Trilby Kent

Trilby Kent studied History at Oxford University and Social Anthropology at the LSE. She has written for the Canadian and British national press and in 2010 was shortlisted in the Guardian's International Development Journalism Competition. She is the author of two novels for children (published in Canada and the U.S.) and one for adults (published in the U.K.) and is working on a PhD. She lives in London, England.

Her Stones for my Father follows 12-year-old Coraline Roux through the darkest days of the Anglo-Boer War: from the sacking of her family’s farm, to a trek across the battle-scarred Transvaal, to internment in a British concentration camp. Scattered throughout are moments of quiet beauty, including a figure of hope who emerges in the form of a Canadian soldier.

Her reply to my recent query about what she was reading:

I’m a huge Nadine Gordimer fan – I have been ever since we read ‘Once Upon a Time’ in school – so I was thrilled when the trade magazine that I write for sent me an early copy of her Life Times: Stories 1952-2007. It’s a great doorstop of a book, but I’m still rationing out the stories to last as long as possible!

My current novel of choice is Manja by Anna Gmeyner, which has been reissued by the delightful Persephone Books and tells the story of five children living in Germany in the 1930s. It’s a period of history that I find endlessly fascinating (my own novel, Smoke Portrait, is set in 1936 and deals with many of the same themes) and I’m enjoying it enormously.

For non-fiction, it has to be A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor. I actually got this as a Christmas present for my husband, as we’d managed to catch snippets of the excellent BBC Radio 4 series and the British Museum is often one of our go-to options for a rainy afternoon. Some of the selected objects are wonderfully surprising: from a 5,000 year-old sandal label to a suffragette-defaced penny. This is the book that I keep to hand whenever I feel the need to put off work for just a few more minutes…

Read more about Stones for My Father at the publisher's website, and visit Trilby Kent's Red Room Writer Profile.

The Page 69 Test: Stones for My Father.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Kihn

Martin Kihn is the author of the comic memoir Bad Dog (A Love Story). It's his story of trying to stay sober while training his out-of-control 90-pound Bernese mountain dog, Hola, for her Canine Good Citizen certification from the American Kennel Club. Kihn's previous memoir of his time as a cutthroat management consultant was recently filmed as a pilot for Showtime.

Not so long ago I asked him what he was reading.  His reply:

Like most writers, I'm always reading -- but rarely what people expect. No modern fiction or biographies. And although I've been known to write them, I don't read business books, which studies have shown are written at the eighth grade level (on average). I like to have three genres going at once, and these days I'm pretty consistently reading at least one in each of the following:

(1) Mysteries featuring dogs or cats -- This, oddly, is a thriving sub-genre of cozy mysteries. The gold standards are the first five entries in Lilian Jackson Braun's "The Cat Who ..." series, which are better than you think, and Susan Conant's Dog Lovers Mysteries. Right now I'm reading Curiosity Thrilled the Cat, first in a new series by Minnesota author Sofie Kelly. She gives the cats magical powers, which is a courageous way of solving the perennial genre problem: How can a non-talking animal actually solve a crime?

(2) Books written or set in big houses in the 19th century -- I've always loved Gothics, especially the sprawling bestsellers of one and two centuries ago by Ann Radcliffe, Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. I just read a contemporary Gothic by Michael Cox, The Glass of Time, which is even better than the prequel, The Meaning of Night. Both manage to pay intimate, knowing homage to Wilkie Collins while still being thrilling time trips into a dubious universe of mistaken heirs, mysterious maids, and eavesdropping as a dramatic device. And Cox put me in the mood to begin Collins' Armadale, which is not nearly as well known as The Woman in White or The Moonstone, but certainly starts with a bang.

(3) Theology -- I write a blog called The God Project Dot Net, which is a kind of non-denominational search for You-Know-Who, and it's requiring me to do a lot of basic reading. Two millenia's worth, to be precise. Right now I'm belatedly discovering the great proto-existentialist Soren Kierkegaard's Training in Christianity, which has all of his passion, wit and eccentricity. I think because he was independently wealthy -- not to mention a genius -- he didn't worry what people would think. He's as exciting to read as Wilkie Collins, in his own way.

Learn more about Bad Dog: A Love Story at Martin Kihn's website and the Bad Dog Facebook page.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Martin Kihn and Hola.

The Page 99 Test: Bad Dog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosalind Brackenbury

Rosalind Brackenbury is the author of twelve novels, a collection of short stories, and five books of poetry.

Her new novel is Becoming George Sand.

