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 Life of George Washington by Washington Irving:

When George Washington died, just weeks before the end of the l8th century, an eminent British statesman, Lord Brougham, wrote: “The fame of Washington stands apart from every other in history.” He then added: “It will be the duty of the historian and the sage of all nations, to let no occasion pass of commemorating this illustrious man, and until time shall be no more, will a test of the progress which our race has made in wisdom and virtue, be derived from the veneration paid to the immortal name of Washington.”

This is the last sentence written in Washington Irving’s biography of George Washington, the first volume of which was published in l855. The fifth, and last volume, was published four years later in l859, sixty years after Washington’s death, and a year before the American Civil War. It was then still possible to entertain the hope that veneration for Washington would remain the measure for the progress made in the wisdom and virtue of Americans. The example of Abraham Lincoln, with his invocation of “our fathers,” seemed to prove the possibility.

For a long time Washington and Lincoln were seen as the models of what American greatness and nobility meant. More than what they had done, the kind of men they had been, was thought to be the standard by which to judge our own best efforts. Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday were both made national holidays, the only American statesmen to be so honored. Then, when our own early history became ancient, when the American Founding and the American Civil War began to recede further back in time and became part of a largely unremembered past, their example no longer seemed quite so relevant, and nothing like so urgent. The twentieth century, which some called the century of the common man, was less interested in the unique achievements of uniquely gifted human beings, and more concerned with what normal, average, people might be able to do. The two national holidays, now become archaic, were eliminated, replaced with just one, Presidents' Day, which celebrated everyone who had ever held the office, all of them treated with equal regard. Washington and Lincoln were no better, and no worse, than Warren Harding or Donald Trump.

Among the important documents Washington Irving included in the appendix to his biography is the statement issued by President John Adams on the death of George Washington. Remarkably close to what Lord Brougham had written, it carried an implicit warning about the future: “His example is now complete; and it will teach wisdom and virtue to magistrates, citizens, and men, not only in the present age, but in future generations, as long as our history shall be read.”

Yes, precisely; as long as our history shall be read. Adams might have added, so long as the history that is written tells the story as it was meant to be told. The history that Washington Irving writes is not the history written now. The story of Washington’s formative years, the history of the American Revolution, the history of Washington’s presidency, are told with all the detail anyone could want; but the details - the events, the decisions Washington made or did not make - are secondary, as it were, to the character of the man. Irving wants to tell us what there was about Washington that invariably led him to put the interests of his country over any of his own. He writes about the “wisdom and virtue” that marked the life of Washington in ways which, to eyes grown used to the small ambitions and tawdry corruptions of self-serving politicians, seem at times almost unbelievable.

Washington had at his birth in 1732 a background few others could claim: a family that traced itself back through six centuries of English history. “Hereditary rank may be an illusion; but hereditary virtue gives a patent of innate nobleness beyond all blazoners of Herald’s College.” Despite being part of Virginia’s landed aristocracy, Washington never attempted the “learned languages.” He studied mathematics and became an expert surveyor; so good that, when he was only sixteen, he made a survey of the Fairfax estate, the largest estate in Virginia, a property so large it took weeks to cross it on horseback. His knowledge of the territory was so extensive that, a few years later, he was attached to the British forces under General Braddock in the French and Indian war. Ignoring Washington’s advice about what the Indians were likely to do, Braddock led his men into a lethal ambush in which twenty-six of his eighty-six officers were killed and thirty-six wounded; two hundred of the rank and file lost their lives. Washington should have been killed. Two horses were shot out from under him, and four bullets passed through his coat without any harm. Years later, the Indian chief who led the attack, told Washington that, watching what happened, he and the other chieftains had decided that he must be the favorite of the Great Spirit who ruled over all of them.

