Raymond Beauchemin

Raymond Beauchemin was born in Western Massachusetts and has lived in Boston, Montreal and Abu Dhabi. He currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He has worked as an editor for the Boston Herald, Montreal Gazette, The National and the Toronto Star. He is the author of Everything I Own, a novel.

Beauchemin's new book is The Emptiest Quarter.

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

Like a lot of readers, I have several books or magazines or newspaper article going on at the same time. Weekly, there’s the New Yorker, for the articles and, let’s not kid ourselves, the cartoons; and the New York Times Book Review, so I have an idea of what’s going on in the book world even if I don’t get around to most of the reviewed books.

Among the highlights of my reading this year were two books from Boston-area writers, Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies, with a kick-ass protagonist named Mary Pat, who goes up against a Whitey Bulger-like Irish mobster in Southie while confronting her own biases during the busing crisis in Boston in 1974; and Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, featuring a recovering addict attempting to make connections with the people around him, or reconnections with the people he lost during his blackout phase, but most importantly get in touch with who he is as a man, friend, ex-husband, neighbor and father.

Not quite Boston, but certainly Irish, was Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, wherein a young woman struggles to make sense of life in Troubles-era Belfast.

Right now, I’m just a few pages into Mick Herron’s Dead Lions, a sequel to Slow Horses, which has been adapted into a series on Apple TV; and Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro, a late 19th-century Brazilian novel I’m reading aloud to my wife (it’s a thing we love to do). In both cases, we’re dealing with a certain amount of unreliability. Herron’s characters are washed-out and washed-up British MI5 agents and it’s not always clear who’s going to get hung out to dry. In Dom Casmurro, there’s the question of a love interest’s fidelity, though the issue could just as well be whether the narrator’s the one telling the tale straight. Did she or didn’t she? Does he even know? I don’t know! We haven’t finished!

Two books I read this year that I absolutely loved this year were Radio Free Vermont, by New Yorker writer Bill McKibben. A veteran radio announcer accidentally sets off a movement for an independent Vermont shortly after the 2016 U.S. federal election. There’s a laugh a page in the novel, along with some thought-provoking exposition disguised as the musings of the announcer. And this being Vermont there’s craft brew in every chapter and a fiercely Vermont-patriotic biathlon team.

The other book was a YA graphic memoir A First Time for Everything by cartoonist Dan Santat. Dan recalls a highlights trip to Europe he took with classmates during his awkward and shy high school years. There’s angst and teasing and embarrassment and a girl, of course. A sweet, wistful book sure to strike a nerve with boys and girls of a certain age and temperament.

Visit Raymond Beauchemin's website and view the trailer for The Emptiest Quarter.

The Page 69 Test: The Emptiest Quarter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward M. Lerner

Edward M. Lerner worked in high tech and aerospace for thirty years, as everything from engineer to senior vice president, for much of that time writing science fiction as his hobby. Since 2004, he has written full-time.

His novels range from near-future techno-thrillers, like Small Miracles and Energized, to traditional SF, like Déjà Doomed and his InterstellarNet series, to (collaborating with Larry Niven) the space-opera epic Fleet of Worlds series. Lerner’s 2015 novel, InterstellarNet: Enigma, won the inaugural Canopus Award “honoring excellence in interstellar writing.” His fiction has also been nominated for Locus, Prometheus, and Hugo awards.

Lerner’s short fiction has appeared in anthologies, collections, and many of the usual SF magazines and websites. He also writes about science and technology, notably including Tropeing the Light Fantastic: The Science Behind the Fiction.

Lerner's latest novel is Life and Death on Mars.

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

I write science fiction for a living. It’ll surprise no one that I read a lot of science and SF: for enjoyment, as research, and to stay current on trends in my genre.

I also enjoy reading that has nothing to do with science, fictional or otherwise. Consider this (anyway, I do) a mental palate cleanser. Two such books from my recent reading particularly stand out.

I’ll begin with The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America, by Walter R. Borneman. Having lived for almost thirty years on the East Coast, I can’t help but be interested in events that shaped this region—and so, the continent. More than informative, this history is grippingly well written. Well aware how the war turned out (how many of us in North America don’t speak French?), I still often found the book difficult to put down. If you ever wondered what qualified George Washington to later lead the Continental Army, this is your book—and he’s only one of the many consequential figures whom Borneman presents.

