Sebastian Rotella

Sebastian Rotella is the author of Triple Crossing, which the New York Times Book Review named its favorite debut crime novel and action thriller of 2011, and the nonfiction book Twilight on the Line. He is a senior reporter for ProPublica, a newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism in the public interest.

His new novel is The Convert's Song.

Last week I asked the author about what he was reading. Rotella's reply:

I alternate among English-language and foreign authors. I try to maintain the foreign languages I speak by reading in the original, even if it induces a headache. There’s a lot of treacherous translation out there. Here are some recent travels in fiction.

A while back I was invited to Festival America, a wonderful literary event in Vincennes outside Paris. I picked up a French book called Arab Jazz, by Karim Miske. It’s a crime novel that takes place in a neighborhood of northeast Paris I know from my work as a foreign correspondent. Fascinating turf: a mix of yuppies, bohemians and immigrants, tough housing projects and hip cafes. In the book, a wild-eyed crew of Islamic extremists, Orthodox Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses get tangled up in a ritualistic murder, police corruption and the trafficking of a designer super-drug. The main protagonist is a troubled young Moroccan immigrant who reads crime novels all day. I enjoyed Miske’s command of sub-cultures and slang. This subject matter, the new France-in-the-making, is more interesting to me than truffles and quaint villages and whatnot.

Then I read The Drop, by Dennis Lehane. It’s now my favorite Lehane, surpassing Shutter Island on my list. I thought this novel was particularly tight and focused. It has a beautifully constructed sense of place: the lonely protagonist wanders his bedraggled Boston neighborhood. He works at its mafia-connected bar. He prays at its empty church. The landscape swirls with ghosts and secrets; you know they are going to rise up and engulf everybody. I need to see the movie; the late great Jim Gandolfini seems perfect for this.

My wife and I like to read short stories aloud in Spanish. We just read Cuento Para Tahures y otros Relatos Policiales (Gambler’s Tale and Other Police Stories) by Rodolfo Walsh. He was a politically-engaged Argentine author and investigative journalist. He died young at the hands of the military dictatorship in the 1970s. When a death squad tried to “disappear” him, he pulled a gun and went down shooting. This book’s recurring hero is a burly, weary detective captain named Comisario Laurenzi. In some of the stories, he sits in a cafe and reminisces. In others, he works cases accompanied by a police reporter. The prose is spare and honed; every word counts. The tone is hard-boiled, compassionate and funny. The locales vary from tenements in Buenos Aires to dusty provincial towns. These stories are gems.

I must confess to a guilty pleasure: the Jeeves series by P.G. Wodehouse. My daughter just gave me Thank You, Jeeves to add to my collection. The world of upper-class British fops of the 1930s and ‘40s is far from my life experience and what I write about. But that’s what I like: it is pure escapism. It makes me laugh out loud. The strength resides largely in the voice. Bertie Wooster’s narration is like a virtuoso musical performance: the goofy obtuse nonchalance, the half-remembered literary quotes, the idle days dedicated to avoiding aunts, nursing hangovers, frequenting the Drones Club. Thank You, Jeeves is about how Wooster moves to a country cottage, and Jeeves quits over Wooster’s incessant banjo playing, and Wooster’s ex-fiancee wants to marry his old chum from school days…the usual silliness. My favorite part is when the new butler gets drunk and chases Wooster around with a knife saying he wants to ascertain the color of his insides.

I recently did a two-man panel with Michael Connelly at the Bouchercon mystery writers convention. We reminisced about our reporter days at the Los Angeles Times and talked books and writing. Mike, who is the hardest working man in show business, just published his 19th Harry Bosch novel, The Burning Room. It gave me another chance to appreciate what a craftsman Mike is. The construction is precise and the momentum is relentless. The plot weaves together two investigations. This is a nice realistic touch, because only fictional cops get unlimited time and resources to work a lone case. Yet it’s presented in a way that the reader can keep track of everything all the way through. The Burning Room has a wistful quality. It shows Bosch—driven and talented and morose as ever--nearing the end of his LAPD career. A new young detective character, Lucia Soto, adds to the sense of a torch being passed.

Learn more about The Convert's Song at the Mulholland Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Petropoulos

Jonathan Petropoulos is John V. Croul Professor of European History, Claremont McKenna College, and author of several books on culture in the Third Reich. He is former Research Director for Art and Cultural Property, Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.

His new book is Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany.

