S.J. Rozan

SJ Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of at least eighteen novels and six dozen short stories. Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story. She’s also the recipient of the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and has received the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Rozan's new novel is The Mayors of New York.

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

I read a lot of non-fiction. I just started Geoff Dyer's The Last Days of Roger Federer. It's about endings, of many kinds, a good book for autumn. Dyer's prose is sharp and clear and the structure of his essays always makes sense. He writes about a range things, including sports. Finding a writer who can articulate the larger societal and, yes, spiritual implications of sports is always a thrill for me.

Two recent fiction reads also have to make this list, though, because I'm very high on them.

One is a fantasy novel, a genre I dip into occasionally. By Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle, Ebony Gate is set in San Francisco among people who look like us, but aren't like us... What I love about this book is the breadth of the authors' imagination and the discipline with which they wield it. Vivid descriptions, propulsive action, and a wry, likeable narrator who abruptly quit her job as an assassin -- how can you go wrong?

The other, equally imaginative but very different, is Rachel Cantor's Half-Life of a Stolen Sister. A re-imagining of the life of the Brontë family, set now and told through narration, letters, diaries, plays... This book swept me up from the beginning. It's a tribute to Cantor's writing that although I know how the story goes -- it's the lives of the Brontës, after all -- I kept hoping for better for them.

Visit S.J. Rozan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Paper Son.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Violence.

Q&A with S. J. Rozan.

The Page 69 Test: Family Business.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paula Ramón

Paula Ramón is a Venezuelan journalist who has lived and worked in China, the United States, Brazil, and Uruguay. She is currently a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, based in Los Angeles. She has written and reported for the New York Times, National Geographic, Columbia Journalism Review, and Piauí magazine, among other outlets.

Ramón's new book is Motherland: A Memoir.

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

For my job I try to mix my reading between something that relates to the place where I am working and something that speaks to me in a personal way. And sometimes I have the pleasure of reading a book that brings both together. My favorite recent books that I either finished or am currently reading:

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.

This is one of those examples where my two interests come together. For me it was a book about grief, and Didion portrays grief without any formulas. Sometimes it made me laugh, sometimes cry. It’s a very human and authentic account. But in its pages, in which Didion looks back over the year after her husband's death, she also takes readers through some places and episodes of recent California history, which is where I live and what I have to write about in my work as a correspondent.

The Beast, by Óscar Martínez

With much delay I recently finished the incredible work of Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez who condenses in this book years of traveling the migration routes from Central America to the United States. It is about what migrants suffer in the region and about the economics of migration that has made migrants a commodity.

Unwind, by Neal Shusterman

I am beginning to read this dystopian novel set in an undated future in a United States where abortion is prohibited, but the government allows that parents or representatives can decide if the bodies of children and adolescents up to 18 years of age can be dismembered and their organs used for donation, known as "unwinding."

Follow Paula Ramón on Instagram and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller 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, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus:

Ammianus Marcellinus, the last Roman historian of importance, born sometime between 325 and 330 A.D., joined the army at an early age, became a general and had the great good fortune to serve with one of the greatest men of that, or of any, age. When he left the army, he settled in Rome where he wrote his history of the Roman Empire from the accession of Nerva in 96 A.D., where the history of Tacitus ends, to the death of Valens nearly three hundred years later in 378 A.D. The history contained thirty-one books, a book being what today would be called a chapter. The first thirteen books are lost. The surviving eighteen cover only the twenty-five years from 353 to 378, which suggests that Ammianus thought this period to be of particular importance. That nearly two-thirds of those chapters deal, directly or indirectly, with the Emperor Julian, suggests that, for Ammianus at least, the history of the Roman Empire cannot be understood without understanding who, and what, Julian really was.

Edward Gibbon knew Ammianus Marcellinus’ Roman History almost by heart, and, as he acknowledged, followed him as a guide in everything he wrote about the fourth century in the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What Ammianus wrote about Julian is extraordinary, and he warns his readers that what they are about to read, “though not emblazoned by crafty devised falsehood, and being simply a plain statement of facts, supported by evident proofs, will have all the effect of a studied panegyric.” Almost from the moment of his birth, Julian increased “rapidly in every desirable quality,” and “soon became so conspicuous both at home and abroad, that in respect to his prudence he was looked upon as a second Titus; in his glorious deeds of war he was accounted equal to Trajan; in mercy he was the prototype of Antoninus; and in the pursuit and discovery of true wisdom he resembled Marcus Aurelius, in imitation of whom he formed all actions and character.” Perhaps even more astonishing, Julian, who had never been a solder or seen a battle, “was drawn forth from the quiet shades of the academy…into the labors of war, subdued Germany, tranquillized the districts of the frozen Rhine, routed the barbarian kings breathing nothing but bloodshed and slaughter, and forced them into submission.”

