Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle.

Current Features:

Reading List – Janelle Brown gives us a list of her favorite books about suburban angst that informed her novel All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.

Multimedia – View the trailer for The Great Derangement.

First Person – Liza Monroy , author of Mexican High, shares her experience writing autobiographical fiction.

Dispatches – Karen Connelly explains how her travels in Burma and Thailand inspired her novel, The Lizard Cage.

I was on the phone with my friend, the Mexican artist Ricardo Gonzalez, the other day, catching up after almost a year. We’d met while attending the same international high school in Mexico City and both ended up in New York for our careers. He’d seen that my novel, Mexican High, was about to be published.

“So how much of it is true?” he asked.

“It’s our high school,” I said. “But it’s not.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding confused.

“There’s one anecdote in there I know you’d know,” I said, wanting to navigate into more concrete territory. “Remember that thing about the guy who was on acid at a party and disappeared, then jumped the fence at the Chapultepec Zoo into the hyena cage?”

Oh, yeah,” he said. “Everyone talked about that. It was crazy.”

This is why I didn’t write a memoir. My memoir of high school in Mexico City would have gone something like the conversation with Rick: “ So there was this guy, I don’t remember his name, but rumor had it he accidentally jumped into a hyena pit . . . Crazy.”

With fiction, on the other hand . . .

I spent my four years of high school attending the international prep school in Mexico City that the school in Mexican High is loosely based on. Ever since I left, I was fascinated with the setting, the people I’d met, and the freedoms teenagers had there. The student council sponsored parties with open-bar beer, rum, vodka, and tequila, as well as weeknight “cocteles”—cocktail parties—where they rented out nightclubs—again, with open bars. No one would drive drunk, because everyone had drivers and being drunk was frowned upon as déclassé, anyway. My peers’ parents were of a small, elite group that ran the country. My sophomore year, somebody’s father was actually assassinated, and he was pulled out of class to be rushed to his dying father’s bedside in the hospital. My mother went on some dates with the head of a prison where major drug lords were held. He was eventually assassinated, too. Kids took acid and streaked through graveyards or dove into the cages of wild carnivores.

The whole place and events that had happened felt rife for memoir, which, in our reality-obsessed age, seems to be a more popular form than the novel. So, at twenty-five, eight years after graduating from that high school and moving back to the States, I embarked on the project. The opening scene was my thirteen-year-old self arriving in Mexico City and feeling overwhelmed by the chaos and pollution. I’d come from Rome, and was devastated to not have been able to stay there for high school.

I got seventy-five pages in, then I was stumped. The memoir wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure out why. I started again, with a different opening, then again. I began doubting whether or not I could even write a book. If I couldn’t write about this, the most heightened time in my young life, how could I ever write anything?

Before law school applications were due, I realized the fundamental flaw in my years-in-the-making memoir-writing plan. A memoir must centralize on the “I,” the most important character, the narrator. I, as a teenager, simply wasn’t the right narrator for the story. I’d come to Mexico City, witnessed a fascinating world, and left. I had no personal connection to the place, and the fact that teenagers had wild lives, easy access to drugs and alcohol, and drivers and bodyguards didn’t give enough of a reason to write my memoir. I didn’t suffer from addictions or sexual trauma (the rape scene in the book was born entirely from imagination). Nor did I have too dramatic a childhood, or come to some kind of grand epiphany in Mexico other than believing freedom was healthy for teenagers, which struck me as a more pedestrian realization, not the stuff of literature. Simply put, the story I wanted to tell wasn’t my story. So then, whose was it?

One late summer night, riding a ferry to Cherry Grove, Fire Island, a vibrant and diverse beach town off the coast of Long Island where I was spending a weekend, I remembered a necklace my mother had bought when we were in Mexico. It was made of charms called milagros, the Spanish word for miracles and surprises, which, as I wrote in the book, “were said to bring luck for whatever they represented. An arm stood for strength, a leg for travel.” What if Milagro were a person, a character, a girl? Slowly, the story came. She could move to Mexico with her diplomat mother (like me). Her mother could have sold Milagro necklaces on the beach when she was young (unlike my mother). Milagro could search for her father, a Mexican politician whose identity her mother had always kept secret (completely fictional storyline). Since it wasn’t a memoir, I no longer had to be married to, or at least in a very serious relationship with, solely true events and people. The birth of these three characters gave the story a backbone, and also turned Mexican High into a bona fide novel, barely recognizable as based anywhere near the true events of my life.

Suddenly, time—and pages—were flying.

Still, I sometimes feel like The Girl Who Cried Fiction. Many of the stories-within-the-story of things Milagro says, does, and experiences range from “precisely what happened” to “deeply rooted in fact” to “loosely based on truth.” There is an emotional authenticity to the story of Milagro’s missing father, as I also have an estranged parent. The story told in Chapter Ten, “When You Steal from Yourself,” about faking a robbery in one’s own home to get out of getting in trouble, is something that I, embarrassingly enough, actually did in high school. (The chapter’s title comes from the song “Slide” by the band Luna, which I was obsessed with in high school.) Also true is the peyote trip in the desert, rendered in Chapter Nine, “Real de Catorce,” though I went with different people. Compressing the timeline of the narrative from four years to one streamlined the story and improved the pacing, and also resolved the dilemma of what I would do with all those long, languid, and quite eventless summer vacations.

By switching to the mode of loosely autobiographical fiction, I got to have my milagros and wear them, too.

Liza Monroy is the author of Mexican High

Little Children, Tom Perrotta

Such a minimal little book—like all of Tom Perrotta’s novels—but it manages to convey with so few words his characters’ feelings of entrapment. He draws, beautifully, the torpid quality of a suburban summer, the small-minded and insular community, the utter boredom of a life of confinement with only children for company. Perrotta is a wonderful satirist, probably because he has so much compassion for his subjects. And it’s funny, too.

Music for Torching, A. M. Homes

This book is the antithesis of Tom Perrotta. A. M. Homes’s unhappy married couple that burns down their suburban home in an act of petulant childishness are repulsive, unpleasant, selfish people, and she seems to find them as distateful as we do. And yet I found this book impossible to put down—both times that I read it. It’s horrifying, surprising, and deeply disturbing.

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

Franzen’s portrait of the self-destructive Lambert clan is about as brilliant a portrait of contemporary family dysfunction as I’ve read. I love the sprawl, the humor, the surprise, the poignancy, and ultimately, the hopefulness of this book—which seems to be a rare quality among suburban novels. I never get bored with this book, no matter how many times I read it.

The Ice Storm, Rick Moody

I saw the movie before I read this book, and was surprised by how busy and raucous the novel was, especially compared to the serenely clinical hush of Ang Lee’s interpretation of the material. This book is dark, dark, dark, and sad, sad, sad. It makes me so very glad that I didn’t come of age in the 1970s, which truly has to be one of the most confusing eras in our recent history.

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

One of my favorite books of all time. Yates carefully dismantles “the great sentimental lie of the suburbs”—that Leave it to Beaver world that never really existed—and sends his unhappily married couple off to their dooms. In postwar America, Mom is trapped at home, Dad can’t live up to work expectation, and their inspired plans to escape it all by running off to France are brought to an abrupt halt by an unwanted pregnancy. Their relationship is beautifully, subtly rendered and incredibly depressing.

The Complete New Yorker

Not a book, exactly—it’s the entire archive of The New Yorker on CD, and I came back to it again and again when I was writing. Here you’ve got all your classic Cheever (including “The Swimmer” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”) and nearly two hundred stories by John Updike—not to mention thousands of other pieces of short fiction by the greatest writers of the last century. When I need inspiration, I like just to browse through randomly and pick out stories I’ve never heard of.

Janelle Brown is the author of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

In November 2003, while I was doing readings and publicity for my book on Darwin’s early years (Darwin and the Barnacle, Faber, 2003) I bought a copy of a new biography of Newton in order to compare Newton’s formative years with Darwin’s.

The book left me with a series of questions about Newton’s fellowship at Trinity, which he was awarded in 1667, five years after arriving at Cambridge as a young student: How had he been given a fellowship without particularly impressing himself on the college authorities? Had someone acted as a kind of patron? Unlike Darwin, who readily acknowledged his dependency on networks of fellow scientists in his early years, Newton appeared to be a legendary recluse. I found this difficult to believe – surely it was impossible for any scientist, then or now, not to be dependent on, and entangled in, networks of knowledge and power?

I checked a second biography for further information about the award of the fellowship which told me that Newton was “lucky” because there were extra vacancies that year in the fellowships, brought about by two deaths of fellows falling down stairs apparently drunk, the expulsion of another fellow for insanity, and the death of a fourth fellow from pneumonia caught from a night spent in a field apparently drunk. Was Newton really that lucky, I wondered. I marked the deaths with asterisks and a question mark in the book.

With some spare time in the University Library, I looked up the sources for these mysterious deaths in Trinity college, and found them in a diary written by an Alderman (city councellor) living in Cambridge in these years. He described the deaths in ways that suggested they were regarded as suspicious. There was a further Trinity death in those years between 1662 and 1667 – the death by drowning of a young boy in the River Cam, also regarded with apparent suspicion by the Alderman.

