spare, clean, understated style and her seamless weaving of past and present.

At the moment, I’m also rereading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It feels like returning to an old friend—comfortable and comforting, but intellectually and morally challenging, as well. It helps keep me grounded.

Visit Sherry Rankin's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Killing Plains.

The Page 69 Test: The Killing Plains.

Q&A with Sherry Rankin.

My Book, The Movie: The Dark Below.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Below.

--Marshal Zeringue

Verlin Darrow

Verlin Darrow is a psychotherapist who lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near the Monterey Bay in northern California. They diagnose each other as necessary. Darrow is a former professional volleyball player (in Italy), unsuccessful country-western singer/songwriter, import store owner, and assistant guru in a small, benign spiritual organization.

His new novel is The Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow.

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

At the moment, I’m oscillating between several genres. (Can you oscillate between more than two things? I’m too lazy to look this up). I like humor mixed into what I read, so I seek out comic crime, quirky science fiction, and offbeat mystery novels. (I did manage to look up synonyms for humor).

Here are the three I’m currently (and concurrently) reading:

Fortunate Son by Caimh McDonell

This is the ninth and latest book in The Dublin Trilogy (Go figure.) I’m not a laugh out loud kind of guy, but in this case…. All the books in the series feature Bunny McGarry, an Irish policeman with a distinctly alternative perspective from any cop you’ve ever read about. The plots are wonderfully convoluted—more like mysteries than most crime novels. I can’t recommend this author more highly.

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

I wasn’t familiar with this author until I streamed a TV series by the same title. The inner monologue of the sentient, cynical, misanthropic android is consistently amusing, and other elements are wonderfully imaginative. I can’t say this author is a paradigm of great writing, but it doesn’t matter to me. Inspired by this book, I actually started writing a novel featuring a sentient android, but it didn’t have legs (the book, I mean, not the android), so now it’s just forty dormant pages.

The Fugitive Pigeon by Donald E. Westlake

Westlake is my favorite author—in all his incarnations and pseudonyms. Nobody can do either comic crime or hard-boiled caper novels with quite the same consistent level of professionalism. And his screenplays—such as Grifters—have won awards. That said, I’m rereading this older novel and may stop. I really want to like it, but I guess it’s not possible for an author’s vision to always match up to what suits me.

Visit Verlin Darrow's website.

Writers Read: Verlin Darrow (May 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Murder for Liar.

The Page 69 Test: Murder for Liar.

The Page 69 Test: The Not Quite Enlightened Sleuth.

Writers Read: Verlin Darrow (April 2024).

My Book, The Movie: The Not Quite Enlightened Sleuth.

My Book, The Movie: The Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow.

Q&A with Verlin Darrow.

--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 Otto Friedrich’s Before The Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s:

Otto Friedrich distinguishes himself from the typical historians who specialize, compartmentalize and would “mistrust any journalistic attempt to include movie stars and generals and bankers and poets in the same chronicle.” The story he wants to tell, “the story of Berlin in the 1920s permits no other approach.” What Friedrich calls his “journalistic attempt,” however, is precisely what a truly great historian tries to achieve. And that is what Otto Friedrich really was, a great historian, perhaps the greatest American writer of European history in the twentieth century. Like Jacob Burckhardt in his classic The Civilization of the Renaissance In Italy, Friedrich gives more than a chronology of interesting events and biographies of important people; he paints a portrait of a place and time, a work of art that, in a way nothing else can, shows what it was like to live in Berlin, a city that before we have read the first page we know is doomed to destruction, and something more than that in the memory of those who remember what the Third Reich did to the world.

Otto Friedrich was not a professional historian, but he majored in history at Harvard, where his father, Carl Friedrich taught government, and became one of the best read men of his generation, a generation that still took reading seriously. In one of his other works, City of Nets, which tells the story of Hollywood in the 1940s, he read five hundred books before he started to write; he read more than three hundred in preparation for Before The Deluge. This gave him the kind of familiarity with things - the different colors, and the different shades of colors - with which to paint the most vivid picture of Berlin in the 1920s we will ever have. It begins with the Russians.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian contingent in Berlin grew to perhaps as many as 50,000. “Russian restaurants and cabarets…opened everywhere.” Karl Radek, Lenin’s personal envoy to Berlin, “sometimes exchanged barbed remarks with the former grand dukes who waited on tables.” A young playwright, Carl Zuckmayer, happened to be in one of the Russian restaurants one evening when the great Russian ballerina, Pavlova, entered. All the talking stopped. Everyone stared in silence. Pavlova, who knew what she was about, acknowledged what they wanted and danced for five minutes, “floated above that narrow space like a phantom, then with a deep bow of her whole body sank to the stone floor. The cheers that burst out seemed on the point of shattering the vaulted ceiling, but she silenced them with another gesture of her lovely arms, then returned to the small sofa and her companions. Thereafter no one looked in her direction.”

