Laura Sibson

Laura Sibson worked for years as a career counselor for undergraduates before getting her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. When she’s not writing, counseling, or drinking impossibly strong coffee, you can find her running miles around her home in Philadelphia, walking her dog, or ingesting pop culture (along with great takeout) with her family.

Her new YA novel is The Art of Breaking Things.

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

It’s not uncommon for me to be reading several books at once and now is no exception. After seeing Endgame for the second time, my 19-year-old suggested, nay demanded, that I read Watchmen for a different take on superheroes. I’m haven’t read many graphic novels and I’m stunned by interplay between the images and the text bubbles.

I’m listening to an audio-version of Sarah Carlson’s debut young adult novel All the Walls of Belfast, which is the dual-narration story of two teens whose families have lived on opposite sides of the Northern Ireland conflict. I’m swooning over the story and the accents of the narrators. Carlson’s depiction of the ways that the conflict has affected generations is challenging me to deeply consider similar current conflicts. Sarah and I will be on a panel along with several other 2019 YA debuts where we will be talking about tackling tough issues in our fiction, so I was looking forward to reading her book before we meet.

I’m also beta-reading the brilliant, new novel by writing friend and fellow VCFA alum, Heather Demetrios. Little Universes follows two sisters, one biological and one adopted, as they try to process the loss of their parents to a tsunami. Mae, who is very science-minded, tries to work out every life situation the same way that she’d work out a calculus or physics problem. Hannah, on the other hand, looks for signs from Something Else and finds herself driven back to her addiction. When the sisters learn about the secrets each are keeping from the other, it’s apparent that neither of their approaches will solve these problems. Heather is one of my favorite writers. I love her mind-blowing metaphors and the ways that she allows her characters to experience their worlds.

The last book I’ve been dipping into every now and then to make it last as long as possible is the absolutely delightful (and useful!) Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, the Chief Copyeditor at Random House. Buy this book for the grammar tips; enjoy it for the footnotes.

Visit Laura Sibson's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Laura Sibson and Nala.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louis Greenberg

Louis Greenberg is a renowned writer in his own right, having been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for his debut novel The Beggars’ Signwriters (2007), but is perhaps more known for his work with Sarah Lotz as one half of internationally bestselling S.L. Grey.

Green Valley is his first solo novel to be published outside his native South Africa. He is currently based in England.

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

My choice for this post surprises me. I usually seek out books that are set elsewhere – whether on another continent or on another planet. I love reading that transports me. But the book I’ve most enjoyed recently is The Plague Stones by James Brogden. I thought it was deftly plotted and felt effortlessly confident, and it was all about the history and present of the part of England where I currently live.

Partly, I suppose it’s because I’m newish to England and the area, so in a way this was like reading a book about another place. But on the other hand, I’ve been here long enough for the villages and towns in the area to feel familiar, and then to get the thrill of those familiar places being rendered strange through this uncanny novel. Finding the right book is so much about where and when it meets you.

I find the layers of history in England fascinating. I live in a place where there are barns and houses older than Shakespeare, and where if there’s a carving in a beam above a door, it’s a genuine witch mark, not some self-conscious, faux decoration. Until not that long ago, people here were stashing children’s clothes and other trinkets in their ceilings to ward off evil presences. Who knows, perhaps some still are.

The Plague Stones brilliantly blends the contemporary politics of short-cut property developers and bodies corporate with much older stories of injustice and ostracism. It made me look at cornerstones and keystones and the weathered old rocks I’ve already started taking for granted with the new eyes of a traveller.

Visit Louis Greenberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Domenica Ruta

Domenica Ruta is a fiction writer and memoirist from Massachusetts. A scholarship kid at Phillips Academy Andover and Oberlin College, she has worked as a videographer and editor, a book store clerk, a waitress, a bartender, an English-as-a-Foreign-Language teacher, a nanny, a nursing home caregiver, a domestic violence hotline advocate and a house cleaner. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin.

Her first book, the memoir With or Without You, was a New York Times Bestseller and named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the top three nonfiction books of the year 2013. The Boston Globe, Macleans, NPR, Slate, Elle, Bust, Oprah.com and USA Today all loved it.

Ruta's newly released first novel is Last Day.

