My total fan-girl moment!

Monday morning, I was sick as a dog but I had one un-missable appoint: a phone interview with Naomi Novik. Novik, you may already know, is the author of the Temeraire novels: Napoleonic-era fantasy, only set in an alternative world with intelligent, sensitive dragons. Not my usual cup of tea, but they're so smart and funny - well, others have made the comparison to Jane Austen. Let me just say it holds up.

Transcribing the tape on Tuesday, I realized how bad I sounded. But Naomi was sparkling and fun and full of news (both about her personal life with husband Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime - there's your crime fiction connection! - and about Temeraire). And later a friend pointed out that in many ways the dragons are like oversized cats, so maybe that's another connection.

At any rate, this is what ran in this week's Boston Phoenix. They promise the full transcript will be up soon, so I'll post a link then.

Tana French's "Faithful Place"

My review in the Boston Phoenix:

"Frank Mackey's life changed when he was 19. The year was 1985, and he and his girlfriend Rosie Daly were about to run away together. Growing up in Faithful Place, one of working-class Dublin's more depressed byways, they knew they had no future in Ireland, particularly because Rosie's aspiring family despised Frank's booze-ruined clan. London — freedom — beckoned, and they were making their break.

Except that Rosie never showed, and the letter Frank found made it seem she shared her parents' aversion to his violent, alcoholic family. So he went off alone, hating everyone who'd doomed him to a lonely, loveless life.

Twenty-two years later and Frank Mackey is still in Dublin, though he's never returned to the old neighborhood. Now he's on the Undercover Squad, with a beautiful daughter, an educated ex-wife, and the kind of life nobody in Faithful Place could ever imagine. His only contact with the past is through one sister, Jackie. And so, when she calls to say that Rosie's suitcase has been found in the abandoned house where the lovers used to meet, the complications are not only criminal, they're personal, as Frank's past rises up to meet him with a vengeance....

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/arts/104817-tana-french-gets-her-characters-where-they-live/#ixzz0tRH35yrf

Yann Martell's new "Beatrice and Virgil"

I review Yann Martel's latest, "Beatrice and Virgil," in the Boston Phoenix:

In contemporary literature, the Holocaust is the okapi in the room: looming and somehow irresistible. Such, at least, appears to be the thesis of Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel’s first novel since his 2002 Booker Award winner, Life of Pi.

The okapi, in the book, is stuffed, the namesake of Okapi Taxidermy, an odd little store in a foreign city in which the narrator, an author named Henry, has gone to live. The author, much like Martel himself, has had great success with a small novel that used animals to tell a story. The choice of animals, as Henry explains, “was for reasons of craft rather than of sentiment. Speaking before his tribe, naked, he was only a human and therefore possibly — likely — surely — a liar. But dressed in furs and feathers, he became a shaman and spoke a greater truth.” ...

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/arts/100294-life-after-pi/#ixzz0lImZSApx

Yes, I loved "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"

Really. I thought it was a great spoof of Austen's style and content and I'm not afraid to say so in public (or, really, in The Boston Phoenix.

Revolutionary fiction!

Long-time friends Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky didn't set out to write a bodice ripper in Blindspot (Spiegel & Grau). But when the two historians – Lepore is the David Woods Kemper professor of American history at Harvard and Kamensky is chair of Brandeis' history department – started drafting a two-character sketch for the 70th birthday of their mentor, historian John Demos, the characters carried them off. Six hundred pages later, their personae – "a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise," as the subtitle explains – have involved themselves in murder, scandal, slave stealing, and some very hot sex, all in Boston on the eve of the American Revolution.

I got to spend some time with Jill and Jane. To read our chat, click here.

Chatting with Tana French

Two weeks ago, I got to interview Tana French for the Boston Phoenix. The Edgar-winning author of In the Woods was in town promoting The Likeness, her second smart psychological mystery, and we had a good chat over coffee in the elegant Oak Room. I got to pick the choice bits of our conversation for the Phoenix, which you can read here. But, space being what it is, I couldn't fit everything in. So here are some bonus bits:

You've been successful as an actress, so why start writing?
Everyone else in my family is a writer, but usually nonfiction. I think it's only me and a cousin who write fiction.

I've always written. I used to write short stories,and then some godawful poetry when I was a teenager. I never decided to go back to writing, I just had the idea [for In the Woods] and I really wanted to see how it would turn out. I really didn’t think I could write a book, but I figured I could write a scene, and then another scene, and the next thing I knew I had a chapter.

Does your acting background influence your writing?
Yes, because for me, what the character would do shapes the plot, not vice versa.

There’s a little bombshell dropped at the end of The Likeness that refers back to something in In the Woods. Had you planned this all along?
No, I didn’t have a clue. That showed up halfway through The Likeness when I was starting to write -- it was sort of back engineered. What happens in real life is that you’re wandering around the house daydreamign and you go, "Oh! I know!” ... Your subconscious does stuff that you weren’t planning on, and it seemed obvious, like I’d been planning it all the time.