This not only tells us something of what Julian did, but by showing that, without any previous military experience, he became a great commander, we are forced to recognize the presence of something rare, and perhaps even unprecedented. From the time he became Caesar, he lived the life of an ancient Roman, when virtue still had a public meaning, when the way you lived was more important than what you had. He had studied all there was to know of Roman history and knew by heart all the early laws; he was determined to make the Romans once again the rulers, not just of the world, but of themselves, to curb their appetites for more than what they needed, and return to the condition the sumptuary laws, the laws against luxury and license, had once enforced by sometimes lethal punishment.

Julian’s mind moved faster and with a surer grasp than that of others. Dictating one thing with his voice, he wrote something else with his hand, a letter to a governor of a province or an order to a general with an army, while at the same time listening to a report from a messenger or taking part in a conversation with someone whose ideas he thought important. Three different lines of thought, three different things to do and think about, and he did it all without mistaking one for the other, did it as if it was nothing difficult or unusual. His nights were divided into three parts, one to rest, one to affairs of state, and “one to the study of literature,” by which Ammianus means the most serious study of the most serious things: “And it was marvelous with what excessive ardor he investigated and attained to the sublime knowledge of the the loftiest matters, and how, seeking as it were some food for his mind which might give it strength to climb up to the sublimest truths, he ran through every branch of philosophy in profound and subtle discussions.”

Always cautious, Julian waited until he became emperor to reveal what he really believed about the Christian religion that had come to dominate the empire. As Ammianus explains, Julian had only pretended to be a Christian. From “his earliest childhood he was inclined to the worship of the gods…yet he was influenced by many apprehensions which made him act in things relating to that subject as secretly as he could.” Ammianus is a careful writer. What he calls Julian’s “apprehensions” were his fear for his life, after his cousin, Constantius, who succeeded Constantine as emperor, murdered Julian’s father and nearly all his other relatives. “But when his fears were terminated, and he found himself at liberty to do what he pleased, he then showed his secret inclinations, and by plain and positive decrees ordered the temples to be opened, and victims to be brought to the altars for the worship of the gods.”

Christianity, with its promise of life after death, made what happened here and now, what happened to the empire, unimportant. Their eyes on heaven, Christians had no use for the belief in Roman greatness, much less the martial discipline that had made that greatness possible. Without the belief in Roman greatness, without the belief in a Rome protected by the gods, Rome and all it meant, including the honor paid to Greek philosophy, would vanish from the world and the world would descend into a darkness that might become perpetual. To restore the ancient gods of Rome, Julian had to destroy Christianity, and the best way to do that was to let Christianity destroy itself. He insisted that everyone should be free to follow the religion of their choice. “He did this the more resolutely because, as long as license increased their dissensions, he thought he should never have to fear the unanimity of the common people, having found by experience that no wild beasts are so hostile to men as Christian sects in general are to one another.”

Twenty-two months after he became emperor, Julian died in battle. He was only thirty years of age. Whether killed by a Persian spear or murdered by one of his own, Christian, soldiers, the last obstacle to Christian dominance, and the last chance for a Roman restoration, died with him. Fifty years later, the Roman empire, no longer able, or willing, to save itself, had been destroyed, but the fear of Julian and what he tried to do lived on. Twelve hundred years after his death, in the middle of the religious wars of the 16th century, Montesquieu was sufficiently worried that something he wrote in his famous work, The Spirit of the Laws, might offend Christians, remarked: “Let us momentarily lay aside the revealed truths; seek in all of nature and you will find no greater object than the Antonines, Julian even, Julian (a vote thus wrenched from me will not make me an accomplice in his apostasy); no, since him there has been no prince more worthy of governing men.”

Montesquieu wrote this, again, twelve hundred years after Julian died, and Julian died after having served as emperor for only twenty-two months. Why was Julian still remembered, and why was he still hated? Why did his name still inspire so much fear that someone of Montesquieu’s genius would feel compelled to surround his praise of Julian with an apology? Because Julian was that rarest of human beings, someone of a kind never seen before, and, after his death, never seen again: a philosopher-king who, by knowing his place in the order of the world knew how to bring order to the things of the world.

Ammianus Marcellinus was with Julian when he died, and gives a report of his last conversation, his final account of what he had done:

The reasonable moment for my surrendering this life…has now arrived, and, like an honest debtor, I exult in preparing to restore what nature reclaims.” Death is a gift of kindness, “to save me from yielding to arduous difficulties, and from forgetting or losing myself; knowing by experience that all sorrows, while they triumph over the weak, flee before those who endure them manfully.

Nor have I to repent of any actions; nor am I oppressed by the recollection of any grave crime, either when I was kept in the shade, and, as it were, in a corner, or after I arrived at the empire, which, as an honor conferred on me by the gods, I have preserved, as I believe, unstained.” Because “the aim of a just sovereign is the advantage and safety of his subjects, I have always, as you know, inclined to peace, eradicating all licentiousness - that great corrupters of things and manners - by every part of my own conduct; and I am glad to feel that in whatever instances the republic, like an imperious mother, has exposed me deliberately to danger, I have held firm, inured to brave all fortuitous disturbing events.

At the end, when everyone around him was weeping, Julian “reproved them with still undiminished authority, saying that it was a humiliating thing to mourn for an emperor who was just united to heaven and the stars.” Then, when everyone became silent, Julian “entered into an intricate discussion…on the sublime nature of the soul.”

In a summation of Julian’s greatness, Ammianus remarks, “He was older in virtue than in years, being eager to acquire all kinds of knowledge. He was the most incorruptible judge, a rigid censor of morals and manners, mild, a despiser of riches, and indeed of all mortal things. Lastly, it was a common saying of his, ‘That it was beneath a wise man, since he had a soul, to aim at acquiring praise by his body.’”

Ammianus goes on to provide a detailed summary of Julian’s virtues and achievements, but, except for a brief mention of “Misopogon,’ an attack on the licentiousness of the residents of Antioch, he does not say anything, here or anywhere else, about Julian’s writings. That Ammianus, a most careful writer, mentions, almost in passing, only one thing Julian wrote, makes us wonder whether Ammianus thought Julian’s other writings too dangerous, too subversive of the prevalent beliefs, to write about openly, and in that way calls attention, silently, as it were, to their importance.

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, published in 1941, Leo Strauss explained what writers like Julian understood. “Thoughtless men are careless readers, and only thoughtful men are careful readers. Therefore an author who wishes to address only thoughtful men has had to write in such a way that only a careful reader can detect the meaning of his book.” On the occasion of Leo Strauss’s sixty-fifth birthday, Alexandre Kojeve, that most profound student of Hegel, wrote an essay entitled, “The Emperor Julian and His Art of Writing,” to honor Leo Strauss by “trying to read between the lines of an author worthy of him for the author in question is not only an ancient philosopher but also an authentic emperor….” Julian had “referred explicitly to that ‘art of writing’ of which Leo Strauss had spoken in almost identical terms apparently without knowing what his august predecessor had said of it.”

In his discourse, “In Response to the Cynic Heracleios,” Julian had written: “For not everything ought to be said, and even of those things which it is lawful to say [to an elite], certain things, in my opinion, must be kept quiet before the many.” Convinced that the empire could be saved only by having his “subjects told pagan myths, and this in such a way that the great majority would begin again to believe them,” Julian did this in his philosophical writings “in such a way that his chosen readers would not believe them at all although they would divine the truths which he wished to teach in telling them.”

Julian’s art of writing was, for Kojeve, “most astonishing. For although he permitted himself to tell us unmistakably that he himself did not believe in any of the theological myths which were told with more or less success in his epoch, it is not as an atheistic philosopher but as a self-proclaimed ‘devout pagan’ and ‘Neo-Platonic mystic,’ that history has transmitted him to us.” Kojeve closes his essay with his own, unique, tribute to Julian’s art of writing: “Telling of Julian’s art of writing, I hope I have not betrayed his secret…by writing these pages. For these pages will say nothing of interest to those whom the Emperor wanted to exclude from the small number of comprehending readers of his philosophical writings. They will indeed say nothing at all.”

Proof that Kojeve was right, that what he wrote about Julian’s art of writing would say nothing to those from whom Julian continued to conceal his meaning, came the same year Kojeve wrote his essay, when Gore Vidal published Julian, his novel in which the Emperor Julian is portrayed as a “devout pagan,’ and a “Neo-Platonic mystic.’ The novel was a best seller, while Kojeve’s essay, like the article Leo Strauss had written in l941, was read by only a handful of careful readers. It is perhaps not entirely accidental that the only novel to take Julian’s art of writing seriously, Julian’s Laughter, was written by an author who had the great good fortune both to study under Leo Strauss and to read The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard is the New York Times bestselling author of 23 novels for adults and teenagers, and the recipient of Great Britain’s Talkabout prize, The Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards, and named to the short list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Her newest novel, A Very Inconvenient Scandal, the story of Frankie Attleboro, an acclaimed young underwater photographer reeling from her mother’s shocking death, whose famous marine biologist father shatters the family by marrying Frankie’s best friend, is out from Mira/HarperCollins.

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

I like to read several different kinds of things, especially while I’m writing a novel. It once was true that I couldn’t let myself read any fiction for fear that I might steal from the author or fall into despair, but I can manage now (I hope). The books I’m reading now really span the globe of styles and topics and, while I never get bored with any of them, I switch back and forth among them because I’m such a fast reader I’m afraid I’ll gobble them up too quickly if I don’t.

At this point, I’m reading:

The Child 44 trilogy by Tom Rob Smith … it’s a cracking good historical mystery series about a disgraced military detective who chases a serial killer of children in the early days of the Soviet Union, when the official position of the state was that crime could not exist in a society in which people were emotionally fulfilled and happy because all their needs were met – which was anything but the case.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward … A reimagining of American slavery by the most powerful young author in the land, this book absolutely hammers the heart but also opens it to hope.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll. Jessica Knoll is absolutely on fire, having written Luckiest Girl Alive, recently adapted for a film with Mila Kunis, about a young woman who survived a school shooting. In her newest, Knoll tells the story of a woman whose fate it was to be the eyewitness to the man who carried out a fatal rampage at a Florida sorority house: While clearly based on the last murders by serial killer Ted Bundy, Knoll’s protagonist, Pamela Schumacher, refuses to speak the name of the man she calls only “The Defendant,” undercutting the media perception of him as bright, handsome, and charming – a fictional critique of the real-life reporting on Bundy.

A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand – This eerie and frankly ghostly story is the only officially sanctioned continuation of Shirley Jackson’s terrifying classic The Haunting of Hill House. It tells of Holly Sherwin, a playwright who fears she’s washed up but who gathers a group of actors and musicians for a two-week rental at Hill House (which still stands against its hills, not sane, holding silence within) to work on her comeback, a production about a woman charged with witchcraft.

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai – I was so looking forward to this new novel by the acclaimed author of The Great Believers that I almost wouldn’t let myself begin it. And, of course, once I did, I devoured this boarding-school mystery about a murder and its echoes, which manages to be deeply personal and sharply political too.

Visit Jacquelyn Mitchard's website.

My Book, the Movie: Two If by Sea.

The Page 69 Test: Two If by Sea.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Son.

Q&A with Jacquelyn Mitchard.

My Book, The Movie: The Good Son.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica Waters

Erica Waters is a lifelong Southerner who recently moved to Salem, Massachusetts. She writes dark fantasy and horror for young adults. Her second novel, The River Has Teeth, won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel and was also an Indie Next pick and a Kirkus Best Young Adult Book of 2021. Waters’s other works include Ghost Wood Song and The Restless Dark. She is also a contributor to the bestselling folk horror anthology The Gathering Dark.

Her new novel is All That Consumes Us.

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

I read a lot of YA horror and dark fantasy that I am asked to blurb. I’m always delighted when one is truly excellent, like the one I just finished: A Place for Vanishing by Ann Fraistat, a YA haunted house story that truly surprised me. It’s filled with masks and bugs and seances, which aren’t things I would have ever thought to put together. I loved the immersive, atmospheric setting and how vividly I could picture everything. Fraistat is particularly good at pacing, setting, and family relationships, especially between siblings. It made for a great spooky season read!

Right now I’m reading Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, a biography of one of my favorite writers. I love getting an up-close look at a writer’s growth and evolution, and so far this book seems particularly good at showing how Jackson slowly became the brilliant writer we all adore. Getting to see her humanness and the development of her craft close up is fascinating, though I know there are some rough life scenes ahead. But as a writer, getting a glimpse into the interior life of an author I admire takes some of the loneliness out of the craft. Even the greats had to go through the process, same as the rest of us.

I just started reading Starling House by Alix E. Harrow, an author I haven’t read before. Because my own books are Southern Gothic-ish, this one has been recommended to me a lot. Set in the South and featuring an unsettling house and a low-income protagonist, it is certainly right up my alley. I am only a handful of chapters in, but I’m already loving the format, with its footnotes, Wikipedia entries, and sense of the unreliability of storytelling.

Visit Erica Waters's website.

Q&A with Erica Waters.

--Marshal Zeringue

R.W.W. Greene

When R.W.W. Greene isn’t writing, he teaches college English and keeps bees. His new book, Earth Retrograde, is the end of a story started in 2022’s Mercury Rising.

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

I read a lot. This year I tried to keep track of it all, and according to GoodReads, I’ve put 96 books in my brain since Jan. 1. I read mostly for pleasure, sometimes for education, occasionally seeking a model for my own writing.

The day before yesterday, I finished Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars. It’s a wonderfully strange mashup of sci-fi and fantasy, doughnuts, competitive-violin playing, online sex work, and found family. I loved it.

Right before that, I read The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey. You might recognize him from his Sandman Slim stuff, but this is not that. It’s morphine- and burlesque-drenched post-apocalyptic urban fantasy/sci-fi with androids, genetically-modified organisms, and a bike-messenger hero. Just gorgeous stuff. Each page reeks of coal smoke.

Yesterday, I read The Secret Sky Express or Slim Tyler Saving a Fortune, a 1932 ‘book for boys’ by Richard H. Stone. I read it for the first time back when it was more age appropriate and picked it up again because I’m writing some pulpy adventure stuff and wanted to have that voice in my head. Not all of it. Slim Tyler and his pals have a tendency to ‘ejaculate’ words when they’re excited, and I like to stick with ‘said’.

What’s next? I shant tell you the title, but it’s a sci-fi book that I’ve opened several times in the last couple of days but keep bouncing off of. I can’t get any traction on the paragraphs, and I’m not sure if it’s a problem with me or with the book. I’m going to give it one more try tonight.

If you want to see all ninety-six that I’ve read so far, you can check out my GoodReads page. I’m R.W.W. Greene there, too.

Visit R.W.W. Greene's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mercury Rising.

Q&A with R.W.W. Greene.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yoon Ha Lee

A Korean-American sf/f writer who received a B.A. in math from Cornell University and an M.A. in math education from Stanford University, Yoon Ha Lee finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Lee’s novel Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera Dragon Pearl won the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Literature and the Locus Award for best YA novel, and was a New York Times bestseller. Lee’s short fiction has appeared in publications such as Tor.com, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Audubon Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies.

Lee’s hobbies include composing music, art, and destroying the reader. He lives in Louisiana with his husband and an extremely lazy catten.

Lee's new novel is Fox Snare.

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

I’m reading a few things right now, but the current standouts are:

S. L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws, a delightful genderspun take on the Chinese classic novel Water Margin (I have not read that one). Larger-than-life adventure, martial arts, and wuxia-style magic and derring-do! I am especially taken with the way the monk Lu Da is introduced: among other things, she was expelled for missing curfew 173 times due to drunkenness.

C. J. Cherryh’s Heavy Time, which is part of her long-running Alliance-Union universe. So far it’s a claustrophobically tense thriller through the viewpoint of two spacers who rescue the survivor of a ruined starship that may be the key to a terrible secret. It’s followed by Hellburner, which I am told raises the stakes even more. If I’m honest, I’m also reading to find out what the heck it is strategist/captain Conrad Mazian, who I met in Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, does in Hellburner!

I was lucky enough that Django Wexler sent me an ARC of his book How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (forthcoming May 21, 2024), which is a delightful take on portal fantasy (or isekai if you like Japanese light novels/manga/anime). The villain protagonist, Davi, is stuck in a Groundhog Day-like time loop, which she uses to her advantage to defy a shitty Chosen One destiny and claw her way to the winning side. I am on Team Davi forever! Also because I don’t want her to destroy me for opposing her!

(Maybe I can sic Master Arms Instructor Lin Chong, Conrad Mazian, and Dark Lord Davi on each other and run away in the confusion? That’s my strategy, because I am a gigantic coward…)

Visit Yoon Ha Lee's website.

The Page 69 Test: Revenant Gun.

My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.

Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee.

The Page 69 Test: Fox Snare.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller 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, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Robert Penn Warren's All The King’s Men:

In the l930s, during the Great Depression, there were those who feared that democracy might not survive. All you had to do was look at what Huey Long was doing in Louisiana to see that the danger was real. One of the most brilliant men in politics, Huey Long, studying sixteen to twenty hours a day, had finished law school at Tulane in eight months, instead of the three years it took everyone else, and became a member of the Louisiana bar when he was only twenty-one. Fourteen years later, when he was thirty-five, he was elected Governor and changed Louisiana government out of all recognition. Local government was all but abolished, and election commissioners were appointed by the state, which meant that Long could make sure the vote was whatever he wanted it to be. And in case anyone should challenge on constitutional grounds anything he wanted to do, he filled the Supreme Court with men completely loyal to him.

Government was corrupt, but no one much cared. Huey Long got things done; more than that, Huey Long was what everyone wanted to be. When he spoke, he said what everyone in the crowd had always felt, but could never find the words to say. He was their idol, what they would give anything to be themselves. He had so much popular support, so much control over what went on in Louisiana that he once walked onto the floor of the state legislature and directed passage of 44 bills in 22 minutes, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Two years after he was elected Governor, he was elected to the United States Senate. Governor, Senator, the only thing left was the presidency, the only question whether it would be in l936 or 1940. He knew exactly what he was going to do: create a third party, destroy the Democratic and Republican parties, serve four terms, and govern the country the way he governed Louisiana. Far from hiding his ambition, he described to a reporter for the New York Times how he was going to become the first American dictator. Franklin Roosevelt thought him one of the two most dangerous men in the country.

