Blogs Guide

These days Bill O'Reilly is a widely known T.V. personality and author but what many may forget is that he was a high school history teacher before he became a household name. Adapted from Killing Lincoln, his bestselling book for adults, O'Reilly brings the end of the Civil War and the assasination of President Abraham Lincoln to life for young readers in a new book, Lincoln's Last Days.

 This action-packed history has fascinating vintage photographs on every spread and is a great way to introduce the excitement of reading non-fiction to young readers.  In the exclusive Q&A below O'Reilly shares his favorite photo from the book and you can see a couple other images  both after the Q&A and in the video of O'Reilly reading from the book.

Q: What aspects of this story did you discover for the first time when you dug into the research?

O'Reilly: The research for Killing Lincoln turned up some amazing things about the assassin John Wilkes Booth. His fiancée was secretly dating the president's son Robert Todd Lincoln, and this might have caused Booth to fixate on the president even more.  Also, Booth almost got away after the murder and the manhunt for him is a real action drama.

Q: What was your favorite part of American history to teach?

O'Reilly: When I taught high school history to seniors and juniors, I would emphasize the greatness of men like Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln.  I would tell personal stories about those great men to make them seem as real people to the students, instead of just myths.   That's why I wrote Lincoln's Last Days—so that young Americans could learn about the Civil War and President Lincoln in an exciting way.

Q: There are so many photos in Lincoln’s Last Days – do you have a favorite?

O'Reilly: The profile photo of Abraham Lincoln on page 59 is my all-time favorite of him.

Q: What was your favorite book as a child?

O'Reilly: As a kid in fourth grade, I read all the Hardy Boy books in school.  But I wasn't supposed to.  I hide them behind the pages of a huge geography book.  So while I was supposed to be reading about Turkey, I was actually reading about Frank and Joe Hardy solving mysteries.

Q: What’s your most prized possession?

O'Reilly: My most prized material possession is a photograph signed by Abraham Lincoln.  The image of him was taken by Matthew Brady, and the president signed it at the bottom.  A superb piece of history.

This weekend, the Hugo Awards, celebrating excellence in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, will be announced at WorldCon in Chicago. You can even follow it live online through streaming video. Voted on by readers—a percentage of whom also tend to be writers and other professionals in the field—the Hugo Awards have taken on all the pomp and circumstance of events such as the Oscars, if on a smaller scale. Each nominee receives a rocket ship pin and a special ribbon so convention attendees know they are a nominee. Nominees appear on panels and can participate in a special “walk With the Stars.” There are pre-Hugo parties, post-Hugo parties (even a Losers Party for, you guessed it, those who don’t win), and nominees must attend a rehearsal prior to the ceremony.

So we thought, going into the Hugo weekend, we’d take a closer look at the finalists in the best novel category. (You can find the full list of finalists here--and check out our prior Hugos coverage here and here.)

Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor). As I wrote in a review for the New York Times Book Review, the novel “purports to be the diary entries of 15-year-old Morwenna Phelps, but it is really a strong argument for the importance of books and reading. Set in the late 1970s in Wales and England, the novel follows Morwenna’s adventures at boarding school after a car accident has left her with chronic injuries…Morwenna can see fairies, her mother is really an evil witch, and the car accident that injured her and killed her sister was part of a magical conflict…It’s a brave act to write a novel that is in ­essence all aftermath, but Walton succeeds admirably. Her novel is a wonder and a joy.” Walton does a great job of sticking to the ambiguous with regard to the fantastical elements, and makes the idea of faery folk wonderfully strange. For those voters who love reading—which would seem to include all of them—the novel strongly evokes one’s own memories of encountering beloved books, and for this reason it would seem to have the possibility of winning against the odds. A Dance With Dragons, George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra). Given high expectations, there was never any way that Martin could satisfy all readers with the latest installment in his epic fantasy series, but he has brought back all of the elements that have made him successful: drama and melodrama, intrigue, battles, characters you care about, and a breadth of vision that has always served him well. As I wrote in a review for the Los Angeles Times: “Some reviewers have compared Martin's work to that of J.R.R. Tolkien or even William Shakespeare, but the truth is a little more complex. The Song of Ice and Fire novels work so well because the epic fantasy is grounded in a strong horror element and because Martin skillfully conveys the gritty physicality of the world while moving, with equal effectiveness, between various levels of society. Martin also owes a debt to the dark yet humane cynicism of writers like Jack Vance, even though he cares much more about the inner life of his characters than Vance. Martin's devotion to fully inhabiting his characters, for better or worse, creates the unstoppable momentum in his novels and contains an implied criticism of Tolkien's moral simplicity.” In terms of sheer number of copies printed (not to mention the popular HBO series) and thus potential voters reached, and considering that Martin is largely loved by core genre readers…it might be foolish to bet against A Dance with Dragons winning the Hugo.