The other book I’ll mention, Tim Mason’s The Nightingale Affair, is historical fiction. It’s a clever mystery set mainly in Istanbul during the Crimean War. The nightingale of the title is Florence Nightingale. While not the main character, she is prominent throughout the novel. Intriguing mystery aside, the book’s aura of time and place are remarkable, just as the portrayal of the rebellious Ms. Nightingale was absorbing.

Hmm. I’ve committed time-travel and alternate-history fiction before. Maybe my subconscious is telling me something.

Learn more about the author and his work at his website.

Q&A with Edward M. Lerner.

My Book, The Movie: Life and Death on Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Life and Death on Mars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael O'Donnell

Michael O’Donnell is the author of the novel Above the Fire. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and other publications. O’Donnell has been a member of the National Book Critics Circle since 2005. An attorney by profession, he lives in the Chicago area, where he practices law. He earned his bachelor’s degree with distinction from Indiana University and his law degree magna cum laude from Boston College.

Recently I asked O’Donnell about what he was reading. His reply:

I have been re-reading Hilary Mantel's monumental Wolf Hall novels about the court of Henry VIII. Just now I'm halfway through the second volume, Bring Up the Bodies. I first devoured these books as they came out beginning in 2009. This second time through, I am really savoring them. Partly this is due to the reading experience. I treated myself to the Folio Society editions, which are beautifully bound in cloth and richly illustrated. But mainly it is due to the brilliance of the prose.

Just the other day I laughed aloud at a passage about the Duke of Norfolk, one of Mantel's most outrageous characters. He often tries to be the alpha male even in the same room as the King of England, yet he emerges as a blustering windbag. Mantel writes that "he looks like a piece of rope chewed by a dog, or a piece of gristle left on the side of a trencher." A wonderful detail is that, for all his puffing, Norfolk is afraid of ghosts--one of Mantel's lifelong preoccupations. He particularly fears Cardinal Wolsey, whom he hounded ruthlessly until Wolsey's death. Norfolk locks up tightly at night, fearing that the late cardinal might "ooze through a keyhole, or flop down a chimney with a soft flurry like a soot-stained dove."

It has been a hard few years for losing great writers. Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks, and Peter Raban all died this year. Yet no writer's recent death hit me quite as hard as Hilary Mantel's in 2022. She passed away too young, and with her we lost one of literature's finest voices. The consolation when a great novelist departs is that her books stay on our shelves, and in our hands.

Visit Michael O'Donnell's website.

Q&A with Michael O'Donnell.

The Page 69 Test: Above the Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris McKinney

Chris McKinney was born and raised in Hawaiʻi, on the island of Oahu. He has written nine novels, including The Tattoo and The Queen of Tears, a coauthored memoir, and the screenplays for two feature films and two short films. He is the winner of the Elliott Cades Award and seven Kapalapala Poʻokela Awards and has been appointed Visiting Distinguished Writer at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

McKinney's new novel is Sunset, Water City, Book 3 of the Water City Trilogy.

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

I just finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang and loved it. It’s the perfect example of how important original story concept is. Imagine pitching this: Two young writers, one, Asian, a superstar, the other, white, floundering, are friends from college. When a drunk Athena Liu dies while eating pancakes, June Hayward steals her manuscript and successfully sells it as her own. Only, the book is about Chinese laborers in Europe during WWI, and fanatical social media sleuths are discovering holes. This satirical novel searingly targets publishing, fandom, racial appropriation, cancel culture, and the toxicity of the internet. What a great story idea. It’s one of those instances of “I wish I thought of that first.”

Kinfolk by Sean Dietrich is the book I read right before Yellowface, and boy, is it different. Set in 1970’s Alabama, its main character, Nub Taylor, is one of those ne’er-do-well old man characters who has been making the wrong decisions his entire life and is finally trying make amends. It’s the type of character that Richard Russo perfected in the late 90’s, and I’m all for it. Kinfolk, with its colorful characters and petty feuds, is rural, American smalltown fiction at its best.

Visit Chris McKinney's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City.

Q&A with Chris McKinney.

My Book, The Movie: Sunset, Water City.