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

I'm reading David Grossman's To The End Of The Land and can hardly put it down. It's so delicately and accurately observant of people's lives and thoughts, as well as bringing in the outside world and its threats and dangers. It's about an Israeli woman, Ora, whose son is in the IDF, in action, and about her relationships with the two men who are fathers to her two sons. I was particularly moved by the account of her going with her Arab driver, Sami, to take her son back to the army base, and her belated realization of how terrifying this journey must be for Sami, as he is the only Arab for miles around. Ora is emotional, irrational, insensitive, self-obsessed, flawed - a real human being. She gets everything too late and is always trying to make amends. I admire David Grossman's ability to get under her skin so thoroughly. There's a just-controlled agony in reading this book, I must admit, but I trust Grossman's ability to bring the reader through it, while not giving any easy answers - quite the reverse. Next, I plan to read Richard Yates' short stories in a collection, because I so admired Revolutionary Road.

Learn more about the book and author at Rosalind Brackenbury's website.

The Page 69 Test: Becoming George Sand.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Darnton

John Darnton is an award-winning journalist and best-selling novelist. He worked for forty years for The New York Times as a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor. He won two George Polk Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. He has written five novels: Neanderthal, The Experiment (both on the NYTimes best-seller list), Mind Catcher, The Darwin Conspiracy and Black and White and Dead All Over.

His new book is Almost a Family: A Memoir.

Recently I asked Darnton what he was reading. His reply:

Latest book was Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which I read for a book group (otherwise I probably would never have picked it up). It's a slow start and it's hard to sympathize with the main character -- almost all the characters, in fact -- but over some 460 pages, the satire takes a back seat and the story, about obsessive love, kicks in. By the end, it's unstoppable.

Learn more about the author and his work at John Darnton's website.

The Page 99 Test: Almost a Family.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Anable

Stephen H. Anable was born in Boston and graduated from Stanford and Harvard universities. His short fiction and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies. At various times during his life, he has been a stand-up comic, a journalist, an actor, a social worker, a scriptwriter, and the communication coordinator at a cemetery.

His new novel is A Pinchbeck Bride.

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

Right now I’m reading The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser. I had never known Henry VIII was basically a crowned serial killer who’d executed his wife Anne Boleyn on what he knew were trumped-up charges (I’d always thought she’d done something to tick him off…). I enjoyed Fraser’s classic biography, Mary Queen of Scots, so thought I’d give this a try. I like history from a remote period because it has nothing to do with (my) writing.

And, since you asked, I’m actually tackling re-reading Ulysses for the first time since college, when I crept gingerly through it while taking a course on James Joyce. I’m just loving it!—the whole detail of life on a warm spring day in Edwardian Dublin: the pubs, Trinity College, Mr. Bloom enjoying his fried liver, his wife thinking salacious thoughts. I picked this up because I needed a jolt of rich language, the reading equivalent of Black Forest cake.

Whenever I’m working on something and feel the need for stylistic inspiration, I read something luscious: Nabokov, Anne Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Ruth Rendell.

Visit Stephen Anable's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carolyn Korsmeyer

Carolyn Korsmeyer is Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of numerous works in philosophy, especially aesthetics and philosophy of art, including Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (1999) and Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (2004). She is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Her new book is Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics.

Recently I asked Korsmeyer what she was reading. Her reply:

I have the habit, possibly not a good one, of reading several books at the same time. At the moment I am reading – or more accurately perusing – Mark Twain’s Autobiography, too hefty to be comfortable for long stretches of time but wonderful to pick up now and then. Twain is as pithy and amusing when writing letters or diary entries as he is when crafting fiction.

By my fireplace, resting on top of Twain, is W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, a compelling, weird, and mentally exhausting narrative of a man rediscovering his Jewish past, a past he forgot after being sent to Wales as a young child to escape the war in Europe.

Upstairs, I am reading Kipling’s Kim, which I recently bought in an airport bookstore and am finding quite absorbing. That followed Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow, not only excellent airplane reading but also an intricately plotted book with vividcharacters and an increasingly likable narrator. Fiction keeps me going by providing excursions away from everyday demands. I need a daily dose and frequently reread old favorites. For bathtub reading I recommend paperbacks, preferably ones not on loan from friends.

Learn more about Carolyn Korsmeyer's Savoring Disgust at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Savoring Disgust.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jim Krusoe

Jim Krusoe is the author of the novels Erased, Girl Factory, and Iceland. His stories and poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bomb, the Chicago Review, the Denver Quarterly, the American Poetry Review, and other publications. He teaches at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles.

His new novel is Toward You.