The Russians, unfortunately, brought more than the marvelous dancing of Pavlova. They brought their politics, which meant their ideas, and their violent disagreements, about revolution. Rosa Luxemburg attacked Karl Radek for the Bolshevik’s use of terror. “Radek had the standard answer - Lenin applied terror, he said, only against ‘classes whom history has sentenced to death.’” Vladimir Nabokov’s father, a former member of the Russian parliament and the editor of the leading Russian daily newspaper in Berlin, opposed any compromise with Lenin and was shot and killed when he threw himself in front of an assassin’s bullet meant for Peter Miliukov with whom he was having a public debate on this very question. Even more troubling than the terror that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were willing to use against classes history had sentenced to death was what some Russians thought should happen to a race that, in their judgement, had no right to live. Fyodor Vinberg, a former Czarist officer, founded a newspaper in Berlin in which “He argued, quite emphatically, that all Jews should be killed.” He brought to Germany the first copies “of a provocative Russian work called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraud concocted in 1895, apparently by the Czarist secret police,’ alleging that a Jewish conspiracy existed to take over the world. A new edition sold 100,000 copies in Germany.

It would have been easy to dismiss this as the ravings of a lunatic fringe. Jews were proud to be German and no one was more patriotic. One of every six Jews, including women and children, had served in the German armed forces in World War I. One hundred thousand had entered the army; 35,000 were decorated for bravery. Twelve thousand had been killed. After the war, Walter Rathenau became“one of the most nationalistic of Germany’s foreign ministers.” Rathenau was also anti-Semitic. “I am a German of Jewish descent,” he explained. “My people is the German people, my fatherland is Germany, my religion is that German faith which is above all religions.” The Jewish refugees that had arrived from Eastern Europe were to him “an alien organism,” a problem that should be dealt with, not by making them “imitation Germans, but Jews bred and educated as Germans.”

When Rathenau, who was enormously popular, was murdered, a million people marched in protest. At the trial of those who had conspired to kill him, one of the defendants testified that he had been told that Rathenau belonged to a Bolshevist movement that was attempting to bring the world under the rule of the Jews. Some years later, on the eve of the Nazi take over, one of the conspirators hit Goebbels on the side of the face and shouted: “It wasn’t for swine like you that we shot Rathenau.” This did not stop the Nazis using his death for their own purposes, declaring that the murder of Rathenau was all in the “spirit of the SS.”

More than anything, what happened in Berlin in the l920s was because of the insistence of the victorious allies that Germany pay for the war. The reparation issue, which Winston Churchill called “A sad story of complicated idiocy,” produced increasing inflation as the government printed money to pay its debt. The German mark fell from 4.2 to the dollar in l918 to thousands, then millions, then billions to the dollar, falling so far and so fast that Bruno Walter, the conductor of the Berlin philharmonic, would take a break during rehearsal so the orchestra’s musicians could use their paychecks to buy what they could before prices were higher an hour, or even a few minutes, later. By the middle of the 1920s, “the whole of Germany had become delirious.” The savings of the middle and the working class were wiped out. All values changed; everyone did what they had to do to survive. Morality could no longer afford to exist.

Life went on anyway it could. And, strangely enough - or perhaps not strangely at all - the arts and architecture took a new turn. Walter Gropius saw that the machines which seemed to produce nothing but ugliness could be used to make beautiful things, and with that insight he began the era of modern furniture and modern design. With the same reasoning, Gropius imagined glass and metal skyscrapers, buildings that “were to be giant crystals,” and would change forever the shape of cities and the way in which people lived and worked in them. Everywhere the traditional was rejected in favor of the new and innovative; nowhere was this passion to abandon the past taken to a greater extreme than in classical music.

It did not matter what Bach or Beethoven or Mozart had done; it was time to do something different, a “whole new language for modern music,” something Arnold Schoenberg was certain he could do. The twelve tones of the chromatic scale were to be equal in value. They could be played in any sequence, but - and this was crucial - “no note could be repeated until the other eleven had been stated.” Schoenberg did not care if an audience hated it. That only proved he was right: The “laws of nature manifested in a man of genius,” he explained, “are but the laws of the men of the future.”

The pianist, Rudolph Serkin, loved Schoenberg. “But I did not love his music. I told him so, and he never forgave me.” Thomas Mann and Schoenberg were good friends. Mann wrote Dr. Faustus in which Schoenberg’s music is made to be the work of the Devil. Schoenberg never spoke to him again. Whatever one thinks about Schoenberg and his music, it is impossible not to admire what he did when the Nazis came to power. While he was in Paris working on an opera, he was informed that he had been dismissed as a professor at the Berlin Academy of Music and should not come back to Germany. Without a job, and without a country, Arnold Schoenberg, a German Catholic, changed his religion and became a Jew.