Then came the “what if.” What if Newton had been involved in some way in those deaths? What would that mean? It was an idle and speculative question at this stage. I also wondered what it might be like to be a historian who found evidence about those deaths and a possible link to Newton – what if you had a lead like that and reached the end of what was known, reached the end of the archives? What if you were really obsessed with knowing something but it was unknowable by conventional means? What would you do next?

A few days later I was supposed to fly to Spain to join a friend there for a few days. At 5 a.m. I cycled to Cambridge station only to be told that there would be no trains to Stansted airport for several hours. Just as I was about to go home, a mysterious man in a dark coat suggested that we share a taxi to the airport – a 45-minute ride. I agreed. As the taxi drove away I mentioned to him that I had read that there was a meteor storm going on up in the sky, which we unfortunately could not see because of thick fog. He was, he said, a meteorologist who was returning to Germany after a conference in Cambridge and yes, meteor showers were common in November, but meteor storms were rare and often extraordinary, even life-changing, to watch. He described the meteor storm as a series of tiny lines coming out from a still center in all directions, like wind blowing dandelion seeds from the seed head. Then he fell silent.

The image he described of the complex movements of the meteor storm worked as a kind of catalyst for all the ideas germinating in my mind over the previous couple of weeks: entanglement, love, the limits of knowledge, the tensions between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, obsession, the dangers of certain kinds of knowledge…

Between that conversation and arriving in Stansted I conceived the plan for the entire novel – or rather it came to me complete as if out of the meteor storm: a woman in red drowned in a river, the psychic, the neuroscientist, the double murder plot, the love story, the fatal entanglements.

When I arrived at the airport I wrote it all down on a scrap of paper which I later glued into a bigger notebook. The finished novel, which took two years to complete, is almost exactly as it was conceived in that taxi ride during that invisible meteor storm.

Rebecca Stott is the author of The Ghostwalk, now available in paperback.

Current Features:

Reading List – Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the The Beautiful Struggle, has been called the “James Joyce of the hip-hop generation” by Walter Mosley—shares eight hip-hop gems that inspired his flow.

Multimedia – View the trailer for The Great Derangement.

First Person – Petite Anglaiseauthor Catherine Sanderson explains how an online diary helped her reclaim her identity and reinvent herself.

Dispatches – Karen Connelly explains how her travels in Burma and Thailand inspired her novel, The Lizard Cage.

Visit Catherine's blog and the Petite Anglaise fan page on Facebook.

Buy Now!
Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Booksense | Random House

About the Book
She has a job in Paris, the city of her dreams, a handsome Frenchman, a beautiful bilingual toddler, and a charming apartment with breathtaking views. So why does Catherine Sanderson feel that her life is coming apart? Stuck in a relationship quickly losing its heat, overwhelmed by the burdens of motherhood, and restless in a dead-end administrative job, Catherine reads an article about starting an online diary and on a slow day at work—voilà—Petite Anglaise is born. But what begins as a lighthearted diversion, a place to muse on the fish-out-of-water challenges of ex-pat life, soon gives way to a raw forum where Catherine shares intimate details about her relationship, discontents, and most impulsive desires—a daily soap opera starring herself, her lover (Mr. Frog), and their daughter (Tadpole).

When a faithful reader (who happens to be an attractive, charismatic Englishman) tries to get close to the girl behind the blog, the lines between Catherine’s real and virtual personas blur, tempting her to leave Mr. Frog and the life she has worked so hard to construct, in pursuit of l’amour fou. Propelled by her intoxicating alter ego and cheered on by thousands of readers, Catherine’s life spirals to exhilarating highs and dizzying lows as her life and her creation collide head-on and she must somehow make peace with both.

Fizzing with the vitality and allure of Paris itself, Petite Anglaise offers a fresh twist on the classic story of reinvention abroad: how a young woman transforms herself, wielding the power of a mouse.

About the Author
Catherine Sanderson worked for a British accounting firm in Paris when she began her blog, Petite Anglaise. When her employer discovered the blog, she was fired, and her story was picked up by news agencies around the world. She continues to write the blog, which boasts 100,000 viewers per month, and still lives in Paris with her daughter.

Author photo © Lauren Tattias

2. “Follow the Leader”—Eric B. And Rakim: Now, while Slick Rick was “a God” to hip-hop heads, Rakim was “The God”. I mean, people eventually literally took to calling him, simply, The God. I believe he’s referenced in my book as such also. The thing about Rakim—and to a lesser extent all the MCs of this era—is I learned from him the incredible beauty of words. In hip-hop, words—optimally—work on two levels. They function percussively, so that certain syllables arranged correctly on the beat basically accent the drums. Then they work as just words in the sense of meaning and connotation. From hip-hop, I came to believe that words really should be beautiful on both levels. They should sound good, and when unpacked, they should also mean something beautiful too. Some people learn this in the classroom. I learned it on the street, and that fact has always made me a believer in the great democracy of words—that in many cases (and I’ve had this confirmed in my career as a journalist), the man who stands on the corner can organize his thoughts just as beautifully as the decorated professor. In his time, no one better demonstrated the democracy of words than Rakim.

3. “Stop the Violence”—Boogie Down Productions: Around 1988, rappers became, as we called it then, “conscious.” I always thought there was something beautifully simplistic about describing the state of mind in which you are politically aware and concerned with race in this country as being conscious. See how many words it took me to sum up the meaning? Anyway one of the chief converts was KRS-ONE, an originator of gangsta rap, whose best friend and partner in the group Boogie Down Productions, Scott La Rock, was murdered while trying to settle a dispute. Scott was not a gangster, in fact he was a social worker, but his death really crystallized the insanity of the violence at that point.

Anyway, when KRS-ONE returned, he was conscious. And “Stop the Violence” is really the first song where he lays out his new concerns and world view, “It’s just the presidents and all the money they spend\All the things they invent / And how the house is so immaculate / They create missiles, while families eat gristle / Then they get upset when the press blows the whistle.” Of course, as MCs like KRS-ONE became more conscious, it influenced me and pushed the lessons of my father, the big one being that words are never politically neutral.

4. “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”—Public Enemy: Pure genius. A lot of people will tell you that Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is the greatest hip-hop album ever. I certainly thought so for many years. What is clear is that, perhaps better than any other act in any era, PE really tapped into hip-hop’s potential. Sonically the album is a mad scramble of samples, an incredible collage of soul riffs, scratches, and drum breakdowns. Content-wise, every song is pushing a sort of leftish, black-nationalist political ideology. But more importantly, it’s expressing a politics that has an origin in the anger that black kids everywhere felt at that point. But most importantly, It Takes a Nation is just great poetry.

“Black Steel” is one of the rawer cuts on the album. The song posits Chuck D as a political prisoner who insights a prison break. I remember this song for its lyrics, but also for its video. Imprisoned along with Chuck were a bunch of hip-hop acts who were absolutely beloved at the time—Stetsasonic, EPMD, Eric B., etc. The video gave this sense that hip-hop was an oppositional force. And not simply a mindless, violent force, but one that actually tried to analyze and disrupt the forces that were, allegedly, allied against us.

5. “The D.O.C. & The Doctor”—The D.O.C.: Hmm, sometimes it’s best not to overintellectualize things. This is what I’ll say: The D.O.C.’s debut, No One Can Do It Better, is an incredibly slept-on album. It suffers from being released in the wake of N.W.A.’s ode to sensationalism, Straight Outta Compton. But No One Can Do It Better is a much more subtle and consistent effort, and also bears none of the cartoonish vulgarity which characterized N.W.A. The cut I chose, “The D.O.C. & The Doctor,” as I said, should not be intellectualized too much. Just sit back and enjoy Dre’s pounding drums and The D.O.C.’s ode to Run-D.M.C.

6. “Evil That Men Do”—Queen Latifah: Queen Latifah was the first female MC who really amazed me. It’s funny to see her gone Hollywood now, but in her time she was as agile an MC as there was. “Evil That Men Do” is sort of quasifeminist cut. Of course I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. I was more infatuated with the pounding drums and Latifah’s aggressive flow. Whenever I hear this song I think of ninth grade, and sitting on the #33 bus with my walkman, lost in my own little world.

7. “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”—Geto Boys: This is the Geto Boys biggest hit. I like to think it was the surrealism of Scarface (“Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned”) that accounted for its success. But more likely it was the sweet guitar riff that the group sampled from Isaac Hayes. It’s almost unfair to use this song as an example, because Scarface—easily the Geto Boys most talented MC—did so much great work before and after this.

8. “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)”—Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth: If the book was a movie (cross your fingers folks) “T.R.O.Y.” would play in the last scene and into the credits. I always loved this song for the incredible beat crafted by the immortal Pete Rock. But there’s also the scattered narrative of the black family offered up by C.L. Smooth. His portrait is beautifully executed—you get his teenage mother struggling with a no-good man, his grandfather stepping in as a surrogate, the tragic death of “Trouble” T-Roy, along with the various ambitions of his aunts and uncles. When I started The Beautiful Struggle, I had “T.R.O.Y.” in my head all the way. I wanted to do in literature what Pete and C.L. so beautifully did in song.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle.