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

About ten or so years ago I read a short fictional excerpt in Granta magazine that impressed me so much I kept waiting for it to appear as a book. Well, it has, and though it’s a short book, Javier Marias’s Bad Nature: With Elvis in Mexico does not disappoint. Marias has been a favorite writer of mine for some years now—especially his mid-career work—which seems to combine maximum elegance with breakneck daring, and Bad Nature exemplifies this seeming oxymoron more than most, especially the daring part.

The narrator of the story is a guy who accompanies Elvis during his stay in Mexico while he films Fun in Acapulco. (I should add here that another movie of The King’s, Blue Hawaii, was responsible for my starting to smoke. The film was so intensely unbearable that I went out to the lobby—I’d come with friends so it was impossible to leave—and, rather than kill myself on the spot, I bought a pack of Salems. They were my first cigarettes ever.) In any case, Marias’s Elvis exits fairly early, and the rest of the piece is like being trapped in a dream of sleazy a Mexican cabaret with prostitutes and gangsters, the dreamer facing nearly certain death. I loaned my own copy to a writer who promptly finished it and loaned it to another who loaned it to another, etc. It’s a fabulous read.

And speaking of dream-like novels set in sleazy Mexican cabarets with gangsters who threaten to kill the protagonist, I can’t resist mentioning here Toby Olson’s The Woman Who Escaped from Shame, even though I read it a while ago. It takes the above mix and adds to it pornographic movies and miniature horses (no, really miniature, the size of Jack Russell terriers). Olson’s novels move with the logic of beautiful and dangerous dreams; he’s another favorite of mine.

And then, speaking of mostly helpless individuals caught up in menacing dream-driven plots (are you detecting a theme?) I commend as well Julia Holmes’ first novel, Meeks, in which her hero/victim moves about in a world where the rules become clear only after it’s too late to change one’s actions. It’s radiant, funny, scary and disorienting—the best sort of read.

Read reviews and excerpts from Toward You, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

The Page 69 Test: Girl Factory.

The Page 69 Test: Erased.

The Page 69 Test: Toward You.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Kane

Ben Kane is the author of The Forgotten Legion and The Silver Eagle. He lives in North Somerset, England.

His latest novel is The Road to Rome, the final book in The Forgotten Legion trilogy.

Recently I asked Kane what he was reading. His reply:

I've been lucky recently, and managed to read several novels back to back. Normally, thanks to my writing and a young family, I manage one novel perhaps every 4 months. One of the recent treasures I've read is The Blade Itself, the first book of a wonderful trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. I've not read much fantasy since I was a boy, but this came so highly recommended by friends and on Amazon threads that I went for it. I wasn't disappointed either. Written from the standpoint of half a dozen or more characters, Abercrombie's writing is fast-paced, gritty and full of black humor. The fact that one of the main characters is a thoughtful torturer (with a tiny amount of remaining conscience) might give you some idea of what lies within the book's pages. I've since read the second book and am about to start the third, and delighted to know that there are more books set in the same world.

I've also been lucky enough to reread The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. While it's a young adult title, the author wrote that her books were for all 'from eight to eighty-eight'. It's true to say that the book -set in first century AD Roman Britain and about the lost eagle standard of a legion - is as good now as it was when I read it as a ten or eleven year old. With two central characters - a maimed and bitter Roman centurion, and his slave, a courageous British tribesman, and central themes of honor, loyalty and the search for redemption against all odds, this book stands out as one of the best novels in the last 60 years. It's a suitable testament to its durability that it's still in print, 57 years after it was first published, and that it is currently showing in movie theaters all over the USA as The Eagle.

Visit Ben Kane's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Larry D. Sweazy

Larry D. Sweazy's first western, The Rattlesnake Season, a Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger novel, was released by Berkley Books in 2009. Book #2 in the Josiah Wolfe series, The Scorpion Trail, followed in 2010. Book #3, The Badger's Revenge, was released on April 05, 2011, and Book #4, The Cougar's Prey, will be released in October, 2011.

A couple of weeks ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I’m just finishing up reading The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. A couple of things grabbed me about this stunning novel right off, beyond the fact that it is a compelling read. It is a first novel, and the author was 70 years old when it sold. Simply put, it’s never too late to make your dream come true. Bradley obviously didn’t let his age stop him. The narrator, 11 year old Flavia de Luce, is written in first person. I thought it was a brave choice for a 70 year old male writer to tackle the voice of an 11 year old girl, but Bradley pulls it off seamlessly. Of course, Charles Portis pulled off nearly same thing with True Grit, but this is different, and just as literary. I love the idea that a writer has the courage and freedom to tell a story as he sees fit, and if it’s good enough, it will find an editor brave enough to buy it, who will then publish it, and set it out into the world to succeed or fail on its own merits.