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

I just finished one book, Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, and am half way through Anne Sinclair’s My Grandfather’s Gallery. The former is by my favorite writer, whom I admire for his nuanced prose, his character development, and perhaps most of all, for his ability to master specific professions. In Amsterdam, he puts himself inside the heads of a musician (a composer) and a journalist. McEwan has brilliant things to say about the creative process—how artists push themselves and sacrifice in order to achieve something great—and his journalist character also takes up the issue of balancing professional accomplishment with the pressures of the “real world.” McEwan is also always good for an astonishing ending. In this case, he ties together many loose threads. I should have seen it coming, but he still got me.

Anne Sinclair has written an elegant and engaging memoir about her grandfather, the hugely important Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg (who was also a victim of Nazi plundering). I like the way she takes a first person approach and writes herself into the story (which includes one of discovery, as she tries to understand her grandfather). She does a masterful job evoking life on the rue La Boétie—with Picasso living next door for a while—and I found her comments about contemporary France (including the issues regarding xenophobia and anti-Semitism) to be insightful. She gets some of the cultural history of Nazi Germany wrong (there were no works by French artists in the Degenerate Art Exhibition and, as I show in Artists Under Hitler, modern artists continued to work in the Third Reich), but her portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most important art dealers is both illuminating and touching.

Learn more about Artists Under Hitler at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jenna Black

Jenna Black is your typical writer. Which means she's an "experience junkie." She got her BA in physical anthropology and French from Duke University.

Once upon a time, she dreamed she would be the next Jane Goodall, camping in the bush making fabulous discoveries about primate behavior. Then, during her senior year at Duke, she did some actual research in the field and made this shocking discovery: primates spend something like 80% of their time doing such exciting things as sleeping and eating.

Concluding that this discovery was her life's work in the field of primatology, she then moved on to such varied pastimes as grooming dogs and writing technical documentation.

Black's new book is Revolution, the third installment in the Replica Trilogy Series.

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

In September, I went to the Writer's Police Academy (my third time!), and went to a presentation by thriller writer and explosives expert John Gilstrap. He was such an entertaining presenter that I just had to read one of his books. At the autographing at the end of the weekend, I picked up Threat Warning, which was a middle book in his Jonathan Graves thriller series. I read it and became completely addicted, so I've been working my way through the entire series as well as a couple of his standalone thrillers. The one I finished most recently was Hostage Zero. A couple of kids are kidnapped, and hostage rescue specialist Jonathan Graves sets out to find the kids and rescue them. Gilstrap's thrillers are great page-turners, and I'm having to teach myself not to start reading too close to bedtime, because if I do I'll never get to bed.

Visit Jenna Black's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Denning

Andrew Denning is a postdoctoral fellow in history at the University of British Columbia.

His new book is Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History.

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

I’m currently plowing through Guy Delisle’s fantastic Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City — an absolute joy to read! Delisle, a graphic novelist, accompanied his partner to Israel for a year while she worked for Doctors Without Borders in the West Bank. The author cared for the couple’s two children as his partner went to work each day, and his observations of daily life are rendered in an engaging visual style and with a wry sense of humor. He offers occasional descriptions of the political situation and ethnic conflicts in this city celebrated by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, but his work is most revelatory in its study of the routines, frustrations, and surprises of everyday life in this ancient city. Traffic jams, border waits, and security checks are commonplace, and Delisle’s fish-out-of-water record — equal parts travelogue, diary, and journalistic reportage — offers fresh new insight into the joys and struggles of daily life in this city wracked by conflict.

Learn more about Skiing into Modernity at the University of California Press website and Andrew Denning's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louisa Treger

Born in London, Louisa Treger began her career as a classical violinist. She studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music, and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher.

Treger subsequently turned to literature, gaining a First Class degree and a PhD in English at University College London, where she focused on early twentieth century women’s writing. Married with three children, she lives in London.

Treger's new book, her first novel, is The Lodger.

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

I have two books on the go at the moment, both completely different and both brilliant.

The first is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. This novel is best read without any prior knowledge of the plot, so I’ll just say that it begins when Rosemary Cooke, the narrator, is 22, and gets arrested for throwing a glass of milk in her college canteen. Her sister vanished when she was 5, and she hasn’t seen her brother for 11 years, but she knows he is wanted by the FBI. The narrative keeps turning back on itself, disclosing through Rosemary’s memories the traumatic events that led to these absences. It is continually surprising, funny, tragic, complex and unsettling, exploring what it means to be human - and humane. I am nearly at the end, and I love it so much that I keep putting it away because I can’t bear to finish it – I know I’m going to feel utterly bereft when I do.

The second book is Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two, by Angela Smith, an examination of the relationship between these fascinating authors. I knew they were rivals: Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield’s was ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’. What I didn’t realise is that they had an intense friendship as well, sharing ‘a queer sense of being like’. Their writerly preoccupations mirrored each other’s, and they felt able discuss their ideas together in a way they couldn’t with anyone else. After Katherine died, Virginia wrote: ‘Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine … I have the feeling that I shall think of her at intervals all through life. Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else.’

This intelligent and incisive book is full of lovely quotes from their fiction, letters and diaries. I particularly enjoyed those about writing, finding echoes of my own thoughts and ideas in them, only they expressed with great eloquence the things that I fumble to say. Such as: 'The English language is damned difficult but it’s also damned rich & so clear & bright that you can search out the darkest places with it’ Katherine Mansfield.

Visit Louisa Treger's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lodger.

My Book, The Movie: The Lodger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Policoff

Stephen Policoff has taught writing at Wesleyan and Yale and is currently Master Teacher of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU. His books include the novel Beautiful Somewhere Else, the memoir Sixteen Scenes from a Film I Never Wanted to See, two YA books, The Dreamer’s Companion and Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens (co-authored with Jeffrey Skinner), and the children’s book Cesar’s Amazing Journey.

His new novel is Come Away.

Earlier this month I asked Policoff about what he was reading. The author's reply:

Actually, right now, I am mostly re-reading. I have to put together a syllabus for a creative writing class I am teaching in the spring in Global Liberal Studies at NYU, so I am looking over some books I have taught previously to decide if I still plan to teach them or not. I re-read and loved Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, her best book, I think, and a wonderful, unusual, coming-of-age story, full of vivid details of childhood in Antigua, and sharply held-back emotions.

I have also recently re-read The Bride Groom by Ha Jin (strange short stories, quite different from most contemporary short fiction), Angela Carter’s wonderful collection of revisionist fairytales, The Bloody Chamber, and Denis Johnson’s enigmatic novella The Name of the World, with its enticing blend of melancholy and sex. I try to find work that can be construed as “global” (this is part of the mandate of my program), work which my students are unlikely to have read, work which does something a little different with voice and narrative point-of-view.

I have also been reading Anya Ulinich’s Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel. I am not a huge fan of graphic novels but this one is funny and weird and rather dream-like, and that is definitely my cup of tea.

Visit Stephen Policoff's faculty webpage and Facebook page, and learn more about Come Away.

--Marshal Zeringue

David M. Carr

David M. Carr is professor of Old Testament at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a leading specialist on how the Bible was formed.

His new book is Holy Resilience: The Bible's Traumatic Origins.

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

In my spare time I read mostly fiction, since it provides an angle on truth and writing that I miss in the mass of research reading that I do. I just finished reading (actually listening to) Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (as read by Juliet Stevenson). I listened to it twice, ever more impressed with the poetic language of the novel, Woolf’s exquisite depictions of the interior lives of her intersecting characters, and the fluid way she moved between the inner worlds of the different characters moving through the day. In one sense, the novel covers very little ground, the happenings of a single day. But in another sense the novel seems to say that the most important stories, for several of the main characters, had happened long ago. The novel traces the reverberations of these earlier stories--of love, rejection, and even wartime trauma--on the current lives of each character making their way through the one day in June. It impressed on me the maelstrom of stories and conflicting interior worlds that swirl around me all the time as I make my own way through each day.

Before Mrs. Dalloway I worked my way through Tolstoy’s War and Peace (in the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude). I was impressed with the naturalistic way Tolstoy depicted the mundane aspects of war. Tolstoy’s “war” sections in the novel don't fit the typical mythology that has dominated most writing about war that I have read. He just seemed to be describing everyday events in these war sections of the novel, except that certain human beings were trying to kill each other. And this was heightened by Tolstoy’s juxtaposition of these war scenes with “peace” scenes in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, which were also described in incredible, naturalistic detail. What I find so powerful about this period of Tolstoy’s writing (also for Anna Karenina), is the spectacular detail with which he could render different characters, their aspirations and foibles, often without a moralistic tinge.

I also read more contemporary novels, but the consistent thread is that I seek out writing by authors who can evoke the lives and feelings of ordinary people with insight, compassion, and grace. The drama, for me, comes in being taken by a master author inside the world of a person living a very different life from my own.

Learn more about David Carr's Holy Resilience at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Holy Resilience.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is Professor of History and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Judaic Studies at Fairfield University.

He has written a wide range of books, including the newly released Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture and the edited collection, "If Only We Had Died in Egypt!" What Ifs of Jewish History From Abraham to Zionism. Rosenfeld is also the author of Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich, and the co-edited work, Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past.