Matt Taibbi is the author of The Great Derangement.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle.

Jessica Queller is the author of Pretty Is What Changes.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it’s unsurprising that the personal blog I began writing just after my daughter’s first birthday came to play such a central role in my life.

Since her birth, and my subsequent return to work, four months later, my sense of self had been all but lost. Rushing from home to nanny’s to work and back again, I played the roles of mother and secretary from dawn until dusk, caring for my daughter single-handedly while my partner became increasingly wedded to his career. The independent, adventurous Catherine I used to be had become submerged under the weight of my routine, and rarely came up for air.

When I looked in a mirror, the post-partum body reflected back at me didn’t even look like my own. Who was this harried-looking, overweight, carelessly dressed woman?

Writing an anonymous blog and building a small but fiercely loyal community of readers began as a substitute for the social life I’d reluctantly put on hold. During the long evenings home alone, while my partner worked and my daughter slept, blogging filled a void. Virtual friendships I struck up online helped quench my thirst for adult human contact.

But my blog became more than just a hobby that enabled me to reach out across the Internet to communicate with like-minded souls. The time I devoted daily to writing was utterly selfish me-time: the ultimate guilty pleasure. I fell in love with my new hobby. It gave me a creative outlet, a place to flex my new muscles.

My self-confidence grew in proportion to my swelling readership, and I began to draw a real sense of pride from my online achievements. I wasn’t just a mother or a secretary any longer. I was a blogger too—a writer with a readership of thousands.

And by writing, not as Catherine but as Petite Anglaise, I’d unwittingly set about the process of reinventing myself. Petite Anglaise was a subtle blend of aspiration and nostalgia: she was the person I wanted to be, the person I wanted to write into existence, but also, in many ways, the embodiment of a Catherine I’d lost sight of since I’d become a working mother.

I’ve been writing as Petite Anglaise for nearly four years now and we’ve been on a roller-coaster ride together, she and I. Writing the blog precipitated the demise of a long- foundering relationship, introduced the prospect of new love into my life, and, when my employer discovered Petite Anglaise and unceremoniously fired me, brought about an unexpected career change. Nowadays writing is no longer a hobby or a guilty pleasure—it’s my bread and butter.

People often ask me how I differ from my online alter ego. It’s an increasingly difficult question to answer, because Petite Anglaise is an integral part of me. The character traits which tend to come to the fore when I write Petite Anglaise are not necessarily those you would see if you met me in the flesh. But all are part of the same whole—we are one and the same.

Not in universities or private schools, but on the streets and in the markets of northern Thailand, in a shepherd’s hut on an island in the Aegean, in the refugee camps and cramped rooms of political exiles on the Thai-Burma border. Living abroad and writing a novel are very similar experiences. Both involve entering other realities, constructing new identities. If you want to have a profound experience of a new place, the mind has to be open, vulnerable, and spacious enough to undergo a violent invasion of the other.

I could not have started writing The Lizard Cage if not for my long education of trying to know the other, and, in all those foreign places, of being the other. Absorbing and living so much in a state of actual foreignness prepared me for the most galvanizing experiences of my life so far: events in Burma and on the Thai-Burmese border. Writing the novel was a continuation and a deepening, an internalization, of those experiences.

Contacts in Bangkok had given me the numbers of many people in Burma’s major centers: political activists, artists, writers, editors, musicians, doctors. On my first visit to the country, I met with them several times over a period of three weeks, and met other individuals through them. I had never heard people speak so passionately about freedom and art and political oppression. Burma was different than the other countries I knew: it was ruled by a dictatorship. It was an entire country flayed by its symbolic parents, its rulers. This was dysfunction and disaster on a national level, and that is exactly how the people described it to me.

Actively suffering the destruction of their human rights, my newfound Burmese friends were keenly aware that I had come from a place of great openness and wealth. They also knew that I was a writer. We discussed various painful and dangerous aspects of living in Burma under military rule. I learned much, and I asked many questions. But the one and key question Burmese people asked me was, “Will you write about this?”

Artists prohibited to exhibit their paintings, the famous writers whose works never pass the Press Scrutiny Board. Hundreds of people gunned down on the street, the school girls who were bayonetted in 1988. “Why don’t you write a book about that?” The children carrying loads of wet concrete at the construction sites of new hotels. Whole villages of women raped by soldiers. Men taken away, enslaved as weapon porters on the frontlines. “Will you write this story down?” The outspoken father, brother, sister, mother who disappears at night, and eventually is sentenced to seven, ten, twenty years in a prison infested with tuberculosis, dysentery, and rats.

Confronted with these stories, and with so much intelligence and indignation, the very least I could do, in my great freedom as a writer, was to reply Yes, I will write it down.

Of course I didn’t really understand what I was getting myself into. Writing The Lizard Cage was profoundly painful, just as researching the book was physically and spiritually exhausting. After I was denied a visa to reenter Burma, I sought out dissidents and revolutionaries who live on the Thai-Burma border. I could already feel the shape of the novel I was to write, but I needed to get the details right, and live longer with my subjects.

I spent almost all of my time with Burmese people who had left Burma for political reasons. The stories they most wanted to tell, it seemed, were the stories of how they became political, and then how they ended up and survived in prison. Metaphorically, the story of modern Burma is one of violence, incarceration, isolation. Living on the border, among Burmese people who had lived that story, who had the marks of it on their skin, I learned the questions I still ask myself: What am I willing to see? What am I willing to feel? How well can I know this world that I live in, this world that I love?

The real people I met in Burma and on the border enabled me to create characters who often surprised me, and who did things I could never do. So many of the people I met were so brave. So many of them had whimsical, zany senses of humor. On the heels of bad news, jokes rushed in, and laughter was a liberal, free-flowing tonic. Wherever I was—the military and refugee camps, them cramped and cluttered rooms of dissidents, the shantytowns of Shan migrant workers—I lived in the realm of their kindness.

But after my research was finished, I had to go into Teza’s prison and live there, alone, in my imagination. After I started writing the novel in earnest, I wrote in tears every day for two years, distraught by the process of internalization that would make my characters and their experiences authentic in writing. One must feel what one writes; at least, I have to feel what I write. But it is another thing entirely, a terrible, necessary act to enter the darkest places in the human world and to stay there for long periods of time, to commit to living there spiritually and mentally.

All people who live in prisons become at least partially, if not fully, invisible. Whether political or criminal prisoners, we do not see them; we do not look for them. To abuse their detainees, governments depend on our blindness. Working on a novel about a man who lives in prison, I had no choice but to look inside, to imagine the world of the prison as well as I could, and to spend a lot of time talking and listening to people who had lived there.

Slowly, I came to understand that the most useful thing I could do as a writer was contribute to the history of kindness. It may seem strange to look for kindness in a prison, but a prison is just a microcosm of the world we live in every day. The details are different, but the human struggles and needs are the same. To eat properly. To be clean and safe. To live with dignity. To live in choice, in truth. To love and to be loved. To die with grace.

I don’t know why some abused people become violent and cruel, while others manage to survive their experiences, even becoming kinder and more compassionate. In Burma and on the border, people who had been brutalized and hounded and violated repeatedly—sometimes for most of their lives—were still kind, and open, and hopeful. And if they were not quite hopeful, they were determined. Sometimes they were also very angry, but their anger did not obliterate their humanity. Every day I would meet such people and the mystery of their goodness seemed as great to me as the mystery of the very real evil of the interrogators and the imprisoners.

That is our mystery, the human mystery. That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, not to speak, not to see those people, the invisible ones, those who live on the other side of the border.

Karen Connelly is the author of The Lizard Cage.

Steve Toltz is the author of A Fraction of the Whole.

Piper Kerman: Well, it might have been the moment when my fiancé turned to me in the prison waiting room, where he had escorted me to begin serving my fifteen-month sentence, and said, “Well, I bet you’re the first Seven Sisters graduate to eat a foie gras sandwich washed down with Coca-Cola for your last meal as a free woman.”

In fact, when I learned that I would serve prison time for a drug offense committed many years in the past, I became an immediate oddity among my friends and family. I suddenly became a person who would experience something almost unimaginable in their world, like going to the moon. Yet I quickly learned just how much prison is a part of American life—we lock up more of our people than any other country in the world, with deeply questionable results.

So while guilt and innocence and personal responsibility and forgiveness play a part in everyone’s life, imprisonment is only typical for “certain people,” and that I was one of them was astonishing to all. The people I met in prison were so different from what popular culture and the media depict, and my story is about reconciling these disconnects—between the person I am and the prisoner I became, and between the system of justice Americans want, need, and deserve, and the one we currently have.

