Kevin M. Bailey

Kevin M. Bailey, formerly a senior scientist with NOAA, is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington and author of Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock. He also operates a boutique consulting firm promoting small-scale traditional fisheries.

Recently I asked him about what he was reading.  Bailey's reply:

All my life I’ve been a step behind. That’s given me a perspective from the tail-end of the crowd. Late in life and true to form, I’ve developed a passion for writing. Since I’m a novice writer without an MFA, I’ve played catch-up by taking some writing classes. It’s helpful to read your instructor’s work before you take a class. Or, if you are like me, you get insight by reading their book after the parade has passed by. Here are three books on my coffee table from teachers of my writing classes, and a couple other books I’ve read recently.

Chris Cokinos, The Fallen Sky. Chris taught at the Wildbranch Workshop sponsored by Orion Magazine. His book is a masterful braiding of astronomy with stories of obsession and memoir. He writes of the compulsion of meteor hunters and also about his own preoccupation with learning their stories, and the deeply personal consequences of that.

Peter Mountford, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism. Peter led a class on story structure at Richard Hugo House in Seattle. I am totally blown away by Peter’s book. It’s a story of a hedge fund analyst who is scoping out the effects of Evo Morales’s election in Bolivia on the natural gas market in South America; a great story and the reading flows effortlessly.

Nick O’Connell, The Storms of Denali. I’ve taken two classes from Nick on creative nonfiction at the Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. His book is abiding on my nightstand. Nick is a master storyteller and a professional writer, and I’m looking forward to reading his book.

Two other books passed by earlier and have themes that still ring true. Erik Larson’s Story of a Gun was written a decade ago, but we are still struggling with gun control legislation and the stranglehold the NRA has on Congress. The other book is Deborah Cramer’s Great Atlantic. This is a story of a voyage woven into a comprehensive view of the Atlantic Ocean. The writing is beautiful and lyrical, exploring the complex relationship of man and the sea.

Visit Kevin M. Bailey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Sarkissian

Julie Sarkissian is a graduate of Princeton University, where she won the Francis Leon Paige Award for creative writing, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her new novel is Dear Lucy.

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

Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder’s Letters From Mexico

Yikes! This book – an epistolary journal of a young American woman’s degrading sexual affairs in Mexico – is almost too painful to read but just too compelling to put down. Witnessing in such gory detail a smart, educated and talented woman subject herself to being used and abused by man after man is excruciating, but her honesty binds you to her suffering in such a way that feels like to turn away from her pain would be to inflict on her yet another injustice.

A Sport and a Pastime – James Salter

As embarrassing as it is, I had never read James Salter until last week. But when a new friend invited me to see him read at the 92Y, I didn’t want to reveal myself as the philistine I am. So in preparation for our date, I bought A Sport and A Pastime and tore through half the novel in one sitting. The pages turned themselves. The novel strikes an elegant balance between beautiful, emotionally wrought language and unexpected literary technique. It also confirms France as best place in the world to have a passionate sexual affair. Easy to see why this book is a classic.

Speed Boat – Renata Adler

After hearing so much buzz, by people more erudite than I, about the reissue of the post-modern classic, Speedboat, by Renata Adler, I had to check it out. The sentences of this novel are gorgeous and clever and the structure and pacing are exhilarating. But I have to admit I can get lost with experimental literature, so I hope I don’t miss too much of what this has to offer because I’m a post-modern neophyte. Regardless, I’m excited to be challenging myself to read something out of my wheelhouse!

Visit Julie Sarkissian's website.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Lucy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Glen Weldon

Glen Weldon is a freelance writer, book critic and movie reviewer.

His new book is Superman: The Unauthorized Biography.

Earlier this month I asked Weldon about what he was reading.  His reply:

I'm taking my sweet time meandering through George Saunders' Tenth of December, putting the book down at the end of each story because I want to spend as much time as I can with it. Man, that guy. I've read every story already, in The New Yorker or wherever, but collected like this I'm finding they keep caroming off one another at oblique angles.

A Saunders story is dependably funny, human, wise. And I want to say ... matter-of-factly heartfelt? Is that a thing? Can it be? Because he's not afraid of big emotions, but he's always careful to earn them.

Visit Glen Weldon's website and follow him on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Superman: The Unauthorized Biography.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Zarr

Sara Zarr was raised in San Francisco, California, and now lives with her husband in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is the author of How to Save a Life, What We Lost, Sweethearts, and the National Book Award finalist Story of a Girl.

Her new novel is The Lucy Variations.

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

I recently finished Better Food for a Better World, by Erin McGraw (The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard), the debut book of a new publishing venture, Slant Books. It's about love and marriage and family ties, but not in the way any other book I've read is about love and marriage and family ties. It's funny, for one thing. I laughed more while I read this book than I've laughed with a novel in a long time. It's not just funny, though. McGraw manages to hold hope, loss, and longing together in a deft balance with the humor, a lot like one of the side characters--a juggler named Fredd--negotiates a mug, a napkin, and a wristwatch during his act:

Vivy couldn't imagine how he kept all the oddly weighted objects in rotation, much less how he could do so while he showboated, catching the wristwatch under his leg, strolling around the stage, whistling.

Vivy is the lead in the book, though the storytelling job is shared by several viewpoint characters and the Greek chorus of the community's semi-absurd marriage group, Life Ties. (I say "semi" because anyone who has been part of a church group, an encounter group, or part of an overly self-aware family will probably recognize the real experience here.) Vivy and her husband and friends run an ice cream shop in town that's making attempts--sometimes valiant, sometimes vain--to address the hungers of their community beyond ice cream. Hunger for joy, entertainment, beauty, art, world peace, marital bliss, and right relationships with each other and the world are all in play.

They don't aways recognize the effect that their own appetites are having on their quest for the greater good, or even for their own good.

When Vivy starts to suspect her husband has a crush on another woman in their circle, she wonders over his hankering:

Vivy wouldn't have minded Sam dreaming about a nymph. But the notion that he was sighing over prudent, frugal Cecilia, devoted Life Ties member, once-a-month soup kitchen volunteer, earnest stick of a woman who dressed like a Puritan and belonged to the El Campo Arbor Society unsettled Vivy. What in the world could he be hungry for, if Cecilia Moore satisfied the craving? The best Vivy could do was hope the taste was fleeting and easily sated, like his occasional yen for pickles.

It's Vivy's restlessness that drives the action, but all of the characters mismanage their need for better food in ways funny, frustrating, unusual, and moving. Toward the end, the Life Ties chorus observes:

People drag their hungers behind them like tin cans on a string--for a mother who loved enough, for a sister who came home, for a boyfriend who didn't shoot himself, for a dog that didn't die. Nothing goes away. After a while we get tired of all that wanting.

This has been the most surprisingly affecting read of my year so far.

Visit Sara Zarr's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Sara Zarr (June 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

Dennis Palumbo

Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), Dennis Palumbo is now a licensed psychotherapist and author of Writing From the Inside Out. As a fiction writer, his short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Strand, Written By and elsewhere, and are collected in From Crime to Crime.

Palumbo is also the author of the Daniel Rinaldi series of mysteries. The debut novel was Mirror Image, followed by Fever Dream, and the newly released Night Terrors.

Late last month I asked the author about what he was reading.  His reply:

As it happens, I’m reading two completely engrossing books at the moment, neither of which bears any similarity to the other.

The first is a terrific, intriguing and psychologically astute novel by Dan Chaon called Await Your Reply. It’s hard to define exactly, though, having just finished it, I guess I’d call it a literary thriller. More importantly, it’s a beautifully complex meditation on the illusion of personal identity, and how today’s technology can play havoc with that particular concept. Though it’s a publishing cliché, there’s no disputing that in this well-plotted novel, nothing and no one is what they seem!

The second book I’m reading is called Lives of the Novelists, by John Sutherland, and it’s a total delight. Its subtitle says it all: the book is “a history of fiction in 294 lives.” With wry wit and amazing erudition, Sutherland presents bite-sized biographies of novelists whose work he feels represents the best of fiction, from the 17th century up to our own. He covers every genre, from gothic to pornography, pop trash to high literature. A fun bedside book, into which you can dip for a few pages, learn something about a few of your favorite writers, and then, edified and enlightened, drift pleasantly to sleep.

Visit Dennis Palumbo's website.

My Book, The Movie: Night Terrors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beth Hoffman

Beth Hoffman is the New York Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and Looking for Me.

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

When I love a book I’ll often read it more than once, and right now I’m immersed in my second reading of Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. Every page offers countless reasons to reflect on the art of superb writing. I say superb because Capote’s genius shines in his ability to observe the ordinary through an extraordinary lens. I believe this sentence pretty much sums it up: “The nearest winter came was to frost the windows with its zero blue breath.”

Up next on my reading list is a collection of stories and poems by teenaged writer Ruby Urlocker. I won her book Monsters In My Closet in a blog giveaway, and when I read the poem "Hidden People," I knew she was a talent to watch.

Visit Beth Hoffman's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Reed Farrel Coleman

Reed Farrel Coleman's eighth and latest Moe Prager mystery is Onion Street.

Late last month I asked the author about what he was reading. Coleman's reply:

Lately, I have been on a big Stuart Neville kick. I’ve known Stuart for years, but hadn’t read his work. I read a review of Stuart’s Ratlines and thought it sounded quite interesting. Of course it was and since I liked it so much I’ve gone back and read Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion. I have always been fascinated by the concept and the absurdity of the law and the legal system during wartime. And though all three of these novels deal with postwar or post conflict periods, you can still sense the problems at hand and smell the gun smoke still in the air. In the end for me, it’s about compelling characters and Stuart sings that siren song of compelling characters to me.

Visit Reed Farrel Coleman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Redemption Street.

The Page 69 Test: Empty Ever After.

My Book, the Movie: The Moe Prager Mystery Series.

The Page 69 Test: Innocent Monster.

Writers Read: Reed Farrel Coleman (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Hurt Machine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Freda Warrington

Freda Warrington, who was born in and lives in Leicestershire, England, is the author of twenty novels. The recently released Grail of the Summer Stars is her third Aetherial Tales novel, her first series to be published in the United States. The first, Elfland, was named Best Fantasy of the Year by RT Book Reviews.

A couple of weeks ago I asked the author about what she was reading. Warrington's reply:

For a fantasy writer, I don’t read much fantasy these days. I certainly don’t have the patience for multi-book volumes full of war, slaughter and sexual abuse (unless it’s by Jacqueline Carey!). That said, there’s a mountain of unread books beside my bed that I’m working my way through, according to what floats to the top and takes my fancy. Lately I’ve been reading some crime novels passed on by my thriller-devouring hubby. Then along came this one, recommended by a friend:

Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit (Penguin). This is a true story, in the form of a long exchange of emails between Bee, a journalist living in London, and May, an Iraqi university lecturer trying to carry on with her life in Baghdad while dodging bullets and bombs in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s downfall. It’s an extraordinary read and extremely hard to put down – being in email form, rather than chapters, you just keep reading one more, and one more… Bee is a mum of three who chats engagingly about the ups and downs of her everyday life, while May, in return, describes the difficulties of teaching English literature to female students who – however bright and eager to learn – struggle to grasp the concept of basic human rights.

That’s if her students turn up at all. That’s if May can even reach the university through hails of bullets, car bombs, or a maze of road blocks as different factions battle for control of the once “middle class” area she lives in. In between, she faces constant power cuts, and dangerous excursions to buy black market fuel – her only means of keeping her car running so she can get to work. Ironically, as a Shia, she’s relatively free to come and go – but her husband, a Sunni, literally dares not leave the house as he’d be killed on sight. So May also has to deal with his increasing depression as the situation steadily worsens. Sometimes the police burst in and ransack the house, searching for non-existent weapons. Sometimes she hears that another of her university colleagues has been assassinated – and then she discovers that she, too, is on the “hit-list”. At one stage, May takes refuge in Syria, describing (with painful irony – the book covers events between 2006 and 2008) how peaceful it is, but how much she hates it there because it isn’t home.

I can’t convey what an extraordinary book this is. It’s shocking, eye-opening. Trying to live in a war zone is everything you’d expect, but it’s everything you didn’t expect, too. A firm, loving friendship develops between the two women and a plot is hatched to get May and her husband out of Baghdad and to the safety of the UK. Yes, May would be safe here – but at the same time it would break her heart to leave Baghdad because, in spite of everything, it’s her home. I won’t give away the ending, just read it!

I’ve just reread The Crone by Barbara G Walker (HarperCollins), a book I first read in the 1990s and felt an urge to revisit. Ms Walker is a renowned writer on “women’s studies” – an unfortunate phrase, I feel, because why should this knowledge be pertinent only to women? Anyway, The Crone examines how older women have become virtually invisible in our society. And not only invisible but – not so very far in the past – reviled as evil, and even mass-murdered, hanged, burned at the stake. Her thought-provoking study examines how women were once attributed with supremacy over life and death – naturally so, since it’s women who give birth, and have always acted as midwives, healers, layers-out of the dead. Terrifying, dark goddesses such as Kali were believed to have the powers both of Creation and Destruction, the power to destroy all other gods and to consume everything into her black Abyss at the end of time.

Walker dissects how male religions arose and set about rejecting the dark goddess – far too terrifying! – by crushing all aspects of female wisdom, sacredness and autonomy. This was in a futile urge to deny Death itself. Female religion was circular, a churning cauldron of life, death and rebirth. Male religion was linear: one life, one God, one afterlife in eternal bliss or torment. In the process, the Crone figure of the older woman was demonized until she all but vanished.

Themes of paganism and ancient earth magic weave through most of my novels, sometimes blatantly so and sometimes more subtly. The Crone, and numerous other books on female spirituality, helped me understand how the idea that women are naturally secondary and subservient to men is a Great Big Lie. What a relief to know that! However, the idea is distressingly persistent. We seem to be taking backward steps, if anything, as young girls are treated as sex objects and women still fight to be taken seriously. The term “witch” is still used as an insult, and there are countries where “witches” are still persecuted and murdered. Sometimes you’d hardly know we were in the 21st century! Walker’s book is as relevant now as it was 30 years ago. And that’s shocking.

Next I’ve got A Glass of Shadow, a short story collection by the wonderful Liz Williams (NewCon Press), to enjoy. If I’m going to read genre it needs to be quirky and this seems to fit the bill, being mostly SF-based with a dash of dark fantasy. I’m only half way through the first story so far but it has a steam-punky, Victorian flavour that I love.

Visit Freda Warrington's website, blog, and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Elfland.

The Page 69 Test: Midsummer Night.

My Book, The Movie: Midsummer Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bridget Siegel

Bridget Siegel, author of Domestic Affairs: A Campaign Novel, has worked on political campaigns at the local, state, and national levels. A graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, she is now an actor, writer, and political consultant. She lives in New York City.

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

I love getting lost in a book and since my favorite reading spot is where I wrote my book -- on the NYC subway -- a great book will usually lead to me missing my stop and getting lost for real. Since my taste varies broadly, you'll find me on the subway these days, getting lost with...

Dr. Vigilante -- a soon to be released medical thriller by Alberto Hazan. It's one of those books you get so frightened and tense reading that when there's a sudden sound on the subway you literally jump out of your seat.

About A Girl -- Lindsey Kelk's new novel with characters as feisty as all of her others. It's superbly entertaining and allows me to think in an English accent, one of my favorite things to do.

The Miracle Carb Diet -- Tanya Zuckerbrot. My ideal meal, much like that of the character in my book, is a bag of Doritos, so the fact that this book has gotten me to accept that healthy food can be delicious is certainly a miracle to me.

The Age of Greed -- Jeff Madrick. It's got the information of a textbook but reads like a novel. I've never enjoyed learning as much.

Fly Away Home -- Jennifer Weiner. She's my hero of character writing. The people her stories come off the page and into your head so easily and with such vivacity. This book is no exception.

Visit Bridget Siegel's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: Domestic Affairs.

The Page 69 Test: Domestic Affairs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel Sattin

Samuel Sattin is a graduate of the Mills College MFA in creative writing and the recipient of NYS and SLS Fellowships. His work has appeared in Salon Magazine, io9, Kotaku, The Good Men Project, and Heeb Magazine,and been featured in the The New Yorker, amongst others. He is currently a Contributing Editor at The Weeklings, and lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, beagle, and tuxedo cat. League of Somebodies is his first novel.

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

I’ve been reading an odd combination of highbrow and lowbrow lately. One of my favorite literary works in recent months has been Etgar Keret’s Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. It’s one of those works that barely needs any page space at all to conjure up elaborate, meaty tales that leave you both devastatingly nostalgic and intellectually fulfilled. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I think Keret is probably one of those global geniuses whose brain was simply assembled from earth’s finest materials by pure happy accident.

On the less upmarket end, however, I’ve been consuming a mix of non-fiction, graphic novels, and sci-fi fantasy. Grant Morrison’s mythic odyssey Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, is one of the best things I’ve read in years, hands down. If you’re at all interested in comic books, then dash out immediately and pick this one up. Morrison, with his characteristically psychedelic sentence-works magicks together threads of mysticism, psychology, and philosophy, quilting them into both a memoir and an all-encompassing evolutionary explanation of the comic book, and why it is these pen and ink artifacts have had such a resounding impact on our culture.

Like everyone else in America, I’m slogging my way through the ingenious but unnecessarily dense A Dance with Dragons. Of course it’s amazing, but I can’t spend too much time with it for fear of missing out on a lot of wonderful reads. Books such as Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners, for example, are haunting and brilliant. Brian K. Vaughan’s glorious new comic series Saga has floored me with its exaction and expertise. That one in particular combines a brilliantly unusual mix of Heavy Metal-style, sexually obscure science fiction and epic elements from Star Wars, Dune, and Blade Runner. Every issue just seems to get better; not that I would expect much less from the guy who created Y The Last Man.

Visit Samuel Sattin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue