An Interview with Toby Ball

Toby Ball is the critically acclaimed author of THE VAULTS and SCORCH CITY. INVISIBLE STREETS, available July 24, is the third in the thriller series.

This is your third novel, and it follows some of the same characters as the first two. Was it challenging to write a book that stood alone from The Vaults and Scorch City but would also please fans of the first two books?

Spacing the three books about fifteen years apart has allowed me to bring returning readers up to speed with what has happened over the intervening years at the same time as I introduce new readers to the characters and the world they inhabit. I’ve noticed that a lot of more traditional series need to reference the previous book or books, because they are so close in time that it would be strange not to. If a character had a harrowing experience six months ago, you can’t simply ignore it in the next book because it will still affect that character. Fifteen years past, however, and the experience is more of a memory—a flicker of something, rather than the thing itself. So the challenge is to imagine how these characters have changed since we last saw them. I certainly don’t think about things the same way I did fifteen years ago, so it makes sense that the returning characters would change as well, while at the same time remaining themselves.

I took a similar approach to the book’s setting. All three books take place in the City—a gigantic, ethnically diverse, extremely corrupt, and nearly ungovernable urban expanse—and I wanted to figure out how fifteen years of mismanagement and chaos would transform it. The answer, as I saw it, was that in response to decades of corruption and economic stagnation, the municipal government and business leaders were going to push a major project to remake the City around the needs of business and the wealthy people who run them. The plot really flowed from that idea: who supports the project? Who opposes it and why? What does this conflict look like?

It’s obvious that the character of Nathan Canada, a man more powerful than the mayor or the chief of police, bears some resemblance to Robert Moses, the controversial urban planner who transformed New York in the middle of the twentieth century. How did you become interested in Moses, and how much did the details of his life shape the character of Canada?

For me, the crucial thing was that a guy like Robert Moses could really exist. I’m fascinated by people who are so clear in their vision for change and so convinced of its rightness that they are willing to really steamroll any opposition. I first found out about Moses when a friend gave me a copy of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. I read the first fifty pages and just stopped because I didn’t want to know any more. I didn’t want to write a book with Moses in it. I wanted to write a book where someone plays the same role in the City that Moses played in New York. 

Speaking of which, the City in Invisible Streets looks and feels a little bit like New York, but it’s also clearly an invented landscape. What were the challenges you encountered as you brought this world to life? Were you concerned with making things feel realistic, or just interesting?

This was an issue that I confronted when I was writing my first book, The Vaults. Would it make more sense to drop clearly fictional institutions and events into a real city with a real history, or would I be better off creating a fictional city that gave me more freedom of plot and atmosphere? In the end, I decided that I didn’t want readers to be distracted by guessing games (did New York really have a huge underground library of criminal records in the 1930s?), and once I made the decision to set The Vaults in a fictional city, I felt liberated to create a setting that was not entirely realistic, but which, I hope, adds to the mood and plot of the books. What’s different about Invisible Streets is that the City has become more of a character, a sort of damsel in distress that everyone in the novel tries to rescue (mostly unsuccessfully). 

I intended for the New City Project—the urban renewal scheme at the heart of the book—to be a little bit over-the-top in terms of its ambition, with Nathan Canada as Robert Moses on steroids. But the strange thing is that people are either thinking about or actually enacting even more grandiose plans—Turkey’s plan to build a canal parallel to the Bosphorus strait; the development of Astana, Kazakhstan’s new and remarkably weird capital; and, of course, Dubai in all of its spectacular grandeur.

Invisible Streets is brilliant at juggling a compelling, fast-moving plot with a textured and rich landscape. What are books that you’ve read that you feel manage to pull this off especially well? They don’t need to be thrillers!

I actually just finished a book called Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer, which is very fast-moving and takes place in Area X, a forbidden zone that was abandoned after an environmental catastrophe. Part of the fun of the book is following the main character as she tries to figure out the secrets hidden by this beautifully described landscape. Another book is The City and the City, by China Miéville. Again, the unusual, even surreal, setting is affects not just the mood of the book, but also the plot. I realize that both of these are books with imagined landscapes, and that might be part of their attraction for me—it’s interesting to see how other authors tackled the same challenge of creating a somewhat surreal setting from scratch. 

Was writing Invisible Streets a different kind of challenge from the first two books, or has your process remained basically the same throughout?

I keep waiting to stumble upon a process that I can use more than once! Each book has been its own challenge and, in some ways, it seems to get harder with each book. With The Vaults, it was almost dumb luck in that, writing by feel, I managed to get the pacing and the transformation of characters more or less right—or at least enough so that I didn’t have to make a lot of huge changes to the manuscript afterwards. Both Scorch City and Invisible Streets required a significant amount of playing with the plot and characters, so that the final product ended up being quite a bit different in both instances than the first couple of drafts. With Invisible Streets, the plot ended up being much more focused after the editing process, with some of the subplots left on the cutting room floor.

Did you plan to write a series when you started out, or has that evolved over time?

The answer is both yes and no. When I started The Vaults, I was working at a humanities organization that spent a lot of time on Big Issues. I’d read somewhere that Robert Towne and Jack Nicholson had envisioned Chinatown to be the first of a trilogy with each movie representing water, fire, and air, respectively. I had in my head the idea of writing a trilogy based on memory, ideology, and perception. I don’t know if those themes jump out at you as you read the books, but that was the concept.

On the other hand, the odds are so long that you get even one book published—much less three—that I didn’t think during the writing of either The Vaults or Scorch City that these were the beginning of a trilogy or series. I was taking them one at a time.

Any chance that we’ll get another book set in the world of the City?

I wouldn’t want to close the door on it, and I’ve been bouncing around some ideas about what a next book might look like. I really like writing about the City, I like the characters that populate it, and I like the potential for future books. That being said, the project I’m working on right now is not the fourth City book. Stay tuned!

Interview: Barbara Mujica, author of I AM VENUS

Barbara Mujica, author of the acclaimed historical novels frida and Sister Teresa turns her eye to 17^th-century Spain and the court of King Phillip IV in her latest book, I Am Venus, published earlier this month by Overlook. Chronicling the scandalous affair between the great Baroque Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and the young model who became his Venus, Barbara Mujica vividly reimagines the great artist’s rise to prominence, set against a backdrop of political turmoil and romantic scandal. Narrated by the mysterious model who posed for Velázquez’s only female nude, “The Rokeby of Venus,” I Am Venus is a seductive historical novel of the forbidden love between an artist and his muse. Barbara Mujica joins us today on the Winged Elephant to discuss the research and inspiration behind her latest novel. Welcome, Barbara!

OP: How would you describe your novel? Is it a book for fans of historical novels, or fans of Velazquez and Spanish history. Who will it most appeal to?

BM: I Am Venus is aimed at the general reader. Fans of historical fiction will find plenty historical atmosphere. I did a lot of research on food, clothing, homes, leisure activities, and other aspects of 17^th-century life, but the novel doesn’t presuppose a particular interest in the Spanish Golden Age. Similarly, fans of Velázquez will find lots of information about his training and artistic development, his use of color and form, and his relationship with mentors. However, you don’t need to be a Velázquez fan or an expert in Spanish history to enjoy this book. The story is rich and entertaining because Velázquez and his contemporaries were fascinating people living at a fascinating time.

OP: As in your previous novel, frida, you show an uncanny ability to portray the life of an artist – both inside and outside the studio. What experience do you have with the lives of artists?

BM: I have always been enthralled by artists. My husband is an architect with extensive training in art and art history, so I have spent much of my adult life hearing about artists and visiting museums. Furthermore, I work in a period—the late Renaissance—when painting and sculpture were flourishing in Europe, and so art history is part of my intellectual background.

OP: What inspired you to use The Rokeby Venus, among many other of Velasquez’s masterworks?

BM: First of all, Venus is an enigma. We don’t know the circumstances under which this painting was produced, so I was really able to let my imagination run wild. Second, this painting was created during a time of religious repression when nudes were forbidden, and the Inquisition persecuted painters who produced them. The fact that Velázquez painted the Rokeby Venus and got away with it makes for a very enticing plot.

OP: Has the historical identity of the model for The Rokeby Venus ever been established? Can you talk a bit about your creation of her for the novel.

BM: The real identity of the model is explained at the end of the book, so I think I won’t spoil the fun. I will say that due to the way the painting was composed, there has been a lot of conjecture about it, which leaves the writer a lot of leeway.

OP: Velazquez’s wife, Juana, is a fascinating character in the story. How much of her is imagined, or based on historical research?

BM: Her identity is historical. She was the daughter of Velázquez’s painting master, Francisco Pacheco, and the mother-in-law of his apprentice, Mazo. However, we know very little about her life. I have done a lot of research on 17^th-century Spanish women and, in fact, much of my scholarly writing is on that subject. From my readings of women’s letters, stories by 17^th-century women authors, treatises on women by moralists of the period, and historical studies on women, I constructed a feisty, down-to-earth character who, like some of the real women I’ve studied, bucks the cultural norms of the period. Both she and Velázquez are deeply human characters, flawed, emotive, and capable of both wonderful and reprehensible deeds. 

OP: I Am Venus contains many parallels between 17^th century Spain and the modern world – political unrest, economic crisis, ongoing wars, scandal and hypocrisy, religious fanaticism. Do you think readers will see and understand these connections, and was it something you were aware of before writing the novel?

BM: I have taught 17^th-century Spain at Georgetown University for many years, and I’ve always been struck by how much that period resembles our own. Spain was deeply in dept, yet continued to spend, borrowing money from foreign creditors. It was engaged in multiple wars that drained the economy. Taxes and unemployment were high.  Veterans who returned from the Thirty Years War were unable to find jobs and sometimes didn’t get their pensions. Politicians and priests preached morality, yet engaged in lechery. Mores were changing. I don’t think readers can help but make connections. I think there are lessons to be learned from I Am Venus. In a sense, it could be seen as a cautionary tale.  

 

EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT: Stephanie Gorton, Editor

Ask any author or agent and they’ll be sure to tell you that the journey from manuscript to finished book can be a tricky process. Sometimes stories written over the course of several months can take years to appear on bookstore shelves (if they even ever make it). Why the wait, you ask? Between fact checking, copy editing, cover design, and the other technical aspects of getting a manuscript prepared for print, about a thousand decisions need to be made before a book is ready for publication.

The creative minds diligently working behind the scenes to oversee this process are editors. At Overlook, our crack-editorial team and legion of dedicated interns all work together to make sure this process happens smoothly and on schedule. Last November we introduced Overlook editor and burgeoning beer brewer, Dan Crissman. Today, our employee spotlight feature returns with questions for editor and Brooklyn resident Stephanie Gorton. Welcome, Stephanie!

OP: Describe your job in 140 characters or less.

SG: Read. Scheme to come up with pitches and design briefs and copy. Have lunch. Edit, argue, read. Dream up new projects. Argue, read, edit.

OP: What are you currently reading?

SG: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

OP: What is your favorite book that Overlook has published?

SG: Impossible question but off the top of my head it would be a 3-way tie between Gone Tomorrow, We Is Got Him, and The Late Great Creature, with NASCAR Legends a close second.

OP: If you didn't work in publishing, what would you be doing?

SG: Freelance editor/ tutor/ translator/ cheesemaker.

OP: What is your favorite word (Can be in any language—bonus points if there is a funny/interesting story behind it).

SG: Probably "glorious." My mother uses often to describe pretty mundane things like scarves or going to the movies and it's still one of the best speech quirks I've heard.

Interview: Kate Colquhoun, author of MURDER IN THE FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGE

Kate Colquhoun’s fantastic Murder in the First-Class Carriage is a meticulously researched telling of the death of Thomas Briggs, the first murder victim in the history of the British rail system. In 1864, Briggs disappeared from a first-class Victorian rail car, only to be discovered some time later, badly injured on the train tracks. Less than a day after being found, Briggs died, and the hunt for his killer began. Kate Colquhoun’s vivid account of the unprecedented crime, as well as the subsequent investigation, trial, and media explosion surrounding the event has received stellar reviews, and placed her on the short-list for the 2011 Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for nonfiction. Today Kate joins us on the Winged Elephant to talk about the work that went into producing Murder in the First-Class Carriage. Welcome, Kate!

OP: In Murder in the First Class-Carriage, you describe not only an account of the first Victorian railway murder, but also the enormous degree of media attention that the investigation received. What drew you to this story, nearly one hundred and fifty years after the fact?

KC: I found myself reading some of those old accounts and just got hooked. It's something to do with how this one event opened a window onto the period of the early 1860s (the sensation-loving generation) and also onto the gritty industrial extremes of London—then the greatest city in the world. Because the story turned out to be more than the sum of its parts and because the cast of characters was as rich and varied as a Dickensian novel, they were believable and I cared about them.

OP: Although it is a work of nonfiction, the book still has the pace and drama of a novel. Did you find inspiration in traditional genre fiction—crime novels and thrillers—while working on Murder in the First Class-Carriage?

KC: Absolutely. I read nothing for pleasure but Victorian sensation novels and crime writing: both fiction and nonfiction. Obviously In Cold Blood remains the greatest nonfiction account of a brutal crime and it is masterfully well told. But novels like Caleb Carr's The Alienist were as useful to me for their renderings of pace and atmosphere as The Woman in White.

OP: Can you tell us a bit more about the research process? How long did you spend writing the book, and how difficult was it to access primary documents like police reports and trial transcripts?

KC: Fortunately police and Home Office files relating to several of the most high profile capital cases of the later nineteenth century have survived in the National Archives and, fortunately, these are located on my side of London. I could not have written the book without them. I'm not a novelist—I can't make things up. It is crucial to me only to include facts recorded at the time. That the Old Bailey Online has online transcripts of all capital case trials was an enormous help. The British Library and Brit Lib newspaper depository were equally important to my research. It's why I live in London—proximity!

OP: The race to identify the killer and catch him was eagerly followed by the public on both sides of the Atlantic. Now that Murder in the First-Class Carriage has been published in the United States, you are also a transatlantic sensation! Do you think the book holds the same interest for American and UK audiences?

KC: You'll have to ask American readers. I sure hope so. I do think that the story allowed me to create a snapshot of New York in August 1864—in the middle of the Civil War, hot, strained, still under construction, fast, mad and bustling—and of its emerging Police Department. The American advocate who represented the prisoner at the extradition hearing has to be one of the most exuberant characters I've researched. So that, for me at least, the American chapters were as involving as the ones closer to home.

OP: In 1864, the murder of Thomas Briggs provoked a widespread sense of intrigue, and an urgent need for closure. As you point out in the book though, no one could ever know the truth about what happened between Briggs and Müller on the night of July 9th. Were there any difficulties in writing this book, given the inherent uncertainty of the events it describes?

KC: I'd call them pressures rather than difficulties. I was constantly taking the book apart and 'restitching it' in the hope that the joins would not be apparent. There are clearly conventions in crime writing that have to be 'learned' and I did it the hard way, through trial and error. It was enormously fulfilling as a writer to be so stretched—consciously to employ narrative techniques in the retelling of history. I'm now a bit addicted.

Thanks for joining us, Kate. Murder in the First-Class Carriage is available now. For the latest updates from Kate Colquhoun, be sure to follow her on twitter, and check out this BBC video in which correspondent Nick Higham interviews her as they visit the documents and sites that formed the basis for her book.

Did you miss Richard Billows discussing MARATHON on NPR?

Never fear! Here's a handy link to both his interview (with a transcript!) and an excerpt of the professor's wonderful book MARATHON: HOW ONE BATTLE CHANGED WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

Our favorite part of the interview with Guy Raz actually occurs right at the beginning, and is a great summary of why the Battle of Marathon is so crucially important to our civilization, besides giving us 26.2 mile runs.

RAZ: Aeschylus was a veteran of the legendary battle at Marathon. It happened exactly 2,500 years ago, and it pitted a heavily outnumbered band of mainly Athenians against the far mightier Persian army. It also lent its name to the famous race, which we'll hear about in a moment.

Historian Richard Billows writes about the battle in a new book called "Marathon." And he says that that one day in 490 BC actually changed the course of Western civilization.

Mr. BILLOWS: What we can tell from the way the Persians treated other cities -Greek cities that they attacked in this same period is that if the Athenians had lost the battle, the city of Athens would have been destroyed. The Athenian citizen population rounded up, put on ships and transported to Persia to be interviewed by the Persian king, Darius, at that time and then probably resettled somewhere near the Persian Gulf where they would've been lost to history.

And as a result, all those great Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries -the likes of Thucydides and Socrates and Plato, one could go on - simply would never either have been born or their works would never have been written and would not have been able therefore to shape subsequent classical Greek civilization and Western culture as we know it.

RAZ: I mean, you say that had the Persians defeated the Athenians at Marathon, democracy would never have flourished.

Mr. BILLOWS: The first democracy that we know of in world history was created by the Athenians just 15 years before the battle of Marathon. It was established as a result of a kind of coup d'etat against a tyrant who had been ruling Athens. And that democracy was a very young and new experiment when the Athenians faced the Persians.

We also love how Mr. Raz chose to end the interview.

RAZ: I'm curious. You emphasize the importance of democracy in the Athenian victory. Why?

Mr. BILLOWS: The way that the Greeks fought was very egalitarian. Every individual soldier fought at his own expense. He paid for his own equipment and for his own upkeep. And essentially voluntarily, they were participating members of the social and political community. They felt that this community, because the democratic system, was theirs, they governed themselves very directly.

We tend to make a distinction between the government and the people. There was no such distinction in Athenian democracy because the people were the government. It was that sense of this is ours - this community, this political state that we've created is our thing.

So, the Greek victories over the Persians were intimately tied up with the political system of participatory democracy that the Greeks had created.

Fascinated yet? Make sure to listen to (or read!) the entire interview. And stay tuned for more reviews, events and interviews with Professor Billows as the marathon race season gears up!

Author of SIMA'S UNDERGARMENTS FOR WOMEN featured in Shelf Awareness

As the excitement mounts over next month's publication of Sima's Undergarments for Women , Shelf Awareness featured a Q&A with the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross, in today's Book Brahmin piece:

Ilana Stanger-Ross grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. She holds an undergraduate degree from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Temple University and is currently a student midwife at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine. She has received several prizes for her fiction, including a Timothy Findley Fellowship, and her work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Lilith magazine, the Globe and Mail and the Walrus magazine, among others. Her new novel, Sima's Undergarments for Women, is a February Overlook Press publication.

On your nightstand now:
I covet a nightstand. But on the floor between my bed and my bedroom door is a more or less upright stack of books, including John Updike's Pigeon Feathers, Tony Horowitz's A Voyage Long and Strange, Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and Maureen Freeley's Enlightenment. I read a few of the Updike stories while watching my daughters in the bath the other night, and they're incredibly rich and almost unbearably sad. The others are all still in the good-intention stage.

Favorite book when you were a child:

If I'm Lost, How Come I Found You? by Walter Olesky. It's hard to pick one favorite, but that was the first chapter book I read on my own. It was a Christmas gift from my second grade teacher--we all were given one book to read over the holidays, and I chose that one out of the grab-bag. I loved it. I no longer remember the plot other than it involved a lost child and some heartwarming adventures, but I do remember the enormous sense of pride in reading a chapter book entirely on my own.

Book you've faked reading:

Oh, I don't fake. But I have perhaps let on that I liked certain experimental books more than I did. Barthes comes to mind. Also Moby Dick--I skipped the whaling detail parts.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen. If you haven't read it--go read it right now. Now. It's a slim novella--you can be through it in an hour, easy, though you'll want to sit and savor it if you can. There's an Alice Walker blurb on my paperback edition. She writes, "Every time I read Tell Me a Riddle it breaks my heart." I can't say it better.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Vox by Nicholas Baker. I was in seventh grade and found myself drawn to the hot-pink cover. Or maybe that's just the excuse I gave myself after devouring the first few pages in the chain bookstore near my junior high. Pretty shocking material for a seventh grader--the hot pink meant something on that one.

Book that changed your life:

Our Bodies, Our Selves by the Boston Women's Health Collective. As a 13-year-old at summer camp, I pored over it along with all the other pre-teen campers. It was my first introduction to women-centered care, healthy sexuality, queer-positive thinking, etc. I'm currently studying to be a midwife, and I can trace my interest in women's health at least in part back to those bunk bed study sessions.

Favorite line from a book:

In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Ramsay is trying to remember a poem. And the line she remembers, which apparently comes from a poem written by a not particularly well-regarded poet Woolf knew, is "And all the lives we ever lived, and all the lives to be, are full of trees and changing leaves." Isn't that lovely and true? I first read To The Lighthouse in high school, and that little rhyme has stayed with me. (Though, like Mrs. Ramsay herself, I am forever doomed to not remember the rest of the poem.)

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. I read it over a few days while sitting in a rocking chair in our Toronto apartment, my then-infant daughter Eva asleep across my lap. I loved the novel and couldn't put it down, but more than just the wonder of that story I want to revisit the moments during which I read it: winter outside, warm inside, my first baby (now four) asleep against me, and nothing to do but rock and read the most wonderful adventure.