Deadline, Mira Grant (Orbit). Grant has tapped into a popular archetype with her take on zombies: “Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the news organization he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn't seem as fun when you've lost as much as he has. But when a CDC researcher fakes her own death and appears on his doorstep with a ravenous pack of zombies in tow, Shaun has a newfound interest in life. Because she brings news-he may have put down the monster that attacked them, but the conspiracy is far from dead. Now, Shaun hits the road to find what truth can be found at the end of a shotgun.” Grant has a significant presence in other categories of the Hugo finalist ballot (including under her real name, Seanan McGuire), which indicates she has a powerful voting bloc of readers behind her. That might or might not translate into a Hugo win, but the strong showing all around indicates she’s a player with staying power.

Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan/Del Rey). The popular (and critically acclaimed) author delved full-on into science fiction with this novel, which may remind some readers of 1970s socio-political science fiction by the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin. Avice Brenner Cho narrates this alien contact adventure set in Embassytown, a human outpost on the planet of Arieka. The indigenous Ariekei have helped create livable space for humans on the planet’s otherwise toxic surface. Thus far, they have lived in an equitable alliance. But then things change, with Miéville using the novel as a way of talking about the uses and mis-uses of language. At times, Embassytown functions as thriller, sometimes a close character study, and sometimes a fascinating rhapsody about communication. Unlike with his past novels, critical praise was far from unanimous, the author’s adventuring perhaps farther than some wanted to follow. In any other year, Miéville would be a favorite to win, but with stiff competition from all quarters, he might in 2012 legitimately be considered the underdog.

Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey (Orbit). The author in this case is a pen name for two writers: Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham. On the face of it, the novel is an old-fashioned space opera set in a colonized solar system (with the stars still well beyond human reach), but reviews seem to indicate it’s a fairly sophisticated approach. Within this future setting, “Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.” Meanwhile, “Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.” For voters who are fans of traditional science fiction, this may the choice for them. Is Leviathan Wakes on the outside looking in or secretly a sleeper favorite? I honestly don’t know.

This week on Kathy Casey's Liquid Kitchen, I make a Blended Peach Whiskey Sour! Using my Vitamix The Quiet One Blender, whole peaches (frozen peaches work well too, if fresh ones are not available) are blended up along with bourbon and apricot jam for this refreshing take on a classic sip. Perfect and refreshing for a hot, summer's day!

It's been a mighty filling season! Lucky me, I've been invited to judge a whole bunch of cooking contests this summer, starting with a rhubarb roundup at a farmers market to a fancy chef lamb throwdown. Whether the competitors were home cooks or pros, they all brought their A game for what basically amounted to bragging rights.

At each one of these fun, food-focused events, I had the pleasure of tasting some truly wonderful dishes, but there was also some delicious take-away lessons. I've been inspired to try re-creating many of these clever preparations at home. Yes, somebody's effort came out on top -- or, in a controversial dead-heat, ended up in a tie -- but all the contestants who took the time and made the effort were winners!

No. 1: The rhubarb contest at the Columbia City Neighborhood Farmers Market invited both sweet and savory recipes. I sure do love this plant's versatility. Contestants brought cakes and pies and a gorgeous rhubarb spritzer. The dish that caused my jaw to drop (so I could shovel more in!) was a rhubarb chutney made with rosemary. Such a great combination. The winner sent me a link to her recipe. 

No. 2: When the rules toss you a curveball, make puffed rice crispies. At the annual Ready, Set, Go... Cook competition at the University District Farmers Market, two fiercely competitive chefs were given the challenge of purchasing products at the market with $20 and then creating two dishes. But, that curveball was a doozy: a grab bag of ingredients from the U-District Food Bank. Stuff like lentils and soy milk and generic Rice Krispies. The idea was to demonstrate that you can make supremely delicious farmers market meals even when you're on a budget. The chefs created some gorgeous plates in just an hour, and both toasted the puffed rice to add a note of crunch to their off-the-cuff creations. The verdict: A tie! Watching Dezi Bonow from Palace Kitchen and Josh Green from Serafina do their respective things was thrilling and reinforced my desire to take full advantage of summer produce at the farmers markets.

No. 3: At an American Lamb Board throwdown yesterday in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, chefs were charged with wowing judges and consumers by preparing dishes featuring leg and shoulder. The entries were remarkable simply because you could see the incredible thought put into the novel presentations. A banh mi made with a lamb shoulder sausage? Yes! Leg of lamb pho? You bet! Lamb that tasted like pastrami? Mmmm! The amazing sausage -- made by the crew at Bastille Cafe & Bar -- really stood out. So spicy and such a terrific snap! It immediately moved my fall sausage making project to the front burner. That, and the fact that I just bought a half a pig!

