Rachel: Channeling Mark Twain is filled multi-layered characters and topics from pimps and prostitution to mental illness and social activism. What made you decide to give the novel that title? Were you trying to direct the reader’s attention to one area of the book?

Carol Muske-Dukes: I couldn’t write this novel for years. I tried it as a long poem (I’m a poet) and as a kind of journalism, but no go. My difficulty in finding its center or nucleus was caused by a conflict I felt in my own life which colored my initial attempts to write this semi-autobiographical novel. The novel is set in a time I remember well. I was teaching poetry at the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island (and in other prisons) during the 70’s (the “present” of Channeling Mark Twain) and I discovered that I could not seem to bring together, in my mind, the world of prison and prison poetry — and the world of the literary life of Manhattan and its traditional aesthetic of poetry. This division of sensibilities, of language, tortured me for years. Finally, I realized that I could write about the conflict itself, what that felt like at the time. And what helped me realize this was a moment of inspiration: I suddenly thought that, along with writing about my own experience, I could invent a character who was a version of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, contemporized — and I tried to imagine what it would be like if Huckleberry Finn “came back” as a young African American woman in prison on Riker’s Island. Thus, my character, Polly Lyle Clement, is at the center of Channeling Mark Twain. This young woman, a mysterious wayfarer and self-described blood descendant of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, channels him — just as I tried to “channel” her.
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“The depth of Gross’ portraits, and the nobility she imbues both moms with, renders a thoughtful account of how, for modern mothers, there is no easy choice.”
— Boston Now

Cara Seitchek: What audience did you have in mind as you wrote the book? It seems to have been written with a female audience in mind, but it’s definitely not chick lit. Did you also hope that men will read the book, perhaps to gain insight into women?

Gwendolen Gross: I started writing The Other Mother(which was, incidentally, originally titled The Mommy Wars) in 1999, soon after my first child was born. I felt as though while there were nonfiction titles about this divide between working and Stay-at-Home (SAH) moms (though this was before mommy lit, and there wasn’t yet so much nonfiction exploration of the subject), the personal, psychological impact was even bigger than the abstract and political. The fact of motherhood changes women’s choices—influences us, via hormones, emotion, the absurd elastic stretching of time, and changes our self-perception. Not only that, but there’s the wisdom of the ages that visits in the form of judgmental ghosts and neighbors. It’s a blissful time, new motherhood, and as difficult as it is tender. Our biological purpose becomes evident, but we’re still women who have thought about our own lives and desires and friendships independent of dependants for all the years leading up to this change. The battle seemed more internal to me than external, though the snappy comments fly, and people settle into camps, people I never expected began lecturing on good and bad mothering.
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Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

Writers Revealed fans will recall that we had technical snafus and couldn’t get the Virtual Book Club running. Amy has since been gracious enough to field questions from her readers after the jump.

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Deemed by biographer Robert Lomas as “the man who invented the 20th century,” Nikola Tesla was one of the world’s most revolutionary and famed electrical engineers. He is a captivating if not puzzling figure, whose interests ranged from electromagnetism to Vedic philosophy to pigeons. Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else brilliantly resurrects Tesla’s stay at the Hotel New Yorker, where he lived out his last days. On New Year’s Day 1943, Louisa, a young chambermaid, first encounters a luminous Tesla during a blackout at the hotel. She strikes up a friendship with the extraordinary inventor through their shared love of pigeons and begins to uncover his past. All the while, her romance with Arthur—a mechanic possibly from the future—buds, and her father’s impending departure in a time machine approaches. With The Invention of Everything Else Hunt celebrates the spirit of invention, and of life itself.
-Lisa Kunik

Lisa Kunik: The opening pages of The Invention of Everything Else transport the reader to an early twentieth century New York painted through a magical realist lens in which Nikola Tesla converses with pigeons. Likewise, your first novel The Seas embodies a magical spirit, that of the sea and mermaids. Has the realm of the magical always inspired your writing?

Samantha Hunt: I never think of it as magic or magical realism but I have always had an interest in mystery and those writers who, rather than solve mysteries, point out even larger ones — people like Haruki Murakami and Kelly Link. The world’s a mysterious place. Science and nature are stranger than any sort of magic or trickery. I’m very interested in the experiments being done by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He studies things like why we know when someone is staring at us, or why, when we think of a long lost friend, very often he or she calls. He would like to demonstrate that these phenomena — that we all agree happen — are controlled not by coincidence or magic but by cells, biology. (He also happens to be doing experiments with pigeons and how they know the way home.) I like to think that’s the way I write as well.

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The Sabotage Café tells the story of Cheryl, a bored suburbanite playing with anarchy for the first time. After running away from home in the novel’s opening scene, Cheryl finds herself down and out in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown, at home– for the first time, perhaps– holed up among the lost youth of her generation in the abandoned building known as the The Sabotage Café.

But Cheryl’s mother, Julia, cannot seem to let her daughter go, especially since she knows what life in Dinkytown is like– having herself gone to live there some twenty years earlier, back when the now dilapidated The Sabotage Café was Minneapolis punk-rock mecca. Cheryl’s attempt to escape her mother, and her mother’s life, join them together, and it seems that the farther Cheryl runs, the closer she gets.
-Adam Goldwyn

Adam Goldwyn: How did you come up with the name The Sabotage Café? Is there an intentional irony in this choice? How does the theme of sabotage play itself out in the novel, if at all? And also, what about “café,” since this word, reeking as it does of bourgeois respectability and Starbucks’ capitalism, is the very thing Cheryl and her friends are trying to avoid?

Joshua Furst: The title rose from a number of sources: When I lived in the East Village in New York in the early 90s, there was a bookstore on St. Marks called Sabotage Books where the gutter punks who were the initial inspiration for the book seemed to spend a lot of time hanging out. Then, also, there’s a legendary collectively-owned Anarcho-leaning joint in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis called the Hard Times Café. The title of the book nods to both these establishments. Hopefully, it does more than this. Of course, much of the action of the book transpires in a place actually called The Sabotage Café. But I think more interestingly, the central story being told revolves around Julia, and the ways her mind is at war with itself. She, in her respectable, bourgeois suburb is a kind of Sabotage Café of one.
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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me”.

I feel like it is almost cliche to begin my post with Daphne Du Maurier’s opening lines to REBECCA, one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Here, Du Maurier immediately establishes the voice, locale, and dream-like atmosphere of her story. We are sucked into another world and, like her nameless narrator, forever haunted by the imposing structure of Manderley and the larger than life ghost of her husband’s dead wife.

And yet, despite her timeless ability to compel readers, Du Maurier often gets a bad rap. Until recently, she was dismissed as an escapist romance novelist. The prevailing thought for some time was that her work was “middle-brow.” Others considered it trash. Why? Let me try to put it into context. The books REBECCA most closely resemble are JANE EYRE (Charlotte Bronte) and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (Emily Bronte), both published ninety-one years before Du Maurier’s bestseller. Meanwhile, James Joyce’s experimental FINNEGAN’S WAKE was published in 1939 (just a year after REBECCA) and Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, MRS. DALLOWAY was published thirteen years before REBECCA. So, Du Maurier was writing traditional historical romances and gothic thrillers at a time when her best known contemporaries were more concerned with experimenting with form. She, in fact, wrote — what we might now call — commercial women’s fiction.

In recent years, critics have revised their takes on Du Maurier and her status has been elevated. They have focused on the Freudian and Jungian subtexts of her books, news of her potential bi-sexuality, and the undeniably powerful psychological realism in her works. Her work is now commonly accepted as literature.

Yes, it might be true that there is a “trashy” element to REBECCA, if trashy is equivalent to page-turning and accessible (although that might not be it, exactly, either) but it seems far too easy to dismiss the novel or the author. First of all, as in REBECCA, Du Maurier’s endings are never quite happy. When one reads REBECCA, they enter a dark and queasy place full of twists and turns and never feel quite at rest even at the book’s close. (Not exactly a place you would want to escape to.) Second, I think Du Maurier touches on something profound in all of her novels and short stories: whether it is the loneliness at the heart of her book and their heroines, the complicated relationship between the narrator and Rebecca, or the way in which a house (Manderley) becomes a complex character in its own right.

-Jennifer Bassett

Long in scope, ambitious with its characters, and grounded with realism and wry humor, MATRIMONY introduces us to Julian Wainwright and Mia Mendelsohn. Here are two intensely likeable yet wonderfully flawed characters, who meet their freshman year at Graymont College, a liberal arts school in western Massachusetts. Julian, an aspiring writer, has arrived at college from New York to study with his literary hero. Mia has come from Montreal searching for something new and unknown. When they meet, folding laundry, they fall deeply and happily into first love.

But real life soon intrudes, and a family crisis arises at the end of their senior year that will cement their relationship more seriously and quickly than they could have imagined. Together they make their way through the next fifteen years — through career changes, family conflicts and losses, betrayals and successes. From the university towns of Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Iowa City, to the brownstones of Greenwich Village, the novel moves back and forth between Julian and Mia’s perspectives as Henkin explores the choices and sacrifices we make at different stages in our lives, our changes in ambition and desire, and how we come to lead the lives we live.

Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in thenew millennium, Matrimony is about love and friendship, about money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith. It asks what happens to a marriage when it is confronted by betrayal and the specter of mortality. What happens when people marry younger than they’d expected? Can love endure the passing of time?

The author will be joining the show at 6:00pm. Want to score a free copy of Matrimony? Leave a comment for the author here, and if we use it on the air, you’ll win a free book!

The inside story of Sassy is bittersweet—a teen magazine with an enormous, almost cult-like following, it enjoyed a brief but brilliant run from 1988 to 1994. For a generation of teenage girls, Sassy was nothing short of revolutionary, the signifier of all that was hip and cool . . . a phenomenon that brought the idea of girl power and girl culture into the mainstream.

Sassy had a knack for discovering the hippest new celebrities and musicians; it was the first commercial magazine to showcase riot grrrl, was chosen by Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love for their first cover photo as a couple, and also launched the careers of Chloe Sevigny and Spike Jonze. More than that, Sassy embraced social activism—it made feminism cool and it was never afraid to tackle taboo issues like teen sex and suicide. Today, Sassy nostalgia is very much alive. With the mainstream media even more juggernaut-ish than it was in the early ‘90s, Sassy devotees have landed in the blog world, where legions of fans keep Sassy alive by sharing their first-person chronicles of their love of Sassy, pop culture, activism, and stories about their lives.

About the Authors: Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer are New York–based writers. They have written and edited for publications such as The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Elle Girl, Bitch, Jane, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Nylon, Nerve, and Elle.

Essential Links!
www.howsassychangedmylife.com
www.myspace.com/sassybook
Buy the Book

The authors will be joining the show at 6:25pm. Want to score a free copy of How Sassy Changed My Life? Leave a comment for the authors here, and if we use it on the air, you’ll win a free book!

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

About the Author: Amy Bloom is the author of the acclaimed story collection Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; a novel, Love Invents Us, and a nonfiction work, Normal. Bloom teaches creative writing at Yale University, where she is a fellow of Calhoun College.

Click here to visit Amy Bloom’s website.

This beautiful, effulgent book sped me forward word by word, out of the room I was in and into Amy Bloom’s world. This is a wonderful novel, a cosmos that transcends its time period and grabs us without compromise. Lillian’s astonishing journey, driven by a mother’s love, will be with me for a long, long time.
–Ron Carlson, author of The Speed of Light