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

The historical legacy of the Nazi era continues to fascinate me and I have begun work on a new book about the history of the Fourth Reich. As part of this project, I recently finished reading a (by now, surely forgotten) novel from 1944, Erwin Lessner’s Phantom Victory: A Fictional History of the Fourth Reich, 1945-1960. This future history (or to be technical, retroactive alternate history) was written by an Austrian World War I veteran and emigré to the United States and features a nightmare scenario in which the United States neglects to follow up its military victory over the Nazis with a hard peace and thereby enables the Nazis to return to power and establish a Fourth Reich. The plot and characters are reasonably engaging (the founder of the Fourth Reich is a charismatic peasant named Friedolin who leads the Germans back to power via feigned penance for their crimes), but the book is mostly of interest for articulating the fears of many Americans in the mid-1940s that their government would repeat the mistakes of 1918 and set the stage for yet another world war.

On a related note, I recently finished a very different future history, Howard Jacobson’s new novel, J. There are numerous connections between this novel and Lessner’s, the most important being its expression of contemporary fears relating to larger political trends. In Jacobson’s case, it is the upsurge in European antisemitism, particularly in Great Britain. Jacobson explored this topic in his recent novel, The Finkler Question, but J deals with the subject in a much more dystopian way: by imagining a future Britain in which the J--- (the word is never printed in the novel) have somehow been expunged from British life root and branch. The novel is engrossing and asks readers to toggle back and forth between the real history of 20th century antisemitism (mostly in Germany) and an imaginary future world, in which contemporary events (mostly in the Middle East) have led Jew-hatred to boil over. Jacobson’s depiction of how this event shapes British life generations later and how Britons ultimately realize they need the J--- in their lives for dialectical reasons is provocative and deeply unsettling.

Visit Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Purser

Ann Purser's latest Lois Meade mystery is Suspicion at Seven.

Last week I asked the author about what she was reading. Purser's reply:

I belong to a book club - around twelve of us turn up in the Reading Room (truly a small building erected about a hundred years ago in our tiny village, in an effort to educate the poor and neglected members of the parish}. We meet once a month, and this is about right for me to read one book a month. This month we have Fludd, by Hilary Mantel, a deliciously creepy read. Into churchy matters - dark corners of the mind - comes Fludd, a strange character who comes and goes at will, sometimes without apparently taking steps to appear or disappear. Frustrated women, corrupt clergy, all described with an accurate pen. And a plot that keeps the reader`s interest until the end - and then for longer!

In spite of writing crime novels, I love to read them, and my favourite, Michael Gilbert, is no longer with us, but can still be found on dusty library shelves.

Visit Ann Purser's website.

The Page 69 Test: Found Guilty at Five.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jen Nadol

Jen Nadol grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania and graduated from American University with a BA in literature. She's lived in Washington DC, Boston, NYC and now, an old farmhouse north of the city with her husband and three sons. When she's not writing, she's probably tending to the farmhouse or the sons, reading, cooking, skiing, or sleeping.

Her new book is This Is How It Ends.

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

I’m reading two middle grade books right now, unusual in that I rarely read MG or more than one book at a time.

The first is Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord which I bought several months ago, thinking my ten year old might like it. He hadn’t picked it up so I started reading it aloud to my two younger sons who are riveted by the story of a group of homeless children living in an abandoned movie theater in Venice. We’re about halfway through and I think the story is about to take a turn for the speculative with the item the children are going to steal. It’s a wonderful book to read aloud because the writing is so graceful and the author has really taken time to paint vividly both the characters and the cold, damp atmosphere of Venice as winter approaches.

The other book is Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Found, the first book in The Missing series. I picked it up at my sons’ school when I found myself waiting there one day without a book to read. The librarian had told me about the series and the premise was intriguing: a plane full of babies mysteriously appears at an airport. Thirteen years later, adopted children start getting anonymous notes that they are “the missing”. I’m almost finished with this one and it really is a fabulous idea, with a fast-paced plot.

Both are successful, engaging stories, but in very different ways. My ten year old has now finished and enjoyed both books, but preferred the action-packed storyline of Found while I really love the depth of description and development of setting and character in The Thief Lord. I lean toward the latter in my own writing and would love to strengthen the former. So, as a writer, it’s been interesting and instructive to read these books side-by-side and make note of each author’s choices and how the different audiences - my son (the intended audience) and I (an adult reader) - respond to them.

Visit Jen Nadol's website.

--Marshal Zeringue