No. 4: When it comes to pies, there are no losers. I rarely make them at home -- because if I had pie around, I'd eat slice after slice -- but when I have them made by others, I so admire these sweet treats. That's what made it tough to pick a winner at a pie contest at the Phinney Ridge Farmers Market a few weeks ago. There were peach pies and tender crusts filled with berries. But it was an apple pie topped with an oatmeal crisp that rose to the top. Definitely a non-traditional pie, almost a cross between a pie and a brown betty. And I'm making one tonight.

No. 5: Finally, all things in moderation! This mantra preached by the late, great Julia Child has been floating around in my brain a lot this summer, with all the feasting and critical eating and food judging I've been doing. I really do try to take just a bite or two of everything, but that's often impossible to do when something tastes so darned good. So, to balance out my occasionally over-the-top eating schedule, I have redoubled my efforts to walk and swim. It has helped, but as August winds down, I'm finding myself reaching for those elastic waistband shorts a whole lot more.

Last week saw the publication of Ariel S. Winter's The Twenty-Year Death, a giant ambitious mystery novel written in the style of three separate crime novels. The book has garnered praise from such names as Stephen King, John Banville, and Alice Sebold. (Not bad.) How does such an ambitious project get its start? Here's what the author had to say about it --

It is impossible to say when a book begins. Did it start at birth, or when I learned to read, or when I set out the first words that grew into a novel?

I am inclined to say that The Twenty-Year Death began when I took two university courses: Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, even though I wrote it many years later.

But perhaps the truer answer lies with that Chandler send-up, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, my favorite movie of childhood…and still today?

What I do know is that The Twenty-Year Death is not the book I set out to write.

That ambitious book was meant to be David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as written by W.G. Sebald. There would be a straightforward first-person narrator, a close approximation of myself, and there would be the books the narrator read. These books would appear in full, so the reader of the novel would read the reading of the narrator—mysteries, romances, westerns, sci fi, and “literary” fiction, his taste would be catholic.

I began the frame narrative, and then I wrote the Georges Simenon pastiche Malniveau Prison, a one-hundred and fifty page replica of an Inspector Maigret mystery.

I didn’t stop there. Next up was a romance, a love story between the full-sized daughter of retired circus midgets and a newcomer to their island home. Oh, I was ambitious.

Still I clung to Malniveau Prison. No writer, especially one young and unpublished, can bear to see his hard-earned work go to utter waste. I didn’t have my novel, but I had a novella, and I knew it was good.

I sent it to an agent. It was January 1st when he got back to me. Or that is how I remember it at least, and it has the poetic ring that appeals to me as a novelist.

“I liked it a lot,” he said. “But it feels like a half-novel.”

That was all the encouragement I needed. I attacked Malniveau Prison, and it doubled in size.

There was talk of a series, but I didn’t want to write a series. Unless…unless…what if the recurring character in the novel was not the detective, but some other side character…

The American writer Shem Rosenkrantz seemed the obvious choice. And where would a great American novelist go after France…

Hollywood, of course. And Hollywood meant Chandler. After all, I had one pastiche on my hands. Why not two?

Before I even began on the Chandler pastiche, I had conceived of the Jim Thompson book as the novel’s logical conclusion. So, like a movie studio that green lights two sequels after the success of the first film, I went into The Falling Star knowing how Police at the Funeral would end.

Is this how all novelists work? Do their books rise like the phoenix from the ashes of their mistakes? I have known several novelists in my lifetime, yet only one to call friend, and still I do not know. It is how this book came to be.

Or is it? Do I really know how I came to write The Twenty-Year Death? Does any novelist know how he came to write a book?

Or is it the true mystery?

Editor's note: Julia Child would have been 100 years old today. In honor of that, we're running this interview that we did last year with her longtime editor, Judith Jones

Judith Jones, who retired just last week from Knopf after a long and distinguished career of editing and writing books, has recorded many a literary milestone. She is famously know as the editor who rescued The Diary of Anne Frank from a rejection pile in Paris, urging Ken McCormick to publish it at Doubleday. She was also the person who brought Julia Child to Knopf. That was fifty years ago, and we were recently lucky enough to talk to Judith Jones about the 50th anniversary of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, about a life spent working with cookbooks, and where cookbooks might be headed in the future.

Why has this book gained such a sacred place in the pantheon of cooking?

I think that Mastering the Art of French Cooking has earned a unique position among cookbooks because it is a one-of-a-kind achievement. It is a genuine teaching book that instructs American home cooks to understand the basic techniques of good cooking, that explains the whys and wherefores: what are the right ingredients (and possible substitutes)--the cut of meat, the secrets of browning, the process of glazing, the reduction of a sauce, what part of a recipe could be done ahead, etc. Julia treated cooking as an art, and that meant that you had to learn these basics in order to have confidence to make judgments and subtle adjustments until the taste was just right. In other words, she empowered us to become good cooks. No book has come close to teaching the basics in the 50 years since Mastering was first published.

