S.F. Henson

S.F. Henson was born and raised in the deep south. She graduated from Auburn University with a degree in Animal Science, which she put to great use by attending law school. Her law degree has gotten some mileage, though, giving her the experience to write about criminals and other dark, nefarious subjects. She lives beside a missile test range in Huntsville, Alabama with her husband, dog, two oddly named cats, and, of course, the missiles that frequently shake her house.

Henson's debut novel is Devils Within.

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

I'm typically a monogamous reader, but I'm cheating a little right now and scandalously reading two books at once.

First, I'm currently re-reading 1984, by George Orwell. I hate being without a book, so I keep a couple in my car for emergency reading needs. I found myself alone at lunch one day recently, and without a book. I reached in the seat pocket of my car and was delighted to find 1984 shoved in there. It's been so long since I last read it that I'd forgotten some plot points that seem especially relevant to our current political climate. The particular copy that I'm reading is one that came from my mother's old classroom where she taught high school English and Literature, so it's a bit dog-eared and covered with students' highlights and notes. I'm very anti writing in books, but it's actually been quite enjoyable to see what students thought the story meant back in 1997 versus what I'm interpreting the story now.

I'm also reading Caraval, by Stephanie Garber. This is one I've been meaning to pick up all year, but it kept getting pushed down my TBR pile. It's about a mysterious, magical performance where the audience participates and everything is a game, a potentially deadly one. It has been completely delightful. The world is richly described and refreshingly unique. It's quite the juxtaposition to 1984, but I'm enjoying the opportunity to slip into another world for a while.

Visit S.F. Henson's website.

Coffee with a Canine: S.F. Henson & Francie.

My Book, The Movie: Devils Within.

The Page 69 Test: Devils Within.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Ranney

Karen Ranney wanted to be a writer from the time she was five years old and filled her Big Chief tablet with stories. People in stories did amazing things and she was too shy to do anything amazing. Years spent in Japan, Paris, and Italy, however, not only fueled her imagination but proved she wasn't that shy after all.

Now a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, she prefers to keep her adventures between the covers of her books.

Ranney's new novel is The Texan Duke.

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

Unfortunately, I’ve been immersed in a lot of books on grief lately since I lost my beloved Sheltie, Flash, a few months ago to hemangiosarcoma. One of the best books I’ve read on the subject was: The Loss of a Pet - A Guide to Coping with the Grieving Process When a Pet Dies by Wallace Sife, Ph.D.

I’ve learned a great deal about the bonds we form with our pets from Dr. Sife. The process of grieving for a pet is as complicated and multi-faceted as the grief we feel for humans. My life is different without my constant companion by my side. He was a great writer’s dog, always keeping me company at my desk and then fussing at me to get some exercise. (And toss him some kibble.)

In other reading, I’ve been fascinated with I Will Find You - Solving Killer Cases from My Life Fighting Crime by Lieutenant Joe Kenda. I enjoy his television series (and his voice) and really like his writing voice in this book. It’s almost like reading a behind the scenes of the series because he explains why certain episodes ended the way they did and what was not included.

I’ve just started Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby series, the books that are the basis of the Midsomer Murders series on BBC. It’s one of my favorite series so I’m looking forward to reading all the books.

For research, I’ve recently read The Story of Cawnpore by Mowbray Thompson and Anne de Courcy’s The Fishing Fleet - Husband Hunting in the Raj.

Visit Karen Ranney's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Texan Duke.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Duffy

Margaret Duffy is the author of numerous bestselling books and has also worked for both the UK's Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Defence.

Her latest Patrick Gillard and Ingrid Langley mystery is Murders.com.

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

I haven’t read any fiction for a while as the following are wonderful books in which it would be criminal not to to immerse oneself.  I have been reading Peter Ackroyd’s The History of England. Right now I am on Volume Four, Revolution. This deals with events from the end of the reign of James the Second to the abdication of Napoleon. At the time, and having fled to France following the invasion of William of Orange, James didn’t think it was all over for him but it was. He had been what childrens’ history books would call A Bad King.

Of particular interest to U.S. readers would be the section on the American War Of Independence. There is hardly space to deal with it here but the political ins-and-outs, the wheeler-dealering, that went on behind the scenes is staggering. After a series of ignominious defeats – it was expensive to wage war in a country thousands of miles away let alone in the 18th Century – Britain was broke. Let them have their independence, Members of Parliament pleaded with the king, George the Third. Finally, he had to agree but regarded it as a huge loss of face.

These volumes are not merely historical accounts, but are written with humour and plenty of gruesome and stomach-churning details therefore are entertaining as well as eye-opening. They are certainly opening mine.

Another book I have read fairly recently is Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants. This is a fascinating study of man’s dependence on plants for almost everything in life. It ranges across science, art and cultural history, together with the author’s personal experience. He traces the history of our encounters with them from Ice Age cave art to recent studies on how mimosas remember and learn. Now I don’t think people who talk to their cacti are strange.

Visit Margaret Duffy's website.

The Page 69 Test: Murders.com.

My Book, The Movie: Murders.com.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie Jones

Carrie Jones is the New York Times bestseller author of the Need series, Time Stoppers series, Flying series, Girl, Hero, Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend, and Love (and other uses for duct tape).

Her new book is Enhanced: Flying Series (Volume 2).

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

My mother always used to make fun of me for the random nature of the books I would read. I would grab a TV Guide and read through every single half-hour television program synopsis with a ridiculous amount of care and then move on to one of her steamy Danielle Steele novels before reading the John Irving that was on my stepdad’s nightstand. Apparently, not much has changed as I look at the books I’m reading today. Wait. No. There’s no TV Guide. Do they still make those?

The first book is a series of essays, How To Write Funny edited by John B Kachuba. It has essays by Sherman Alexie, Dave Barry, and Bill Bryson, among others. The first sentence of J.Kevin Wolfe’s essay, “The Six Basics of Writing,” is the one that’s resonating right now because it’s so blunt with a light twist of the unexpected in its last word.  What is that sentence? It is, “Deep inside each of us lurks a Bozo.” It’s basically a motivational speech about how you don’t have to be funny in real life to be funny on the page.

I’m also reading A Man Called Ove, which is a novel by Fredrik Backman that is infinitely charming and also incorporates humor into its narrative, although not so bluntly as telling everyone they have an inner Bozo. It’s the story of a curmudgeon of a man whose loneliness is shattered by his community and its needs. It’s definitely a love story about a man and a neighborhood.

Finally, I’m reading Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, which is billed as a ‘block buster novel that shocked a nation.’ Despite the fact that I’m from New Hampshire, I never read it and I think that’s because my mother would grow insanely jealous whenever my stepfather mentioned knowing Grace. Or maybe it’s because I could steal my mother’s Danielle Steele novels. Through the magic of DNA, I’ve found out that I’m closely related to Grace’s children. It seems pretty natural that a novel about secrets has led to the unveiling of some secrets in my own family.

Visit Carrie Jones' website.

Coffee with a Canine: Carrie Jones & Tala.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan Kirk

Ryan Kirk is the author of the Nightblade series of fantasy novels and the founder of Waterstone Media. He was an English teacher and nonprofit consultant before diving into writing full-time in 2015.

His new novel is Nightblade's Vengeance (Blades of the Fallen, Book 1).

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

I'm a reader who enjoys reading both nonfiction and fiction at the same time. I'm always reading at least one of each. Recently, on the fiction side, I've been reading the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Although I've been a fantasy fan for many years, I only picked up Wheel of Time recently. As a reader, I love the scope of the story and the incredible depth of the world. As a writer, I'm constantly impressed by how he keeps the tension high, even after thousands of pages.

On the nonfiction side, I recently completed Lying by Sam Harris. Lying isn't so much a book as a long essay, but Harris makes a strong case for eliminating "white lies" from your day-to-day existence.