Jessica Queller: I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times about being a single woman grappling with the information that I had inherited the breast cancer gene from my mother. The response to the article was overwhelming, and the piece sparked passionate debate. In the article I posed the age-old question: Is knowledge power or is ignorance bliss? By choosing to seek my genetic information I took the stand that knowledge was power, whereas my sister chose not to take the gene test and be free of the burden of such knowledge. It seemed everyone who read the article took this dilemma personally—they imagined themselves in the situation—and each person fell vehemently into one camp or the other. It became apparent that this was a modern, ethical dilemma that had touched a collective nerve. The week after the article came out I realized the subject was worthy of a book.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Hmmm, only after I got my contract. Of course, I wasn’t originally at S&G. Back when I was at Crown, the book was supposed to focus on my father’s life, using my life only as commentary. But my father—and my editor, Chris Jackson—felt that the writing was a lot stronger when I was closely connected to the story. Once it became clear that it was smarter to focus on my time, I tried to give the story a definite beginning, middle, and end. Originally, this thing was going to span from my father’s time right up to the present--roughly sixty years. That would have been a mess. Once it occurred to me to tell a singular coming-of-age story with my father and my older brother as central characters, everything became easier. So yeah, it took some time for me to get focused and clear.

2. Ta-Nehisi, you’re a journalist. Jessica, you are a TV writer. Piper, you’ve been involved in corporate and public-interest communications. What kind of adjustments did you have to make to write in the first person and about an intimate, personal subject?

PK: When I first began writing I found that I was very good at describing what I saw, and what happened, in vivid detail. Yet I struggled to express how I was affected by what I witnessed and what I did. It took an enormous amount of work to reorient my writing from reporting on what took place to trying to make it possible for the reader to know “what it feels like to be me.”

JQ: Writing a book was an enormous adjustment for me. TV writing has trained me to work on deadline—I’m used to writing around the clock for five or six days in order to produce a sixty-page script. I only gave myself six months off from TV commitments to complete a draft of the memoir. I found myself cramming like I usually do—except this time it was not a sprint, it was a marathon. There were months in which I thought I would never possibly make it to the end. Also, writing about my mother’s illness and death was so emotionally draining—I wept while writing for weeks. I’d certainly never had that experience while writing for Felicity or The Gilmore Girls!

TC: I didn’t come to journalism in the usual way. When I was fourteen or fifteen, my Dad gave me a copy of Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk. I didn’t know what the hell Greg was talking about—but on some visceral level I knew the book was ambitious and beautiful. A few years later, when I was around twenty two, I started my career at Washington City Paper, under the ambitious eye of David Carr. In those days, and even today, City Paper was much more interested in a mix of literary nonfiction and investigative reportage than most papers. The ideal writer there had to be bold and tenacious in his/her reporting, and equally bold and adventurous in his/her writing. We used to have whole sessions in which Carr would import writers from other alternative papers or magazines to critique our work. Also, he’d clip stuff from Esquire, GQ, and Vanity Fair and make us read it. Half the time the stories were told in such a weird way that I had no idea what the hell I was looking at. This was in the last days of really great literary magazine writing—like the mid to late nineties. The approach was very novelistic, but at the same time there was a strong stigma attached to any sort of inaccuracy. We didn’t have people there cooking shit.

That approach informed everything I did after that. I was—and am—always looking for a way to tell a story that is unique to that particular story, because I believe every story is different and deserving of that respect. I usually fail in my attempts, but I think the intent, the desire to say something original, is important, and it certainly informed the style of this memoir. I spent a good three months searching for the voice of the book. In fact, if anyone wants a good laugh they should see the “sample chapter” I used for my proposal and compare it with the voice I ultimately found.

3. What are your thoughts about publication—the moment your story goes out into the world, into the public domain, to be read by (we hope!) the masses? It must be strange to anticipate reviewers responding critically to your life story. Do you look forward to it, or is the excitement also accompanied by some anxiety?

PK: I am terrified, and hopeful. I broke the law and committed a serious crime, and I know that I will be reproached for this, and for having the nerve to open my mouth about the nature of the “corrections” meted out by our government. Some people will question whether I can be trusted. Many may feel that the shame of imprisonment should keep me silent. It is hard to put myself out there.

It would be disingenuous to say I don’t care what people think of me. I am writing on some controversial and emotional topics within the framework of prison: transgression, guilt, revenge, redemption, forgiveness, justice, race, and class. So I expect to take some hard knocks on a number of fronts.

But I am very hopeful that I can tell an engrossing and yes, entertaining story that will reveal something new and truthful about who is in prison and why they are there. My hope for the book is that it helps spur a more honest and productive public debate about the role of prisons in America. And I feel very lucky to have the chance to tell my own personal story.

JQ: I cannot imagine what it will be like once the book is actually in bookstores and being read by the public. Already I’ve had the surreal experience of talking to a stranger who had read the galleys and having her say, “How’s Danielle?” (my sister). And, “How’s Bruce?” (my brother-in-law). “What a great guy!” In the same conversation, I mentioned that I’d been staying in an apartment on 57th Street, and the woman said, “Your grandmother Harriette’s apartment?” (Indeed it was.) Later, I referred to having been an actress when I was young and she said, “Yes, I know . . .” It’s eerie to meet someone who knows intimate details of your life and has read your most personal, interior monologues and yet knows nothing about them. I’m a bit anxious about how this will feel on a large scale!

TC: Good Lord, I can’t wait. I am obsessed with the whole thing. It ain’t pretty. But I feel like much of my life has really led up to this. This all started when I was around twelve, fell in love with Rakim, and decided I wanted to be an MC Then I fell in love with djembe and wanted to be a drummer. Then I fell for Larry Neal and Carolyn Forché and wanted to be a poet. Through it all I desperately wanted to tell the story of my generation. That sounds pretentious, but it’s what I wanted. Stylistically, I sought to bring all my past disciplines to bear on this project. I wanted to try to echo the detail and the lovely word economy of, say, vintage Nas. I wanted the random, beautiful chaos of a djembe solo. And I wanted to emulate the surreal imagery of Yusef Komunyakaa. I don’t know how close I came to any of that. And if I completely and utterly failed, it’s OK. But I really, really enjoyed trying to get it done.

April is the cruellest month.†

April, come she will.‡

It’s April! Month of great opening lines. See if you can correctly match the first line with the book below . . .

1. “I was on fire.”

10. “I exaggerate.”

A. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
B. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
C. The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
D. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
E. Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
F. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir by Lauren Slater
G. From “Strays,” the first story in the collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard
H. The People's Act of Love by James Meek
I. The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato
J. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Answers:

1. B
2. I
3. G
4. C
5. J
6. E
7. A
8. D
9. H
10. F

* The first sentence of 1984 by George Orwell
† The first line of “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot
‡ The first line of “April Come She Will” by Paul Simon

But all this was years before I embarked on writing a novel myself, before I even considered being a writer. This was in college, when my mother’s anxiety about who I would marry—that is, how she would find me the person I would marry—could be heard in every phone call home. I was twenty, I was twenty-one, I was twenty-two (the age at which she’d settled down), I was unattached, unmoored, and uncooperative. Off campus, in the dark movie theater, I thought: Well, Ammi, if you can find me the Indian Muslim Daniel Day-Lewis, I’ll drop—in a (skipped) heartbeat—all my silly principles about needing to choose the person I want to spend my life with.

Or maybe it didn’t happen quite that way. Maybe inspiration began with the beautiful, twisting, who-will-marry-whom plots of the Austen novels I’d read before then and loved? Or perhaps it began with the inexorably doomed marital arrangements in George Eliot’s Middlemarch? Being the child of immigrants who’d imported the custom of arranged marriage (along with a strong sense of the kind of people they had once been), I found the central problems of all these classic novels—should a person marry for love or for the myriad compelling reasons having to do with loyalty to the people one comes from?—strangely contemporary and urgent. But maybe the nature of inspiration is such that it’s hard to pin down.

Even so, about three years into the writing of my novel I heard the echoes between the story I was hoping to tell and Wharton’s classic tale: A man of the world, who is rather smugly engaged to the best candidate among his mother’s list of potential brides, encounters a woman who makes him realize that he’s made a mistake. In both Newland Archer’s and my main character, Nasr’s, cases, the mistake is almost a joke on himself, on his own pretensions of being a person who, while belonging to a privileged social set, has long cultivated a disdain for the narrow-mindedness of its members.

In much of her work, Wharton portrays the shifting social and private relations in the New York society of the late 1800s, and, taken together, her novels capture a moment in the evolution of intimacy that was in such flux that the difference between one’s parents’ marriage prospects and one’s own felt like the difference between epochs.

My novel began as an investigation of a similarly transitional period in which arranged marriages and love marriages are both available to my generation. I assumed that the norm of our adopted culture would eventually win out among my peers, but arranged marriage continues to be a viable, rational, and even attractive option to many people I know. So my central question was: Why would a person who’s grown up in the West, who’s taken pride in the seamlessness of his own assimilation and is free to marry for love, consent to an arranged marriage? What possible allure could such a tradition hold for him? To complicate matters, the story is set in the fall and winter of 2001, when the attacks of September 11th came to signal that we (here the larger we, of Americans and Muslims) had entered another sort of age—had shed an innocence that had previously defined our actions.

I hope to write one day a novel as exacting and astute as The Age of Innocence. In the meantime, I’m thankful to have spent some time in its long, inspiring shadow.

Saher Alam is the author of The Groom to Have Been, coming July ’08.

When you read this I will be back at work with the rest of my beloved Spiegel & Grau colleagues whom I missed terribly during the almost 7 months I was out of the office on pregnancy related bedrest and maternity leave. While I am sure to suffer the usual separation anxiety that comes with returning to work, I’m excited to get back into the routine of being the publicity director for a new house. Although I’ve been in the book publicity business for eighteen years I have never had the good fortune to come into a venture at such an early stage. It has been truly thrilling to watch Spiegel & Grau go from publishing two books in 2007 (two hugely successful books, I might add) to launching their first full list in 2008, and I can’t wait to hear about all of the books that were bought while I was on leave. I have loved watching the development of this Web site from afar (aka my bed) and was glad to discover that it is an excellent place to keep track of what we are publishing.

One of the aspects I love most about my job is helping to launch the careers of talented new writers, and this month on our site we will hear from four young, debut novelists. Liza Monroy writes our dispatch this month from her recent trip back to Mexico City. This June we will publish her debut novel, Mexican High, about the intense culture shock a high school senior suffers after being transplanted to an elite international school in Mexico City. This month’s First Person comes from Saher Alam, author of the forthcoming July paperback original The Groom to Have Been, a moving debut about young lovers thwarted by the restrictions of their community and the fears of a world suddenly defined by tragedy. This month’s multimedia features a video from another of our debut novelists, Steve Toltz, whose book, A Fraction of the Whole, was just published last month to rave reviews. Three more first-timers discuss the task of writing a memoir in this month’s Roundtable—Jessica Queller, Ta-Nihisi Coates, and Piper Kerman.

Well that’s all from me for now. I look forward to welcoming you again in the future. Thank you so much for visiting our new site and come back often for updates.

Best regards,

Gretchen Koss
Director of Publicity
Spiegel & Grau

I lived in Mexico City during high school, between 1994 and 1997, years when I was unconsciously researching my first novel, Mexican High. I wanted the book to accurately reflect this complicated, fascinating mystery of a city, a place where Rodeo Drive—like Avenida Masaryk represents a privileged microcosm within a largely developing nation. For a teenager—and my school more than slightly resembles the fictitious one my main character, Milagro Marquez, attends—Mexico City was a place full of temptations: classmates’ wealthy parents were often out of town, and drivers and bodyguards ensured safety but, as hired help, never refused to take us to nightclubs and bars, which were open all night. A common expression went, “If you’re old enough to see over the bar, you’re old enough to drink.” It was controlled chaos, a unique, surreal world I wanted to tell a story about ever since I moved back to the States.

At twenty-seven, I was revising the first draft of Mexican High and working as a freelance journalist in New York City when I read online that MTV and Frommer’s were collaborating on a guidebook series and seeking writers for the Mexico edition. I hadn’t been back to Mexico City; I was inventing the novel’s plot sitting in cafes in New York. I interviewed and several months later, I was hired.

1994, my first year in Mexico, had been a chaotic one in the country’s history: Zapatista revolutionaries in Chiapas, the peso’s devaluation from three to twelve to the dollar, the assassination of favored presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and the volcano Popocatépetl’s near-eruption. How different would it be now? I wondered. It was an interesting time to return: the streets in the city center were shut down by protestors who’d flooded into Mexico City from all over the country to protest former mayor Manuel Lopez Obrador’s loss of the presidency to Felipe Calderon. My family was worried about my being down there while the protests were in full swing; news reports had described tear gas and riots in the plaza.
In my taxi from the airport to the Condesa neighborhood, where I was staying at cool colonial Condesa D.F. (www.condesadf.com), my new favorite boutique hotel, I thought, Even the air still smells the same. Memories rushed back and it immediately struck me why I had been consumed, haunted, and fascinated by the Mexican capital’s dramatic cityscape. One of the world’s largest cities still felt like my hometown, even though I had no family and very few friends left there.

In the morning, I wandered alone through Lagunilla, a crowded outdoor market where vendors sell everything from clothing to art, antiques to puppies (!). As I strolled toward Plaza Garibaldi, even though I’d been warned to take a cab because it was peligroso, I revived some of the old rebellious adolescent spirit by sampling pulque (an ancient alcoholic Aztec beverage made from fermented maguey, an Agave plant) at ten in the morning. As I made my way further to the majestic Zócalo to revisit Casa de los Azulejos, the house of tiles, which now houses a Sanborn’s department store and restaurant, I realized I was coming up on the protest and prepared to run the other way if I needed to. But I encountered something completely different than I’d expected from the news reports—a political protest, Mexican-style. The atmosphere was that of a carnival, with kids’ rides, tents, the smell of outdoor cooking, songs, and music. There was no violence. People were everywhere, but the magnitude of the protests, other than in size, had been exaggerated by the media.

Protestors also shut down Reforma, one of Mexico City’s main avenues. This caused major traffic calamities—getting from one place to another became a baffling challenge for drivers. I walked in the middle of Reforma, taking in scenes from the protest (a soccer match, plentiful beer-drinking in lawn chairs), and was glad I hadn’t rented a car for my time in Mexico City.

I did drive to Valle de Bravo, a verdant lake town three hours outside Mexico City that’s a popular weekend retreat for the city’s elite, as well as adventure-seekers. It’s one of the paragliding capitals of the world. While staying at adventure-sporting eco-lodge Rodavento (www.rodavento.com), I reported on the best paragliding schools (www.flymexico.com), hikes (my favorite leads to Velo de Novia—“Bride’s Veil”—a waterfall), and spas (www.elsantuario.com), but my real mission was to rediscover the points of reference I’d written about in the chapter of the novel set in Valle de Bravo. The restaurants and clubs I’d gone to in high school were still there, repopulated by a new generation of cute young revelers in designer outfits. For the first time, ten years felt like a lifetime ago.

Back in Mexico City, the day before returning to New York, I rode the subway for an hour to UNAM, the largest university in the Americas. In the vast field known in my novel as “Las Islas,” which looked exactly the same as I remembered, I sat under a tree and watched students walking to and from classes, playing soccer, sitting in groups eating lunch and talking, and thought of my own experience attending school in sprawling, wild, often-overwhelming Mexico City, and how it ultimately had come to feel like home. I wrote in my journal of the “smells and sounds of a city no longer mine,” my amazement at revisiting places of my past, years later and far calmer. I found that as much as I had changed, the city that had been my obsession for years really hadn’t.

Liza Monroy is the author of Mexican High, coming June ’08.

This was the story I ultimately sold, but it became clear to a lot of folks that there was a book within this book, one that came from my perspective, and used my father as an antagonist. Back then, memoir still seemed like a big word to me, an act committed by BIG writers—or by some guy who’d spent a year trying to place a ten-minute call to everyone in the Manhattan phone book and decided to write about it.

Of course I didn’t see just how difficult it was until I got into it. I’m a hard-headed dude, and so I set out, in my arrogance, to commit the greatest possible act of literature that I was capable of—to tell an amazing story and trick it out with flourishes of beautiful language and style. In other words, my expectations didn’t include gleaning what we used to call Knowledge of Self. In fact, what I quickly discovered was that if I were going to write anything approximating even a merely adequate book, I’d have to understand myself on a deeper level. Even with that in mind, however, I probably came closer to plausible explanations than exact truth.

Writing The Beautiful Struggle was like being an actor and playing my younger self in a low-budget movie. I had to get to some sort of core reason for why I, for instance, repeatedly took school as a joke, or why in the summer of ‘88, I couldn’t stop playing Public Enemy. Answers to these kinds of questions gave me deeper insight into myself. I know that I was negotiating a violent world as best I could. I know that I was totally overwhelmed by own dumb imagination. I know that I, like a lot of boys, had no idea how to communicate with the opposite sex.

But what I now know, more than anything, is that were I president, I would give everyone a small advance, and then tell them to go off and write a memoir. Even if we don’t get close to finding out who we are, we at least arrive at an invented explanation, a reasonable facsimile of the truth. That’s better than nothing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, coming May '08.

This is a celebratory moment for us. We are officially launched. We have books in the bookstores, we've hired our last editor, Tina Pohlman, who comes to us from Harcourt as Senior Editor, hardcovers, and Editorial Director of our paperback list. We're thrilled to have her with us.

We held a memorable and spirited party to commemorate the launch, attended by our authors, their agents, and other industry folk. It was a tremendously moving experience, after two years of building a list of books, to stand among so many friends and colleagues. But what made it particularly special was that so many of our authors were able to attend. Iain Pears (and his agent Felicity Bryan), Rebecca Stott (and her son Jacob), and Jane Kamensky flew in from England; Janelle Brown came from L.A. via Sundance; Dan Baum and Marianne Szegedy-Maszak from D.C.; Jill Lepore and Saher Alam from Boston; Mary Johnson from New Hampshire; Philipp Meyer from Austin; Aviya Kushner from Iowa; and Suze stopped in before her Larry King appearance. Sara Gruen, who'd bought her plane ticket and packed her bag, unfortunately came down with the flu and couldn't make it. We're trying to create an online community of authors and readers with this Web site, but the night of the party was a moment of real (not virtual!) community. Click here to view party pictures.

But even authors who couldn't attend in person were with us, as you'll see in this month's multimedia feature: we debuted our "I Am Spiegel & Grau" video at our party but it's up in perpetuity on our site. The message of the video is clear: Our authors are what make us possible; they inspire us daily. We're glad to have the opportunity to introduce you to some of them now.

Hill on Fire
“Hillary Clinton has taken an enormous amount of abuse over the years from some very bad people, but her basic problem is that she’s deserved all of it.”

Giuliani: Worse Than Bush
“Giuliani has good stage presence, but his physical appearance is problematic—virtually neckless, all shoulders and forehead and overbite, with a hunched-over, Draculoid posture that recalls, oddly enough, George W. Bush, the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns.”

Mike Huckabee, Our Favorite Right-Wing Nutjob
“If this religious zealot’s rise represents the end of corporate dominance of the Republican Party, is that a good thing? Or is the real thing even worse than the fraud?”

Mitt Romney: The Huckster
“For this is the great strength of Mitt Romney: when the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican front-runner in Iowa is on his game, voters walk out of his campaign events thinking he’s the candidate of blue sky and sunshine, of cute newborn puppies, of the crack of the bat in spring training, of the first bite of a warm oatmeal cookie.”

Obama’s Moment
“Like Kennedy or Reagan or even Bill Clinton, Obama is a politician whose best chance for success has always been on the level of myth and hero worship; to win the Democratic nomination, he must successfully sell himself not just as a candidate but as an icon, a symbol of the best possible future for twenty-first-century multicultural America and an antidote to both the callous reactionary idiocy of the Bush administration and the shrewd but soulless corporatism of the Clinton machine.”

Matt Taibbi is the author of The Great Derangement, coming April '08.

Meghan Walker: To me, marketing is a two-pronged process: one internally focused and one external. First, we play an integral role in shaping the message of a book in-house. On the most basic and obvious level, we head up the creation of sales tools like title information sheets, catalog copy, and sell sheets that help with the process of selling books to accounts. We try to ensure that all the key players working on a title are clear on our approach and that our reps know exactly what they are selling and have what they need to do it. When all goes well, marketing can be the grease that keeps all the moving parts in smooth operation, making sure essential information from editorial is communicated to sales, that advertising and promotion are timed well with publicity, and that we are able to respond when a book starts to take off or provide extra ammunition when the opposite occurs. The second prong is focused on the sell-through and communicating our message to the outside world. Closer to publication we raise consumer awareness through print materials such as postcards, bookmarks, posters, and displays that are mailed directly to consumers and/or distributed or displayed by bookstores. We create promotions and contests that can run online as well as on radio and TV. Increasingly we are focusing efforts on the online world: video trailers, e-cards and e-newsletters, blog advertising, and helping authors to create a presence for themselves on blogs and social networking sites. At Spiegel & Grau we are also aiming to use our website to build an online community by posting new and original content from our authors each month.

Suzanne Herz: Marketing is a multi-layered process. Once a book is bought it is critical to begin the buzz. This is done by reaching out to booksellers and harnessing their enthusiasm. Additional excitement is created when editors garner early advance praise for a book and then the marketing team begins to share it with our retailers. One of our greatest marketing tools is the jacket. It is what the consumer responds to, and each jacket has to bring home the message of the book. With jacket and endorsements in hand, and of course advanced readers’ copies, we can seed the marketplace and build word of mouth through the Web, bookstore newsletters, and targeted mailings to niche markets.

Kelsey Nencheck: Marketing can also play a key role in reaching unique consumer markets. Brainstorming and identifying niche communities of any size can add yet another layer of buzz with a very targeted—and influential—audience. If such a loyal audience supports a book, its popularity can have a viral effect and translate into a wider audience. The increasing importance of online marketing also makes it imperative for marketing departments to be on constant watch for new technologies and marketing tools. Finding those tools and educating editorial, sales, and publicity on their effectiveness not only helps promote our books but also keep publishing ahead of the technology game.

2. Marketing departments are always trying to look for new ways to find audiences for their company’s books. What techniques have had exciting results in the first few months seasons of publishing Spiegel & Grau titles?

MW: The motivation is always the same: to reach as many people who you think will be interested in a particular title as you can. How you go about that depends on the type of book you are working on. For Spiegel & Grau’s first title, Suze Orman's Women & Money, we were blessed with a well-known author with an established platform, an endless list of contacts and connections, and a clear and targeted message. Suze is a tireless promoter who really believes in the message of her book. Working with Suze is akin to what I imagine working on a political campaign would be like. Our message was refined from very early on. And then we took it to the people. We hit up every single person, website, corporation—you name it—who had ever worked with Suze and enlisted their support. With that book it was more a matter of keeping up with the response than it was coming up with new and creative angles. Our second title, the historical thriller Ghostwalk, was all about getting people to read it early on. The amazing read coupled with the great package helped us garner a lot of early enthusiasm. Once we had the support from our accounts and blurbs from other writers, we were able to make a concerted effort to reach book clubs through direct mail and online outreach. We also had a lot of very interesting ancillary materials that enabled us to build a beautiful Web site. With Ellington Boulevard, we were lucky to have a novel that had a few great hooks: real estate, Manhattan, and musical theatre. So we crafted pitches and materials to reach each audience. With Lee Siegel's polemic on the Internet, Against the Machine, we are using the serious and thoughtful review coverage to spark an interest in the business and technology/Web 2.0 realms as well as stoke the flames our controversial author will undoubtedly set in the blogoshpere.

3. If money were no object, are there marketing strategies other industries use that you wish you could apply to Spiegel & Grau titles?

MW: If money were no object I would do a lot more online outreach, including prominent and repetitive banner ads on highly trafficked Web sites. I would also love to create video trailers for more titles, because many of our authors have interesting back stories and have traveled far and wide in order to craft their narratives. Video interviews with them and slideshows of their photographs and personal effects can really help to bring their stories to life for a reader. Of course, loads of television and radio advertising would also be quite nice, but they are a luxury reserved for only the biggest of the big titles.

SH: If money were no object I would start teaser campaigns for books months ahead of time.

KN: I would love to have the budget and audience reach of major film campaigns. From compelling theatrical teaser campaigns, polished and high-end TV trailers, billboards, and extensive online advertising, studios have the resources to make a big splash—immediately. Studios seem to use the Internet to its fullest potential from advertising to original online content (behind-the-scene specials, syndicated actor/director interviews, etc.) that can overtake the blogosphere and drive consumers to theatres. With that said, however, the publishing world is quite special in that a title’s popularity and bestseller potential can grow organically and exponentially via word-of-mouth and incredible reviews, whereas a film without a marketing budget rarely becomes a box office hit.

4. Do you foresee any changes in marketing as the digital age progresses?

MW: Oh my God, yes! To paraphrase Chevy Chase’s ball-bearings line in Fletch: It’s all online these days. The amount of time people spend online is increasing rapidly. So we need to reach our potential customers where they are. Creating book-specific Web sites seems to be a waste of money, as it is tough to build traffic. A better approach is to figure out ways to reach preexisting communities and we are always looking for ways to do this. Dwindling review space in traditional print media has led to the creation of many online communities for book lovers and we need to continue to look for ways to work with these sites to market our books. On a more basic level, it’s also worth noting that the digital age has made traditional marketing much easier. Researching special interest groups and creating mailing lists and can now be done with the click of the mouse.

KN: The next generation to enter the workforce has grown up in the digital age—they regularly use text messages, RSS, and blogs. It will be interesting to see if their buying behavior changes the industry in the next few years and how we’ll adapt in the publishing world. Will e-readers take off and be the hot item for 2011? Will print advertising become less effective while people in their twenties and thirties spend more time on the Internet and watching television than reading a newspaper? The publishing world must rise to the challenge to stay viable in the digital age.

1. “Why Is That,” Boogie Down Productions, from Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop, 1989

In The End of the Jews, this song is hugely important to Tris Freedman, aka RISK, a Jewish hip-hop kid who finds himself DJing Bar Mitzvahs in 1989—which is not what he was hoping would happen when he bought his turntables. “Why Is That” showcases BDP frontman KRS-One at the height of his lyrical power and political relevance. His importance in 1989 is impossible to overstate; hip-hoppers of my generation all thought he would be a senator and/or able to levitate by now. KRS was one of the first MCs to use songs as forums for sophisticated argumentation, and here he uses Biblical quotes and references in service of the assertion that Moses was black: “Moses had to be of the black race / because he spent forty years at Pharoah’s place.” Tris plays this song to kick off each Bar Mitzvah he DJs, as a form of protest and a statement of allegiance. Being in a Jewish space, even one as compromised as the rich suburban Bar Mitzvah party, makes him uncomfortable, and this song becomes his response (along with stealing liquor from the bar). Nobody but him listens to the lyrics, of course; the challenge goes unreceived.