The incessant desire for change, the belief that everything is the creation of human genius, that the only rules are the rules we make and impose upon ourselves, found support, and had, as it were, its foundation, in what was happening in theoretical physics. Friedrich treats this with a clarity a specialist in science could never achieve. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Planck explained the Quantum Theory. “Light and energy, he said, do not move in continuous waves but in a flow of tiny particles.” Niels Bohr then applied Planck’s Quantum Theory to the problem of atomic structure, which in turn led to Werner Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy which “abolished, to state it simply, the whole idea of exact observation. There was no longer such a thing as a ‘scientific fact.’” The result was, that “If, basically, Einstein taught that all facts are relative, Heisenberg taught that all facts are purely momentary perceptions of possibilities.”

Everything is relative, there are no objective facts. Everything is subject to interpretation, and no interpretation is any better, any more true, than any other. As Nietzsche had foreseen, everything takes the shape of whoever has the power to enforce their belief on everyone else. It is the will to power that Nietzsche insisted gave meaning to the world; it is the will to power that, with the loss of belief in all objective standards, made Hitler so appealing. It was the reason that so many of the youth of Germany gave him such great support. Richard Lowenthal, who had studied at the University of Berlin in the twenties, told Friedrich that nearly two-thirds of the students “were already committed to the right.” Friedrich expressed astonishment. How could the Nazis “appeal so strongly to young students,” he asked, “when one usually thinks of young people as idealistic?” Lowenthal answered without hesitation. “Because the Nazis were idealistic, too.” They “promised national unity and national resurrection.” They “promised an alternative to what they called the corrupt plutocratic system.” But there was more involved than misguided idealism; there was a deep dislike of Jews. In l927, the Prussian Student Organization, Friedrich reports, was 77% against the admission of Jews. More than their parents, they were not just anti-Semitic, they were pro-Nazi, “60% by actual count - and ready for violence.”

None of this seemed to matter at the beginning of 1929. It was the year when Berlin, like much of Europe and America as well, basked in the glow of “euphoric prosperity.” The new technology, the speed of transport, the crossing of the Atlantic by air, seemed to mark the triumph of the machine age. Germany, finally, was on the road to recovery. Then, suddenly, on October 29, the stock market crashed and within weeks 750,000 of Berlin’s population of four million were out of work. Goebbels’ newspaper with its slogan, ‘For the Oppressed Against the Exploiters,’ had a new appeal. The National Socialist Party which had only 17,000 members in 1926, and 120,000 in the summer of l929, had at least a million members in 1930. In the election of that year, the Nazis, who had only twelve seats in the Reichstag before, won 107 and became Germany’s second largest party. More than the numbers changed inside the Reichstag. Enjoying parliamentary immunity, the Nazi members turned legislative debates into “a scene of shouted insults, loud singing, and threats of violence.” And then, in the next election, in 1932, the Nazis nearly doubled their vote, won a majority in the Prussian state election, forced Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor and gave birth to the Third Reich.

The reaction in Germany was emphatic. Hans Gisevius, “who, as a young lawyer, shared in the national illusion,” explained years later that, “The glorious sensation of a new fraternity overwhelmed all groups and classes.” They had “suddenly learned what seemed to be the greatest discovery of the century - that they were comrades of one race…. Above all, youth, youth was getting its due.”

Goebbels was not surprised. He claimed to have helped the Nazi cause “in four essential ways: by introducing Socialism into a middle-class group, by ‘winning Berlin,’ by working out the style of the party’s public ceremonies, and by the ‘creation of the Fuhrer myth. Hitler had been given the halo of infallibility.” It was a myth Hitler himself believed. When one of his followers told him he was mistaken about something, he angrily replied, “I cannot be mistaken. What I do and say is historical.” There was never any doubt about what Hitler meant to do, and how he meant to do it. He understood what he was working with, and what had to be done to get what he wanted: “The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be repeated until every last member of the public understands what you want him to understand.”

Before The Deluge is an extraordinary book, a book that tells the story - the whole story - of what happened in Berlin a hundred years ago, and what happened to the rest of the world because of it. If that seems too far back in the past to have any relevance to the present situation, if it seems too far back in time to tell us anything about what our own future may hold, we would do well to remember that, as the author explained at the beginning, “people who forget the past are condemned to misunderstand it.” Anyone who does not see the parallels with what happened in Berlin in the l920s and what could happen here today has not read Otto Friedrich, and does not understand the past.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Chance

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

Chance's new novel is The Vermilion Sea.

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

I just finished The Everlasting by Alix Harrow. My bookseller daughter urged me to read it, and since she usually has my reading taste on speed dial, I did. I used to read a lot of fantasy when I was younger, and I still do on occasion, though it’s not really my go-to genre. Why, I don’t know. Truly the best writers work in fantasy, and the themes they explore are often mind-bending and challenging.

This book was no exception. I absolutely loved it. As a writer, I was awed by the way she pulled off the structure. It’s impossible to describe this book without giving too much away, and its appeal is in the pleasure of discovery. In essence, The Everlasting is about how legends are made. Even more importantly, it’s a thoughtful exploration of why legends exist, and who they serve.

The hidden voices in history, and how history changes depending on who is telling the story is ever at play here. This is already one of my favorite books of the year.

Visit Megan Chance's website.

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--Marshal Zeringue