--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 Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt:

In the introduction to his universal history, Diodorus Siculus remarks that “it is an excellent thing…when we confront the varied vicissitudes of life…to be able to imitate the successes which have been achieved in the past.” Khufu’s Wisdom, the first novel in Naguib Mahfouz’s trilogy about ancient Egypt, was first published under the title, Vicissitudes of Fate. Diodorus Siculus, who spent the middle years of the first century B.C. working on his history, visited Egypt and reports that 360,000 men spent twenty years building the Great Pyramid. Mahfouz’s novel begins ten years after the work has started.

Watching tens of thousands of men digging out the base for his pyramid, which he “wanted to make his eternal abode,” the pharaoh, Khufu, asks his architect, Mirabu, why all these men, these tens of thousands, “obey me and withstand the terrors of this arduous work?” Mirabu explains that half of them are slaves and have no choice, but that the others are “Egyptians who believe in their hearts that the hard labor to which they devote their lives is a splendid religious obligation, a duty to the deity to whom they pray, and a form of obedience owed to the title of him who rules on the throne.” Khufu accepts this as a matter of course. It cannot be otherwise, for “what is Egypt but a great work that would not have been undertaken if not for the sacrifice of individuals; and of what value is the life of an individual? It equals not a single dry tear to one who looks to the far future and the grand plan.”

Pharaoh’s grand plan, his vision of the far future, is threatened when a mystic informs him that no one from his “seed shall sit upon the throne of Egypt.” Asked if he knows “whom the gods have reserved to succeed” him, the wizard announces that it is “an infant born that very morning.” When Khufu learns that the wife of Monra, the High Priest of Ra, has given birth to a boy that morning, and that Monra has said that the boy would “rule over the valley of the Nile as the successor to the God Ra-Atum on earth,” he leads a hundred war chariots to end this threat to his dynasty. Learning of the danger, Monra sends his wife and child away. His wife’s handmaiden, Kata, could not go with her because she had, that very morning, given birth to a baby boy of her own. Another servant, Zaya, goes with her instead.

Confronting the high priest, Khufu reminds him that, “Loyalty owed to the Pharaoh obliged him to execute his divine will without the least hesitation.” But which will is really divine? Lord Ra had decreed that his son should succeed Khufu on the throne of Egypt. Who should he obey - Khufu or Ra? Monra suddenly remembers the servant, Kata, and her newborn son, laying in the room next door. Khufu, certain that he is being taken to the room of the high priest’s wife and child, gives Monra his dagger, but instead of stabbing the child, Monra stabs himself in the heart. Enraged by this act of disobedience, Khufu draws his sword and with a single swift blow severs the heads of Kata and her child.

It is not difficult to guess what will happen after this, but it does not matter. Naguib Mahfouz is not writing some cheap thriller, a mystery, whose only interest is in how the puzzle gets solved; he is writing a tragedy as full of meaning as anything written by Aeschylus or Euripides. When he decided to become a writer, instead of pursuing his post-graduate studies in philosophy, Mahouz started reading the major classics of world literature. With this almost unique combination of philosophy and literature, Mahfouz attempts to show what ancient history can teach the present.

Making her escape, Monra’s wife is captured by bandits, but her servant, Zaya, saves the child and, while walking along the road, hopeless and alone, is overtaken by Pharaoh and his men. Khufu tells his architect, who is still shaken by the death of the high priest and his family, “Take care not to accuse your lord of cruelty. Look at how it gratifies me to carry along a famished woman and her nursing baby to spare them the ills of hunger and cold, and deliver them to a place that they could reach by themselves only with tremendous strains. Pharaoh is compassionate to his servants.” He then adds a remarkable, if, from his prospective, logical justification for the murders he has committed: “And he was not less compassionate when that ill-starred infant’s fate was decreed. In this way, the acts of kings are like those of the gods - cloaked in the robes of villainy, yet, in their essence that are actually celestial wisdom.” Pharaoh’s son and heir apparent, the cruel and restless Prince Khafra, tells Mirabu, “to marvel at the power of the overwhelming will that has defeated the Fates and blotted the sentence of destiny.”

