Douglas G. Greene

Douglas G. Greene recently received the George N. Dove Award from the Detective/Mystery Caucus of the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association.

Greene is the owner of Crippen & Landru, publisher of short story collections of both classic and contemporary mystery authors, and a professor of history at Old Dominion University. He is also the author of the Edgar Award-nominated John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995) on locked-room mystery master Carr.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Right now, I am reading the 4 volumes of Dorothy L. Sayers's letters. An extraordinarily talented and complex woman. How, for example, could she desperately want to marry a Jew and have his children, yet have a great deal of anti-Jewish prejudice?

Here is the Wikipedia entry on Dorothy L. Sayers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is an accomplished writer and poet; she teaches at Tufts University.

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Well thank you for asking! It made me stop in the middle of what is usually an uninterrupted and not particularly considered stream of picking up and putting down this book and that. So here is what I've been reading the last day or two, in addition to poems and comments by my students - and more or less why and what I've discovered.

I am happily surprised by the fresh angle of commentary on Isabella Stewart Gardner and her acquaintances in Patricia Vigderman's new book, The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which I only discovered because I went to a bookstore reading in New Hampshire. To take one self-glorifying woman and circle around her and into the world as she wandered it, interspersed with and shaped by the very titles of her collection.

I'm reading Hayden Carruth's Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey with much delight.

In between I'm picking up various books about Switzerland. The one on my right, by Lina Hug and Richard Stead was written in 1902 and chats merrily about the discovery of lake dwellings from the bronze age that had just been discovered, by accident in the mud of a dried lake outside Zurich! My other book about Switzerland spills hundreds of names of playwrights and poets and artists and thinkers I in my benighted state of knowledge had no idea were Swiss.

For several weeks I've been dipping into CD Wright's remarkable Deepstep Come Shining. Suddenly her new book, One Big Self: An Investigation, arrived in the mail. So that's tomorrow.

Last week I read Dale Peterson's about Jane Goodall, nonstop, couldn't put it down. So much detail about such an astonishing life - and Dale is delicate and deft in his almost invisible commentary.

I am also reading A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature by Jacqueline Goldsby - a complex and mind altering book.

And that's it, not counting The New Yorker.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has had work published in Agni, Field, The Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix, Mothering, Antigonish, Northwest Review and Verse Daily, MARGIE, and in Slate, and forthcoming in an anthology called Cadence of Hooves.

She has published two chapbooks of poetry through Roundy Wells Press, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition.

She has written reviews for The Boston Review of Books and Pleiades.

Read -- or listen to her read-- her poem, "Clearing the House," in Slate.

Read more Rebecca Kaiser Gibson poems.

--Marshal Zeringue

Diane Shipley

Diane Shipley "co-edits books site Trashionista, contributes to TV Scoop and Catwalk Queen and talks about herself, evil hairdressers and fake window cleaners (don’t ask) at www.dianeshipley.com. When she can be persuaded to stop blogging, she writes freelance articles on a variety of topics."

I learned about Shipley when she blogged at the Guardian about Maureen Dowd's odd report from a visit to a New York bookstore.

Last month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I was recently unfortunate enough to spend six weeks without the internet (which is when I discovered that four days offline is my limit) and with very patchy TV reception, so I read twenty-four books. My favourites included About Alice, Calvin Trillin's poignant and understated tribute to his late wife and muse, and Kalisha Buckhanon's Upstate, a modern day Romeo and Juliet told in the form of letters between two teenage lovers, one of whom is in jail… yes, upstate. It's fantastic.

Now I'm home and back online, my reading rate has slowed considerably. I'm halfway through Mommies Who Drink, in unbound proof (because it's not out in the UK yet) – an interesting way of reading a book which means you can't really turn back and check stuff, you just have to keep ploughing ahead. The book's a little disconnected but I'm enjoying it.

I've also just read the first twenty pages of a book I've had for ages: Fashion Babylon. I promised it to my friend Helen and I'm seeing her in a few weeks so want to finish it soon! Already I can tell it's a deliciously gossipy book, a great read – the fun will be trying to guess which designer and model the anecdotes are about, as everything in the book really happened, but the main players have been disguised…. Helen's a fashion expert so hopefully she can fill me in!

Finally, and God knows when I'll have chance to read it (but I must) I've just bought a second-hand copy of Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, because for years everyone's been saying how great it is. At 800 plus pages, I'm not quite sure when I and my toppling pile of books for review will fit it in … hopefully sometime this year!