While Huey Long was creating a system of free healthcare and education, and building highways where only dirt roads had run, while he was showing how someone with a mass following could trample on all the safeguards of democracy. a young teacher in the English department at Louisiana State University, fascinated by what he saw, started thinking about writing a novel. Huey Long’s slogan had been “Every man a king;” Robert Penn Warren called his novel All The King’s Men. As the title suggests, the novel is not about the king, the Governor, Willie Stark; it is about the people around him.

The central character is Jack Burden, who tells the story the way a Southern writer used to tell a story, with long, sometimes endless, sentences, like the one that describes his first glimpse of Willie Stark: “Fate comes walking through the door, and it is five foot eleven inches tall and heavyish in the chest and shortish in the leg and is wearing a seven-fifty seersucker suit which is too long in the pants so the cuffs crumple down over the high black shoes, which could do with a polishing, and a stiff high collar like a Sunday school superintendent and a blue-striped tie which you know his wife gave him last Christmas…and a gray felt hat with the sweat stains showing through the band. It comes in just like that, and how are you to know?”

Willie Stark, treasurer of rural Mason County, objected when the contract for the construction of a new schoolhouse was given to a contractor who gave kickbacks to politicians and used substandard materials to save himself money. Stark’s warning lost him the support of those same politicians and cost him the next election. Three years later, the fire escape collapsed during a fire drill at the school, three children were killed, a dozen others seriously crippled, and Willie Stark “had Mason County in the palm of his hand.” A hero, the man who had tried to stop the political corruption that had led to the schoolhouse tragedy, he campaigned for the candidate running against the candidate of the machine.

Willie Stark’s speeches weren’t any good, but that did not matter. People came out to see the man who had tried to fight against the corruption that seemed to be everywhere. Then, in the next election, the state’s power brokers “persuaded Willie that he was the savior of the state.” A lot of people thought Willie had a special relationship with God from what had happened with the schoolhouse, and Willie himself believed he “had been summoned.” This, as Burden explains with rare insight into the character of ambitious politicians, was “nothing but the echo of a certainty and a blind compulsion within him.” Certain that he is destined to save the state from political corruption, Willie Stark tells everyone he can get to listen exactly what needs to be done, all the facts and figures about the “ratio between income tax and total income for the state,” all the arcane reasoning that supports a more “balanced tax program.” He tells them, in other words, what no one understands and what no one wants to hear about.

Jack Burden, who starts out covering his campaign as a reporter but becomes Stark’s most trusted advisor, insists that he has to get people excited, make them feel alive again. “That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything, but for Sacred Jesus’s sake, don’t try to improve their minds.” But Willie Stark believes that, if people will only listen, they will understand what he is trying to do. He believes it, until he finds out
from his campaign manager, a woman who has been hired by the very people Stark thinks he is fighting, that he has been had, that he is being used to split the vote of one candidate to elect the other.

“They’d have paid you to take the rap,” she tells him with scorn, “but they didn’t have to pay a sap like you. Oh, no, you were so full of yourself and hot air and how you are Jesus Christ, that all you wanted was a chance to stand on your hind legs and make a speech.”

Willie Stark, who had seldom taken a drink in his life, gets blind drunk. The next day, at the fairgrounds, where he is scheduled to give a speech, he tells the crowd a story, the story of a “hick,” the story of how some fine upstanding important men came in “a big fine car and say how they wanted him to run for Governor.” He was a hick, but, he tells the crowd, they are “hicks, too, and the’ve fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me. For that’s what they think we’re for. To fool. Well, this time I’m going to fool somebody. I’m getting out of the race.” But instead of going quietly into the night, he is going to run for Governor again, and when he does, “I’m coming on my own and I’m coming for blood.” He keeps his word. He runs in the next election and becomes Governor.

The story of Willie Stark is the classic story of innocence lost, a story of how the fight against corruption brings with it a corruption of its own. The end, being admirable, makes the means, however evil, seem necessary. Willie Stark, determined to do good, cannot do it unless he is prepared to fight, and fighting, when you are in danger of losing, makes winning seem suddenly the only rule. It is not just Willie Stark; the same thing happens to everyone who goes with him, all the king’s men, whose lives and careers are tied up with his. Willie Stark wanted to do good, and he did. He gave the people what they wanted, and what they needed: free education, modern highways, a tax system in which the rich, finally, paid their fair share, and one more thing: a hospital, the best in the country, maybe the best in the world, bigger, finer than anything ever built; a hospital where, in Stark’s own words, “any bugger in this state can go there and get the best there is and not cost him a dime.”