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

Right now I'm reading In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. It's about this Tibetan Buddhist monk living in India, a man who essentially grew up as royalty. He's from a long lineage of esteemed teachers and monks and has led a very sheltered life full of meditation and study but not much dish washing or laundry or even walking alone. One night he leaves his monastery, telling no one, to spend a few years in poverty and anonymity begging for food on the streets. Of course the narrative is interspersed with bits of spiritual wisdom and practical techniques for dealing with the noisy chaos of regular life, but these two threads - the story and the lessons - are so beautifully woven that at no point does this book feel like a "how-to." My favorite part so far (I'm not finished) is Yongey's account of a more common childhood experience for Tibetan Buddhists: when a toy breaks or an older sibling elbows a kid in the side or some little thing like that happens, the typical parental response to the crying child is to say, "impermanence and death!" I've been trying that on my four-year-old at home and I don't think it's working but it cracks me up every time.

Visit Domenica Ruta's website.

The Page 69 Test: Last Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

Season Butler

Season Butler is a London-based writer, performance artist and teacher, and an associate producer of the I'm With You art collective.

Her new novel is Cygnet.

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

I’ve been thinking a lot – and writing a bit – about the idea of intergenerational conflict and the climate crisis, so I revisited Rachel Carson’s classic, Silent Spring. Carson’s brilliance comes through in her command of the diversity of her reader’s imagination, weaving together science, fable and reportage to illustrate the challenges facing humanity. Rachel Carson was close to the end of her life when Silent Spring was published in 1962 – though only 54 when it came out, she died of cancer two years later. While we often think of environmentalism as a youth movement (and young activists like Greta Thunberg and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez certainly deserve credit for the eloquence and energy they bring to the movement), it’s worth remembering that mass movements for social change happen across social divisions, in coalition, benefitting from experience and optimism alike.

I like to read one piece of fiction alongside one non-fiction, and The Farm by Joanne Ramos has me completely gripped. It’s a poignant look at commodification under late capitalism through the deeply personal experiences of motherhood and other kinds of “women’s” labour. It has been compared to Handmaid’s Tale, and I agree that it achieves a similarly potent social critique, but the work is totally original. I am devouring it.

My next read was recommended to me by the artist Liz Rosenfeld. The Motion of Light on Water is Samuel R Delany’s memoir, and Rosenfeld’s all-time favourite book. I’m expecting a personal reflection that is also a loving tour through New York City’s evolution from mid-century toward the millennium. I have loved Delany’s sci-fi and social critique (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is among my all-time favourites), so I think I’ll be in for a treat with this one.

Visit Season Butler's website.

My Book, The Movie: Cygnet.

The Page 69 Test: Cygnet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Chung

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL, and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Writing has been her life-long passion, but as an undergraduate she indulged in a brief, one-sided affair with mathematics at the University of Chicago followed by a few years in Santa Monica working at a think tank by the sea.

Eventually she attended Cornell University for her MFA, and since then she and her books have been given shelter and encouragement from The MacDowell Colony, Jentel, Hedgebrook, SFAI, Camargo, The University of Leipzig, VCCA, UCross, Yaddo, Civitella Ranieri, The Jerome Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Her brother, Heesoo Chung, has also given her a bed and fed her lots of ice cream at criticał times.

Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a Granta New Voice, and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

Chung's new novel is The Tenth Muse.

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

This has been a phenomenal year in reading for me so far: I've been blown away by the amazing books have come my way which I found both timely and timeless. Two of my favorite poets published new collections this year: Honeyfish by Lauren Alleyne, is a shimmering, elegiac collection of poetry laced with wonder and grief that tackles immigration, police and state violence, and the longing for the home left behind and the home not yet found; in Deaf Republic Ilya Kaminsky imagines an occupied country that goes collectively deaf after the soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy. Terrifying, tender, and filled with beauty and pain, it is a work of tremendous imagination and heart. Another poet (and novelist and translator) Idra Novey wrote one of my favorite novels of the year, the extraordinary Those Who Knew about personal and political power, violence, and the cost of speaking up versus the cost of staying silent.

Every book I read by Helen Oyeyemi is an utter delight--I don't know if there's anyone writing today who charms me more. She's wildly inventive, wickedly smart and funny and full of heart. She doesn't write like she's breaking the rules, she writes like there are no rules, like nothing can touch her. Her latest novel, Gingerbread, is pure exhilaration.

Spring by Ali Smith was--as her entire quartet has been--a revelation. It brings together different lives and outlooks, different times, ideas, and modes of art into one dazzling, thought-provoking, endlessly compassionate conversation, at the center of which is a young immigrant girl of such heartbreaking courage and integrity, with such a beautiful capacity to trust the humanity in anyone, even those who would harm her--that I found myself resolving to be better somehow after reading it.

Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi I read back to back and was blown away by the brilliance of both. They're each structurally daring in different ways, and each grapples with the implications of who gets to tell the story, and involves coming to a new comprehension of the past that requires a reckoning with one's place and agency in the present. I found them equal parts heartbreaking and empowering, and though they are very different, they are both unsettling books of immense depth that ask enormous, difficult questions about community, love, self-determination, and power.

Visit Catherine Chung's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Houlahan

Peter Houlahan is a freelance writer contributing to a wide range of publications. In his career as an emergency medical technician, he has written a number of articles related to his profession. He holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. A native Southern Californian, Houlahan now lives in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

His new book is Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History.

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

Mayflower: A Story of Courage Community and War. Nathanial Philbrick. It doesn’t get any better than Nathanial Philbrick when it comes to history writers, and his wheelhouse is anything maritime. His sense of story arc and trenchant prose makes fiction writers envious, but he never sensationalizes or trivializes his subjects. The Nantucket-based writer is happy to take the reader on little field trips into related subjects and somehow never make it feel tangential. History of maritime cannibalism anyone? You never feel that he comes to a subject with an agenda or ideological chip on his shoulder, but he is not afraid to set the record straight when it comes to our most cherished national tales, as he does here in Mayflower. Often for better and sometimes for worse, the Pilgrims were certainly not who you thought they were.

Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World. William J. Rehder and Gordon Dillow. I love little known facts and stories that absolutely astonish me when I learn of them. “Of all the bank robberies in the nation over the past three or four decades, at least 25 percent of them have gone down within commuting distance of the soaring white spire of [Los Angeles] City Hall,” writes former FBI Special Agent William Rehder. Rehder is talking about the epidemic of bank robberies that swept the L.A. metro area during the 1980s and early 1990s when he was the head of the bank robbery squad for the Fed’s L.A. field office. So how bad was it? Really bad. Between 1985 and 1995 there were 17,106 bank licks in the area, including 2,641 in 1992 alone, one every 45 minutes of each banking day. Rehder and Dillow – a veteran crime journalist and war correspondent – tell this frequently absurd, often terrifying, always entertaining story of a crime wave that seems almost unimaginable by today’s standards.

Visit Peter Houlahan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ashley Dyer

Ashley Dyer is the pseudonym for prize-winning novelist Margaret Murphy working in consultation with policing and forensics expert, Helen Pepper.

Dyer's new novel is The Cutting Room.

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

I bought a copy of November Road by Lou Berney at the Left Coast Crime Conference in Vancouver, after numerous attendees recommended it to me. Berney was awarded the LCC ‘Lefty’ award for Best Mystery for this novel, and it’s a worthy winner (his acceptance speech was a hoot, too!). A road trip novel—even a romance of sorts—and a tense and suspenseful one, set as it is against a backdrop of mafia affiliations and political shenanigans. Berney draws you in to a terrifying world of psychopaths who own yachts and have the means to make people disappear in horrifying ways. But this clever, stylish, atmospheric and immersive novel also explores the influence of the past on our future, the redemptive power of goodness, and the possibility of second chances. November Road is masterful and filmic—a must-read for 2019.

I love researching the background to my novels, and I’m currently reading The Panama Papers, by Süddeutsche Zeitung journalists Obermayer and Obermaier. I feared it might be dry and difficult, but it had me hooked on the first page. Over the period of a year, between 2015-2016, the two journalists received texts, contracts, emails and spreadsheets from an anonymous source, detailing the ways in which prime ministers, dictators, oligarchs, sports officials, major banks, arms smugglers, mafiosi, diamond miners, art dealers—and celebrities—were flouting international law to launder money, or evade tax. The clarity of the writing makes the subject matter totally accessible, and the human stories behind the criminal activities which stretch right around the globe, reads like a fictional thriller, even though it’s very much real-life in all its ugliness.