Diane Shipley's riposte to Dowd, "In Defence of Chick Lit," opens:

For a genre that's supposedly just about sex, shoes and shopping (more on that misconception later), chick lit certainly stirs up controversy. Maureen Dowd recently realised it's not 1994 and expressed shock at the number of books in the shops with pink covers - pink signifying literary unworthiness, clearly.

I always find that the people who criticise chick lit, both in the press and to my face (when they discover I edit a chick lit website) are those who know the least about it. [Read on]

A follow-up article supplied proof to back up her claim "that good chick lit was not the contradiction in terms that some people think."

--Marshal Zeringue

Moira Crone

Moira Crone lives in New Orleans and is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel-in-stories What Gets Into Us.

Her stories have appeared in New Stories From the South on five occasions, and in magazines such as The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and many others.

Last month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I am reading the first truly comprehensive anthology of New Orleans voices addressing the experience of the storm for individuals and artists, of which I am one. There have been many books of essays about what New Orleans was before the storm, and many journalistic accounts of the devastation and its many political causes and consequences. But this book is something new: a compendium of thoughtful voices (over eighty different ones here, and many photographers.) that speaks to what was lived and what has come after, and what could come after.

The writers and photographers, the poets and essayists, professionals and peace officers, address the emotional and cultural, historical and artistic impact the events have had-both on their personal lives and, so far as they can see, which is pretty far, upon the community and the city as a whole. These materials were gathered in summer of 2006, which was the first time people could pause for breath. The result is a true city of the book, full of long ago and current history, memory, poems and fictions. It is tragic and hilarious, sad and full of hope. I laughed out loud at Richard Katrovas's "transvestite;" I nodded in recognition when Chris Wiltz described how months after the storm, people flocked to see a play based on her book about a great madam. I wept when photographer Harold Baquet described how, as he fled the city, driving through a throng of hungry, thirsty, desperate people, he had failed to recognize his nephew who called out to him weakly on the bridge. His nephew didn't wave -- he told him months later that was too dehydrated and exhausted to raise his hand in the crowd.

There are over fifty poems, a few stories, (full disclosure, one is mine) a wonderful array of essays, and over thirty interviews from people in every walk of life-from young free-lance medics to composers to photographers to police officers, to mystery writers, to jazz musicians, to entrepreneurs of culture.

This bright book of a city, of its lives, has come in the mail from its editor, the incredibly resourceful Charles Henry Rowell, in the guise of Volume 29, No. 4 of Callaloo. Callaloo is generally known as a premier literary journal specializing in African American literature. It is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This issue is called American Tragedy: New Orleans Underwater. It does not concentrate on any single ethnic group or social group -- it fulfills the editor's stated intention admirably: "To present aspects of U. S. American culture and creativity in their full richness." At over five hundred pages, thick as that dictionary you got for college and couldn't ever throw away, it depicts the devastation and the start of the resurrection of a place -- it's a little like a dictionary, actually, one with a single, but incredibly complex definition: New Orleans, après le deluge. See also: taking stock, starting over, re-creation of.

Visit Moira Crone's website, and read her Beliefnet essay on Hurricane Katrina, being a refugee, and keeping our hearts open to those in need.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Allen Dymmoch

Michael Allen Dymmoch's most recent novel is Death in West Wheeling.

A few months ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

The books I finish are those I'd recommend because I don't have time to finish bad books.

So I'd recommend:

William Kent Krueger's Mercy Falls and Copper River (read together, in that order, because they are really one long, terrific story);

Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse by Steve Bogira;

On Directing Film by David Mamet;

Big City, Bad Blood by Sean Chercover; and

Homicide 69 by Sam Reaves.

Marcus Sakey's The Blade Itself and Nancy Pickard's The Virgin of Small Plains are on the top of my list to read next.

Happy reading.

Read the results of the Page 69 Test for Michael's White Tiger.

Learn more about Michael's books, and check out The Outfit, a group blog powered by her and six other Chicago crime writers.

--Marshal Zeringue

© Campaign for the American Reader. Reprinted with permission.

Rick Kushman

Rick Kushman is a nationally syndicated television columnist for the Sacramento Bee and the co-author of a new book, A Moveable Thirst: Tales and Tastes from a Season in Napa Wine Country.

Last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I need to say right off, as a TV critic like my friend Peter Carlin – whose book, Catch a Wave, I loved for his intelligent adoration of Brian Wilson and the gang, and for his great sense of why I was a fan of the Boys – my reading habits are weird. I’ll be sitting on my couch, reading, and I'm thinking, “I ought to be watching TV right now.” It’s a freaky little life.

I’m just finishing a book by another friend – and if it matters, those are all my friends with books out at the moment – Four Days To Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland, about high school wrestling in Iowa. It’s by Mark Kreidler and it’s a joy to read for the rhythm and the writing alone. But it’s also a mesmerizing story, about sports and challenges, about Iowa grit, and about the hard, hard work that both makes champions, and that simply comes when you love something like wrestling. It brought me back to my far-less-impressive years in high school and college sports, and it reminded me of why I still go for those long, achy runs on Saturdays.

I’m also working my way through Dave Eggers’ What is the What, and by working I don’t mean it’s hard to read, at least not in the reading sense. Eggers is a writing star and his story of the Sudanese “Lost Boys” is riveting and absorbing and at times surprisingly funny. But it’s also a tale of real, unimaginable horrors, and I can only pick it up after the nightmares have stopped from the last readings.

I’m moving slowly through Robert B. Parker’s School Days for a different reason. I adore Parker’s Spenser series because I’m a fan of hard-boiled PI’s, and because the books are so thoroughly witty and fun. I read them slowly, sort of like the way I eat cheesecake. I try to savor every page/bite. I read everything Parker writes. I also eat a lot of cheesecake.

And because I just wrote a book about wine, I thought maybe I should learn a little about the stuff. So I’m reading A Hedonist in the Cellar by Jay McInerney. It’s a collection of his wine columns from House & Garden, and one thing is very clear. He gets to drink way better wine than I do. Not that I’m bitter.

Peter Ames Carlin on A Moveable Thirst: "The second half of the book is a guide to actual Napa wineries, but the first half is pure narrative, about the [authors'] adventures touring the wineries themselves. It's charming and funny, but also smart and a nice tutorial for aspiring wine buffs."

--Marshal Zeringue

Holly Goddard Jones

Holly Goddard Jones's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Epoch, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, American Literary Review, and Velocity, a supplement to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Her story "Good Girl" received a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best Of The Small Presses, and another story, "Life Expectancy," has been selected by Pulitzer-prize winner Edward P. Jones to appear in New Stories From The South: The Year's Best, 2007.

She is currently a Visiting Writer at Denison University.

I recently asked her what she has been reading. Her reply:

These days I’m reading more student papers than anything else, but I’ll take this opportunity to make a recommendation. I just finished a wonderful book of short stories called Things Kept, Things Left Behind, written by my friend Jim Tomlinson. I met Jim in person for the first time at the 2006 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, but we’d been in touch by email a few times before that. Jim had sent me a lovely note about a story I’d published in The Southern Review, identifying himself as a fellow Kentucky writer. A few months later, news went out that Jim was a recipient of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and I was delighted to be able to return the favor. When we finally hugged for the first time at Sewanee, it felt to me like Jim was someone I’d known for a long time, even though we’d only exchanged a few messages. Every now and then you connect with someone that way.

And I connected with Jim’s book the way I connected with its author, which was an enormous thrill. Things Kept, Things Left Behind is set in Kentucky, and these are the kinds of stories I love to see written (and strive to write) about my home state: realistic, certainly, but also dignified and tender. My favorites are the two that comprise the book’s title: “Things Kept” and “Things Left Behind.” These linked stories both center on the infidelity of their central character, but Jim writes about this familiar material in surprising and poignant ways. What I also love about these pieces, especially “Things Left Behind,” is their breadth. Here’s a twenty-three page story that does as much work as a novel — that has a novel’s scope and texture, and alternates seamlessly between several points of view, both male and female. But it’s a testament to Jim’s skill that he can just as successfully write the more succinct, “an-afternoon-in-the-life-of” kind of story, and those are in Things Kept, Things Left Behind, as well. The final story, “Stainless,” is such a piece, and it’s masterful.

I’ve read other books recently that I loved — Claire Messud’s The Emperor's Children, William Trevor’s Felicia's Journey, and I finally succumbed to Jane Austen after resisting her for a long time, which means I’ve plowed through Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma the way I once plowed through C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle — but I emphasize Jim’s work here because I love that Jim and I share a community as well as an aesthetic.

Read Holly Goddard Jones's story "Life Expectancy" in The Kenyon Review.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Levine

George Levine, Professor Emeritus of English at Rutgers University, is the author of, most recently, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World.

About Darwin Loves You, from the publisher:

Jesus and Darwin do battle on car bumpers across America. Medallions of fish symbolizing Jesus are answered by ones of amphibians stamped "Darwin," and stickers proclaiming "Jesus Loves You" are countered by "Darwin Loves You." The bumper sticker debate might be trivial and the pronouncement that "Darwin Loves You" may seem merely ironic, but George Levine insists that the message contains an unintended truth. In fact, he argues, we can read it straight. Darwin, Levine shows, saw a world from which his theory had banished transcendence as still lovable and enchanted, and we can see it like that too -- if we look at his writings and life in a new way.