Washington’s name was known everywhere. Elected to the legislature, his installation was greeted “by a singular testament of respect.” The Speaker “returned thanks for his distinguished military service.” Washington was so moved he could not speak. “Sit down, Mr. Washington,” he was told, “your modesty equals your valor, and that surpasses the powers of any language I possess.” When the discontent of the colonies with England required concerted action, Washington was sent, along with Patrick Henry and Edmund Randolph, to Philadelphia to meet with representatives from the other colonies. The fifty one delegates were, in the judgement of John Adams,“such an assembly as never before came together on a sudden, in any part of the world.” Out of that assembly, Patrick Henry thought Rutledge of South Carolina the best orator, but “if you speak of solid information and sound judgement,” Washington had been the greatest man there.

When peaceful efforts failed and the war began, Washington knew what he would do. “It is my full intention, if needful, to devote my life and fortune to the cause.” No one doubted he would do what he said, or that he should be put in command of the American forces. It is curious, the way Washington was seen by others, the remarkable first impression he made. When the wife of John Adams saw him for the first time, she wrote to her husband, describing what she had seen: “Dignity, ease, and complacency, the gentleman and the soldier look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face. The lines of Dryden instantly occurred to me:

“‘Mark his majestic fabric! He’s a temple
Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine;
His soul’s the deity that lodges there:
Nor is the pile unworthy of the God.’”

The lines of Dryden! And we talk about all the progress we have made! We ought to be talking about how it is possible that the men and women who led this country at the beginning knew so much more than we do now what makes someone worthy of admiration.

When the war was over and independence had been won, Congress wanted “to produce some national reward for his imminent services.” Washington respectfully declined the offer, “jealously maintaining the satisfaction of having served his country at the sacrifice of his private interests.” That sacrifice was just beginning. Independence had been won; the question now was whether the Americans could govern themselves. In the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, and for three months, under the watchful supervision of George Washington, the unanimous choice to preside over their deliberations, engaged in an exhaustive examination of how to create a government to protect, instead of destroy, the rights of its citizens. The Constitution was written; it had to be ratified by the states. It was approved, but in some of the states only “by a mere majority,” and only then because it was generally understood that the executive office - the presidency - would be held by Washington himself. By the unanimous vote of the new electoral college, George Washington became the first president of the United States. The country felt safe; Washington felt like a “culprit, who is going to his place of execution.”

Two things were needed immediately: someone who could put the country’s finances on a solid basis, and someone who could deal effectively with England, France, and Spain, the three countries which still retained a presence in North America. Washington chose Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury and Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State, two men with widely different views of the kind of government the country should have. Hamilton had made no secret of his belief that the “idea of a perfect equality of political rights among the citizens, exclusive of a permanent or hereditary distinction,” was a proposition open to serious doubt. The new Constitution, however, deserved “the good wishes of every good man, whatever might be his theoretic doubts….” He meant what he said. He was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, the greatest single defense of the Constitution ever put in print.

Jefferson had not been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention; he had been in Paris, awaiting what he hoped would be the end of both the French monarchy and the French aristocracy. He was alarmed to discover there was no limit to how often the president could be re-elected. Perpetual re-eligibility meant, in his mind, the inevitability of perpetual rule. It was only a matter of time before the president became a monarch, and, he was convinced, no one was more interested in having this happen than Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, for his part, thought Jefferson more than a little insane. “The idea of introducing monarchy or aristocracy in this country…is one of those visionary things that none but madmen could meditate, and that no wise man will believe.”

What began as a disagreement over political principles soon devolved into a personal hatred made all the more intense by the French Revolution. Jefferson did not just favor the French Revolution, he hoped, according to Irving, that “revolution would be established and spread all over the world.” It did not matter the cost. When thousands were put to death during the Jacobin reign of terror, Jefferson thought it unfortunate, but rather than the revolution “should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it now is.” For all his hatred of monarchy, however, Jefferson never included in his condemnations the one man who, had he wanted to, might have become an American monarch. When Washington seemed to have decided against a second term, Jefferson begged him to reconsider. No one else could stop the country from tearing itself apart; only Washington in the presidency guaranteed against the fear of a monarchy he believed Hamilton was plotting to bring about.

Washington agreed to serve a second term and was, for the second time, elected by the unanimous vote of the electoral college. The country would stay united, and the war between Hamilton and Jefferson would only get worse. Jefferson might believe that the French Revolution was only a continuation of the fight for the rights of man that had started with the American Revolution; Hamilton thought only a fool could fail to see the differences.

“Would to Heaven we could discern, in the mirror of the French affairs, the same decorum, the same gravity, the same virtue, the same dignity, the same solemnity, which distinguished the cause of the American Revolution!” The difference between them was “no less than that between liberty and license.”

Hamilton might write about the evils of the French Revolution, but when France declared war on England, the country followed Jefferson in support of France, and turned not just on Hamilton, but on Washington. The President’s insistence on a policy of strict neutrality was treated with contempt. It was nothing less than “a daring assumption of power; an open manifestation of partiality for England and hostility to France.” Washington had known what would happen; he had understood that “in withstanding the public infatuation with France,” he might lose all his popularity; “but he put it at hazard without hesitation; and in so doing set a magnanimous example for his successors in office to endeavor to follow.” An endeavor, it is perhaps needless to remark, few of his successors have thought advisable to attempt themselves.

After eight years in the presidency, Washington was finally able to retire to his beloved Mount Vernon. A few months later, war with France suddenly a real possibility, John Adams insisted that only Washington could lead the army. His answer was as simple as it was direct: “As my whole life as been dedicated to my country in one shape or another, for the poor remains of it, it is not an object to control for quiet and ease, when all that is valuable is at stake, further than to be satisfied that the sacrifice I should make of these, is acceptable and desired by my country.”

It will no doubt be objected by some that Washington owned slaves and does not deserve our full respect. This is to be expected from those who learn their history without bothering to read a page of what was written at the time. Washington, and Jefferson as well, inherited vast plantations, which had for generations been worked by slaves, but both thought slavery an abomination that needed, somehow, to be ended. In September of 1786, Washington wrote to John F. Mercer that it was “among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.” Eleven years later, in August of 1797, he wrote to his nephew, Lawrence Lewis, “I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual abolition of slavery. It might prevent much future mischief.”

Two years later, the legislature still having done nothing to abolish slavery, Washington freed his own, and did it in a way that, once freed, his former slaves would be cared for. In his will he directed that those who were unable to support themselves because of infirmities or old age, “shall be comfortably clothed and fed by my heirs while they live.” Those still children were to be taught to read and write and “brought up to some useful occupation.” There was a specific provision for his “mulatto man, William.” He was free to do whatever he wished, but, because he was now incapable of walking or any “active employment,” he could also remain there, at Mount Vernon. Whatever he chose to do, he was to be given a fixed annuity during his natural life, “as testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful service during the revolutionary war.”

Who was George Washington? Washington Irving had an answer: “The character of Washington may want some of those poetical elements which dazzle and delight the multitude, but it possessed fewer irregularities, and a rarer union of virtues than perhaps ever fell to the lot of one man.”

If we do not honor George Washington as much as we once did, it proves only that we have, ourselves, become incapable of honor. Washington Irving’s biography is the perfect place to start if we want to remember what greatness and honorable conduct really means.

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; The Golden Bowl

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryan Gruley

Bryan Gruley is the Edgar-nominated author of seven novels and one award-winning work of nonfiction. A lifelong journalist, he shared in The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. A longtime Chicago resident, he now lives in northern lower Michigan with his wife, Pamela.

Gruley's new novel is River Deep.

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

I’m a judge for the Edgar Awards this year and my favorite book so far is—sorry, if I told you I’d have to kill you.

Best book I’ve read in the past few years: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, a book published many years ago that resonates even now. Moving, funny, suspenseful, heartbreaking, with a perfect first-person voice inhabited by an autistic boy. (Almost as effective voice-wise is the autistic boy in Ken Jaworowski’s What About the Bodies).

