This week: Danielle Trussoni, author of the novel “Angelology”; Joseph O’Neill on Turkey and its ethnic conflicts; Motoko Rich with notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler with best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host. (Podcast Archive)

Robert Reynolds Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte is the author of several works of fiction; his new novel, “The Ask,” has just been published.

What are you working on?

I’m working on a collection of short stories. It was due last week, which means it’s definitely time to get cracking. Some of the pieces were finished over the last few years, some are in arrested infant stages and a few have yet to be born. I’ll have to do some culling and I’m not sure which pieces will survive. Things are going to get gruesome.

What is a typical day in your writing life?

There are two typical days in my writing life, one taking place during the school year (I teach at Columbia University’s School of the Arts) and the other in the summer. Read more…

Here’s Daniyal Mueenuddin last night, telling the Story Prize director Larry Dark why running a farm in Pakistan has been good for his fiction: “One of the problems for writers is that they live as writers, and that doesn’t give them any material. It would be a good idea, if you wanted to start an M.F.A. program, to start one with goats and a garden.”

Mueenuddin won the 2009 Story Prize for his first collection, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which is set (mostly) in Pakistan and describes the lives of a feudal landowner and his servants and family. He read last night at the New School’s Tischman Auditorium, along with his fellow finalists Victoria Patterson and Wells Tower, then sat for a Q&A with Dark. Current events, he said modestly, had no doubt helped draw attention to his book. “If I was Bulgarian, no one would read me. It’s just because I live in a part of the world where interesting news is happening. I should give half of my royalties to the Taliban.”

It’s strange, the way we mourn our writers. We react to the news of their passing, typically, by rushing out to buy their books. Volumes that have sat on shelves for years, gathering dust and perhaps remainder stickers, are suddenly carried off in stacks. For many writers, especially those in midcareer or of midrange repute, death is the best (and last) great sales push they ever get. I like to think of the posthumous book purchase as an example of what Raymond Carver called “a small good thing,” offered up as consolation and condolence for those yet living, part of the same chain of motive that fills homes in mourning with casseroles and pies.

Knowing that this is how the reading public mourns, it makes perfect sense, and is even in some sense commendable, that bookstores come swift to our aid. Nonetheless, the sudden appearance of memorial tables and displays may leave a sour taste in the mouth of the literary mourner. However noble the motives, however dignified the presentation, commerce in the face of death is ghoulish. It just is. And what’s worse, the Memorial Sales Display turns the experience of loss into a jostling for front-of-table real estate. It is, in this sense, quite terrible, a compounding brutality to the fact of the death itself.

On March 1, Barry Hannah died of a heart attack at his home in Oxford, Miss. I did not know him personally, but I’ve spent so much time in his writerly company that it’s easy to convince myself I did. He was, sentence for sentence, among the most powerful, innovative and — this is important — fun writers of the present era, which is hardly to say that he was among the best known. Read more…

Michael Tierney Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco is a cartoonist and journalist whose books include “Palestine,” “Safe Area Gorazde” and, most recently, “Footnotes in Gaza.”

Spending the whole day cartooning is “not working in the quarries,” as one of my relatives once sneered, but it can be hard, even monotonous work.  Not that I’m complaining about the hours, the isolation, and the carpal tunnel.  One of the great fringe benefits, after all, with all that time on one’s lonesome, is the freedom to indulge in any sort of background noise, be it talk radio, podcast lectures, or, especially, music.

Music is an essential component of my every workday, one that accentuates a mood or acts as its counterpoint.  Sometimes I want to get down on my hands and knees and thank all the musicians, living and gone, who have seen me through all the years of penciling and cross-hatching.  They have been my most loyal companions along my creative road.  Here are few of my favorite songs and artists.

1) Rachel, Russell Morris.  I rediscovered this one recently in a fit of nostalgia for my childhood in Australia and as I was finishing up my book on Gaza.  Morris was and is a singer-songwriter who had a few memorable Aussie-only hits a few decades ago.  This one is a production-heavy weepie, presumably about a nurse overseas, probably in Vietnam during the war, who writes to her mom and dad to tell them she’s seen too much, she can’t take anymore, and that she’s coming home for good.  ”Rachel” suits me perfectly when I’m in a self-pitying, overwhelmed mood, which has been more often these last couple of years than I prefer to admit. Read more…

Robert Jordan/University of Mississippi, via Associated Press Barry Hannah

Twelve years ago, I talked an editor into assigning me a profile of the great novelist and short-story writer Barry Hannah, who died Monday at 67 at his home in Oxford, Miss. The pretext for the article was a flimsy one; he wasn’t on the verge of publishing anything new. But like many people who have discovered Hannah’s work and fallen in love with it, I’d become a little obsessed with knowing more about him. If the short story, to borrow a phrase from Zola, sits “at the exquisite point where poetry ends and reality begins,” the best of Hannah’s stories were somehow able to operate well over on the poetry side of that equation, laying bare a vision of reality that was hilarious, beautiful, heartbreaking and sometimes terrifying.

When I called Hannah to propose the article, he laughed, said, “Why not?” and invited me to spend a couple of days down South. Like a proud local squire, he ferried me to such requisite Oxford stops as Faulkner’s house and Square Books, the legendary independent bookstore. He drove me out to his favorite fishing hole, a kind of existential proving ground for his fiction, and bought me some mind-blowing barbecue from a counter in the back of a little grocery store. Later, standing in front of his modest ranch-style house, he watched his black-and-white feist Jill, a squirrel dog, on the run, exulting in her the way some of the speechifying, half-cocked Civil War characters in his stories exult in their horses. Read more…

The Oxford (Miss.) Eagle reports that Barry Hannah has died, days before the 17th annual Oxford Conference for the Book. Hannah and his work are the focus of this year’s conference.

(Hat tip to HTMLGiant)

This week: James S. Hirsch on his biography of the baseball legend Willie Mays; the Book Review’s Alida Becker on driving in China; Motoko Rich with notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler with best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host. (Podcast Archive)

Laura Thomas Don Lattin

Don Lattin is the author of four nonfiction books, including most recently “The Harvard Pschedelic Club.”

What are you working on now?

This week finds me in that transitory state between promoting the last book, “The Harvard Psychedelic Club,” and pitching the next. Writing books is a strange business. You spend a year or two in your pajamas in your basement hardly seeing a soul or saying a word. Then you find yourself flying around the country, appearing on TV shows, peddling your work at bookstores and talking, talking, talking. I’m ready to get back in my pajamas and crawl back down into my man cave.

Next week my literary agent and I have a meeting to talk about a new book I’ve proposed, a kind of prequel to the Harvard book. I’ve stumbled across some interesting new material about the psychedelic drug scene in the 1950s that could be woven into a compelling story.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I finished writing two reviews for The San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday Book Review — on “What Is God,” by Jacob Needleman, and “Jesus Freak,” by Sarah Miles. I’ve also started working on a freelance magazine article about promising research into beneficial uses for some newly developed psychedelic drugs. Read more…

Dave Eggers, the fledgling press baron behind The San Francisco Panorama, the much-ballyhooed (and drop-dead gorgeous) newspaper released in December by the McSweeney’s gang, has been making the rounds with his full-throated argument that the future of the news business can be written not just in pixels but with old-fashioned paper and ink.

“There are a lot of things that newsprint can do uniquely well that the Web cannot,” Eggers recently told The Chicago Tribune. “The two forms could coexist, instead of the zero-sum situation that we seem stuck in.”

As it happens, The Panorama includes an apologia for its own glorious dead-tree existence, in the form of an essay by the novelist Nicholson Baker considering “the strange possibility that the transferring of information digitally is more environmentally destructive than printing it.” Read more…

India and Pakistan last went to war over Kashmir in 1999. But the violence continues, mostly invisible to outsiders.

The driving force behind Basharat Peer’s memoir, “Curfewed Night,” is a sense of responsibility to bear witness to this conflict. Born in southern Kashmir in 1977, Peer grew up amid the extreme violence of the early ’90s, when Pakistan-backed militant groups sprung up to defy Indian rule and the army became a regular presence in the once-idyllic valley. He went on to work as a journalist in Delhi, and later to moved back to Kashmir to supplement his memories with months of reporting in the summer capital of Srinagar and its surrounding areas. (Peer now lives in New York.)

The result is an instructive primer on the conflict mixed with literary reportage on its human toll, written in English by a native Kashmiri. Because of his firsthand knowledge of the region, its people and its politics, Peer doesn’t focus on a small portion of the story. He documents Kashmiri history, investigates the war, gets stories from Muslims and Hindus in the region — and grapples with the trauma of his childhood. And he manages all this, in prose that captures both the flavor of life in the valley and the fatalism of its capital: Read more…

Kanji Takeno Geoffrey Becker

Geoffrey Becker is the author of the story collections “Dangerous Men” and “Black Elvis,” and the novels “Bluestown” and “Hot Springs.”

My book “Hot Springs” is a love story and a road novel. In it, a young woman — with the help of her new, older boyfriend — steals back the child she gave up for adoption some years earlier. These people are probably not, to use the cheery phrase popular at my son’s preschool, “making good choices,” but they mean well. Landis, the boyfriend, is roughly my age, and we’re both originally from New Jersey. I suspect if he and I could meet for drinks some night, we’d be able to agree on the following song selections as a soundtrack for the narrative, although I’m sure he’d suggest others that I haven’t heard. I don’t get out nearly as much as he does.

1) Wall of Death, Richard Thompson. This song is either a metaphor about living life on the edge and taking chances, or it’s just about an amusement park. Thompson skips the other rides — the Tunnel of Love, Noah’s Ark, the carousel — returning to the Wall of Death, which he wants to ride “one more time.” The Wall of Death is a ride where you stand inside a spinning cylinder and then the floor drops out from beneath your feet, leaving you pinned to the wall with only centrifugal force to keep you from falling. Actually, that’s a pretty good metaphor for love. I think Landis could relate. Read more…

This week: Ted Conover, author of “The Routes of Man”; The Times’s Richard L. Berke revisits Clinton vs. Starr; Motoko Rich has notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host. (Podcast Archive)

Bill Hayward Justin Taylor

Justin Taylor is the author of a story collection, “Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.”

What are you working on now?

I’m working on two main projects. The first is a novel, which Harper Perennial plans to bring out sometime next year. I turned the final draft in to my editor on the first of this month, so the hard part (writing it) is done, but the editing process is only just beginning. The novel is set in the South in the summer of 1999, and concerns a group of self-styled anarchists who form a religion based on the abandoned diary of a hobo who used to live in a tent in their backyard. I’m interested in the boundaries — if there are any — between religion and politics, faith and fanaticism, and what happens when those boundaries break down. But I also wanted to explore this very specific and fleeting moment in our cultural history, when the cross-pollination of early ’90s slacker ethos with the pre-millennial notion that we were living at or after “the end of history” produced some remarkable bodies of utopian lifestyle-politics. I sometimes refer to the novel, only half-jokingly, as “historical fiction” — but Katie Roiphe shouldn’t worry; there are lots of dirty parts. Read more…

Marion Ettlinger David Goodwillie

David Goodwillie is the author of the forthcoming novel “American Subversive,” and the memoir “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”

I did something weird while I wrote “American Subversive”: I went out of my way to listen to music with incisive lyrics. When I mention this to my book-writing friends they look at me sideways, and I don’t blame them. Waltzing with one set of words is hard enough; a concomitant two-step is a recipe for madness. But the music brought me closer to my two main characters — Paige Roderick, a young idealist who turns to radicalism after her brother’s death in Iraq, and Aidan Cole, a cynical New York journalist turned gossip blogger who stumbles upon Paige’s underground world. When I was still sketching them out — long before I developed the plot — I began wondering what kind of music they might enjoy. While opposite in many ways, they both seemed too smart for their own good — a trait I felt should be reflected in their tastes. So I started listening to songs driven by words more than amplification, stories over sound. And a funny thing happened. My former workday favorites — old-time jazz singers, ambient indie rock, and the alt-Americana of Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt — began taking a backseat to newer names, younger voices. My characters’ music became my music, and has remained so these many months later. The songwriting inspires me — the art, the beauty, the struggle. Company’s nice when you’re all alone.

1) Red, Okkervil River. I’m not sure there’s a more literate songwriter out there than Okkervil’s Will Sheff (I even stuck him in the novel). “Red” is a low-fi heartbreaker of a tune from one of the band’s early albums, and a great introduction to their unique sound: “ ‘Yes’ is my favorite answer / I took a dancer home, she felt so alone / We stayed up all night in the kitchen / Doing the dishes on and on till the dawn /She said, ‘I know it’s easy to have me …’ ” Read more…