Although Darwin could find sublimity even in ants or worms, the word "Darwinian" has largely been taken to signify a disenchanted world driven by chance and heartless competition. Countering the pervasive view that the facts of Darwin's world must lead to a disenchanting vision of it, Levine shows that Darwin's ideas and the language of his books offer an alternative form of enchantment, a world rich with meaning and value, and more wonderful and beautiful than ever before. Without minimizing or sentimentalizing the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, Levine makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism -- a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving to understand it.

Last month I asked Levine what he has been reading. His reply:

As ever, most of what I read in the way of books is related to what I'm thinking as I say what's on my mind through essays, lectures, and books, as literary scholars do. Reading simply for the pleasure of the reading is so mixed for me with reading for what I will be writing that I often envy real readers -- people who read things just because they are immediately interested in the writer or the subject and find them temptingly on the shelves.

Right now, for example, I am reading, or trying to read, several second line Victorian novels, Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe and Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive and John Halifax, Gentleman. Such novels are always more interesting than one would expect (after all, they were successful in their time -- though the authors wrote literally hundreds of books) but they remind me too of why the "classics" are classics, after all. Not that there aren't, buried in the hundreds of Victorian novels, books worthy of much more attention than posterity has given them, but, on the whole, Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Hardy really are much better and more interesting writers -- at least for me. Still there is much to be learned from these books and often they can have moving and brilliantly written passages.

One novel that I recently read only for the first time, Mary Augusta Ward's Robert Elsmere, is truly worth the effort although we may not be entirely interested in or sympathetic to the travails of faith of an Anglican clergyman at the end of the nineteenth century. Ward was both very intelligent and capable of writing long sequences of gripping and sensitive narrative, often having nothing to do with Victorian crises of faith.

In addition, partly as a result of the subject of my last book, Darwin Loves You, I have been reading other recent and more popular discussions of questions of religion and science, most particularly, of course, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, both of which are passionately intellectual and passionately rational. For the most part I agree with their arguments, and find them brilliantly articulated, although it does seem to me that for people previously committed to their rational/empiricist/naturalist view of the world, they become a bit predictable. They are aimed at an audience that will be offended by their total rejection of religion but are undoubtedly largely read by people like me, the already converted seeking comrades in a world hostile to non-belief.

The problem, in these current wars between science and religion, is that there is no way to persuade believers, since belief tends to be based on non-rational qualities. But these qualities are real and important (even Dennett and Dawkins are passionate about their rationalism) and any discussion of the question needs to take into account this basic human need. I have been reading a recently completed book on Darwin by an Italian scholar, Paolo Costa, that argues similarly for some recognition of the ways in which Darwin and science can indeed come to terms with (because they participate in) the deep feeling for nature and the world that extends, even for scientists, beyond "reason."

In addition, I am always reading manuscripts about to be published and would recommend another one to people interested in these subjects, Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability, being published by Cambridge University Press. Dawson shows in wonderful detail how the very shape of Darwin's theory was affected by his sensitivity to public opinion and by his abiding desire for respectability.

And finally, for pleasure, literature in Italian, which I have been teaching myself for ten years with enormous pleasure -- this time Luigi Pirandello's brilliant and complicated, "Il Fu Matteo Pascal," as they say in Italian, a capolavoro.

Adam Gopnik praised Darwin Loves You in the New Yorker:

Darwin Loves You ... tries to vindicate Darwin for students of literature by emphasizing his modest “sense of wonder,” the almost mystical awe at the sheer existence of life in the universe; Darwin disenchanted believers in Heaven, but he reënchanted lovers of Earth. Levine’s book is one of the most appealing and subtle attempts to bridge biology and the humanities. It proposes an “enchanted secularity”; because Darwin robs mankind of place and purpose, he gave us a chance to love and revere nature “precisely in its refusal to be like us.”

Read Chapter One of Darwin Loves You and the Page 69 Test results for the book.

Among Levine's other books are: Dying to Know (Chicago, 2002); The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge, 2001); Darwin and the Novelists (Harvard, 1988); The Realistic Imagination (Chicago, 1981); Lifebirds (Rutgers, 1997). He also wrote the introduction and notes for The Origin of the Species (Barnes and Noble, 2004).

--Marshal Zeringue

Maureen Ogle

Maureen Ogle's most recent book is Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer.

Last month I asked her what she has been reading. Her reply:

I write non-fiction, so I often spend my days reading for “work.” That's especially true when I'm breaking terrain on a new book, as I am now. My current work-in-progress is Carnivore Nation: The History of Meat and America, a project that has led so far to Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley, 1783-1860, by Paul C. Henlein, and Allan Kulikoff's From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, along with travel narratives, government documents, diaries, and newspapers from the 17th and 18th centuries.

But when I stop for the day, I want something less, um, intense.

I started reading mysteries when I was a kid, and there's nothing I love more than dropping into the world of well-crafted, well-solved murder. I recently finished new novels by two of my favorite authors: Deborah Crombie's Water Like A Stone and Charles Todd's A False Mirror. In January I read Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her. It's not exactly a mystery, but it's her usual take-great-risks-and-write-beautifully.

But now I'm on a Hollywood kick. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because I visited southern California twice in February for speaking engagements? Because I'm escaping the remnants of a tough Iowa winter with settings of palm trees and green lawns? Because I'm hoping to sell the film rights to my last book? (I'm kidding! I'm kidding!)

First I read Clea's Moon, by Edward Wright, whose mysteries are set in post-WWII Los Angeles and which, no surprise, touch on Hollywood and movies.

I followed that with Garson Kanin's Hollywood (which is terrific fun but should be taken with a huge grain of something: Kanin was notorious for “embroidering” events.)

Then I dived into Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, by William J. Mann, a book that forced me to abandon everything I believed about the actress. (If you enjoy Hollywood history, I also recommend Mann's Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood).

Next came an old, and decidedly dark, Hollywood novel, Bud Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?.

And now I'm reading Jane Smiley's new novel, Ten Days in the Hills. It's a “Hollywood” novel only in the sense that it's set in the hills above Los Angeles and opens on the morning after the 2003 Oscars and just after the start of the Iraq war. It's a novel about the business of being human, and so veers from the serious to the hilarious. The novel reminds me, in structure and style, of her brilliant Greenlanders, which I think is her finest book.

Next up: Michael Tolkin's The Player, another Hollywood novel (which I want to read so that I'll be prepped to read his new book The Return of the Player.

By that time I should be ready for the red carpet.

Maureen Ogle was an academic historian before she "decided to write history for the 'rest of us' — ordinary Americans who are curious about who we are as a people and a nation." In addition to Ambitious Brew, she is the author of Key West: History of An Island of Dreams and All the Modern Conveniences.

Visit Ogle's website, her blog, and check out how the Page 69 test served Ambitious Brew.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul W. Kahn

Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School.

His most recent book is Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil, which David Luban called "an extraordinary, deeply original reflection on the nature of evil."

I recently asked him what he has been reading. His reply:

I think of my day as organized around what I am reading. I read for different purposes throughout the course of the day. I write in the mornings, so I read books then that help me with my current project, which is a book on torture and terror. My morning reading now is Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights and Robin Wagner-Pacifici's The Art of Surrender.

In the early afternoon, I read books that are relevant to what I am teaching -- currently courses on violence and human rights. My early afternoon reading now consists of a lot of Hannah Arendt, including The Promise of Politics and The Origins of Totalitarianism, along with Jonathan Schell's classic The Fate of the Earth (full disclosure: I am coteaching a course with Jonathan this term). Jeremy Waldron, by the way, has an excellent response to the recent Arendt revival in the March 15 issue of the New York Review of Books -- also on my regular reading list.

I read/listen to a lot of recorded books in the car, between my home and my office. Driving, I enjoy both fiction and popular history. Right now, I'm into Colm Tóibín's wonderful novel about Henry James, The Master, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, about Lincoln's cabinet. Particularly interesting to read together, since they are writing from such different perspectives about the character of 19th century Americans: politicians versus intellectuals.

Late at night, I read about whatever is on my mind, often science. Having just seen Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, I turned to Jared Diamonds' Collapse, hoping for some help on how to stave off environmental disaster. So far, things are not looking too good for us.

Kahn teaches in the areas of constitutional law and theory, international law, cultural theory and philosophy. Before going to Yale in 1985, he clerked for Justice White in the United States Supreme Court and practiced law in Washington, D.C., during which time he was on the legal team representing Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice. He is the author of Legitimacy and History: Self-Government in American Constitutional Theory; The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America; The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship; Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear; Putting Liberalism in its Place; and Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil. He earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in Philosophy and J.D. from Yale.

Read the Page 69 Test results for Out of Eden.

--Marshal Zeringue