Zaya, saved by Khufu, marries Bisharu, inspector of the construction of the pyramid, and they raise the child, whom they name Djedef, as their own. When it is time to choose “that to which he would devote his life,” Djedef enters the military college. Visiting his half-brother, Naja, one of Bisharu’s sons, who had become a portrait painter, he sees a miniature painting of a “ravishing goddess,” a peasant girl Naja has seen once on the riverbank, and immediately falls so much in love that he goes in search for a girl he has never met. He finds her, on the riverbank where Naja had first seen her, and shows her the portrait he carries around his neck. She wants it, and when he tells her that he won’t give it up, she can’t believe her ears: “I never dreamed that I would meet a man of your insolence.”

“And did I ever dream that I would surrender my mind and my heart in a fleeting instant?” he asks in reply.

If Djedef does not find this peasant girl’s arrogance unusual, it is because no girl, no woman, has ever been this beautiful. He tries to keep her talking, but she runs away, and he does not see her again; not until, a few years later, when he graduates from military school and, what no one has ever done before, wins all the day’s competitive events. Prince Khafra is so impressed that he chooses him to become a member of his guard. As he listens to the prince, Djedef’s gaze drifts away to the prince’s sister, Princess Meresankh. “Thunderstruck, he nearly fell on his face. By the gods in heaven, what did he see but the face of the peasant girl whose portrait he carried next to his heart!”

Like the prince, the princess is heir to the throne. As Djedef is told, “The throne rightfully belongs to those two before anyone else.” Nowhere in the novel, nowhere in the trilogy, does Mahfouz explain what this means. In the second novel, Rhadopis of Nubia, in which a young and handsome pharaoh loses the throne by spending all his time, and much of the kingdom’s wealth, on a famous courtesan, the fact that the king and queen are brother and sister is stated as if it were neither shocking nor a matter of surprise. The reason, as we learn from Diodorus Siculus, is that, following the example of the gods Isis and Orisis, children of Cronus who married and brought civilized life to Egypt, the law of Egypt allowed brother and sister to wed. Incest, marriage between brother and sister, kept the ruling dynasty within the same bloodline. What was allowed later became required. Cleopatra, married when she was only twelve, married her brother.

Djedef cannot forget the princess, but he has to keep secret what he feels. Things happen quickly. On a hunt, he saves Khafra from a lion, and, as a reward, becomes captain of the prince’s guard. Khufu declares war on the tribes of Sinai, and Djedef becomes commander of the campaign. With death in battle a real possibility, he finally speaks to the princess about his love, but her only answer is to remind him, “It would have been better if you learned the virtue of silence.” Then, in camp, the night before the battle is to begin, a messenger arrives from Prince Khafra. It is the princess in disguise.

“You have overcome me totally, so I have come to you.” Smiling, she adds, “And the gods witnessed my arrogance and are amused by my contempt. Have you ever seen such a farce as ours before?” But what future can they possibly have, a princess destined to be a queen and a soldier in service to the pharaoh. She has an answer: “My father would not be the first pharaoh to make one of his subjects a member of his own family.”

With three thousand war chariots “bristling with weapons,” Djedef wins the battle, and on his victorious return sees the princess. In a single stunning sentence, Mahfouz describes their emotions with such power the reader not only understands what they feel, but feels it himself: “Their eyes exchanged a burning message of ardent desire and consuming passion, and if, on its path between them, it had brushed against the hem of one of the banners, it would have burst into an engulfing flame.”

When Khufu asks what he wants, having saved “the life of my heir-apparent,” and “rescued the well-being of my people,” Djedef tells him that he wants the princess. Looking at his daughter, “whose arrogance has deserted her, weakened by bewilderment and timidity,” Pharaoh lays her hand on the hand of Djedef, “and said in his most awesome voice, which made hearts shiver, ‘I bless you both in the name of the gods.’”

Instead of the end of the story, this is the beginning of “great and peculiar events that shook souls to their core and shattered minds completely.” One of the women taken prisoner spoke Egyptian and explained that she was from the city of On, the residence of “Our Lord Ra,” and had been kidnapped twenty years earlier. Having promised that he would ask the king to set her free, Djedef takes the captured woman to his house, where she recognizes Zaya and demands to know what she has done with her son. The woman is Djedef’s real mother, wife of the High Priest of Ra. She tells him about his birth and the “momentous prophecies surrounding it.” Overhearing their conversation, Bisharu realizes that the son he has raised is suddenly the enemy of Pharaoh, the means the Lord Ra is using “to usurp the right of the noble heir apparent!”

Bisharu has to make an awful decision: protect Djedef, who he has raised as a son, or, loyal to pharaoh, reveal Djedef’s real identity to Khufu who will almost certainly have him killed. But before that happens, Prince Khafra, the heir apparent, tired of waiting for power, decides his father has to die. Djedef uncovers the plot, and, just in time, kills the prince and saves Khufu’s life. With an irony that will not long escape him, Khufu explains to the queen the reason for the death of the prince: “The divine wisdom decreed his death because the throne was not created to be occupied by criminals.” And now Bisharu enters and tells him that Djedef is not his son, but “the son of the former priest of Ra, whose name was Monra.” When Djedef confirms this, Khufu understands what the gods have done, and that fate and destiny cannot be overcome: “Here you all see how I repaid the baby of Ra for killing my heir apparent by choosing him to succeed me on the throne of Egypt. What a marvel this is!”

At the beginning of Khufu’s Wisdom, Khufu remarked, “And what is Egypt but a great work that would not have been undertaken if not for the sacrifice of individuals: and of what value is the life of an individual: It equals not a single dry tear to one who looks to the far future and the great plan.” At the end of the third, and final, volume of his trilogy about ancient Egypt, Mahfouz comes back to the beginning of the first. In Thebes At War, Egypt has been under the domination of a foreign, white, race for two hundred years, but an Egyptian army is now on the verge of winning back Egypt’s freedom. On what was expected to be the last day of the decisive battle, “the Egyptians awoke crazy with excitement, straining at the leash, their hearts yearning for the music of battle and of victory.” But as they approach Thebes, ready for the final assault, they discover that the encircling wall has been covered with naked bodies, Egyptian women and their small children, taken as shields.

Angry, uncertain, and distraught, the king asks his commander, if he really thinks he “should give the order to shred the bodies of these wretched women and their children?” The commander, whose own mother is one of the captives, knows what his mother wants: “put your love for Thebes above your pity for her and her unfortunate sisters.” The king issues the order, and, as the battle commences, the women “called out in high, hoarse voices, ‘Strike us, may the Lord grant you victory, and take revenge for us!’

Of what value is the life of an individual? Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize, suggests the answer is to be found in the ancient belief in the love of one’s own, not our own life, but the life of what gives us life, the life of our birthplace, the country, the nation, that makes nearly all of us what we are.

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.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tracy Clark

Tracy Clark is the author of the Detective Harriet Foster crime fiction series, including Fall (2023) and Hide (2023). She is a two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winning author and the 2022 winner of the Sara Paretsky Award. The four novels in her Cass Raines series (2018-2021) have also been honored as Anthony Award and Lefty Award finalists and have been shortlisted for the American Library Association's RUSA Reading List, named a CrimeReads Best New PI Book of 2018, a Midwest Connections Pick, and a Library Journal Best Books of the Year. A native of Chicago, she works as an editor in the newspaper industry and roots for the Cubs, Sox, Bulls, Bears, and Blackhawks equally. She is a board member-at-large of Sisters in Crime, Chicagoland, a member of International Thriller Writers, and serves on the boards of Mystery Writers of America Chicago and the Midwest Mystery Conference.

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

I am currently reading Bad Influence by Alison Gaylin. I love it, I love it, I love it! There is nothing about the PI genre I don't like, and Gaylin artfully continues with one of the late Robert B. Parker's iconic Boston PIs, Sunny Randall (and her doggy sidekick Rosie).

This one delves into the world of Instagram influencers. Someone's out to kill one of them and Sunny's brought in to protect the guy from his tormentor and figure out what's what before he ends up DOA. The snark is back. The level-eyed stare. Did I say already that I love it?

When Parker died in 2010, I was bereft at the loss of his voice, that snap on the page. Gaylin gives a little bit of that back.

Visit Tracy Clark's website.

Q&A with Tracy Clark.

My Book, The Movie: What You Don’t See.

The Page 69 Test: Runner.

The Page 69 Test: Hide.

The Page 69 Test: Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

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