Visit Ashley Dyer's website and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Blumlein

Michael Blumlein is the author of several novels and story collections, including the award-winning The Brains of Rats. He has twice been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and twice for the Bram Stoker. His story "Fidelity: A Primer" was short-listed for the Tiptree. He has written for both stage and film, including the award-winning independent film Decodings (included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and winner of the Special Jury Award of the SF International Film Festival). His novel X,Y was made into a feature-length movie. Until his recent retirement Dr. Blumlein taught and practiced medicine at the University of California in San Francisco.

Blumlein's new novella is Longer.

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

I just finished reading the table of contents of the latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Not too much to excite me in this one, save for an article on stem cells (deliberately positioned, no doubt, as a dissenting view to our government's anti-stem cell, anti-science madness.) Apart from its science, the NEJM has reliably interesting articles on the ethics, politics and public policy concerning health.

Next up is this week's Nature, which has some cool looking research on genomics, biology and neuroscience. These two journals and a handful of others form the bulk of my non-fiction reading. They keep me more or less abreast of what's happening in the world of health and biology. They feed my brain.

Fiction feeds my heart and soul, as well as my brain. I'll read anything and everything, and I do, provided it doesn't put me to sleep.

What keeps me awake? Pretty much what you'd expect: a book that makes me think and feel, preferably deeply; a book that makes me shake my head in wonder; that makes me laugh; that inspires me (usually to stop reading and get to work); that lets me escape, but never for too too long.

Recently, I was blown away by Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker. A brilliant, beautifully written, psychologically astute novel about twins, loss, attempted suicide and...I won't divulge the rest. With a brief but memorable appearance by a rarity in fiction: a sympathetic and very human psychiatrist. This is a book you'll want to tell your friends about.

This one too: Solar Bones, by Mike McCormack. Poetic, expansive, generous in nearly every way. A man's life as father, son, husband, lover, and engineer unspools in a single sentence. McCormack makes it work, and you barely notice. It feels like a bedtime story. The voice is everything.

Clay's Ark, by Octavia Butler: Biological science fiction at its finest. Written 35 years ago and reads as if it were penned yesterday. Unputdownable. Chilling, unflinching, humanistic and then some. It turns out that love and tolerance do help when you're dealing with...well, with anyone.

The Queen's Gambit, by Walter Tevis. An old favorite. My copy is coming apart at the seams. A troubled orphan finds her way, a prodigy comes of age, an addict gets straight. The early scene with the janitor in the basement kills me every time.

The Chill, by Ross Macdonald. Sharp-eyed, humane, and relentless. The characters vibrate off the page. The ending is twisted and perfect.

Pain: A Political History, by Keith Wailoo. Non-fiction and riveting. This is the story of pain and its treatment in the US from the 19th century to today. A master historian and storyteller, Wailoo examines our understanding of pain, our definition of pain, and our perception of pain through the decades. Shows the pendulum of treatment swinging back and forth, often holding whole groups hostage to misapprehension and prejudice. He pins today's opioid crisis squarely where it belongs: on everyone. Big pharma, government, doctors, nurses, patients, pharmacists. How it did get so bad? Greed? Tunnel Vision? Deregulation? Put them together and what does it spell: free market capitalism.

Visit Michael Blumlein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Travis Rieder

Travis Rieder, PhD, wants to help find a solution to America’s opioid crisis—and if that sounds a bit too lofty, he’d settle for making clear, incremental progress in a responsible, evidence-based way. A philosopher by training, bioethicist by profession, and communicator by passion, Rieder writes and speaks on a variety of ethical and policy issues raised by both prescription and illicit opioid use.

This wasn’t always his beat, though. Both in his doctoral training at Georgetown University, and as faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics, Rieder published widely on a variety of topics in philosophy and ethics. His interest in opioids came about suddenly, after a motorcycle accident, when he took too many pills for too long and suddenly found himself with a profound dependency. In the wake of that experience, he became driven to discover why medicine is so bad at dealing with prescription opioids, and how that problem is related to the broader drug overdose epidemic.