I love it when hip-hoppers use samples to indicate their artistic lineage, as KRS does here. The voice on the chorus—“the government you have elected is inoperative”—is that of Gil Scott-Heron, perhaps the greatest and most underacknowledged political musician in American history. The depth and breadth of his engagement is unparalleled; he makes Bob Dylan look like Kevin Federline and if there was any justice he’d have a MacArthur grant and be chilling. Instead, he’s in prison on drug charges.

2. “A Lullaby of Itsugo Village,” Elvin Jones, from It Don’t Mean a Thing, 1993

I was a roadie for Elvin from 1997 through 2002, and he was a close friend and a mentor until his death in 2004. (I was also with him for what turned out to be his final week of performances; here’s the piece I wrote about it for JazzTimes: adammansbach.com/other/elvin.html. This is a song I saw him play countless times, in clubs all over the world; it’s a traditional Japanese tune that his wife and manager, Keiko Jones, arranged. Elvin’s commitment to his art, and his belief in the transformative and healing power of music, were profound and humbling. I wish everyone had the opportunity to spend some time with someone so connected to his calling, so centered by it.

Elvin was a titan; as John Coltrane’s percussionist throughout the sixties, he revolutionized the way the drums were played—not just in jazz, but in every form of American music. This is the kind of song—by turns beautiful, haunting and forceful—that I imagine Albert Van Horn, the musician in The End of the Jews, playing. Elvin and Keiko were certainly partial inspirations for Albert and Mariko in the book. Long before Elvin passed away, I remember contemplating what Keiko would do without him—without this man whose music was like their child, their mutual reason for being—and that led me to write the chapter in which Mariko finds herself alone for the first time in forty years.

3. “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Public Enemy, from Fear of a Black Planet, 1990

Boy, did this song set off some shit! This was the middle of the end for Public Enemy, who at the time were the most important and controversial group in the world. Professor Griff, their “Minster of Information” (a job that seemed to mostly involve standing around—he was never on their records, really) had said some stuff in an interview about the Jews being “responsible for the majority of the wickedness” in the world, and all of a sudden there was chaos. The media, who were scared of PE’s militance to begin with, jumped on it. Chuck D, the group’s leader, had to decide whether to fire Griff. At the time “Fight the Power” was out as part of the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and Chuck didn’t want the controversy to derail this important film, so he kind of stood by Griff, then fired him, then unfired him—all under incredible scrutiny.

Then “Terrordome” came out in the fall. Chuck said “apology made to whoever pleases / still they got me like Jesus,” a line about the media that got misinterpreted as being a line about Jews. Whew. This is another song that, in ’89, mattered a lot to Tris. Even at the tail end of the eighties, black-Jewish tension was still crazy, especially in New York—the Crown Heights riots, Minister Farrakan and Reverend Jackson’s comments—and, if you were a Jewish hip-hop fan like Tris, you were rolling your eyes and wondering when the manufactured hysteria would die down and people would actually listen to what groups like PE were really saying. This music meant more to you than being Jewish did, and you inherently grasped the fact that there was no actual threat involved, that PE or whoever was not invested in hurting Jews—hell, you read their liner notes and knew they were down with Bill Adler and Lyor Cohen!

4. “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” Rashaan Roland Kirk, from Return of the 5000 Lb. Man, 1976

This is a Charles Mingus tune, an elegy to Lester Young. Rashaan Roland Kirk wrote these beautiful lyrics to it and recorded his own version. Lester Young appears briefly in The End of the Jews; Tristan Brodsky (Tris’s grandfather) sees him play at a club in 1935, shortly before Prez becomes famous. It’s Tristan’s introduction to jazz—he’s introduced to a lot of things that night.

Lester was a real character, renowned for inventing all kinds of slang, for ushering in a whole sartorial style with the rumpled three-piece suits, the porkpies, the casual way he held his horn. That photograph of him sitting with his sax, smoke rising from the cigarette between his fingers, might still be the most iconic image in all of jazz. I think this song makes this list, rather than an actual Lester Young tune, because my jazz education really began with the music of the sixties, and I had to go backward to pick up Lester Young. So in some way, I connect more with the Kirk/Mingus elegy for him than I do with the actual music he made, as great as it is.

5. “The Gas Face,” 3rd Bass, from The Cactus Album, 1989

3rd Bass was the first credible white hip-hop group, and this song was their take on race and racism—very much a behind-enemy-lines piece that cosigns and validates the kinds of statements their black peers were making at the time. MC Serch, who delivers the last (and strongest) verse here, is a Jewish cat from Far Rockaway, Queens, whose story is kind of the hip-hop version of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer—he was planning on becoming a rabbi or a cantor until a racist rabbi turned him away from the religion. He found his way back to it years and years later. He’s now the host of The White Rapper Show on VH1, and a friend of mine; I recently interviewed him for the magazine Guilt & Pleasure: "Soul Serching."

This song, alongside the BDP and PE cuts, forms a kind of tryptich detailing how race, hip-hop and Jewishness came together in 1989, when Tris was coming of age. Incidentally, the first white rapper ever—also Jewish—is another friend of mine, Vanilla B aka Lord Scotch, aka Keo, aka Blake Lethem. He actually designed the cover of my previous novel, Angry Black White Boy. And yes, he and Jonathan are brothers.

6. “Misterioso,” J.J. Johnson, from J.J. in Person, 1958

Devon Marbury, the other important musician in The End of the Jews, is a trombonist—outside of that one Paul Newman/Sidney Poitier movie, Paris Blues, trombonists never get to be leading men, romantic figures, so I figured I should give the instrument a little shine. Delfeayo Marsalis—who prefers to call his instrument a “trambone,”—was one of the people who educated me about jazz, and he introduced me to the work of J.J., the greatest trambonist of all time and the guy Devon gets compared to in the novel. J.J. was also the first person to take Elvin Jones out on the road, so I heard a lot of stories about him—how he and Tommy Flanagan and Wilbur Little and the rest of that band took Elvin out to eat all the time when he could barely afford better than hot dogs. This is J.J.’s take on the great Thelonious Monk tune, and it features an explosive, killer opening solo by Nat Adderley on cornet. I remember listening to this song with Delfeayo, and rewinding that solo again and again because Adderley just came at it so hard.

7. “Cocaine,” Sly & Robbie, from Black Ash Dub, 1980

I listen to more dub than anything when I’m writing: it’s mellow, it keeps you locked into a zone, and there are no vocals or changes to distract you: just these incredibly thick, funky basslines and hard-ass drum patterns, and snippets of other instruments coming in and out of the mix with crazy reverb and effects on them. Dub is really the first producer-based music; the Jamaican studio bands would lay the instrumentals, and then cats like King Tubby and Scientist and Lee “Scratch” Perry would come in and do these dub mixes to put on the b-sides of singles and have deejays chat over. So this is reflective of the kind of stuff I often bump when I’m writing, and also of the music I imagine would be playing at Talking Blues, the coffee shop (i.e., herb shop) Mariko sends Tris to in Amsterdam at the beginning of Book 2.

8. “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band,” Collins & Harlan, 1906 (from the complilation Jewface, 2006)

First of all, yes—those six notes are indeed the melody to “God Bless America,” and yes, Irving Berlin jacked this bit of turn-of-the-century silliness about a conductor with a schnozz so big he doesn’t need a baton, and turned it into a baseball park anthem. This is from a fascinating compilation some friends of mine over at Reboot Stereophonic put together, and it’s an example of the kind of now-forgotten tune you might have heard at the Yiddish theater during the first quarter of the last century. Tristan references this song in the book, during a speech he delivers at Harvard University in 1953. He’s defending himself against charges that it was wrong of him to write Manacles—a novel about a Jewish-owned slaveship making middle passage—in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. He says that to understand evil, we must first understand it in ourselves, and brings up these songs to argue that Jews are comfortable being reduced to caricature but refuse to reckon with the reality that they, too, have been the hunters rather than the prey.

Long after I wrote this scene, I read Arnold Rampersand’s new biography of Ralph Ellison (whose name also comes up in this scene—Tristan responds to a student who quotes a vicious review of Manacles by Irving Howe by saying he’s in good company, since Howe didn’t like Invisible Man, either) and came across a scene in which Ellison, in 1967, is shouted down at a college gig by black power advocates in a strikingly similar manner. It’s funny; I didn’t intend for Tristan to evoke anybody, but I continue to find small commonalities between him and different writers of his generation: Ellison, Malamud, Mailer, Bellow, and so on.

