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 Golden Bowl by Henry James:

The novel is no longer a serious art form and has not been for a great many years. What is called a novel today is seldom more than a reader’s excuse for wasting time, a few hundred pages of mindless violence or insipid romance filled with characters who cannot speak in more than single sentences and, if they think at all, think only of themselves, what they want, what they have to have. We were warned this would happen. In 1936, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was forty, he wrote about why the novel - the serious novel - had begun to fall from favor, and why the situation would become even worse:

I saw the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanized and communal art that…was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of subordination. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures.

This was not the first time someone insisted that the novel was in serious danger. Fitzgerald’s complaint that literature was losing its influence, that the motion picture was on its way to replacing the novel in the estimation of even the reading public, had been made years before the first motion picture. In 1891, Henry James was certain that the novel faced no greater danger than the magazines and newspapers, the mass publications to which the reading public had become more or less addicted. These were the publications in which the practice of literary criticism had reached a new low. It flowed “through the periodical press like a river that has burst its dikes.” It was a catastrophe; nothing less than “the failure of distinction, the failure of style, the failure of knowledge, the failure of thought.” Literature, which lives “upon example, upon perfection wrought,” he thought might not survive it. Books in great numbers were being sold, stories of all kinds, but, as he put it eight years later in 1899, “The sort of taste that used to be called ‘good’ has nothing to do with the matter: we are so demonstrably in presence of millions for whom taste is but an obscure, confused, immediate instinct. In the flare of railway bookstalls, in the shop-fronts of most book-sellers, especially the provincial, in the advertisements of the weekly newspapers, and in fifty places besides, this testimony to the general preference triumphs….”

Faced with the obvious preference of the reading public for novels that told stories that were quick to read and easy to understand, novels full of of the kind of action the appeals to what he considered the vulgarity of the crowd, Henry James proceeded to attempt instead, as Gore Vidal described it, “to create something that no writer in English had ever thought possible to do with a form as inherently loose and malleable as the novel: He would aim at perfection. While James’s critics were complaining that he was no longer American and could never be English, James was writing The Portrait of a Lady, as nearly perfect a work as a novel can be.” This was no temporary, single book achievement. “From 1881, James was the master of the novel in English in a way no one had ever been before; or has ever been since.”

Henry James wrote The Portrait of a Lady, and then, in 1904, wrote The Golden Bowl, the last novel he would complete, and with that novel came even closer to perfection than he had before. Like The Europeans, a novel James wrote at the beginning of his long career, The Golden Bowl is about the mutual attraction of American money and European titles of nobility. Without the means to support themselves and their ancient properties and positions any longer, the Europeans looked to American women - wealthy American women - to change their fortunes. Americans with more money than they could count, looked to marriage with European nobility to convince themselves, if no one else, that they were worth more than their money. This, in the latter part of the 19th century, had become a fairly common practice. One of the first such exchanges, and the one that was without doubt the most fortunate, not just for themselves, but their respective countries, was the marriage between the extremely wealthy Jenny Jerome of New York and a rising British politician by the name of Randolph Churchill, the future parents of Winston Churchill.

There are four principal characters in The Golden Bowl, three of them American, two of them, Adam Verver, an American millionaire, and his daughter Maggie. Adam’s wife, Maggie’s mother, had died some years earlier, and Maggie had done everything she could to fill the void in her father’s life. One of the things they do together is travel through Europe buying everything of value they can find. Anyone who has something to sell, whether a priceless painting by a famous French artist, or a centuries old statue by a Florentine sculptor, is always grateful when Adam Verver comes to look. When Henry James tells us that Adam Verver is an American millionaire who spends his time buying priceless works of art, he assumes we will understand that the wealth of Adam Verver was nothing less than the kind of wealth possessed at the turn of the century by, for example, the Vanderbilts, one of whom - William K. Vanderbilt - had a home on Long Island with 110 rooms, 45 bathrooms, and a garage for 100 cars; or that of George Vanderbilt whose home on 203 square miles in Asheville, North Carolina had forty master bedrooms and a library of no less than 250,000 volumes, several of which he might actually have read. Adam Verver, in other words, was one of the richest men in the world.

Adam Verver and his daughter take a house in London, and almost immediately become the objects of great attention. But something happened before they came to Europe, something that will change their lives forever, something that is the central element of the story. How do we know this, how do we, the readers, know anything that has happened? Someone has to tell us; someone has to tell the story. There are, generally speaking, two ways in which a story gets told, two different voices we have ourselves listened to when we read a novel. One way - perhaps the most common - is the voice of the impersonal, and omniscient, narrator who tells us everything - what the characters say, what they think, what they do. It is a voice without identity, and, because of that, without perspective. The other way to tell the story is to have it told by someone with an identity of their own, someone who brings their own perspective to what they describe. Joseph Conrad, for example, would often have a sea captain - Marlowe - tell the story of what happened, what really happened, when confronted with a rumor someone had heard.