Another book I love is my fellow Michiganian Sara Maurer’s debut novel, A Good Animal. A gorgeous rendering of a romance on a sheep farm in the Upper Peninsula. I haven’t finished it because: contest reading.

Also, two books by guys named John:

Bear County, Michigan by John Counts. This short-story collection by my fellow journalist is funny and searing and written with clarity and simplicity that reveres attention to physical detail.

The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon. You think you know the story, but you don’t. You know the ending, but you will be on the proverbial edge of your seat. Great reporting + exhaustive research + propulsive writing = fantastic book.

And now, back to that contest and all those great books, the best of which so far is ?????????

Learn more about the book and author at Bryan Gruley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Starvation Lake.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Tree.

The Page 69 Test: Bleak Harbor.

The Page 69 Test: Purgatory Bay.

The Page 69 Test: Bitterfrost.

Q&A with Bryan Gruley.

My Book, The Movie: Bitterfrost.

My Book, The Movie: River Deep.

The Page 69 Test: River Deep.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Colt

Peter Colt is the author of Cold Island in the Detective Tommy Kelly series and the Andy Roark Mysteries. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1973 and is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island. Colt spent twenty-four years in the army reserve, with deployments to Kosovo in 2000 and Iraq in 2003 and 2008. He is currently a police officer in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lives with his family and two perpetually feuding cats. Colt’s hobbies include cooking, camping, and kayaking.

Colt's new novel is The Driftwood Bones, the second title featuring Detective Tommy Kelly.

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

The last several months have been a race against time with a deadline for my publisher. That really cut into my reading time. I don't read much fiction but have always liked military history, not odd given I was a commissioned Army Officer. I recently finished Christopher Goscha's outstanding, The Road to Dien Bien Phu . The book is an excellent look at the French Indochina war that spans from the end of the Japanese Occupation to the eponymous battle. What makes Goscha's book stand out is the level of detail he goes into. He provides a comprehensive view of the Vietminh's strengths and weakness in a way most historians wouldn't consider. I have been studying the Indochina war and the Vietnam war for forty years and his book offered genuine insights. I would submit that while not a first hand view of the war, Goscha's work could stand shoulder to shoulder with the works of the brilliant French writer/academic, Bernard Fall. I would recommend this book strongly to anyone with an interest in either war.

Visit Peter Colt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (June 2022).

My Book, The Movie: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Judge.

My Book, The Movie: The Judge.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (May 2024).

Writers Read: Peter Colt (March 2025).

My Book, The Movie: The Banker.

The Page 69 Test: The Banker.

The Page 69 Test: Cold Island.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (September 2025).

My Book, The Movie: Cold Island.

My Book, The Movie: The Driftwood Bones.

The Page 69 Test: The Driftwood Bones.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Gates

Eva Gates, also known as Vicki Delany, is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty-five books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Catskill Summer Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Delany is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

The latest Lighthouse Library mystery is Whose Body in the Library, the thirteenth title in the series.

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

It’s been a great spring so far for reading. Two of my favourite writers have new books out, one right after the other. And they did not disappoint.

Last One Out by Jane Harper:

Jane Harper’s books are set in different parts of Australia, and the sense of place is outstanding. This is not a thriller and it's certainly not a cozy. It's more about people and community and what happens when people lose that community than the details of the plot itself, although it is a good one.

The Keeper by Tana French:

You might be able to tell that I love setting and this book also has an extremely strong sense of place. In this case rural Ireland. It’s also a study of people and community. In The Keeper the community isn't in danger of falling apart, but perhaps of being all too close. A good mystery goes along with it, but again, don't read this for thrills and action.

The Pharaoh’s Curse Murders by Melodie Campbell:

For a total change of pace I picked up this one by a Canadian author. What would be more fun than a cruise to Egypt in the 1920s? If one is rich, of course and Lady Lucy Revelstoke, our intrepid sleuth, is. This is a fun, funny romp aboard said ship as it sails up the Nile, rival archeologists argue, and everyone wonders if the Pharaoh's Curse is on board.

Follow Eva Gates on Facebook, and visit Vicki Delany's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death By Beach Read.

Writers Read: Eva Gates (June 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

Writers Read: Eva Gates (June 2023).

Writers Read: Eva Gates (May 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Stranger in the Library.

The Page 69 Test: Shot Through the Book.

The Page 69 Test: Whose Body in the Library.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Kass

Linda Kass began her career as a magazine journalist and correspondent for regional and national publications. Along with her forthcoming novel, World News from Waverley High (September 2026), she is the author of three previous works of historical fiction: Tasa’s Song (2016), A Ritchie Boy (2020), and Bessie (2023). A longtime civic leader, she is the founder and owner of Gramercy Books, an independent bookstore in Central Ohio. Kass lives in Columbus with her husband, Frank; they have four children, six grandchildren, and a labradoodle named Wally.

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

I recently picked up The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits after receiving an email invite from Al Filreis, a Faculty Director at UPenn’s Kelly Writers House, to join a small book group to discuss this novel in in the fall—I must have been on their mailing list. While I couldn’t participate, my interest to read the book, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, was piqued. This is a tender story about a middle-aged man fighting illness and marital woe who heads on a road trip, east to west. Tom Layward, a 55-year-old academic, is at a crossroads in his life. When his wife had an affair twelve years earlier, he vowed to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. The story takes place at the time when daughter Miri is headed for Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and Tom and wife Amy are not on good terms. His decision to keep driving after dropping Miri off at school is an impulsive act for Tom, a man of reason. As Tom keeps driving west, he visits people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son. As he moves toward some unknown future during this extended road trip, he considers his life and his past choices with regret and irony. His thoughtful insights and observations leave you aching, and the ending surprises.

I own a bookstore and curate our author programs. So I’m always eager to attend author conversations hosted elsewhere. I was in Sag Harbor when The Church, a vibrant community arts center and exhibition space, hosted Gayle Feldman, veteran Publishers Weekly reporter and author of Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, in conversation with Cathleen McGuigan, longtime cultural writer and arts editor at Newsweek. While I don’t often read biographies, rarely whopping 800+ pagers, this subject really appealed to me. Feldman’s book takes readers inside the world of the co-founder of Random House, a man who later became a celebrity on the game show, What’s My Line?. It is both a landmark cultural history and a personal detailed look at Cerf’s star-studded life when New York, Hollywood, and the literary life were at their most glamorous and privileged. Worth reading for anyone interested in American publishing in the 20th century and how Cerf, with other prominent entrepreneurs, remade the book business: what was published, and how.

My bookstore, Gramercy Books, is located in the Columbus area, in the home state of the legendary Toni Morrison. As part of a state-wide collaboration going on in Ohio this year, we agreed to dedicate three of our book club-formatted programs to Morrison novels. We held the second in our series featuring The Bluest Eye, her acclaimed first novel of eleven. The book is a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with the Novel Prize winner’s characteristic subtlety and grace. It’s the story of Pecola Breedlove—an 11- year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. Morrison delivers the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. There is a precision to the writing, restrained and yet charged with pain at its core. Haunting.

I’ve been in a book club that has met monthly for nearly three decades. By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult was our most recent selection. It takes its title from a famous line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." The title leads the reader straight into a dual timeline novel split between the present and the sixteenth century, with interspersed snippets from the script of a play. In the present, a young woman, Melina Green, has written a play about her ancestress, Emilia Bassano, but Melina is unable to get her play produced because of misogyny in the theater world.  The historical timeline is the story of Emilia Bassano, a real-life woman, who Picoult suggests wrote the best of Shakespeare’s plays since Emilia could not publish them under her own name. The theory that Shakespeare was a woman, as Picoult acknowledges, was first put forward by the academic Elizabeth Winkler in a 2019 essay in the Atlantic, and then in a book published last year. While the historical sections are meticulously researched and the novel has vivid depictions of Elizabethan England, the modern-day timeline doesn’t feel as compelling or have the same depth as the historical arc.