This is a milestone in cooking, but it is a milestone in your career as well. What does the publication of the 50th anniversary edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking mean to you?

Mastering the Art of French Cooking certainly changed my life both as a home cook and as an editor. As a result of its success I made it a mission to explore new culinary worlds, to seek out good writers who could explain lesser known cuisines that we were beginning to enjoy but flying blind when we attempted them at home. Recently I have felt particularly grateful that a new generation of Americans is experiencing the pleasures of good cooking.

How has the country’s relationship with food changed since the original publication?

Our relationship with food in this country has undergone a real revolution since the 60s. We no longer think of home cooking as demeaning, as something we don't have time for, and we can feel empowered to try anything and be creative. Recently we have become much more aware of the sources of the food we eat and the pleasures of shopping at farmers' markets.

What would Julia Child have thought about this change?

Julia would have been thrilled at what has happened in America, particularly that we have managed to conquer some of "the fear-of-fat mania" (as she called it) of the 90s and that we seem to better understand that moderation, eating a little of everything, is the way to go.

What is the future of cookbooks?

It is an exciting time now because of all the digital possibilities that are open to us today. We certainly can make cookbooks easier to use in the kitchen and there is much to explore in the app area that can furnish valuable additional information to the home cook. Not that I think for a moment that these devices will or should replace a beautifully made hardcover book that can not only stand up to the wear and tear of constant use but that can also be read happily in bed. There is nothing like turning your own pages and dreaming of what you will be savoring tomorrow.

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Phil Stutz and Barry Michels, authors of the best-selling book The Tools. Their approach to helping people is straight forward and compelling, and I thoroughly enjoyed our talk (and the book).

(Hint:  It’s not all reviews, word of mouth, or advertising. Sometimes it’s not even Oprah….)

  One of the great pleasures of most of my mornings lately has been to sit down and look through the best sellers lists; I’m a little nerdy, I admit, but I do feel at peace when I notice that even while I slept nothing much had changed in Bookland. Fifty Shades of Grey, in all forms, is still at the top of our lists, and Gone Girl; is never far behind.

But then I get further down on the lists, where the surprises start happening. Suddenly, for example, I spot David Mitchell’s brilliant Cloud Atlas at #53, a book originally published in 2004. Why the sudden surge in popularity, I wonder. It’s not a book for absolutely everyone–it’s difficult and loooong. Some snooping around the Web reveals that it’s also about to be released as a movie, and the trailer for said movie– starring Halle Berry– came out in late July. We always know that when a movie hits the screen, the book on which it’s based will soon hit the best sellers list, even (or maybe particularly) if the book hasn’t been that high-profile in the first place: I’m thinking, for example of The Descendants, which enjoyed a nice ride around the time the George Clooney movie came out. Likewise the huge success of The Perfect Storm, book and film, when that one appeared. (Hmm. That movie starred George Clooney, too. Coincidence? You decide) And I don’t have info from this far back, but I’d bet you when Sissy Spacek played Carrie in the 1976 movie, the Stephen King novella shot to the top, too.

But trailers? They– or rather their reach– has changed a bit since this thing called the Internet came along. I would have said, for example, that The Great Gatsby is sitting around #13 on the Amazon Books best sellers list these days because it’s required summer reading for lots of high school kids and/or being bought to be read in English class in the fall. And that may be part of it. Except then I learned that there’s a new Baz Luhrman 3-D version of the classic Fitzgerald book coming out in 2013 (starring Leonardo DiCaprio)–and the trailer was released in late May.

Still, let’s speak more about course adoption and required summer reading lists. Because looking at these lists, you start to see a pattern: books you haven’t thought about since high school are made famous again by high schools and colleges [or “by English teachers”]. How else to explain how Brave New World; has spent 62 days in Amazon’s top 100, lately at around #89? Unless I missed it, there isn’t a new movie version in the works. Ditto Things Fall Apart; which is a perennial bestseller thanks in part to appearing on many high school reading lists. In the New York Times last June, Claire Nedell Hollander, a middle-school teacher, admitted she and her colleagues would be happy if their students read the obvious coming of age books like To Kill a Mockingbird, but she also recommended such modern classics as the graphic and disturbing A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah’s memoir of being a boy soldier in Sierra Leone. Sarah Crichton, who published that book at her eponymous imprint, hoped the book would be course-adopted (one reason she kept it short, she says), but she worried that its graphic scenes of war would be too much for high schoolers. “We owe a lot to the teachers of America,” she says.

So, probably, does the estate of JD Salinger, whose Catcher in the Rye has been in the top 100 for at least the past nine months; likewise the late Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, which lands this week at #99 and has been thereabouts for the past 337 days. Why? It’s a perennially popular gift for grads.

So much for Tuesday salad night!

I had tossed organic lettuce purchased at the neighborhood farmers market with cold curried garbanzoes, shallots, roasted cauliflower and sliced almonds. Something light and fresh for a warm summer evening. 

About halfway through the big bowl, what did I spy with my little eye? What was that moving in those greens? A teeny slug! How did this shell-less snail survive my usual lettuce-washing ritual? A soak in ice water, a wild ride in a salad spinner and crisping in a tea towel in a plastic bag is the routine that's always served me well.

Now, I'm not exactly squeamish, but the unexpected appearance of this wiggly worm made me lose my appetite. Guess next time, I'll try adding some salt to the water with which I was the greens.

Clive Barker — writer, artist, and master of the horror genre — speaks exclusively with Amazon Studios about the true nature of fear, finding the right arena for his stories and his Neverland dreams.

What separates great horror from the things that go spatter in the night?

Clive Barker: Metaphysical despair. That the world is meaningless and we’re just bouncing around on it and when we’re finished we die and that’s the end of it. That’s scary. That’s existential. When Sartre put the idea of existentialism in front of us at the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of human hope was possibly at its lowest ebb. The bombs were going off. Europe was trashed. Economies were in ruins. And worst of all, we’d learned new ways of killing each other. Existentialism arose from the ashes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and we had to address that very seriously.

There are horrific moments in movies (and not necessarily horror movies either) when something is evoked that has an awe-inspiring emptiness. When we are imbued with the sense that the cosmos is huge … and empty.

Pascal says, “We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

What that phrase evokes is the sense of a limitless empty meaningless space we as human beings have no control over and a total inability to impress meaning upon.

We think we have the power to impress ourselves upon the world in some fashion — through having a family, through feeling love, through our associations with political parties or to a church — and when we feel those connections we feel momentarily safe. And that’s horror; it is only momentary. It’s about reducing our sense of importance. Most horror says, “You think you’re fine and fancy, don’t you. Well you’re not. You’re meat.”  That I can be so easily erased.  In my estimation, all of that is as far from a simple ‘boo’ as it gets.

You tell stories in so many different arenas (books, movies, comics, video games) … how do you decide which is the right one for a particular idea?

Barker: I don’t. They choose it for me. I’ll start something with the intention of being a novel for example, and through one circumstance or another, it will end up a comic book. Or a movie. I’ve found that the story will end up being the format it wants most to. I just try not to get in the way of that.

If you could create a mashup with one of your worlds with one of someone else’s, which would you choose?

Barker: Neverland and my very real, very personal world. As a child it was always Neverland that caught my imagination. I didn’t read Narnia till quite a lot later by which time some of its charm had waned. I was rather too old for it.  I was a very shy kid. A very solitary kid. I couldn’t play games in the play yard. I wasn’t the kind of guy that played war. You have to remember this was twelve years after the second world war. It’s all everyone still talked about. And the cleanup is going on all around us. And we still had ration cards. It’s bizarre to think this, but that’s what was going on. So there was me feeling like a solitary little kid and when the wind came along, I was just carried away. I’ve always loved the sound of the wind. The sound of the wind to me is about the far away.  And there was just something about Neverland that I adored. As a child I used to see myself as Peter Pan and still do to some extent, I suppose.

What has been the hardest story for you to tell?

Barker: My life story. It’s an ongoing story, and I don’t know what happens at the end yet.

For new readers (ages 6 and up) who have discovered chapter books, a great series to get them hooked on this summer is Ivy & Bean.  When Ivy and Bean meet in the first book, neither girl imagines that they will become fast friends, but a shared sense of humor and love of mischief quickly brings them together. 

Ivy and Bean have been together through eight books so far, most recently in Ivy & Bean No News is Good News, when they set out to create a neighborhood newspaper that turns out to deliver a lot more news than the grown-ups intended.  On September 5, the ninth adventure of the dynamic duo begins and early readers won't want to miss it when Ivy & Bean Make the Rules for their own camp--no big sisters allowed. 

Below is a deleted scene from the new book (involving an important phone call, toilet paper, and the inexplicable logic of children) sent to us by author Annie Barrows--you can read the rest after the jump.

Spring, Sprang, Sprung - a deleted scene from Ivy & Bean Make the Rules

 “In five minutes, I’m having a phone conference,” Bean’s mom called up the stairs.

 Nobody answered.

“In five minutes, I’m having a phone conference,” she called again.

Silence.

“Don’t bug me while I’m on the phone, okay?” she shouted. “Okay?”

Silence

“Did you hear me?” she yelled

Bean’s door opened. “We heard you. We’re not supposed to bug you while you’re on the phone.”

“You promise? This is a really important phone call.”

Bean sighed loudly. “Of course we promise. We’re way too busy to bug you.”

"Good.” Bean’s mom went to her office. She arranged all her papers neatly. She got out three pens. She poured herself a glass of water. She was ready. She was waiting. The phone rang.

Five minutes later:

“My plan is this,” Bean’s mom was saying, “we’ll have the meeting the day after—“

A drawer slammed in the kitchen. “Where’s the tape?” Bean bellowed.

Bean’s mom concentrated. “After the motion, and then we’ll—”

“Who stole the tape?” shrieked Bean in the next room.

Bean’s mom covered the phone with her hand. “It’s on the table! Stop yelling!”

“I found it!” screamed Bean. Something fell on the kitchen floor.

“Sorry,” said Bean’s mom to the phone. “We’ll announce that we’re ready and able to put it on the—“

“Don’t go that way!” Bean hollered. Feet pounded up the stairs.

Bean’s mom took a deep breath. “Ballot. Afterward, we can give Karen the responsibility for the—”

“Out the window! Out the window!” Bean yelled from somewhere in the house.

“For the—”  stammered Bean’s mom.

“Bring it in through the front door!” Ivy called. Feet pounded down the stairs.

“No! Let’s wrap it around the house,” Bean shouted. She was outside now.

“Bean,” said Bean’s mom. “Sorry, I meant the blog. The blog.” The person on the other end said something. “Right. Sure.”  The person on the other end said more things, but Bean’s mom didn’t hear them. She was listening to the screeching outside.

“Lookit, lookit! It goes all the way down to the street!” Feet tore down the driveway.

“Watch out!” screamed Ivy.

“Thar she blows! GERONIMOOOOO!”

“Frank! Got to go!” Bean’s mom slammed down the phone and scrambled out of the office. She was moving fast, so fast that she didn’t notice the unusual thing in her house. The unusual thing was white, and it was very, very long. It was so long that it came down the stairs and into the living room and out the living room window and in the other living room window and over to the hall and around the dining room table and back through the hall and out the front door.

Then it went down the front steps and around the side of the house and around the back of the house and around the other side of the house and halfway across the front of the  house, where it met up with itself and went up the driveway and back down the driveway before it slithered right over the sidewalk and out into the center of Pancake Court. That’s where it stopped.

It was toilet paper.

Bean’s mom stopped running. She stood on the front porch, panting. For a moment, she just looked. She looked at the toilet paper. She looked at Ivy and Bean, who were lying on the sidewalk, laughing. She looked at her front yard. And then she yelled, “WHAT THE HECK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!”

Bean looked over her shoulder. “Can you believe it?” she called

“No!” yelled her mother. “I can’t!”

“Only four rolls!” called Bean. “There’s a lot of paper on those things!”

Ivy sat up and nodded happily. “That’s some good toilet paper you’ve got there!”

“Girls!” squawked Bean’s mom. She waved her arms. “Do you realize—Why?—Whatever possessed you to—Why do you do these things? Why? Why?”

“Why?” Bean looked at her mother in wonder. “Why?”

“Yes! Why?”

Bean shrugged. “Why not?”

“Girls!” Bean’s mother sat down on the front steps and put her head in her hands. “Don’t you realize how wasteful this is?”

“It’s not wasteful,” said Bean. “We’re going to roll it all up again.”

“Nice and neat,” said Ivy.

“No, you’re not,” said Bean’s mom. She held up a strand of paper. “Four rolls of toilet paper, down the drain.”

“Well,” said Bean, trying to look on the bright side, “isn’t that where it all ends up anyway?”

Bang!  Bean’s older sister, Nancy, popped out the front door. “Mom! Can I have your cell phone? I need to have a super-important conference call with Mischa and Didi.”

“You’re having a conference call!” groaned Bean’s mom. “Why do you need to have one?”

“We’re planning spring break, Mom,” explained Nancy. “We’ve got to talk about what we’re going to wear.”

Bean’s mother put her head in her hands and groaned again. “Spring break? When’s spring break?”

“Next week!” crowed Nancy and Ivy and Bean together. “Yay!” Bean boinged from one foot to the other. “Break-a-break-a-break-a-break-a!”  she yodeled. It was her spring break dance. 

Bean’s mom lifted her head to watch Bean dance. “Spring break!” she muttered. “Spring break!” She gazed around at the toilet paper covering her house.

“Break-a-break-a-break-a-break-a!” sang Bean, hopping from foot to foot. “Do the funky chicken!”

Bean’s mom got up and went inside.

"I love spring!” yelled Bean.