Henry James does not choose between these two methods; he uses them both. He tells the story, describes what happens, the omniscient novelist; but he tells the story by telling how the characters themselves see and understand from their own unique, that is to say their own restricted, point of view, what the other characters are like, and what they think they are doing. In the preface to The Golden Bowl, written some years after the novel was first published, he explains:

The “whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters. The Prince, in the first half of the book, virtually sees and knows and makes out, virtually represents to himself everything that concerns us - very nearly (though he doesn’t speak in the first person) after the fashion of other reporters and critics of other situations.” The Princess does the same thing in the second half. The “thing abides rigidly by its law of showing Maggie Verver at first through her suitor’s and her husband’s exhibitory vision of her, and of then showing the Prince, with at least an equal intensity, through his wife’s…”

The Prince James refers to is an Italian nobleman, a prince named strangely, if appropriately enough, Amerigo. He had fallen in love with a young American woman, Charlotte Stant, and she had fallen in love with him; but as Fanny Assingham, who likes to arrange things for other people, tells her husband, they had “the courage to look the facts in the face.” The Prince’s family, ancient but impoverished, needs him to marry well, which meant, as we have seen, marry a rich American. Charlotte is an American, and, though sufficiently well-off to visit Europe, would not bring the fortune needed to restore the Prince and his family to their former glory and position. Charlotte and the Prince were in love, but, Mrs. Assingham insists, they did not become lovers - “there was not enough time.” Her husband, no fool, asks the obvious question, the question that will go unanswered through much of the story, “Does it take so much time?”

A year later, Mrs. Assingham, who has an instinct for what other people need, an instinct she does nothing to control, introduces the Prince to Maggie Verver. Though still in love with Charlotte, the Prince discovers in Maggie everything he requires, and Maggie discovers in him everything she loves. They become engaged. Maggie knows nothing of his former relationship with Charlotte and is thrilled when Charlotte, who, as it turns out, is her closest friend, sends word that she is coming back from America to attend the wedding. Mrs. Assingham, who of course does know about Charlotte’s former relationship with the Prince, thinks she is doing this to be “magnificent.” Charlotte’s real reason, as she tells the Prince, is to have “one hour alone with you.” This is achieved when the two of them go in search of a wedding gift, something Charlotte can give Maggie. They find themselves in a little shop in Bloomsbury where the shopkeeper shows Charlotte a golden bowl. Charlotte suspects that at the price he is asking there must be something wrong with it, a flaw that makes it imperfect. The shopkeeper suggests that, “if it is something you can’t find out isn’t that as good as if it was nothing?” The flaw in the golden bowl is a flaw that, as the shopkeeper explains, might cause it to split into parts but will never cause it to shatter like glass.

The golden bowl tells the story of Maggie’s marriage. The marriage, which seems a success, meant that Adam Verver was now alone. Without a daughter beside him, he needed a wife. Not only was he one of the world’s richest men, he was only forty-seven. The possibilities were endless. The always eager Fanny Assingham had the perfect candidate. Who better than a woman Adam Verver had known for years, his daughter’s great good friend Charlotte Stant? Adam Verver is quite taken with the idea, and, of equal importance, his daughter very much approves. Charlotte Stant becomes Charlotte Verver, the mother-in-law of Maggie, and the very good friend of her husband’s son-in-law, the Prince. It is all very convenient, especially, as it seems, for Maggie. Having become “so intensely married,” she has felt the need to make up for all the time she has spent with her husband by now spending more time with her father. She does this by “allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path - by installments, as it were - in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side.” The Prince seems not to mind.

No one has written as well as Henry James about the ways in which men and women began to sense a change in their relationship. One of the happiest aspects of Maggie’s marriage was “the fact of its have practically given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend.” But while the Prince and Adam Verver have grown close, Maggie has begun to feel “very much alone.” Mrs. Assingham, who, unlike Maggie and her father, knows that the Prince and Charlotte had not only known each other, but been in love, begins to suspect that Maggie now “knows there is something between them.” This is not the same thing, however, as knowing what it is. Maggie, she explains, can’t bring herself, she won’t allow herself, to think there is something intimate between them. She “hasn’t ‘arrived’ at it, as you say, at all; that’s exactly what she hasn’t done, what she so steadily and intensely refuses to do.” But it is what she fears.

Fear brings clarity, not about what has happened between Charlotte and her husband, but what she is in position to do about it. She understands the relation, the very precise relation, she occupies as her father’s daughter, and what this means in relation to her father’s wife. James describes it in terms of royal power: “It hung there above them like a canopy of state, a reminder that though the lady-in-waiting was an established favorite, secure in her position, a little queen, however good-natured, was always a little queen and might with small warning remember it.” And remember it she does.

When Maggie can no longer deny her own knowledge that her marriage is in danger, that the golden bowl has been broken, that the flaw can no longer be concealed, that it has split into three parts, she acts now to discover how, with her as the stem of the bowl, the parts can be put back together again. She decides that her father has to go back to America to take up again the business he has built. His wife will of course go with him. It is neat and clean and utterly ruthless.