Visit Linda Kass's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tracy Lynne Oliver

Tracy Lynne Oliver is a writer based in Los Angeles. She has been published online at a variety of places such as Medium, Fanzine, and Occulum. She co-authored the graphic novel, The Sacrifice of Darkness, with Roxane Gay. Her story, “This Weekend” was included in Best Microfiction 2019.

Her new book, Magician, is "dark magic debut novel featuring the Boy who becomes the Magician and the villainous Mother whose sadism might end it all."

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

A book about remote viewing. Have you ever heard the name Ingo Swann? He was a man that worked with a ‘deep black’ agency that handled UFO’s, aliens on the moon and telepathic mind control. Ingo Swann was an extraordinarily talented remote viewer which means he can be given ‘targets’ which he can access with his mind. These targets can be physically located here on earth or even other planets. The book is called, Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy. I love shit like this. And, after reading, well, let’s just say, what he saw on other planets may change your brain.

Joe Hill’s King Sorrow which follows a friend group over decades. Back in college, they summon a dragon and murder, sacrifice and destruction ensue. I quite enjoy Joe Hill’s work and throw in a dragon and I’m there. This was a thick gal, so it took me just over a month to devour, which is only a quarter-second in dragon time.

Because I wanted to relive her magic again, I re-read Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water. When this book came out in 2011 it proved to me how beautiful words can be no matter how ugly or distressing the subject matter. A memoir of a girl who becomes a woman who becomes a twice-mother and some ugly struggles in between. The way Lidia uses her words imprints all she wants to say into your soul.

Visit Tracy Lynne Oliver's website.

Q&A with Tracy Lynne Oliver.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stig Abell

Stig Abell believes that discovering a crime fiction series to enjoy is one of the great pleasures in life. His first novel, Death Under A Little Sky, introduced Jake Jackson and his attempt to get away from his former life in the beautiful area around Little Sky, followed by Death in a Lonely Place, The Burial Place, and now A Twist in the River. Abell is absolutely delighted that there are more on the way. Away from books, he presents the breakfast show on Times Radio, a station he helped to launch in 2020. Before that he was a regular presenter on Radio 4’s Front Row and was the editor and publisher of the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London with his wife, three children and two independent-minded cats called Boo and Ninja (his children named them, obviously).

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

I don’t know how common this is, but I always have at least five books on the go, each fitting a different part of my life. So:

The main book. Currently, I am reading The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene, as part of an accidental Greene jag I am currently on. This one is perhaps his classic, a sweaty, sad tale of religious persecution in Mexico, full of terse descriptions of morally-strained characters.

The bath book. I like something light to read in my nightly bath. It tends to be either PG Wodehouse, for some literary froth, or a sports book. I love American sports and sportswriting, and there are so many great examples of the canon. Currently it is a re-read of The Bad Guys Won by Jeff Pearlman, which is a romp through the story of the 1986 Mets.

The pre-bed book. I have to get up very early to present a breakfast radio programme, so my routine at the end of the day is all about slowing things down. I’m currently re-reading Hollywood by Gore Vidal, part of his truly transcendent series of historical novels about the rise of modern America.

The bed book. Now I am doing this, I realise now just how much American stuff I am currently reading. In bed, I need something very soothing: WLT: A Radio Romance, by Garrison Keillor, the gentle saga of a Minnesotan radio station, which is witty and weird and has an odd relationship to my day job.

The non-fiction book. For reasons of stubborn auto-didacticism, I always like to be learning something historical. At the moment, it is A Distant Mirror: the 80s classic by Barbara Tuchman, which tells the tale of the violent, unforgiving, brutal fourteenth century in Europe. When the current world feels mad and bad, it is rather reassuring.

Follow Stig Abell on Instagram and Threads.

Q&A with Stig Abell.

The Page 69 Test: The Burial Place.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on The 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