The novel is a historical mystery set in 1950s England. Bradley had never been to England until after he wrote novel. More courage on the writer’s part. And even though the narrator is 11 years old, this book is not being marketed as a YA (young adult) novel, but as an adult mystery. All of that said, once the reader encounters Flavia, it’s a rip-roaring start to a great story, and a love affair that promises to last beyond the first book, since this is also the beginning of a series. Flavia is an aspiring chemist who lives in a house that was once considered one of the finest estates in England, but has fallen into disrepair. Flavia’s mother has died. Her father is heart-broken. And her two sisters are older, and off on their own adventures, pretty much leaving Flavia to herself to practice her chemistry. That changes when she finds a dead bird on the front stoop with a stamp stabbed through its beak, and hours later, when she finds a dead man in the garden, who is mysteriously connected to her grieving father. What comes next is a twist at every turn, description worthy of a master, quirky characters, and a fantastic mystery, that shouldn’t be missed. This is one of best debuts I’ve read in a long time.

Watch the trailer for The Badger’s Revenge, and learn more about the book and author at Larry D. Sweazy's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Badger’s Revenge by Larry D. Sweazy.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Larry D. Sweazy and Brodi and Sunny.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Vorhaus

John Vorhaus is the author of The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even if You’re Not. An avid poker player, he has written several books on that subject, including the bestselling Killer Poker series and the poker-world novel Under the Gun. A veteran creative consultant, he has taught writing in twenty-four countries on four continents, most recently running the writing staff of the Russian version of Married ... with Children.

His new novel is The Albuquerque Turkey.

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

Since my next novel is set in 1969, I was excited to see how a master like Thomas Pynchon handled the task, and so picked up his noirish new novel, Inherent Vice, which follows the stoned adventures of detective Larry “Doc” Sportello through the drugs-and-corruption underworld of a semi-fictitious, late ‘60s Los Angeles. Having grown up in LA in the late ‘60s, I was interested to see where Pynchon’s research had yielded verisimilitude, and where he cut a corner or two in the name of good storytelling.

This is a challenge I’m facing every day in my current work, a coming-of-age tale set in Milwaukee in 1969. Of course I wasn’t there then, and Internet resources on the subject are scarcer than you might expect. Nor is it entirely necessary that I adhere strictly to ‘60s reality, since my protagonist is only fifteen years old, and his first-person narrative yields only the evidence available to a fifteen-year-old’s eyes. In this sense, I made a conscious decision to “cheat the research.” Had I selected a third person narrator, I would have been much more responsible for a full and accurate portrayal of the era – and the fact is, I hate research like a cat hates baths, for the simple reason that when I’m researching I’m not writing, and I’d rather be writing, full stop.

Interestingly, I detect a similar cheat in Inherent Vice. By assigning the storytelling to the limited, subjective (stoned) perspective of Doc Sportello, Pynchon deals himself the liberty of capturing such details as he sees fit, and ignoring or eliding the ones he doesn’t need or doesn’t choose to pursue. In that sense, I found Inherent Vice to be a totally uplifting read. If my approach mimics a master’s, it can’t be too off base.

On an emotional level, I thought I also detected something of Pynchon’s yearning, and in it a yearning common to all authors. Having succeeded in writing eyeball-bleed fiction (fiction that’s a challenge – albeit a worthy one – for the reader) he clearly decided to go for something less stressful here. I can almost hear his inner monologue: Sure, I can write riveting and authentic historical fiction (Mason/Dixon) and I can write game-changing science fiction (V, Gravity’s Rainbow) but can I write a pot-boiler? Dunno. Only one way to find out…

“Only one way to find out.” These are the words, I think, that drive every writer to ever higher levels of challenge and achievement. No sooner have we conquered one writing task than we set ourselves new and more difficult ones. My own career is a picture-book history of this, as I progressed from advertising copywriter to songwriter to sitcom writer to hour-drama writer to screenplay writer to comic novelist to serious novelist. I have now arrived at a genre I define as “voice fiction,” fiction with something to say. I expect to be here for quite some time, but I don’t expect to stay here, because writing is a “have more/need more” condition. Once I’ve conquered voice fiction, I know I’ll be motivated to do something I haven’t done. That’s how a real writer rolls.

Just ask Thomas Pynchon.

Visit John Vorhaus's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Albuquerque Turkey.

--Marshal Zeringue