Maggie has won, but it is not the kind of victory we might normally expect. Henry James understands, as few other writers have, the sometimes subtle nature of human beings, the absence of sharp lines of differentiation, the way emotions can crowd in on each other, how the meaning of things can change. The Prince was in love with Charlotte, and may always be in love with Charlotte; but that does not mean that he cannot, or will not, fall in love with Maggie. When they watch Adam and Charlotte drive away, Maggie starts to tell him about the need to see things as they are, but he stops her and tells her that he only sees her. And that, as Henry James would put, is how it all ends, “as it were.”

The novel is no longer a serious art form, but it was once, years ago, and Henry James is still there, waiting to be read by anyone who wants to know what perfect writing was, and still might be.

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; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams; Talleyrand.

--Marshal Zeringue

DeAndra Davis

DeAndra Davis is New York–born and Florida-bred. She’s a hopeless musical theater nerd (Wicked is definitely her favorite), a perpetual student and teacher, and always trailed by a kid or a dog because she has way too many of both. She has an opinion for everything, an argument ready, and a hug for everyone, and she thinks you should, too. She is the author of All the Noise at Once, winner of the William C. Morris Award for best young adult debut book, and The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

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

I always tackle a few books at a time because I’m a mood reader. Currently, I’m vacillating between books for pleasure and research (though the books for research are still pleasurable).

Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma is, for me, such a well-done work of mystery, dark academia, and fantasy. I really wanted to tap into this vampire story, especially pulling from the brevity of the chapters, the timing of reveals, and the tension between the main character and her antagonist because of how well written I believe it is. That tension especially. I eat that up!

Alternatively, I’m listening to Wicked King by Holly Black because I missed the initial fae craze and I lament that to this day. The books are so easy to lose yourself in and once again, the tension with the main character and her antagonist/love interest. I think maybe I have a thing for that sort of tension, but it’s great to tap into how to sustain that sort of tension over a longer period—across more than one book.

Just started The Gravewood by Kelly Andrew as well and that is because I feel like Kelly has some of the best prose out there. I mean, the sentences! They’re gorgeous. If there’s ever a writer I read for pure sentence envy and inspiration, it’s Kelly Andrew.

Visit DeAndra Davis's website. She can be found on most socials @DeAndraWrites.

My Book, The Movie: The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ilona Bannister

Ilona Bannister is the author of three novels: When I Ran Away, Little Prisons, and the newly released Five.

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

I love learning from other writers. Reading a wide range of authors and genres while I’m writing is part research, part search for inspiration, and part coaching session in craft. To write Five, I drew from fiction and non-fiction to inform my characters’ lives and to keep suspense-building at the forefront of my mind. I have learned that the stories and facts I take from books to fill up my subconscious may seem unrelated at the time that I read them, but they always work themselves into my fiction in unexpected ways. One of the best non-fiction books I have ever read for research was Unnatural Causes by Dr. Richard Shepherd. He is the UK’s most distinguished forensic pathologist, and this book is as much a memoir of an extraordinary career as it is a fascinating, factual examination of the social importance of this little understood but absolutely vital work. I have no medical background and I’m not a scientifically oriented person, which made this book doubly intriguing and unputdownable because it taught me about a profession I knew nothing about, but which we should all be very grateful for as a society. People like Dr. Shepherd, who work to understand death, are incredibly special.

When I need a pep talk to push me to make a scene suspenseful or a character’s dialogue unsettling, I turn to Shirley Jackson. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is her gothic classic about two isolated sisters, Merricat and Constance, who are ostracized from their community and relegated to a life in their huge but crumbling home where most of their family was poisoned under suspicious circumstances years earlier. Jackson is an expert at creating tension and uneasiness in the seemingly ordinary. But what I appreciate most about her and what makes her one of my writing idols is that she was a mother of four. She prioritised her duties as wife and mother within the constraints of 1940s and 50s gender roles, but she thought of her creepy, suspenseful, eerie tales while folding the laundry and making dinner for her children every night. Her life story, for me as a mother working from home, maintaining a writing career while running a household, is just as inspiring as her gothic stories.

Finally, one of my favorite ever thrillers that I keep as a model of expert craftsmanship of twists and truly shocking turns is Apple Tree Yard, by Louise Doughty. It’s the gripping story of Dr. Yvonne Carmichael, a respected, middle-aged, unhappily married geneticist and a chance extra-marital encounter at the Houses of Parliament that unravels her conventional life in a dark multitude of ways. You just don’t see what’s coming in this book. This is the book that taught me about tension. It’s a master class in how to hold a reader’s attention and keep them turning the pages. A real masterpiece of the genre.

Visit Ilona Bannister's website.

Q&A with Ilona Bannister.

The Page 69 Test: When I Ran Away.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha Silva

Samantha Silva is an author and screenwriter based in Idaho. Over her career, she’s sold film projects to Paramount, Universal, and New Line Cinema.

Sometime This Century is her third novel, following Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mr. Dickens and His Carol, her debut.

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

I’m having a glorious time listening to the audiobook of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (read by Steven Crossley). When my brain hits a wall with the writing (I get up in the wee hours and work till mid-day), I’m hungry to read, but find being read to an absolute tonic, letting a book wash over me and rewire my brain. And because I have a terrible memory, and had forgotten so much of the story, this is like reading it for the first time. Forster is an absolute genius with language. I’d forgotten how utterly funny he can be, how he can send up big and difficult subjects (class, capitalism, imperialism), by making fun of his characters, drawn so distinctly. There’s this brilliant narrative voice (Forster as omniscient) who sees it all as this great human comedy. But then there comes a turn that bares his soft-heartedness about the world he creates and the vivid, flawed, sometimes marvelous people who live in it.

Visit Samantha Silva's website.

Q&A with Samantha Silva.

The Page 69 Test: Sometime This Century.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kerri Hakoda

Kerri Hakoda has worked in and out of Alaska in advertising and marketing, marine transportation, cable television and trade magazine ad sales. She was born and raised in Hawaii, but now calls northwest Washington her home, where she lives with her husband (himself a veteran of the Alaska fishing industry) and writes mystery, historical, and young adult science fiction.

Hakoda's new novel is Too Deep to Cross: A Thriller.

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

I recently finished reading An Immense World by Ed Yong, as part of my resolution to read more non-fiction. Informative and fascinating, dense but so fluidly written and easy to read. Ditto The Library Book by Susan Orlean. I just cracked open The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson – I very much admire his brand of narrative non-fiction. I loved The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry and think she might be the new John le Carré. Midnight in Soap Lake by Matthew Sullivan was a wonderful, quirky read that I enjoyed immensely. Circe by Madeline Miller and Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon – excellent, immaculately researched historical novels. George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy was moving, accessible, and necessary.

Visit Kerri Hakoda's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Odden

Karen Odden received her PhD in English from New York University and taught Victorian literature at UW-Milwaukee. She is the author of several crime novels set in 1870s London, including her award-winning USA Today bestselling debut, A Lady in the Smoke. Her work has been nominated for the Lefty, Anthony, Agatha, and Derringer Awards, and appeared in Best Mystery Stories of the Year.

Odden's new novel is An Artful Dodge.

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

I read a lot of nonfiction to research for my own novels, but as I was putting together this list of “other books,” I realized I’m the reader equivalent of a lemming, easily led! These are some of my favorites over the past few months.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (trans. from the Italian)

My friend Filiz recommended this book so highly that I bought it. For a year I took it down off my shelf, read the first twenty or thirty pages, and put it back, several times. I just couldn’t get into it—and then recently, I pulled it down to give it one more try and read it in two days. Some books are like that. This novel, the first of four in the Neopolitan Novels, begins with Elena receiving a phone call that sets her to committing to paper all her memories of her childhood friend Lila, beginning with their childhoods in rough-and-tumble 1950s Naples, Italy. In her own mind, Elena is the more “ordinary” of the two, studious and rather plain; her friend Lila is beautiful, fierce, and fearless. By the end, it becomes clear that Lila views Elena differently. The narrative style is unusual—although purportedly written by an adult recalling her childhood, much of it reads almost like a teenage girl’s journal, almost as if she has slipped back into her teenage self, complete with changeful emotions, dramatic utterances, actions driven by whim, and shifting allegiances. But once I let myself sink in, I was absorbed in the world, with the feeling of shifting ground under my feet and violence always close at hand.

Jacinda Ardern, A Different Kind of Power

In March, my husband and I traveled to New Zealand, and while I was there my cousin Kate texted me, asking if I’d read this book; she’d loved it and urged me to find it. I bought the book in the Auckland airport and read it on the way home. Jacinda Ardern was New Zealand’s prime minister (and its third woman PM, the first to have a child while in office) during Covid. This book is part memoir, part manifesto; it’s frankly and warmly personal as well as thoughtful and serious. It covers her childhood—she grew up in a rural area on the North Island and was raised Mormon—and traces her path to working in government. She also shares her vision for what she calls “a different kind of power,” one based on inquiry, collaboration, and compassion. This was a compelling, intriguing read.

Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why we fall for it every time

For my next book, the sequel to An Artful Dodge, I began researching cons. I wanted to write a book about a series of art heists that happen during one London Season. When I told my friend Libby about my idea, she said I should take a look at this book. (Konnikova has two other books, in part based on her experience as a poker player.) This one outlines the 7 distinct steps to a long con and what suppositions and expectations most people bring to an encounter, making each step a likely success. It was unsettling, for it made me uneasily aware of how there are people out there who instinctively prey on our desires for belonging, for believing, and for not wanting to appear the fool. It was absolutely essential reading for “A Thieving Season.” This is a primer on the con, with psychology thrown in, and accompanied by vignettes about accomplished cons including Madoff and Jim Bakker over the years. Fascinating.

Michael Koryta, Die Famous

This book doesn’t come out until September; I read an advanced copy for review. But I want to feature it here because it’s one of the best I’ve read this year. A historical crime novel set during the Depression, it’s told in three separate stories, that of Savannah Cody, a woman speaking to an FBI agent on the eve of her execution; her twelve-year-old son Alford; and her lover Eddie “Nickel” Terhune. As a young man, Nickel falls in with Al Brady, who fancies himself another Derringer, brandishing guns and robbing banks. After a big hit, Nickel flees to Maine, where Savannah and her father search for Nickel, hoping to find him before the FBI does, and where a chance encounter allows Nickel and his son Alford to see what might have been. The character of Savannah is especially well drawn; her voice is tart and quick, but she shows a growing sense of her own culpability and her own capacity for love. The language is fresh, and though every reader will see heartbreak coming, the pages fly. This is excellent fare for fans of William Kent Krueger’s historical novels, J.R. Moehringer’s Sutton, and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang.

Visit Karen Odden's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Karen Odden and Rosy.

The Page 69 Test: A Lady in the Smoke.

My Book, The Movie: A Lady in the Smoke.

My Book, The Movie: A Dangerous Duet.

The Page 69 Test: A Dangerous Duet.

Writers Read: Karen Odden (January 2020).

Q&A with Karen Odden.

My Book, The Movie: Down a Dark River.

The Page 69 Test: Down a Dark River.

My Book, The Movie: Under a Veiled Moon.

The Page 69 Test: Under a Veiled Moon.

Writers Read: Karen Odden (October 2022).

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Holt

Katie Holt is a New York City resident but a Tennessee native. She studied English with a concentration in creative writing at NYU and fought with every professor to prove that romance novels were worthy of their time. She’s a Nora Ephron fanatic, Swiftie, and warm chocolate chip cookie enthusiast.

Holt is also the author of her highly-acclaimed debut Not in My Book.

Her new novel is The Last Page.

Recently I asked Holt about what she was reading. Holt's reply:

I’ve just finished two books that had me hooked. I read a physical copy of If Not for My Baby by Kate Golden. It’s been on my list for a while, and it’s awakened something in me. I’m obsessed with Hozier because of it and developing a bit of a parasocial relationship…The romance is so tender, tense, and hits all the right emotional beats. I read it in two sittings and was still craving more.

On audio, I just finished The Favorites by Layne Fargo. I usually only read romance, but I’m trying to read books outside of the genre on audiobook. I went into this one blind and was delighted that it was a Wuthering Heights retelling. I had no idea and Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s so twisty and dramatically romantic. I was gasping at so many scenes and chapters. I’m excited to read more from both of these authors!

Visit Katie Holt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Katzenbach

John Katzenbach is the New York Times bestselling author of such novels as the Edgar Award-nominated In the Heat of the Summer, which was adapted for the screen as The Mean Season; The Traveler; Day of Reckoning; Just Cause and Hart's War, which were also made into movies; The Shadow Man, another Edgar nominee; State of Mind; The Analyst; and The Madman's Tale. Katzenbach has been a criminal court reporter for the Miami Herald and Miami News and a featured writer for the Herald's Tropic magazine.

His new novel is The Architect.

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

Fact is, I like to read my friends. After them if I have any spare energy, re-read some classics. And then, from time to time, I try to work in something that my wife – a far more accomplished and ardent reader than I am – recommends.

Very rarely do I read anything in my own genre of “psychological thrillers.” This is because even after many writing decades and publishing many books in many languages, I still possess the lurking fear that all those other thriller writing men and women lurking out there are... well... better? Cleverer? More adept with words and phrases? Smarter when it comes to plots and twists? Or maybe just luckier?

I just don’t want to prove the accuracy of this paranoia to myself. I am very happy in my ignorance.

That said, on my desk now are two collections of short stories.

The first Wandering Souls is by Phil Caputo – who passed away a few short weeks ago, so this is his last work in an extraordinarily distinguished writing career. Bestsellers, Pulitzers and respect. What more could one ask for? The stories in this collection often return to the themes of war and emotional conflict and the impact experienced by men after battle that characterizes much of Phil’s output. The writing is brisk, intense and always spot-on. Each character and every setting in each story is painted with his typical prose vibrancy. As I said, Phil was a great friend – forty plus years with only a couple of life-threatening activities – and his voice, so strong and often elegant on these pages, is one that will be sorely missed and is not easily forgotten.

Beside Phil’s work, is Don Winslow’s The Final Score.

Just started, and, as with everything Don writes, it is edgy, direct and evocative. There are few writers today who can command a simple declarative sentence with the style and skill that Don owns. Here is a personal aside: there are stacks of writers around today with claims on various bestseller lists – but very few who rival Don for narrative control and explosive plot. He is the writer I direct my “literary” friends towards, because his stories are never indulgent. They are hard-edged without losing psychological depth. Doubt my word? Read the first two chapters of The Kings of Cool or Savages. Simplicity, yet profundity. My jealous imagination knows no limits.

Two other books that bear mentioning:

In the classic realm, I’ve been re-reading for the one millionth time Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. And every time I am immersed in his tale of brothers, fly fishing, religion and Montana, I see something new. And, as a slight, parenthetical addition, I consider the initial sentence of A River and the opening page of Maclean’s Young Men and Fire to be two of the finest beginnings to any work. Right up there with “Call me Ishmael...” and “It was the best of times, the worst of times...” and “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure...” among my other favorites.