The hospital is an obsession. Stark plans to name it after himself, tangible proof that he had done something important, something of value. But it is not enough to build it; he has to get someone to run it, and the best person to do it is Dr. Adam Stanton, Jack Burden’s boyhood friend. But Adam Stanton, whose father had been governor, and whose sister had once been engaged to Jack Burden, despised Willie Stark and all he stood for. Burden tells Stark that Stanton hates him, but Stark does not care. “I’m not asking him to love me. I’m asking him to run my hospital.” He tells Burden to change Stanton’s mind.

When they were young, Burden and Adam’s sister, Anne, would go for long walks together while Adam “spent his time reading Gibbon or Tacitus, for he was great on Rome back then.” This allusion to a young man’s appreciation of ancient, public, virtue establishes the difference, the radical difference, in the way Adam Stanton sees things. When Burden tells him that Willie Stark knows his weakness - “You want to do good, and he is going to let you do good in wholesale lots.” - Adam shakes his head and smiles, a “smile which did not forgive me but humbly asked me to forgive him for not being like me, for not being like everybody else, for not being like the world.” It is only when his sister, Anne, reminds him that he is a doctor, and that he should not put his pride before his duty, that he agrees to meet with Stark.

Later, standing with his sister and Jack Burden, listening to Willie Stark speak to a crowd in front of the Capitol, he remarks that Stark’s promises about what he is going to do are a bribe, a way to win popular approval, and power for himself. Stark will do anything to get what he wants, what they all want. Stark brags about it: “And if any man tries to stop me…I’ll break him. I’ll break him like that!” he cried, crashing his right fist into the left palm. “And I don’t care what I hit him with. Or how!” The crowd roared, and Burden yells into Anne’s ear: “He damned well means that.”

There is corruption everywhere, and Willie Stark knows it. He has Burden investigate a retired judge, a man Burden has always looked up to and believes incorruptible. Stark isn’t asking him to make something up. It is not necessary to frame anybody, “because the truth is always sufficient.” He was right. Judge Irwin had once, years earlier, taken a bribe, the only way he had to avoid foreclosure on his home. When this comes out, Irwin kills himself, and Burden’s mother tells her son that the judge he had revered, the judge he had now, to all intents and purposes, killed, was his father. The tragedy, the tale of corruption, does not end there. Governor Stanton had known what Judge Irwin had done, and had helped cover it up.

Burden’s father, Anne and Adam Stanton’s father, two of the most respected men in the state, men who had, both of them, done a great deal of good, had also done something bad; but so, also, had their children. Jack Burden had gone along with whatever Willie Stark had decided to do, even investigating people, like Judge Irwin, with whom he had been close. Anne Stanton, the woman Jack Burden had loved, and deep down, still did, had done something worse. She had become the mistress of Willie Stark. Burden’s reaction, when he finds this out, is described in a way no commonplace writer could have done. Robert Penn Warren does not describe the emotions - the hurt, the anger, the rage - Burden must have felt; he describes what Burden notices as he rushes out of the Capitol:

“It seemed forever down the length of white sun-glittering concrete which curled and swooped among the bronze statues and brilliant flower beds shaped like stars and crescents, and forever across the green lawn to the great swollen bulbs which were the trees, and forever up into the sky, where the sun poured down billows and surges of heat like crystalline lava to engulf you, for the last breath of spring was gone now and gone for good….”

Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark. “That fact was too horrible to face, for it robbed me of something out of the past by which, unwittingly until that moment, I had been living.” Anne was not sorry for what she had done. Willie Stark wasn’t like “anybody else I had ever known.” She wasn’t sorry, “not for anything that’s happened.” Her brother, Adam, was sorry, sorry he had let himself be used, sorry he had listened to his sister and to Jack Burden when they told him he had a duty, if he wanted to do good, to take Willie Stark’s offer and become director of the new hospital. Adam Stanton was not like other people; he was not going to be the “paid pimp to his sister’s whore.” Taking his revenge, he shoots Willie Stark on the steps of the Capitol, and is then killed himself.

It was the same way Huey Long had been killed, killed by a doctor whose father was a judge. As he lay dying, Huey Long asked why he had been shot. Showing a deeper grasp of the relation of good and evil, Willie Stark tells Jack Burden, “If it hadn’t happened, it might - have been different - even yet.”