When I was a kid I loved stories of mermaids and (I'm dating myself here) liked to pretend I was Darryl Hannah in the movie Splash.  I would have loved Liz Kessler's Emily Windsnap books, and recently passed them along to my nine year-old neice--she now has mermaid fever and is spending the summer reading and dreaming her way through the series.  Kessler does a fantastic job of creating fun summertime reads for girls--in her Philippa Fisher series fairy godmothers are not only real, but they also have help from fairy godsisters--so it's fitting that she is this week's featured Summer Reading author.  In the exclsive video below we travel with her from a big blue rocking chair, to a gorgeous seaside, to the inside of the phone booth, and beyond, while she talks about the books she loved as a kid and some of her more recent favorites:

The Adventures of the Wishing Chair - by Enid Blyton

Secret Seven series - by Enid Blyton

The Phantom Tollbooth - by Norton Juster

Real Mermaids Don't Wear Toe Rings -by Helene Boudreau

It's National Hot Fudge Sundae Day, but any spot on the calendar is good for celebrating the ultimate contrast of warm on cold, bitter chocolate on velvety sweet ice cream.

Our family celebrated the occasion with a Grand Slam, the over-the-top creation served at the Hit It Here Cafe at Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners. Served in a giant martini glass, this decadent treat was easily enough for four, more like six.

The history of the hot fudge is fuzzy, but it doesn't require a special study to recognize the steady pull of ice cream smothered in sticky sauce and topped with a dollop of whipped cream. It's magic!

One of the pleasures of attending Book Expo America in New York City early in June was meeting Walter Mosley, best known for the Easy Rawlins mysteries. He’s also a science fiction writer whose book The Gift of Fire/On the Head of a Pin is comprised of two novellas. “The Gift of Fire” takes as its inspiration the ancient myth of Prometheus, but is set in present-day South Central Los Angeles. In “On the Head of a Pin,” researchers find something hiding in high-tech animatronic film footage that leads them beyond reality. The book is the first of three sets of unique doubles by the O. Henry Award winner, part of his “Crosstown to Oblivion” series.

Mosley participated on the SF in the Mainstream panel at BEA, along with me, my wife Ann VanderMeer (The Weird), and John Scalzi (Redshirts). A relaxed and free-wheeling conversation in the green room beforehand included Mosley’s ruminations on airlifted crocodiles in Australia, among other topics.

As for the panel, at 30 minutes it was too short. I felt we were just getting into the meat of the topics when we had to stop. Early on Mosley called science fiction “the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world,” and as a result “The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.”

Later, talking about the idea of genre and of audience, Mosley said that when he sent his early novel Gone Fishin’ to publishers, he was told, “White people don’t read about black people. Black women don’t like to read about black men. Black men don’t like to read. So who’s going to buy your book? If it was true, it was because they made it true.” I agreed with Mosley, citing his example as just one way in which the book world can hamper itself with narrow operational realities, which is another way of saying you can see a failure of vision at times that is comparable with the obsession with classification that creates genre divisions.

Mosley noted the similarities between books across many genres, on a thematic level, to make the argument for the unimportance of genre distinctions. This resonated with me since reconciling the genre/mainstream divide has been important to our anthology projects. Somehow we also got onto the topic of the aesthetic of Steampunk, which I said had appeal because while the seeking of perfection was a very human impulse, attaining it was a kind of insanity—as evidenced by the kind of seamlessness of Apple products. We want to see the human element in our technology. Reacting to the Apple comment, Mosley said “like white sugar,” which I thought was a great observation. Refined sugar is supposedly a great leap forward, but you could also see it as the end product of the work of mad scientists who knew not what they wrought. This could have led even more fascinating discussion, but our time was up.

In the end, the idea of a panel on SF and the Mainstream didn’t just spark a great conversation, ably moderated by Ryan Britt; it also helped bring some interesting books to readers’ attention. Whether the debate itself, which has been part of genre convention panels for years, will ever reach some kind of definitive conclusion is unclear…and probably unimportant.

  For more on the panel, read these useful reports, from which some information was taken for this feature:

  --Rose Fox, Publishers Weekly

Best seller Emily Giffin's latest novel Where We Belong publishes today, and Omni caught up with her to ask a few questions, including how she arrives at her themes, how she got her start, and what she thinks about the "chic lit" moniker.

In your previous books you’ve embraced betrayal, lost love, and tragedy to name a few subjects. What made you choose to write a story that revolves around a woman who’s given up her daughter for adoption?

At its heart, the book is about secrets and what happens to us and those closest to us when we keep them. I’ve always been intrigued by the power of secrets.  When is it justifiable to keep them from the ones we love? And does keeping them irrevocably change who we are? Adoption (under the secretive circumstances in Where We Belong) seemed to be a great way to explore some of those broader themes. In addition, I have always been interested in adoption. There are so many perspectives to explore—so much rich, emotional terrain.  

When you’re choosing your stories, do you begin with the themes or the characters? Both seem so well fleshed out.

It depends on what you mean by themes. I always begin with a basic premise. A question such as “What would happen if you fell in love with your best friend’s fiancé?” (Something Borrowed) or “What if you had a second chance with the one who got away?” (Love the One You’re With) or “What would happen if you kept a baby a secret for your whole life and suddenly she showed up on your doorstep?” (Where We Belong). The characters are born almost immediately after that. Then the plot unfolds as the characters and their relationships with one another are explored. Broader themes, such as how important it is for us to feel that we belong to something or someone greater than ourselves (Where We Belong) emerge at the end when everything feels illuminated and I realize what the book is really about.    

Your books are about how women relate to men, how they relate to other women, and often how they relate to their own careers. You were a Manhattan attorney before you became a writer. To what degree is Marian Caldwell, or any of your characters, based on your own experiences?

My books are all relationship-focused so much of my inspiration comes from my own relationships and the issues and concerns that arise among my friends and family. In addition, I often try to find some way to identify with my protagonist, such as her profession or where she lives, particularly when I’m writing in the first person. But the plots have never been autobiographical.

You often write about flawed characters. Is this something you do intentionally?

I find flawed characters much more interesting than perfect ones and enjoy the challenge of making readers root for them in spite of their unsympathetic paths and destructive choices. Life is about the gray areas. Things are seldom black and white, even when we wish they were and think they should be, and I like exploring this nuanced terrain. I believe most people are good at heart and sincerely try to do the right thing. Yet we are all capable of missteps and of hurting the people we love, and we all have had to grapple with the guilt and regret that come from these mistakes and weaknesses.

Was it difficult to make the jump from attorney to writer? How did you do it?

Although I enjoyed law school, I loathed the actual practice of law—at least the big firm culture. And I discovered that misery can be quite motivating. So very early on, I devised a plan to pay off my law school loans and then write full-time. Meanwhile, I began writing a young adult novel in my free time (and sometimes while at work!). Four years later, my loans were paid off and my book was completed. I was able to land an agent, but over the next several months, I received a dozen rejection letters from publishers. I seriously contemplated giving up and keeping my nose to the legal grindstone, but instead, I quit my job, moved to London and decided to try again. It was then and there that I began writing Something Borrowed. To answer the question more generally, I just never gave up. I think all writers have that in common!

You’re often categorized as a writer of chick lit—do you embrace that label? Is it even an accurate claim?

It’s not that I don’t like the moniker—and I’m in favor of any label that encourages people to read or helps them find the kind of books they will enjoy. It’s just that the term only seems to be used in a pejorative sense these days and, beyond that, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate, especially for my last few novels. There is really nothing about Heart of the Matter or Where We Belong that conjures chick lit. They are more straight women’s fiction—books about exploring universal relationships and complex emotions. Bottom line, I try not to get too hung up on labels as I think they can be limiting.    

What can we expect next from you?

I don't know if he drinks Dos Equis, but he's written a science fictional Tolstoy parody called Android Karenina, he's written a young adult mystery that was nominated for an Edgar Award, he's written the horror thriller Bedbugs and the New York Times best seller Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters. He's written the book and lyrics for musicals, and he's working on a book of scary poems for kids.

I'm probably missing something in his oeuvre, but you get the picture. He's a bit of a genre-buster. Winter's latest book The Last Policeman certainly falls into that category, as it's a pre-apocalyptic novel about a policeman trying to solve a murder while an asteroid is hurtling toward earth (expected to bring total destruction within about six months). We liked it so much, we picked The Last Policeman for our July Best of the Month.

Read on for a brief conversation with Ben Winters, as he talks about The Last Policeman:

The Last Policeman is set in a world in which a massive asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, but the novel centers on one detective's murder investigation. Where did you get the idea to combine these two disparate elements of storytelling?

Well, you know, story ideas are like giant planet-dooming asteroids: they always take you by surprise. But I've always had a soft spot for certain kinds of science fiction, books that imagine one grand change to the human situation and tease it out. P. D. James's Children of Men is a marvelous example, or Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series. 

The "pre-apocalyptic" side of this "pre-apocalyptic murder mystery" definitely came first. I thought it would be fascinating to imagine my way into the sad and terrifying last months of civilization. Then I set about imagining the right hero for this kind of book, and I thought that what I needed was someone who is extremely dedicated to his work, who cannot let the world end before solving the puzzle before him. That's where the character of Detective Henry Palace came from, my intensely, even bizarrely dedicated public servant.

The obligatory question: What would you do if Earth would be annihilated in six months?

Well, I'm under contract with Quirk Books to write the sequel to The Last Policeman, so first I'd get that done. 

Just kidding. I think, honestly, that I would spend time with my children. I'd read them a lot of books, and take them to beautiful places, and try to prevent them from hearing anything about what was coming. (The idea of that, by the way, makes me tearful, as it did periodically over the course of writing this.) 

Can you give us any details about the upcoming second and third novels in the series?