And finally, the book I’m currently writing is set in a part of the world I am curiously very fond of: Miami and South Florida. The curious part of my affection is the recognition that Miami is a place of mixed cultures, mingled madness and subterranean angers, bizarre conflicts and far too damn much traffic beneath skies that are perfect in February and threatening in August. Regardless, what I’m writing is – as is often the case – admittedly dark. So, to lighten up, I’ve got a copy of my old friend Dave Barry’s Best. State. Ever. This is his paean to the wonderfully bizarre nature of Florida – where truth so often outstrips anything another of my old friends, Carl Hiaasen, imagines even on his most fevered and wonderfully productive days. Carl would likely agree with that observation.

Visit John Katzenbach's website.

My Book, The Movie: Red 1-2-3.

Writers Read: John Katzenbach (January 2014).

The Page 69 Test: Red 1-2-3.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carmela Dutra

Carmela Dutra is a Bay Area–based author who writes cozy mysteries with sharp banter, strong sibling bonds, and the vibrant food culture of Northern California’s most eclectic region. Her Food Truck Mystery Series blends culinary competition, small-town secrets, and humor-forward sleuthing, all rooted in the distinctly diverse rhythms of the Bay Area.

Dutra's debut novel, A Murder Most Fowl, received praise from Kirkus Reviews for its “serious set of crimes leavened by plenty of amusing moments,” and from Criminal Element for the “juicy reasoning behind the sabotage [that] was almost as shocking as the murder itself.” New York Times bestselling author Ellery Adams called it “the perfect escapist read, brimming with banter and an extra helping of fun.” Dutra has also been featured in CrimeReads.

The second installment in the series, Hot Wings and Homicide, earned additional praise from Kirkus Reviews, which said, “Winner, winner, murder for dinner ... An entertaining mystery with amusing characters—including a pet chicken.” Further cementing the author’s voice in the cozy mystery space.

A frequent podcast guest and live-event panelist, Dutra has appeared on Bookish Flights, The Fiction Lounge, Cozy Crime Reads, and Bookshelf Odyssey, and has spoken at bookstores including Kepler’s Books & Magazines. She is known for her warm, engaging presence and her ability to connect with readers through humor, craft, and community.

Dutra lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two dinosaur-obsessed sons, and an assortment of over-cuddled pets. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found at a bookstore, a farmers’ market, or chasing the perfect chicken wing.

Recently I asked the author about what she was rearding. Dutra's reply:

Lately I’ve been listening to the Nosey Parker cozy mystery series by Fiona Leitch through my Libby app. I’m extremely picky about audiobooks, so borrowing through the library has become my favorite way to discover new series and narrators without pressure. The Nosey Parker books have completely transported me to the English countryside with their charming village settings, food, humor, and murder mysteries. They’re also shorter books, which makes them perfect for listening to while running errands, folding laundry, or tackling the endless cycle of household chores. I’ve just borrowed A Cornish Christmas Murder, the fourth book in the series, and I’m already looking forward to diving back into that world.

Physically, I’m currently reading An Impossible Impostor from the Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn. I absolutely love the balance of mystery, adventure, and character development in those books. Veronica is such a sharp, unconventional protagonist, and even though I write contemporary cozy mysteries rather than historical ones, I often find myself inspired by the way the series develops its relationships and long-running character arcs. They’re the kind of books that make me excited both as a reader and as a writer.

Since summer break has officially started in my house, reading has also become more of a family event because my boys and I started a family book club. My youngest, who’s six, and I have been reading the Pug Diaries books together, while my oldest recently discovered the re-release of the Animorphs series. That one has been especially fun for me because I absolutely loved Animorphs when I was his age. Now, I get to experience those books all over again through his eyes, which has been surprisingly emotional in the best possible way. Watching him react to moments I still remember decades later feels a little like sharing a piece of my childhood with him one chapter at a time.

Visit Carmela Dutra's website.

Q&A with Carmela Dutra.

--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 Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand:

No one now remembers Duff Cooper, but in Great Britain in the l930s, and in the years of the Second World War, everyone who paid attention to what Winston Churchill was trying to do knew Duff Cooper’s name. Alfred Duff Cooper was part of the English aristocracy that in 1890 when he was born still considered itself to have not just the right to rule, but the duty to prepare itself for the task. Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, attended Eton and Oxford, and was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1924. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1938, but resigned when Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler. When the war broke out, and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister, he asked Cooper to become Minister of Information, a position he retained until 1944 when he became England’s ambassador to France. Cooper knew more about France than many of the public officials with whom he was to deal, and, more importantly, understood the precise relationship that needed to exist between England and France if the peace of Europe was to be maintained. He had written about it before the war, in l932, in his remarkable biography of one of the greatest, and most misunderstood, statesmen the world has ever seen.

Born in 1754 into the French aristocracy, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord was treated like most of the children of his class: he was ignored by his parents and sent at the age of eight to boarding school, to college, where he spent most of his time in the library, “reading works of history and biographies of statesmen, feeding his hopes for the future upon the record of the past.” Trading one monastic life for another, he was ordained a priest in 1779. This then was not really a monastic life at all. If Talleyrand ever prayed, it was for the swift departure of anyone who failed to keep up their end of a dinner table conversation. Talleyrand could talk, and to “talk well was then considered the highest attribute that any person could possess,” and the “great ladies were the leaders of talk as well as of fashion.” Though not especially attractive, women, even those who thought they would hate him, fell easily, sometimes too easily, under his spell.

In 1788 Talleyrand became the Bishop of Autun, and at the age of thirty-five was one of the most important men in Paris. He soon had a reputation for seduction so great that in “an age of universal latitude and easily condoned license,” he “acquired notoriety even before he acquired fame.” Cooper sums it up: “Noble birth, influential connections, and a powerful intelligence, supported by high ambition and unburdened by scruples,” he seemed destined to become “a worthy successor to the great ecclesiastical statesmen who in the past had controlled the destiny of France.” He had already made one important contribution to the destiny of France: he was the father, the unacknowledged father, of the great French painter Delacroix.

History has a way of changing its meaning. July 14th, Bastille Day, is celebrated in France the way July 4, Independence Day, is celebrated in the United States, the beginning of self-government, freedom from the oppressive rule of monarchs and aristocracies. No one who lived through the French Revolution would have been quite so convinced that the Revolution, and the Terror which followed, had been something worth celebrating. When it happened, when the Revolution suddenly erupted, Talleyrand had two choices: leave France — emigrate, as most of the nobility did — or give his wholehearted support to what the Revolution was trying to accomplish. Talleyrand refused to leave, and such were his powers of persuasion, such was the force of his mere presence, that in February 1790, he was elected President of the Assembly. Like nearly everyone else who played a prominent part in the early days of the Revolution, Talleyrand was soon under threat of the guillotine for not going as far as the Jacobins demanded. He had nowhere to turn, “ruined in pocket, tarnished in reputation, with nothing to hope for from the victorious Revolutionaries, and even less from the defeated Bourbons.” He sailed to America, where he spent the next two years and became friends with Alexander Hamilton.

Cooper says every little about this relationship, but it tells us more than anything else could about what made Talleyrand so often seem irreplaceable. Talleyrand, as has already been noted, could carry on a conversation better than anyone else. Even on first meeting, he seemed to those who met him more intelligent, more deeply instructed, than anyone they had known before. It is not difficult to understand. Listen to all the music you like, when you hear for the first time something by Mozart or Beethoven, you begin to have an idea what a revelation it must have been for someone who suddenly found himself in the presence of a master of the spoken word. And Talleyrand, it should be mentioned, had something like the same impression of Hamilton. Years later, when he was the French Foreign Minister under Napoleon, he kept a portrait of Hamilton on the wall behind his desk. When Aaron Burr, who had killed Hamilton in a duel, came to visit him in Paris, Talleyrand refused to see him.

After the Terror had run its course, after the guillotine had finished with its gruesome work, the Directory took control of France, and from November of 1795 to November of 1799 did everything it could to protect those who had profited from the Revolution, those who feared, on the one hand, that the Bourbons might return, and, on the other, that a new revolution would bring about a redistribution of property “and the submersion of those particular revolutionaries whom chance, and no other conceivable agency, had recently thrown to the top of the melting pot.” Talleyrand came back to Paris in September of 1797; eight months later he was Minister for Foreign Affairs. He quickly made his fortune. There had been a reaction from the “gloom and misery” produced by the Revolution, “an outburst of enjoyment which took the form of almost frenzied revels and unbridled license.” It was an “age of corruption,” in which every transaction came with a cost, an expense, in other words, a bribe. Because Talleyrand took millions, while others took thousands, he “became an object of obloquy.” He did not mind; there were so many other things he had to do. The government, for example, was, as he quickly realized, too weak to survive. Something had to be done. He began a regular correspondence with the army general whose success in Italy had begun to attract attention; he became friends with Napoleon, and the Directory, unable to govern, was easily dismissed.

Cooper’s explanation of why this happened is an unusually insightful diagnosis, not just of what happened then, but what has often happened since: “as is usually the case when democratic institutions are failing, the general demand among all classes and in all parties was for one strong man who would sweep away all the politicians, who would not pander to the ephemeral powers that were, but would give good government to the majority, who wanted it, and impose firm government upon the few, who did not. Talleyrand, ever sensitive to popular opinion, and gifted with a power of perception that could penetrate the future further than most, was aware of this widespread desire, and was determined to satisfy it.”