The other nonfiction book that I've really been enjoying is How to Create a Mind, by the noted futurist Ray Kurzweil. I'm fascinated by the direction technology is taking us, and few technological fields have the potential impact as artificial intelligence. As a primer to the subject, I'm not sure one could do much better.

Visit Ryan Kirk's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Gordon

Linda Gordon, winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is the author of The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Dorothea Lange and Impounded, and the coauthor of Feminism Unfinished. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University and lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

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

I’m loving Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government, one of an unfortunately small and quirky category of history books that I enjoy, a book that takes a piece of the background and makes it the foreground, the plot, the interpretation and everything else. It’s a biography of a building, possibly the largest apartment building in Europe, built in Moscow in 1931 to house Communist big-wigs. It provided 505 furnished apartments, and all the services of a small town—cafeteria, grocery, medical clinic, bank, gym, etc. , not to mention a theater seating 1300 and a cinema seating 1500. In 1935 it had 2,655 residents. The story begins with portraits of the pre-Bolshevik young revolutionaries—often teenagers high on utopian dreams revealed in remarkably intimate letters and diaries, then proceeds to introduce the Stalin-era functionaries replete with their gossip and power struggles, and ends with tragedy, when some 800 of them were imprisoned or killed in Stalin’s purges. (Disclosure: I was once an historian of Russia.)

Because I’m interested in non-standard ways of writing history, another genre I enjoy is mystery/spy novels, either fictionalizing true stories and/or mixing real with imaginary characters. Several years ago I was gripped by the novel HHhH, standing for Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, or Himmler's brain is called Heydrich, by Laurent Binet and translated from the French. Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi Obergruppenführer, aka “the butcher of Prague,” led the plan to murder all the Jews, gays, disabled people, etc.  Another practitioner of that genre is Joseph Kanon, whose Los Alamos concerns the espionage going on as physicists rushed madly to build an atomic bomb. We meet J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the project, and many of his co-workers, often refugees from Nazidom, as well as a fictional hero and, of course, a love affair.

Visit Linda Gordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Halpern

Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, and the author of fifteen popular science books, including Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Athenaeum Literary Award. Halpern has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including Future Quest, Radio Times, several shows on the History Channel, and The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special. He has contributed opinion pieces for the Philadelphia Inquirer, blogs frequently on Medium, and was a regular contributor to NOVA’s “The Nature of Reality” physics blog.

Halpern's new book is The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality.

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

I’m currently reading, and greatly enjoying, The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, which had been recommended to me by many people.  It is fabulously written, full of many profound insights about the nature of time and the brevity of life.  I’m finding Mann’s description of a sanatorium (health spa for patients with tuberculosis and other illnesses) in the Swiss Alps fascinating because of the connection with my own book.  Feynman’s first wife Arline had tuberculosis and sadly died at a young age in a sanatorium.  With his incredibly rich descriptive prose, it is no wonder that Mann won the Nobel Prize.  Plus, he was a friend and colleague of Einstein in Princeton, which makes his life story even more interesting.

Visit The Quantum Labyrinth website.

My Book, The Movie: The Quantum Labyrinth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abeer Hoque

Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She has published a book of travel photographs and poems called The Long Way Home, and a book of linked stories, photographs and poems called The Lovers and the Leavers. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has received several other fellowships and grants. Her writing and photography have been published in Guernica, Outlook Traveller, Wasafiri, ZYZZYVA, India Today, and The Daily Star. She has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.

Hoque's latest book is Olive Witch: A Memoir.

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

I have been on a Booker Long List reading kick this summer/fall. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, was an often brutal, sometimes beautiful genre-mashing slave narrative. Reading the novel, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between pre-Civil-War times and the Great Migration and Jim Crow and Civil Rights and now 2017, the year of white supremacy in the White House.

I loved Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (also from the Booker long list), with its sharp and finely drawn scenes, precise and clever dialogue, and a plot that vibrates with increasing intensity. The novel stretches from family ties and community to the wider sweep of global terrorism, religion and radicalism, immigration and nativism, and what we do for love and war.

I picked up Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, because the author is of Nigerian descent, and it’s just been optioned for an HBO series. I’m excited that a story with Nigerian/pan-African characters and folklore will hit the screens in a big way. I found the writing and characterization a bit uneven and choppy, but it’s a thrilling plot, wildly inventive, mythic, and feminist. I’m looking forward to its TV adaptation.

I was riveted by Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Starting from our earliest human ancestors, going into the present day and beyond, Sapiens is irreverent, indicting, entertaining, and informative. If you’re tender about things like religion or capitalism or even human rights, you won’t get a break, but it’s rollicking and relevant.

And my most recent reading foray was volume one of Margaret Atwood’s comic book, Angel Catbird, a collaboration between the much beloved prize winning literary author (I’m a huge fan of her novels) and an illustrator and colorist. Angel Catbird is a bit standard in terms of plot and structure, but sprinkles lessons for cat owners here and there, and my favourite bit – a half-cat creature of Anishinaabe descent, a First Nations people.

Learn more about the book and author at Abeer Y. Hoque's website.

The Page 99 Test: Olive Witch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tracey Neithercott

Tracey Neithercott’s first book was written by hand and illustrated with some really fancy colored pencils. It was highly acclaimed by her mother. Now she spends her days as a magazine editor and her nights writing stories about friendship, love, murder, and magic. (None of which she illustrates—you’re welcome.) She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, who suggests improving her novels by adding lightsabers.

Neithercott's new novel is Gray Wolf Island.

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

I usually read five to 10 books each month, but September has been odd. With massive day job deadlines and my debut novel about to release, I’ve been slowly making my way through only one: Laura Ruby’s middle grade novel, York.

I fell in love with Ruby’s writing in Bone Gap, her 2015 Printz Award–winning and National Book Award–nominated YA novel. When I heard she was writing another book, I knew I needed to read it. And when I learned what it was about—a puzzle of sorts in which three kids search for a treasure in an alternate New York—I knew I needed to read it right now.

Middle grade isn’t my go-to genre (though I admit I do need to read more of it!), but I’m loving York so far. Ruby is a master at creating quirky, well-rounded characters. I also appreciate the level of intelligence in the story—the next time someone tells me children’s books need to be dumbed down for kids, I’m going to hand them York (and then a giant stack of more middle grade and young adult novels). I can’t wait to find out how the book’s trio solves the cleverly crafted clues to find the treasure.

Visit Tracey Neithercott's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gray Wolf Island.

The Page 69 Test: Gray Wolf Island.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Porter

Sarah Porter is the author of the Lost Voices Trilogy (Lost Voices, Waking Storms, The Twice Lost) in addition to Vassa in the Night—all for the teen audience.

Her new novel is When I Cast Your Shadow.

Recently I asked Porter about what she was reading. Porter's reply:

For the last few years I’ve been working intermittently on an historical novel set in 1816. The amount of research it takes to understand the period is truly intimidating, and most of my reading now is focused on that era. I see a lot of historical fiction that takes great care with the dresses and carriages, but gives the characters completely modern outlooks. I’m trying to grasp how people of that era actually thought about the issues confronting them. Free speech was still a contested ideal in England, with journalists clapped in the stocks for criticizing the regent. The deceased Mary Wollstonecraft was fervently hated for asserting that women might possess something resembling humanity. And even radicals thought that organizing working-class people was simply too dangerous to risk.

Recently I’ve been reading Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes. My characters are intellectuals and poets, o Shelley and his friends offer a great window into the ideas they would have been discussing. It’s a fascinating but very long biography, published in 1975. I sometimes find it painfully sexist—Mary Shelley’s mind was “curiously masculine,” really? But overall it’s providing a lot of insight into the attitudes of the era. After the Shelley bio, I have a volume of Byron’s letters waiting. There’s a particular tone to 19th century snark that I’m trying to capture, and Byron’s snark was the best of his time!

Now and then I can’t resist taking a break from research. I recently finished Brittany Cavallaro’s The Last of August, a mystery in which the descendants of Watson and Holmes team up to find Charlotte Holmes’s missing uncle. It’s dark, brutal, scathing, and yet still full of charm and wit. And Ann Leckie’s Provenance just came out. I’m not made of stone and I won’t be able to hold back from reading it for long!

Visit Sarah Porter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Bailey

Sarah Bailey lives in Melbourne, Australia and has two young sons. She has fifteen years experience in the advertising industry and is currently a director at creative projects company Mr Smith.

Bailey's first novel is The Dark Lake.

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

My reading pile has been dominated by Australian authors of late and I feel fortunate to have been on some memorable journeys with some incredible characters.

Sam, the young protagonist in Ben Hobson’s To Become a Whale was a beautiful young soul and his coming of age tale set against the harsh Australian landscape was very vivid. I spent the majority of the book wishing that I could adopt him.

I have also recently enjoyed Kylie Ladd’s The Way Back which was a really interesting twist on the thriller genre, exploring the impact a kidnapping has on the family of the young girl taken, rather than purely focusing on the drama of her abduction. The characters were all wonderfully drawn and incredibly engaging.

I always have a few crime thrillers on the go and have just re-read Michael Robotham’s Watching You which is a great little ride and part of his wonderful series featuring the psychologist Joe O’Loughlin.

I’m currently reading a Camilla Lackberg thriller The Lost Boy, set in icy Sweden. Ironically, I picked this up on a holiday in sunny Queensland – it’s especially nice to read about somewhere cold when you are somewhere warm! I always enjoy Lackberg’s mix of crime and human drama.

Visit Sarah Bailey's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Lake.

My Book, The Movie: The Dark Lake.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Biespiel

David Biespiel was born in 1964 and grew up in Houston, Texas.  He is a poet, literary critic, columnist, and contributing writer at The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, Politico, New Republic, Partisan, Slate, Poetry, and The New York Times, among other publications.

He is the author of ten books, most recently The Education of a Young Poet, A Long High Whistle, which received the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction, and The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

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

I’m reading Men, Women, and Other Anticlimaxes by Anatole Broyard. It’s collection of pieces by the late New York Times book critic about, as the title tells, men and women in different stages of their lives. Broyard’s style is terrifically easy, complimentary, without neurosis. He can handle the bucolic and the mean streets with an undisturbed acquaintance with their complexities and simplicities. I’m also reading the June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffery Yang. The poems are hit and miss really, by my tastes, but the subject matter about the struggle for human rights in China, about the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 wonderfully thrusts language and meaning into the widest civic sphere a poet can.

Visit David Biespiel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is the New York Times best selling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy.

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

I just finished Scott McClanahan's gorgeous and dangerous new novel The Sarah Book. It's the first person account of a young father going through the breakdown of his marriage, a breakdown that is primarily fueled by his own uncontrollable urges and proclivity toward chaos. Much has been made of the hillbilly since JD Vance's elegy, but McClanahan's novel proves that Vance's book isn't the last word on the culture, nor is it the most eloquent or powerful or insightful. While many of the socio-economic struggles of Appalachia can be traced back to regional isolation and an economy shackled to dirty, dangerous fossil fuels, there is no better way to unravel the psychology of a region than to throw yourself into McClanahan's novel, which, much like the culture itself, I have no explanation for.

Visit Wiley Cash's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Land More Kind Than Home.

My Book, The Movie: This Dark Road to Mercy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meryl Gordon

Meryl Gordon is the author of the New York Times bestselling Mrs. Astor Regrets and Phantom of Fifth Avenue, a Wall Street Journal bestseller. She is an award-winning journalist and a regular contributor to Vanity Fair. She is on the graduate journalism faculty at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She is considered an expert on “elder abuse” and has appeared on NPR, CNN and other outlets whenever there is a high-profile case.

Gordon's new book is Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend.

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

This happens to be a season when several friends have published books, all very different, and I have been enthusiastically devouring them. Julie Glass's new book, A House Among the Trees, is so beautifully written that I found myself stopping to re-read every sentence, about a famous but secretive children's book author and what happens to those near and dear when he dies.

Linda Fairstein's latest mystery, Deadfall, has great New York City details and she keeps the plot moving.

Betsy Carter's new novel about German immigrants in America in the 1940's, We Were Strangers Once, is wonderfully evocative of an era.

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

Meryl Gordon's five best chronicles of high society.

The Page 99 Test: The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Kang

Lydia Kang is an author of young adult fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction. She graduated from Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine, completing her residency and chief residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. She is a practicing physician who has gained a reputation for helping fellow writers achieve medical accuracy in fiction.

Kang's novels include Control, Catalyst, and the newly released A Beautiful Poison.

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

I usually have a few things going at the same time. I used to be a serial reader and wouldn’t pick up a book until the last one was done, but due to a cramped schedule that’s out the window. I find that I DNF more often, and I’m usually reading for research as well as for pleasure, depending on the time of the day.

Right now for research, I’m reading Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York, by Catherine Elizabeth Havens, a ten year old girl who wrote between 1849-1850 in New York City. My current WIP in set there, and nothing beats a day-to-day account to understand the language, location, and cultural mores were.

For fun, I’m reading Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. I read both YA, adult nonfiction, and fiction, and this is one I’ve had a long while but haven’t cracked. I’ve only just started it, but the opening line is “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” I’m hooked! It’s won a lot of praise, which makes me both nervous and excited—will it be as good as I hope it will be? I’m about 20% in, and so far, it’s amazing.

Visit Lydia Kang's website, blog, Facebook page and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Control.

The Page 69 Test: Catalyst.

The Page 69 Test: A Beautiful Poison.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zack McDermott

Zack McDermott has worked as a public defender for The Legal Aid Society of New York. His work has appeared on This American Life, Morning Edition, Gawker, and Deadspin, among others.

McDermott's new book is Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother's Love.

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

For the third time, Kent Russell’s I’m Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son. Kent is definitely in my top three favorite living writers. When I read him, I think, “I am sure I’ll never be that good.” The New York Times said he “has more than a little in common with the late David Foster Wallace.” Who can live up to that? Kent. His essays are weird, hilarious, kind of dark, with plenty of soul. The man has a fascinating brain – I’ve given his book to so many people as a gift.

Visit Zack McDermott's website.

The Page 99 Test: Gorilla and the Bird.

My Book, The Movie: Gorilla and the Bird.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Zheutlin

Peter Zheutlin is the author of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride and Rescue Road: One Man, Thirty Thousand Dogs and a Million Miles on the Last Hope Highway, a New York Times best seller.

His new book is Rescued: What Second Chance Dogs Teach Us About Living With Purpose, Loving With Abandon, and Finding Joy in the Little Things.

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

Right now I am reading Elissa Altman’s food memoir, Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire and the Art of Simple Cooking, which is based on her James Beard-award winning blog of the same name. My wife, Judy Gelman, is a food writer and she suggested I contact Elissa because Elissa and her partner, Susan, share their lives with rescue dogs. I interviewed Elissa for my new book Rescued: What Second Chance Dogs Teach Us About Living with Purpose, Loving with Abandon, and Finding Joy in the Little Things. Elissa’s writing is funny, unpretentious and keenly observant. I interviewed her for Rescued before reading her book and am not surprised at how insightful and thoughtful it is.

This month my book group, a bunch of sixty-something guys who have been meeting for more than twenty-five years, is discussing The Sympathizer by Viet Tranh Nguyen, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The first chapter takes off like a runaway train and it never falters. It ranks up there with my favorite book of all time, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.

I also recently read both of Amor Towles' novels, Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow. Towles’s characters are rendered so precisely, and his writing is so smart, that every sentence was like popping a piece of exquisite chocolate in your mouth. I kept thinking, “wow, I wish I could write half as well.” His writing harkens back to other eras…F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton come to mind.

Visit Peter Zheutlin's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Peter Zheutlin & Albie.

--Marshal Zeringue