Jack Burden marries Anne Stanton and they move away; out, we are told in the novel’s final sentence, “into the convulsions of the world, out of history and into history and the awful responsibility of Time.” Which means, if it means anything, that they are going to live their own, private, lives, and only think of the good they can do each other, the kind of good that does not have evil as its price.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Epstein

Allison Epstein earned her MFA in fiction from Northwestern University and a BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A Michigan native, she now lives in Chicago, where she works as an editor. When not writing, she enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets.

She is the author of historical novels including A Tip for the Hangman, the newly released Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and the forthcoming Our Rotten Hearts.

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

I'm currently about halfway through In Memoriam by Alice Winn, a queer love story set at the front during World War I. Books about 20th century wars are generally not what I go for, but I was persuaded to pick this one up, and I'm glad I did. The two main characters are only eighteen years old, and it really captures the feeling of being that age, when everything is desperately important and embarrassment could kill you. It's wonderful and heartbreaking and I'll need something very lighthearted to follow.

Before that, I recently enjoyed R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, a thriller slash publishing industry send-up about a white woman who steals an unpublished manuscript from her deceased Asian friend. I keep seeing this one described as "compulsively readable," and that's accurate! I kept reading one more chapter... and then just one more chapter... As someone currently navigating the publishing industry, this book also sent my blood pressure skyrocketing. Sorry to my doctor.

I'd also like to shout out A Sweet Sting of Salt, a debut novel by Rose Sutherland that's coming next April. It's a queer retelling of the fairy tale "The Selkie Wife," about a 19th-century Canadian midwife and the mysterious, beautiful young woman who turns up pregnant at her door during a storm. I was lucky to get an advance copy of this book, which is gorgeous and atmospheric and wonderful. I mean, sapphic yearning by the sea is one of my favorite subgenres.

Finally, I'm working on writing a Dickens retelling right now, so a few weeks ago I decided this was the time to finally read Bleak House. It's so much weirder than I expected! It's a legal drama blended together with a Victorian drama of manners, a Gothic romance, a detective thriller, and Lord knows what all else. I'd like to read it again and pay more attention to how it all hangs together, but I need a break before I pick that 900-page brick back up. (Also, Inspector Bucket should get his own movie franchise, Knives Out style. Who do I need to contact.)

Visit Allison Epstein's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Tip for the Hangman.

The Page 69 Test: A Tip for the Hangman.

Q&A with Allison Epstein.

My Book, The Movie: Let the Dead Bury the Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Let the Dead Bury the Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paula Munier

Paula Munier is a literary agent and the USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. The sequel Blind Search, inspired by the real-life rescue of a little boy with autism who got lost in the woods, was followed by The Hiding Place in 2021 and The Wedding Plot in 2022.

Munier's new Mercy Carr mystery is Home at Night.

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

I’m always reading several books at a time, all in different formats: There are the hardcovers on my coffee table that I read whenever I take a break from work. There are the audiobooks I listen to as I’m cooking dinner every night. And there are the e-books I read on my iPhone in the dark at night in bed before I fall asleep. Some of the books are research and some are just for fun. And some are big break-out novels that I read to see what the fuss is all about.

I've been rereading Ulysses by James Joyce, and it's way more compelling this time around, much more so than it was when I was a young woman reading it. It’s taking a long time because I have to look up a lot of the Latin as my Catholic-school Latin is a little rusty these days. Along the same literary lines, I'm also reading the new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the classic into English. I listened to it on audiobook first, and now I'm reading the print version. It’s really quite good. Wilson’s translation of The Iliad just came out, and I’ll have to read that next.

I also read a lot of nonfiction, especially related to science and nature and, well, death. I’m loving All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes, by Sue Black. It’s a fascinating study of all the aspects of death—physical, emotional, cultural, and more. All fuel for the fire of a mystery writer’s imagination.

For fun I’m reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves; I’ll read anything she writes. I’m filing Edwin Hill’s fab thriller Who to Believe under the just-for-fun category, too, even though I have to read it with the lights on. It’s the same for The Sandbox by Andrews & Wilson, which is a wicked scary AI story. Finally, there’s Emma Straub’s All Adults Here, a warm and wise novel about one matriarch’s mission to correct the mistakes she’s made with her family, like it or not.

On my TBR list for the snowy days of winter ahead: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, and What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman.

Visit Paula Munier's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Paula Munier & Bear.

My Book, The Movie: A Borrowing of Bones.

The Page 69 Test: A Borrowing of Bones.

My Book, The Movie: Blind Search.

The Page 69 Test: Blind Search.

My Book, The Movie: The Hiding Place.

The Page 69 Test: The Hiding Place.

Q&A with Paula Munier.

My Book, The Movie: The Wedding Plot.

The Page 69 Test: The Wedding Plot.

--Marshal Zeringue