Napoleon, only thirty years of age, was “ignorant, anxious to learn, and not ashamed to be taught. The wisest and best liked of his tutors was Talleyrand.” The four years of the Consulate were, in Cooper’s judgment, one of the two most “glorious periods of French history, the reign of Henry IV being the other.” Napoleon’s work was “the reconstruction of France and the pacification of Europe.” The pinnacle of his achievement was the Treaty of Amiens of 1801 which brought peace with England. “If Napoleon had at this moment been capable of moderating his thirst for dominance the history of the world would have been altered.” Talleyrand understood this and tried in vain to change the way Napoleon thought about the future. Napoleon, Talleyrand learned, allowed nothing “but the adversity of fortune to limit the scope of his ambition.” Two years later, the war with England began again. Convinced that Napoleon was a danger to both France and Europe, Talleyrand began to work for his downfall. That meant treason, but not treason to France. With rare intelligence, and rare courage, Talleyrand understood the difference and was willing to act on what he knew.

When Czar Alexander and Napoleon met at the conference of Erfurt to discuss whether Russia would support Napoleon in a war against Austria, Talleyrand did not hesitate to tell Alexander that it was not in his interest to do so. “Sire,” he told him in private, “it is in your power to save Europe, and you will only do so by refusing to give way to Napoleon. The French people,” he insisted, “are civilized, their sovereign is not. The sovereign of Russia is civilized and his people are not: the sovereign of Russia should therefore be the ally of the French people.” The Czar took advantage of advice from the French Foreign Minister and gave him information about the proposals Napoleon had made each day. “This was treachery,” Cooper acknowledges, “but it was treachery upon a magnificent scale. Of the two Emperors, upon whose words the fate of Europe depended, Talleyrand had made one his dupe and the other his informant.”

Talleyrand knew exactly what had to be done. The future of France, and more even than that, the future of Europe, depended upon the continued independence of England. He was convinced that “the liberalizing anti-autocratic spirit of England was necessary in order to maintain the mental equilibrium of the Continent, and prevent the violence of reaction, provoked by the violence of revolution, from going too far in the opposite direction. ‘Get this through your head,’ he once exclaimed to Madame de Remusat, ‘if the English Constitution is destroyed, the civilization of the world will be shaken to its foundations.’”

Talleyrand’s loyalty was to France; Napoleon’s loyalty was to himself. On January 23, 1808, at a special meeting of the privy council, Napoleon began with a few remarks to the effect that “his ministers had no right even to think for themselves, far less to give their thoughts expression. To doubt was for them the beginning of treason, to differ from him was the crime itself.” He then turned to Talleyrand and for “one solid half-hour, without interruption” attacked him for every crime imaginable. Shaking his fist at him, he told him he “was nothing but so much dung in a silk stocking.” Talleyrand never so much as changed expression; never so much as indicated an awareness he was being addressed. When it was over, when the meeting broke up, he turned to one of those who had witnessed this unprecedented torrent of abuse and remarked drily, “What a pity such a great man should be so ill-bred!” The next day, it was as if it had never happened. Napoleon had come to hate him, distrust him, but still could not do without him.

The Czar would not help with Austria, and with an army of half a million men, Napoleon invaded Russia. Talleyrand knew this was the beginning of the end. When Napoleon was banished and the monarchy restored, it was a government that, thanks to Talleyrand, was government on the English model. He was convinced, and for a while convinced the country, that the world had changed, that supreme power could only be exercised with the “consent of bodies drawn from the heart of the country that it governs.” Legitimacy, the Divine Right of Kings, had been based on, and received its support from, religion, but religion had lost its power.

France was free of Napoleon, but it was a conquered country. The four victorious Powers — England, Russia, Prussia and Austria — met at the Congress of Vienna to decide what France would have to pay. Instead, representing a vanquished nation, Talleyrand, “by the charm of his mind and the ascendancy of his genius,” dominated the proceedings. From “being the representative of the one Power which Europe had united to conquer he became at a turn of the wheel the determining factor in the future settlement.” He did more than that. He negotiated a secret treaty in which England, Austria and France agreed to maintain the peace and the existing borders. France was safe.

Talleyrand, sixty years of age, retired from active pubic life and lived with his niece by marriage, a beautiful young woman of twenty-four. In l820, his niece had a “somewhat ostentatious reconciliation” with her husband and bore him a third child, Pauline. The “true parentage was generally attributed to Talleyrand.” A year later, in 1821, Napoleon died. “What an event!” someone declared. Talleyrand rejoined, “It is only a piece of news.” He later explained his real feelings about Napoleon. “I served him so long as I could believe that he himself was completely devoted to France. But when I saw the beginning of those revolutionary enterprises which ruined him I left the ministry, for which he never forgave me.” Nine years later, in 1830, Talleyrand, who was now seventy-seven, became the French ambassador to England, the country whose government he always thought the best model for France. He had no illusions about what the world thought of him, and no doubt about what he thought of himself. “I am thought immoral and machiavellian, I am only calm and disdainful….I have braved the stupidity of public opinion all my life….”

It is hard to find fault with Duff Cooper’s judgment that Talleyrand “was a true patriot and a wise statesman, to whom neither contemporaries nor posterity has done him justice.” Duff Cooper’s biography goes far to right the balance.

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; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams.

--Marshal Zeringue