9. “The Legend of Buddy Bolden,” Wynton Marsalis Septet, from Citi Movement, 1993

Devon Marbury’s band is an octet, and I imagine their music—improvisational but orchestrated, jubilant, historically inclined, New Orleansy—to be much like that of Wynton’s early nineties band, which I got to see play a lot, and which was one of my favorites. This tune has been a favorite of mine forever; I remember trying to write a poem to correspond to the notes of Wynton’s solo when I was in high school, and using the last few phrases of it—up until the part when Herlin Riley comes in with the cymbal—on my answering machine back when that type of thing was acceptable.

10. “Cold Crush Brothers at the Dixie,” Cold Crush Brothers, from the Wild Style soundtrack, 1982

My novel begins in the Bronx, and the Bronx contines to make its presence felt, in different ways, throughout. So I thought it would be appropriate to have something on here that gave a nod to the early days of hip-hop, which also started in the BX. There weren’t too many Jews left there (some, though) by the time Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa started spinning records in school yards and local cats started grabbing the mics and the spray cans and busting headspins, but it’s the same terrain, the same few square miles. This song is as faithful and accurate a recording as there is in terms of capturing the early Bronx sound. The Cold Crush Brothers are one of the original crews, and one of the best. Grandmaster Caz, their leader, made the mistake of lending his book of rhymes to a nonrapper named Big Bank Hank. His slapped-together crew, The Sugarhill Gang, usurped Cold Crush and ended up being the one to blow hip-hop up worldwide with “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 (and no, Caz didn’t get a credit, or a check), but this is what the real shit sounded like.

Adam Mansbach is the author of The End of the Jews, coming March '08.

Jean Traina: Upon graduating from Parsons, I knew that I was interested in editorial design but leaned toward magazines, eventually landing a staff position with a publisher developing magazine prototypes. I soon realized that magazines, to my annoyance, were unending and repetitive. Book jackets, on the other hand, are a one-shot deal (maybe two with the paperback), each one like a little poster. There is endless possibility, so much freedom within a 6 x 9, two-dimensional space.

Rex Bonomelli: When I was in college, one of my teachers was Michael Ian Kaye, creative director at Little, Brown. He offered me an internship during my senior year and I became dazzled by the ins and outs of book publishing. After I graduated, I worked at design studios where I would occasionally get book jacket projects to work on. From there, I was hired at Random House.

Michael Windsor: I started as an illustrator—my first real artistic aspiration was to draw comic books. But as it turned out, I graduated and moved to the city right when the market crashed. There wasn’t much work out there, so I went back to school for design. I ended up having a knack for it, and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. It was in my junior year that I decided that book covers were what I enjoyed the most and wanted a career in. The fact that you hold a book in your hands and turn it over and open it up appealed to me in an artistic sense. It’s not just a flat piece of art, it has dimensions. Every turn is a canvas to create something on.

Emily Mahon: I went to the graphic design program at Penn State, and felt inspired by the legacy of Chip Kidd (an alum) to go into book design when I graduated. I feel grateful that I started my career at Picador, which publishes a great list of literary books, and that I was given the opportunity to design covers within my first month there.

2. Can you tell us a little about the book jacket design process from start to finish?

RB: We start the process by having a discussion about the book with the publisher and editor. We talk about comparable titles, target audience, and possible visual ideas. If a manuscript is available, I read it. I take notes on things that would make interesting images. After I read it, I do image research and begin designing.

After I’m happy with the designs we have another meeting where a) a cover is approved or b) everything I was happy with is picked apart and reconfigured into a mess, and I start over.

MW: Presenting the cover comps to the editors and publishers in the jacket meeting is the brutal part of the job. If you don’t have a thick skin and you are unable to listen to someone tell you everything you’ve slaved over for the last three weeks is all wrong, then you will never last as an art director.

EM: With fiction I always read the book first. As I’m reading I usually sketch and take notes of visual ideas or passages in the book, which could inspire a cover. After I finish reading I usually take a week or two to digest the book and decide what is the best approach for designing, whether it be all type, illustration, photography, etc., and begin to come up with concepts that will reach the right audience and deliver the essence of the book. I’d say I usually end up in a much different place than where I start when designing. One idea will trigger another until I reach a point where I know I’ve found a good solution.

3. When you are designing a jacket, how do you strike a balance between the commercial and the aesthetic? Is your first impulse a beautiful design, or are you always thinking about the placement of the book in the bookstore and how it can best draw readers to it?

JT: Positioning of the book is definitely the jumping off point. It would be a waste of time to begin the process any other way but from there, an aesthetic solution is the ultimate goal.

RB: The most important thing for me when I design a jacket is to serve the book. Period. If that means creating the most beautiful cover because it’s the most beautiful book, super. If it means creating a very commercial cover because it’s a very commercial book, fantastic. Everyone involved in publishing has some kind of agenda that needs to be met, but my job is very clear-cut. I have to create a truthful visual interpretation of the book.

MW: The first design I do is always my own vision. Now, that’s not because I’m a design snob! I find that if I don’t get my first impression down on paper, it’s really hard to move forward with any other ideas. In a weird way it’s like letting the floodgates loose. Balancing the commercial and the aesthetic is tricky. Art is subjective. What speaks to one person may be completely overlooked by another. The key in my opinion is to make the jacket stand apart from everything else around it. My theory is that something beautiful or interesting will always be noticed.

Design is really about relating different information together to form a solid unit. I like to use juxtapositions to achieve this. It could be two images that at first don’t make sense but that work together. Strange cropping, textures, a mixture of fonts, color, what have you. They all have to work together in the end. By staying away from the expected and obvious you can pique people’s interest more. Give them something they haven’t seen before and chances are they’ll pick it up. And if they do that, my job is done.

EM: The content of the book, whether literary or more commercial, dictates how the book needs to look. I first try to determine who the audience for the book is, and then figure out what the design calls for. I feel fortunate that I have been able to work on a wide range of books, so I have learned to determine how to make a book look “bigger” or “smaller” depending on the audience it is speaking to.

4. Of all the book jackets out there, which one do you admire most and why?

JT: I can’t resist gorgeous typography and illustrative hand lettering.

RB: I would rather tell you my favorite movie. A tie between West Side Story and Rosemary’s Baby.

MW: Wow, that’s a tough one. I go to the bookstore almost every week just to see the new releases and gauge where things are headed . . . trying to stay ahead of the curve. I do have favorite designers, though, whose work I have long admired. They include but aren’t limited to Rodrigo Corral, Peter Mendelsund, John Gall, Honi Werner, and others. They all have their own voices. I can pick their work out when I see it.

EM: I admire many that Paul Rand designed in the fifties and sixties. A few that stand out are Goodbye, Columbus and H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices. He was able to create covers with simple, strong, graphic iconography, and his solutions always seemed to work.

5. What does it feel like when you see a book you designed on the subway or on a friend’s shelf? Does it feel different when you see it out of the context of your workspace?

JT: I always think it could have been better!

RB: Whenever I’m at someone’s apartment, I can’t resist the urge to see if one of my books is on their shelf. When I see someone on the train reading one of my books, well, it’s like eating a cake made of rainbows.

MW: It’s always nice to see something you’ve worked on in someone’s hand or on a shelf. However, I am very critical when it comes to my own work. All I see is what I think is wrong with the design. This happens way more outside the office... “Oh, if I had just made that title 2 points bigger or that blue 5 percent lighter or put that image on the opposite side” . . . but I think this is because I’m always trying to be better at what I do.

EM: I won’t lie, it’s pretty exciting every time I see a book I designed displayed in the front of a bookstore, or anywhere outside of the publishing house. I’ve watched people in bookstores to see which books they are drawn to pick up, based on a first unbiased attraction to it. I like knowing that I had a part in the whole process of giving a book a personality and an identity outside of its words alone.

6. Tell us about the covers you designed for the Spring 2008 Spiegel & Grau list. How did you come up with these designs?

RB: I designed A Fraction of the Whole for the S&G Spring ’08 list. The covers I have the hardest time designing are usually the books I most enjoy reading. It’s kind of paralyzing to work on something you like so much because you’ve become emotionally invested in it and don’t want to do anything to screw it up. This was the case with A Fraction of the Whole.

For this book my direction was to create a bold design that was fun, clever, young, and original, with “ballsy and ambitious type.” Easy! Because this story is an epic journey I couldn’t just have one image. I decided to draw lots of little icons that were representative of points along the journey. I wanted the end result to be mysterious but compelling. I love it when I read a book and I don’t quite know what the cover means, but when I get to the part in the book that refers to the cover I get the “a-HA!” moment. I hope that’s what people will get.

EM: Ellington Boulevard was a fun read, I knew the cover had to feel very fresh, and it called for an illustration. The characters in the book were all unique, and I loved the way in which they were described by role, and not so much by name (i.e., the tenant and his dog). The illustrator I chose to work on this one, Juliette Borda, has an incredibly imaginative and quirky sensibility and I knew she could give the characters real personalities through small vignettes. I sketched a few ideas about how I felt the overall wraparound jacket should look, and I was thrilled with how the final art turned out.

Against the Machine was about coming up with a smart concept to differentiate the computer age from the world as we knew it before computers. It took a while to come to this solution, but I finally realized it was as simple as showing the disparity between the old and the new.