Rieder’s first article on the topic, in the journal Health Affairs, was one of the most-read essays in 2017 and was excerpted by the Washington Post. Since then, Rieder has co-authored a Special Publication of the National Academy of Medicine on physician responsibility for the opioid epidemic, written several essays for the popular media, and spoken widely on the topic to physicians, medical students, and the general public.

Rieder's new book is In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids.

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

I’m just finishing Judith Grisel’s beautifully-written Never Enough, in which she combines her own experience as someone in long-term recovery with her expertise as a neuroscientist. I have a bit of a complicated relationship with this book, as I worry a bit about some of her central ways of framing the discussion around addiction—in particular, with the way that tolerance and physiological dependence is sometimes framed as part of the problem of addiction (I go to great lengths in my own book to show how dependence and addiction can come apart from one another). However, Grisel is a compelling teacher, and I learned a lot from reading her book. Never Enough was a great read.

Related to one of my other major areas of interest, I’m also working my way through David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth. So far, it feels mostly like a longer, more detailed version of his quite famous essay from New York Magazine, but that’s not a bad thing. It was a compelling and important essay, and the book is the same—perhaps even scarier, but we need to be scared. Anyone who doesn’t fully understand the stakes regarding climate change ought to read this book.

I just started Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, which is a book-length argument for the claim that the white, working-class population in America is promoting, voting for, and helping to enact policies that are killing them (as in the case, for instance, of gun laws and access to health care). It’s a deeply-researched book that feels comfortable for someone like me, who is accustomed to reading academic literature; it may be a bit dense for the more casual reader. But the interviews and stories are fascinating, and Metzl is a wonderfully clear writer.

Lastly: I’ve been keeping Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime on my side table for months, reading a chapter here and there when I need an escape from the darkness I typically engage with. And boy does it work. Noah is a captivating storyteller, but what’s really impressive is the sophistication he exhibits when pulling themes from his stories together. It’s a remarkable achievement, and I feel like I’m being given insights and having secrets revealed to me every time I pick it up—all the while chuckling out loud. I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t benefit from reading this book.

Visit Travis Rieder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Tucker

Laura Tucker is a writer and former literary agent who has coauthored books on a wide range of topics, including health, fitness, parenting, and self-help. Her credits include Still Room for Hope by Alisa Kaplan, Standing Tall by C. Vivian Stringer, Shalom in the Home by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Training for Life by Debbie Rocker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tucker's debut novel is All the Greys on Greene Street.

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

I went on a bookseller tour last month, which meant I talked to a lot of children’s booksellers, and the middle-grade that many of them recommended was The Line Tender by Kate Allen. They were right. I devoured it—a beautiful, tough, funny, tender book about love and terrible loss.

Another middle-grade I loved recently is The Parker Inheritance, a tribute to another one of my favorites, The Westing Game. Varian Johnson skillfully sets his story against the backdrop of some very difficult American history. At one point (and I’m paraphrasing), an older character says to two modern-day kids: You can read all you want about segregation, but that doesn’t convey at all the lived, everyday experience of what it was like to be black in the South in the nineteen-fifties. And then we drop back in time—and Johnson uses these amazing historical characters he’s developed to show us. I thought it was masterfully done, not to mention that he’s also written a great mystery and a very moving middle-grade about friendships and family secrets.

Right now, I’m (re)reading The Hot Rock, by Donald Westlake. I think my next middle-grade is going to have a confidence game/caper aspect to it, and you can’t do better than Donald Westlake. I courted my husband with crime fiction—James Crumley, Chester Himes, James Ellroy—but especially Westlake, with the result that we have two entire bookshelves devoted to him: every Parker, every Dortmunder, every standalone, not to mention obscure sex novels he wrote under different names, even a quickie biography he wrote of Elizabeth Taylor.

It’s very relaxing to be in the hands of someone this expert. I love the joy you can feel Westlake taking in the language he uses, his sense of humor (even in the books that aren’t funny), and the way he makes even the most minor character count.

Next up: Heroines, by Kate Zambreno, about the wives and mistresses of modernism, which was recommended to me in a mic drop of a book talk by a bookseller in Chicago. Also Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, a total immersion in a wildly imaginative world, complete with gorgeous language. I can’t wait.

Visit Laura Tucker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue