Below is a recent Reuters article about Somaly Mam, a grassroots activist whose mission is rescuing and rehabilitating girls and young women sold into sexual slavery in Southeast Asia. Her courageous efforts to fight the sex-trafficking industry drew the attention of The Body Shop, who recently partnered with the Somaly Mam Foundation to raise awareness of the sex trade worldwide. Somaly's extraordinary memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, is now out in paperback.

We are proud to publish authors dedicated to making a difference in the world.

For more information, please visit www.icmec.org and www.somaly.org.

Former sex slave seeks help as 4-year-old found in brothel
Mon Aug 3, 2009 12:54am EDT

By Belinda Goldsmith
CANBERRA (Reuters Life!) - A former sex slave on Monday launched a global campaign against trafficking, saying the age of girls forced into prostitution keeps getting younger.

Cambodian Somaly Mam, whose eponymous foundation is dedicated to fighting the $12 billion a year sex-trafficking industry, said a four-year-old girl was found last month at a brothel in Cambodia after being reported by a male client.

The youngster had been sold to the brothel by her mother, who is also a prostitute.
She is now being cared for at one of the seven shelters run by the Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam set up to protect and rehabilitate girls rescued from sex slavery. The group also has an office in Thailand dealing with repatriation.

"You just have to hold her and stay with her and show her that you love her. Children can become children again," Mam told Reuters as she launched a joint venture with cosmetics retailer The Body Shop to raise awareness of sex trafficking.

"There is this belief that having sex with a virgin will cure you of HIV so there is an increasing market for younger and younger girls. In my time it was girls aged 15 or 16 but it has got younger and younger."

The United Nations estimates that two million women and children are trafficked every year, with 30 percent of these in Asia. Poor families sometimes sell a daughter to pay off debts.

To continue: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE5720FH20090803?sp=true

Tough Trip Through Paradise by Andrew Garcia. This is an account of a kid who gets a loan to buy equipment and supplies in Bozeman, Montana, and then takes it into the Musselshell Valley to trade with the Indians for furs. This during 1878 and 1879. Some historians accuse of Garcia of playing hard and fast with the truth, which is probably true, but his account provides an astonishing look at the culture and sex lives of Indian tribes that were edging toward the end of their free existence on the Great Plains.

Interior and Northern Alaska: A Natural History by Ronald L. Smith. Boring as hell title, yes, but this guy really knows his stuff. If you're at all interested in the finer, interconnected workings of the natural world, I suggest this book. And it doesn't just relate to Alaska. It's full of stuff that anyone who loves nature should know.

Red Rover by Deirdre McNamer. Full disclosure: Dee, as her friends call her, is a wonderful friend of mine. But I can't let that stop me from adding her fourth novel to this list. She is a beautiful writer, and her prose is dark, precise, and unsettling. If you need to be in a sunny, carefree mood over the next few days, better put this one off for now. But don't wait too long.

Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell: Simply the greatest thing ever written about the American west. Period.

To continue, please visit: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/india/article6676174.ece

Julie Grau, Publisher: On deck for my vacation is THE GREAT MAN by Kate Christensen, which comes emphatically recommended by my big sister--a great reader who turned me on to Edna O'Brien when I was thirteen and has been making great recommendations ever since. She says it's one of the best novels she's read in recent years.

Mya Spalter, Editorial Assistant: My next door neighbor has it in for me. She must have known what would happen when she gestured to the pile of black, glossy paperbacks. The TWILIGHT series sat stacked on her hall table. "You can take those if you want," she said. Her nonchalance was staggering. Never have seven deadlier words been spoken. I read the first three books over the course of a single week. I was transformed. I no longer needed to sleep or eat. My eyes took on a reddish hue. I spent sunny afternoons indoors. But alas, that lifestyle proved unsustainable-- by the end of book three I knew I had to postpone my enjoyment of the fourth if I hoped to hang on to some shred of humanity. It waits on my bedside table, coiled as if to strike.

Chris Jackson, Executive Editor: I met Chimamanda Adichie at a star-studded literary conference in Aspen a couple years back (Ngugi Wa'Thionga and Wole Soyinka were among the other attendees) and was awed by her grace and intelligence and wit. I read HALF OF A YELLOW SUN when I got back to New York and loved it - it told the tragedy of the Biafran War in a way that owed something to the post-colonial African masters, but also felt totally fresh in its rhythm and tone and sense of freedom. It wasn't burdened by any agit-prop obligations; its power was in its portrayal of the full humanity of its rotating narrators: heroism and folly and passive suffering, yes, but also humor and vanity and cowardice and desire and moral compromise. I'd love to read her new collection of stories, THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, even though the title feels like an old drive-through horror movie from the '50s.

When I was a boy, I prayed for straight hair. You have to understand, I grew up on heavy metal. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to start. Then Anthrax and Exodus, Megadeth and Metallica. My friends and I gathered in living rooms and basements and empty lots and banged our heads to "Damage, Inc." and "I Am the Law." If you nearly snapped your neck, you were doing something right. We were a pretty wild mix: a Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys, and me--the only one with a tight, curly Afro. The rest had straight hair, grown long, and when they thrashed to the music, their hair bounced and whipped like it was supposed to. I'd watch them pull off this casual magic and wish I'd been so blessed. But I was black, and there was no enchantment in that. It actually felt like a kind of curse. I'm so embarrassed to admit any of this.
Now, heavy metal may be to blame for any number of ills (my tinnitus, for instance), but I can't really say it spawned my self-loathing. Instead, let's head upstairs, to my family's apartment in Flushing, Queens. We won't meet the guilty party there, just another link in a long chain.
My mom grew up in East Africa. Uganda. A member of a tribe called the Baganda, the largest ethnic group in the country. Daughter of a proud and courageous mother and father. They worked to eject the British colonial powers; they were one small part of the Pan-African movement. My grandfather helped oust the British and set up schools in rural Uganda. He made sure his own kids were educated. For college, my mother packed off to Canada. In Kitchener-Waterloo, she was denied housing, mistreated and maligned in school and on the street. Finally, she moved to America to escape the racism. That poor woman--she didn't understand what was happening to her. What had already happened. Somewhere, flying over the Atlantic Ocean maybe, she'd stopped being a Muganda, a Ugandan, or even African. She had become black.
The original American slaves weren't black, either. They were Ashanti and Ewe and Fanti, among others. The slaves' path to Christianity has been told and retold as the great conversion story of Africans in the Americas. But that's not the only conversion story. There's the legal conversion: from humans being into chattel. And there's the cultural conversion: A wealth of ethnicities became one black race. This must have shocked those Africans as much as it did my mother.
To continue, please visit: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_01/3516

My earliest memories are of camping outside Rebecca's bedroom door, where I waged a nightly campaign of tears until my parents relented and let me sleep in her bed; she and I running around the gym of our elementary school, shirtless, flapping our arms as we played the nonsensical diversion we'd dubbed The Chicken Game; me trying to keep up with her on her bike as I trailed behind on my loud, loping Big Wheels. Growing up, when I wanted to know what to wear, what magazines to read, what music to like-when I wanted to know how the world worked and how I was supposed to work within it-I looked to her.

So the idea of siblings has always been of interest to me, and in particular the power older siblings hold over younger ones. I have been fascinated by what my friend Luanne calls "The Little Sister Syndrome." Luanne, like me, grew up with an older sister who was, roughly, the sun and moon to her. Now Luanne calls me days after her sister has made a cutting remark ("I've decided to spend Christmas with my husband and kids from now on. No extended family"), still bruised from it. This, according to Luanne, is a classic case of Little Sister Syndrome. No matter how old or accomplished or out from under our older siblings' sway we consider ourselves, they still wield a unique ability to influence and penetrate, rendering us into earlier versions of ourselves: young and spazzy, suddenly unsure of the ground beneath us.

When I decided to explore these tensions in my first novel, I had little interest in writing a thinly veiled story about Rebecca and me. We lacked the requisite conflict. Decades later, we still live seven minutes from each other. She still tops of the list of people I call when I have news: grad school, engagement, book deal. She's still the person I spend birthdays and holidays with, though the guest list now also includes her husband and mine, and her two young daughters.

As one of my favorite authors, Charles Baxter, wrote, "All happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories."

I needed to invent some unhappy siblings.

And one day, a single scene came to me: a teenaged girl is traveling through her neighborhood, distributing posters of her missing older brother to local businesses. She gets into an argument with a convenience store clerk who refuses to hang the poster. That was it. My sole idea. So I wrote the scene. From there, The Local News was born.

I only knew two things when I began. One, I knew that Lydia Pasternak, the narrator, did not get along with Danny, her missing older brother. Two, I knew the outcome of Danny's disappearance. Everything else I discovered in the two years of writing the book. What fascinated me the most-more than the search for Danny, or the tumult of Lydia's high school life, or the rapidly crumbling Pasternak family, all of which I loved writing about in their own right-was the jumble of love/hate feelings Lydia had toward Danny, and the power Danny had over Lydia, and the way that power was complicated and deepened and muddied and intensified by the fact that he was suddenly missing. Their relationship turned out to be neither as simple nor as bleak as I had initially imagined, their shared orbit far more nuanced and multi-layered than my early ideas of it.

Rebecca was one of the earliest readers of the finished book. I was well into a successful writing career by then. I'd landed my first book deal. I'd won awards and fellowships. I knew that I was a good writer, that this was a good book. But still I waited in the anxious way little sisters do, to find out what my big sister thought.

He wouldn't shake hands. "All the infections going around? Fuck that. Get in." He said he used to be an emergency-room doctor at the Touro hospital, but that he "got tired of the politics and the insurance fraud. Ordering more bloodwork than necessary, ordering more chext x-rays than necessary, just to pump up the bills, you know?" I couldn't follow the story about how he'd acquired the hearse. "To get what I've got, you'd have to put yourself in the system to be evacuated, and a lot of people don't want to do that. This is the choice they give you: you want to get the medicine you need, you have to leave the city. So I'm driving around providing care. To get supplies, I loot. Do you think they'll ever be able to use anything that's in Touro ever again? After the filth and the dead bodies lying in there? They're going to have to throw away everything anyway, so why shouldn't I go in there and get it? And in the pharmacies, the people don't know what that stuff is and it's better off with me anyway so people don't use these things incorrectly. So yes, I'm a looter. Fine. You got me. But I have things even the ambulances don't have. You go to a first aid station or an ambulance and ask for Diavan. They'll say what the fuck is that. Ten minutes ago, you should have been here, the fucking FBI pulls up, like eight agents, and they surround the car. They're like, who the fuck are you? What are you doing with all these stuff? Is it stolen? Who do you think you are, driving around giving out medicine. I say, I'm a doctor. They ask for my license. But I don't carry my license with me because I don't want to lose it. I show them this, this old Tulane ID, which is expired, and they say, fuck, this is expired. Who the fuck are you? So we go round and round. One of them says, what are you some kind of weirdo? This is a car of death, and you paint a cross on it? What are you, sick? Then they find this" - he reached under the seat and came up with a huge Bulgarian army pistol - "and that was another whole go-around. It was just a big fucking hassle, like they don't want anybody freelancing - you know, helping people. They finally left me alone, though they took all the bullets." He took a breath and his eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time. "What do you need? Nothing? Then get out."

Leslie T. Chang is the author of Factory Girls.

Suddenly the girls spotted someone they knew on the street outside and took off in a hurry; they were so new to the city that they didn't know their dormitory phone number and did not have mobile phone numbers to give me. We agreed to meet two weeks later, in the same public square where we had first met. I flew down from Beijing at the appointed time and waited for two hours, but they never came. I had no way of finding them again.

In the four years during which I researched and wrote Factory Girls, whenever I went to Dongguan, I scrutinized the faces of the young women on the street, hoping to find Yongxia and Dali again. If an unfamiliar number showed up on my mobile phone, I thought immediately of them. And whenever I met someone new, I always asked for multiple ways to contact them--mobile phones, factory phones, the numbers of friends and relatives, and even the names of their farming villages. Eventually I found two young women, Min and Chunming, who became the book's main characters. Even now that the book is done, I continue to call them regularly. I know how quickly I will lose them if I stop calling.

To lose someone for all time, I discovered, is the central experience of factory life. Min lost her mobile phone--and with it, any way to find her two best friends or her boyfriend. Chunming lost touch with countless acquaintances over thirteen years in the city; during that time, she had switched residences seventeen times. Occasionally there were stories of people found. A young man struck up a conversation at a bus stop with Chunming and then mentioned her to a young woman he knew; the woman turned out to be a good friend with whom Chunming had lost contact eight years before, and so they were reunited. "This is the meaning of fate," Chunming told me.

The fear of losing people lent urgency to my reporting--I came to realize you could just as easily lose a place, even one as vivid and specific as Dongguan. To spend time in China today is to know that this historical moment will not last. People will not be forever experiencing the city for the first time; owning a mobile phone, dating someone from another province, and living among strangers will lose their novelty. I suppose this same conviction drives many writers: I must tell this story, or it will be lost for good.

These days I find myself thinking of all the people I left out of the book. They come before me, bright-hued and unchanged from the day we met. There is Li Wenfang, the young woman with a "stifling" job as an elevator operator, who dreamed of attending beauty school; when I called the number she had given me, she had already left. And Ding Xia, the prostitute who vowed to save another one hundred thousand yuan and quit the karaoke clubs forever--did she? And the two girls I met on a Dongguan street who could not have been more than twelve or thirteen, with no evident source of income. "We are just in the city to have fun, not to work. We want to have fun all day long," one of the girls said, her too-insistent young voice telling me that what she said could not be true.

Seven months after my first visit to Dongguan, my phone rang. "Guess who I am?"

I named several migrant women I had recently met.

"This is Yongxia," she said, sounding peeved that I had not guessed. "We met on the square, remember?"

She was now working at the Aigao electronics factory, which paid better than her old job. "We work until eleven or twelve every night and never have a day off," Yongxia told me, cheerful and matter-of-fact. "But we have three days off for the National Day holiday. Will you be around?"

I told her I wouldn't but that I hoped to see her on my next trip to Dongguan. "Is there a number where I can reach you?" I asked.

"No."

"Do you ever have a day off so we could meet?"

"No."

Finally I told her that we should keep in touch and hung up. I had found Yongxia, only to lose her again.

How was she doing? Was she happy? And what had possessed her to keep my number and to phone me, after all this time? I'll never know, because she never called again.

Leslie T. Chang is the author of Factory Girls.

When I think of "summer reads," I think of books I read when I was a kid, when summers seemed like magic and the thrill of a trip to the bookstore was on par with the race down the street to meet the ice-cream truck. Perhaps there's a theme here in my top three picks . . .

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi—I think I was about twelve when I read this super scary page-turner about Charles Manson and his notorious "family"--and was possibly scarred for life.

The Electric Kool-Acid Test by Tom Wolfe--From the Manson family to the Merry Pranksters. I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I came across this gloriously strange "nonfiction novel." But it doesn't really matter, now, does it? It was the eighties, and I was a teenager. But as far as I was concerned, it was 1964, and I was on the bus!

Papa John by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas--A juicy autobiography with an endlessly fascinating photo insert. It was the summer of '87, I was seventeen, and I had recently discovered "California Dreamin'" on the local classic rock station. I had the mass market edition, and it had a blue cover with pink type.

From Mike Mezzo, Editorial

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer--If summer is the time to indulge in guilty pleasures, well, then, I'm guilty. On a whim while killing time at Grand Central one recent summer Friday, I dropped ten bucks on the first installment of this bestselling young adult vampire saga, figuring if I found it too simple or too stupid, I wouldn't regret the cost so much. Forty-eight hours and five hundred pages later, I was hooked on the romance between mortal Bella and bloodsucking Edward--impossible love, vicious predators, gloomy weather, and teen angst mingle to make for a very addictive summer read.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber--On a weekend trip to Cape Cod with friends several summers ago, rain kept us all indoors with our noses in books. I had picked up Michel Faber's massively long saga, along with another friend, and within the first several pages we found ourselves in a race through the next thousand or so, riveted by the story of Sugar, a Victorian London prostitute who uses her wiles to rise from the gutter to the upper echelons of society. Sex, duplicity, obscene wealth and poverty, outrageous coincidence, and, most important, wicked humor, stitch together a novel with so many subplots and characters you'll wonder how it all came from the mind of one man.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates--I read Richard Yates's perfect novel of suburban despair maybe five or six summers ago, and it still rests comfortably at the top of my list of favorites. It's rare to read a book in which every single sentence is so expertly crafted, and it's rarer still when such beautiful prose is the vehicle for a genuinely harrowing story--a story so gripping that it makes a literary novel almost as page-turning as a mass-market thriller.

From Gretchen Koss, Publicity

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta--I am reading this right now and it is vintage Perrotta--funny, smart, and sarcastic. Right up my alley.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn--Oh how I loved this book in all of its twisted glory. I could not wait to pick it up at the end of the day and hear more about the Binewski family. Please write another book, Katherine!

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving--I know, I know everyone loves this book but it remains, to this day, the most memorable summer book ever. I read it while backpacking through Europe in 1990 and would scream with laughter every time Owen Meany TALKED IN ALL CAPS.

From Meghan Walker, Marketing

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson--I didn't so much read this book as it provided me with a very memorable "summer reading" experience. It was the summer between fourth and fifth grade and I was a very precocious (and young for my grade) nine-year-old. We were asked to select one book to read over the summer and submit a book report on it in September. When I alerted my teacher about my selection she insisted it was too hard for me and too scary. All you had to do was tell me I couldn't do something to make me want to do it ten times more. So I insisted. Lo and behold, she was right. It was both too hard and too scary. In a panicked moment in August, rather than admit defeat, I decided to crib from the jacket copy to write my "report." This didn't go over too well when school started up again as I knew nothing about the characters or plot and was immediately found out. I never did read this book, but I will never forget it all the same.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt--Everyone I know was reading this book at the same time over the course of the same summer and no one could stop talking about it. In fact, you could look up and down the beach, and this book was propped up by tan arms in front of every third beach chair. I love Frank McCourt and I love this book.

Beach Music by Pat Conroy--Pat Conroy is a genius and a tortured soul who I just want to give a big hug. Beach Music is epic and completely captivating. It takes you from the marshes of the South Carolina coast to the piazzas of Italy (with some amazing food writing) all the while giving you a front-row seat to the most messed-up family dramas you can imagine. Just looking at the cover takes me back to a zoned-out sand-between-the-toes state of mind. Great stuff.

What's the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank--Summer 2004. Anti-Bush sentiment is at a fevered pitch. I'm about to board the ferry to Block Island for a family vacation the last week in August. There's a guy standing there with this book in his hands, proselytizing to the dude next to him about how good it is. Between that and everything else I'd already read and heard about it, my mind was made up. We get to Block. I go to the bookstore and buy this book. Later that week I watched Barack Obama deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention on a tiny, crappy TV in our rental house. "Who was that?" my husband said. "I have no idea but I think we just saw our next Democratic president." (Let's face it, Kerry's campaign was abysmal.) So I will forever associate Thomas Frank's book with that summer.

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown--Yes, it's S&G. What do you want from me, I'm in marketing. But even if I didn't get paid to pimp our own stuff, I would be an evangelical for Janelle Brown's debut novel. It is so delicious with three amazingly well-drawn female characters and a plot that never quits. You blaze through it so fast and immediately want everyone you know to read it too. If that doesn't describe the perfect beach read, I don't know what does.

From Sonya Cheuse, Publicity

The Mother Knot by Kathryn Harrison's --A raw yet beautifully told memoir about her relationship with her mother. It's both haunting and healing.

Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes by T. Cooper--An engrossing story that includes a quirky Jewish immigrant mother, Charles Lindbergh, and an Eminem-impersonator, what could make for better summer reading!?

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez--I was completely and utterly swept away in mind and heart.

From Mya Spalter, Editorial

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler--While enduring the sweltering, stereo-less, nine-hour drive from Maine in fourth of July traffic, I read this hardboiled detective classic out loud (with voices!) to my travel companions to great effect. Chandler's dialogue is like poetry written in wet cement and Detective Phillip Marlowe's 1940's L.A. is a dizzying carnival of vice populated by cops, thugs, wannabe-starlets, and society matrons, whose lives depend on an alcoholic, smart-mouthed, private dick's ability to connect the dots.

From Laura van der Veer, Editorial

Straight Man by Richard Russo--A wonderfully witty and sweet book about academia. A joy to read.

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek--Svejk is hopelessly endearing. A great antiwar novel cloaked in delightful humor. It's nothing if not long, but it's definitely worth the read.

Distortions by Anne Beattie--I love short stories in the summer; they provide such a satisfying sense of accomplishment. This collection is quiet but powerful, and a great introduction to her writing.

From Kelsey Nencheck, Marketing

Anybody Out There by Marian Keyes--My summer would not be complete without my chick-lit fix. Keyes is one of my favorite authors, and this book touches on a profoundly sad time in a woman's life yet still manages to make me laugh and smile--the best of the genre.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald--This book was assigned summer reading in 1997 before my first year of high school. Though I usually cringed at the thought of "homework," I was totally captivated by the story, imagining what it would be like to know Nick Carroway and Jay Gatsby. Worthy of many summer re-reads.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson--A fast-paced journey following a middle-aged Bryson on his journey through the Appalachian Trail. Bryson's fear of bears is both too funny and realistically scary. I read this on a long plane ride and almost fell out of my cramped seat and made a few passengers concerned because I was laughing so hard.

From Lauren Lavelle, Publicity

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb--Wally Lamb's writing always impresses me (so true to life!). This is the first book of his that I read, and I picked it up one summer when I was at the beach on vacation. I was so hooked and impressed, I spent all day in the same position on my beach towel reading it--I didn't go inside to eat, go swimming, turn over to even out my tan lines, nothing. I finished all 500 plus pages in one day, and I regret nothing (except for the horrendous, blistering sunburn I got that day . . . shudder)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky--This book was published the summer before my freshman year of high school, and my friends and I were obsessed with it. It was our modern-day Catcher in the Rye--It's a coming-of-age tale of a high school boy who is troubled with all sorts of teenage angst, most of which I couldn't relate to. What did get me, though, were the great lines that summed up perfectly what my friends and I, and probably everyone else on the planet our age, felt about life and about each other. Reading it now, I would probably find those lines a little cheesy and obvious, but back then, in those times, at that age, with those friends . . . life-changing.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris--I love David Sedaris, but who doesn't? Even though this is an obvious choice, I had to add it to the list because it's been the perfect accessory to my lazy summer weekends spent lying in the sun in Riverside Park. It has thoroughly entertained me and has thoroughly annoyed my sister as I continuously force her to listen to me read sections out loud. Entertaining, funny, easy to put down and pick up....the perfect summer read.

Cindy Chen, Publicity

Atonement by Ian McEwan--This book always reminds me of summer, or at least what a summer would be like if I lived in an English manor in 1935. The languid but evocative first half of this book captures the perfect sinful summer: languishment in heat followed by guilty secrets and unexpected passion. Of course the climax of the first half sets the mood for the heartbreaking second half, but what's summer without a little heartbreak?

The Ghost Writer by John Harwood--The perfect antidote for a hot summer day, The Ghost Writer will provide just the right amount of thrill and chill. And what's more scandalous than reading a booked filled with disturbing family secrets, gothic ghost stories, and a very mysterious and--perhaps a little dangerous--femme fatale?

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks--For the science fiction guy or gal. If you're bored and waiting for Battlestar Galactica to come back, here's the perfect book to tide you over. For a book that has all the hi-tech gadgetry, space travel, and sarcastic AI to set a fanboy's heart aflutter, it's also incredibly intelligent and one of the most entertaining and interesting ruminations on war that I've ever read.

Artie Lange is the author of Too Fat to Fish, coming November 2008.

"Go get that writer!" I was told by the same folks who'd passed on the chance at publishing Nuala the first time around. But I wasn't one to stand on ceremony, so go after her I did with the full force of the house behind me. And, after reading 100 pages of her first attempt at fiction and an intense, dazzling meeting in which it was never quite clear which one of us was doing the auditioning, I did in fact acquire Nuala O'Faolain's next work for our list. Shortly after, Nuala called me at my office.

"Are you well, Julie?" she asked.

"Yes, I'm fine, thanks," I said.

"No--I mean, are you well, are you a healthy person?" she said.

"Sure...yes...I'm fine, I'm healthy," I replied.

"Well, good! Because every day I want you to come to your office and ask yourself, 'What can I do for Nuala today?'"

I might have thought that was a peculiar little joke for a while, but soon it became clear to me that that was no joke. Ours was not to be a typical editorial relationship. At first, Nuala tested me--tested my devotion to her, my loyalty, my ability to fight on her behalf in publishing meetings. She also tested my breaking point--when I'd push back and let her know she'd crossed a line. In the early days, I didn't have the temerity to go up against Nuala very often and mostly, really, I wanted to prove myself worthy of her, I wanted to show her I could keep pace with her brilliance and stamina and fortitude. So I'd read the prodigious output that came out of her printer--draft after draft after draft. She was tireless and un-self-conscious and had the work ethic of a newspaper columnist who was used to generating several hundred words a day. Except with Nuala it could be more like thousands of words each day. She was a dogged, miraculous reviser too. Often I'd see work that was very rough survive several drafts--and it would be maddening, because I'd felt she'd chosen to ignore my diligent comments--when suddenly in its fifth or sixth incarnation, in due course, these same pages would be breathtakingly transformed into gold.

So in those early years, she would test me and I'd strive to pass each test--because could there be a better feeling for a youngish editor than the approbation of a writer you admired with your whole heart, a person who prevailed over a childhood of terrific adversity and deprivation through sheer intellectual grit to become an academic and a journalist, an opinion-maker, a feminist, a memoirist, a novelist--a somebody--whose life and survival was a singular testament to the transformative power of literature?

She'd ask me to meet her for lunch, for dinner, to discuss her work. She'd never want to hear about other writers, other books--when I was with her, she was my one and only. She'd make somewhat nasty, casually mean comments--maybe I was dim, but I was never sure if it was her intention to be so cutting toward me or if it was a vestige of her childhood. I only knew I didn't want to find myself in her crosshairs.

In no time the boundaries blurred--she'd ask me to come shopping with her to help her choose clothes for a book tour--and tell me to follow her into the dressing room so we could keep talking. I lost my discomfort at such moments surprisingly quickly--which is more about Nuala's famous candor and her ability to disarm those around her than it is about my unflappability. One Valentine's Day, before Nuala met John, she and I shared a candlelit dinner at an Italian restaurant full to capacity with lovers, where, in very close proximity, we watched Tatum O'Neal open a jewelry box from her hopeful suitor and clocked her disappointment with its contents. Of course Nuala's play-by-play made us both weep from stifled laughter.

She asked me to come to the west of Ireland to work with her on the final draft of My Dream of You. She didn't really need me there, we could have spoken on the phone or written each other emails, but I recognized that she was throwing down a gauntlet. How far would I go for her? Could she make me fly across the Atlantic, leave friends and family behind and devote five days to her exclusively? Of course she could. I got on a plane to Shannon and entered Nuala's beloved Barrtra--I understood that by making this trip I was meeting her particular needs, but I also realized that on some level I was being rewarded for all the tests I'd previously passed. We walked the misty, lush country lanes down to the Atlantic Ocean, with Molly and Roger, two wonderful dogs, beside us, and we'd talk about the novel. She pointed out the seals' sleek heads bobbing in the waves, the lichen that was disappearing from the rocks. She educated me about traveler culture. She drove me to see the marvelous grottoes and shrines tucked into the green hills of County Clare. We took steam baths in the spa at Lisdoonvarna. I read the pages as they came out of her printer, and we'd talk endlessly about the work. We took every meal together. She marvelled aloud that I wasn't getting on her nerves.

On our last day together, we went into a dress shop in Cork. Luckily there was only space for one in the fitting room. But the sales ladies recognized her instantly and swarmed around her, making a fuss, asking for an autograph, and I had a glimpse of the folk hero status she enjoyed at home. My memories of that trip, however it came about, are cherished ones--all the more so now.

I went on to publish two more of Nuala's books--a second volume of her memoirs and an unconventional biography of a turn-of-the-century Irish émigré who became a mythically glamorous international criminal. In between I killed a novel she stubbornly tried to bring to life more than once. Writing that letter, knowing how it would cut Nuala to the quick, was perhaps the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my professional life. It was also, though, a measure of how I'd grown, under her inimitable tutelage.

Years later, when she was very sick, she wrote to me in an email: "I've talked to you very often recently, especially at night. Mostly laughing at this or that. Other people might not realise it, but I loved every minute of knowing you, including when I'd let you/me down." I was sitting at my desk when I read those lines and burst into tears. I was instantly choked with regret. How could I have failed to appreciate fully every moment with her? Why did I let time go by when we weren't closely in touch? Did I not understand that she was utterly, uniquely gifted as a human being--difficult, oh yes, she could be very difficult and complicated and demanding, but she was so worth knowing. What a privilege it was to be her editor and publisher, to have passed the tests, to have been able to make her laugh, and to have a held a place in her memories of happy times--as she has in mine.

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

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.

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.