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The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt is an entertaining romp of a novel that should satisfy readers of fantasy, SF, and Steampunk alike. As fantasist extraordinaire Jay Lake has said of The Court of the Air, "If Charles Dickens and Jack Vance had ever collaborated, they might have written this book...a collision between English letters and the hard-edged vision of grunge fantasy." Rogues, brothels, murders, balloons, and orphans populate this clever adventure. Hunt recently signed a major six-book deal and has had much (and well-deserved) movie interest in his work. I recently caught up with Hunt via email to find out more about this inventive UK writer.

Amazon.com: Can you describe for readers where you are as you’re answering these questions?
Stephen Hunt: I’m actually reading the questions and blasting the answers out on my laptop as I’m on the train. I get most of the writing for my novels done on the hoof – normally on the train as I commute back and forth in the mornings, or the dead time when I’m stuck in hotels in the evening. It used to be said that a private in the army would learn to snatch sleep in five-minute bursts while standing ramrod straight on a parade ground. I’ve learnt the same trick for pushing out wordage, but doing so while queuing in Starbucks or stuck on the Tube/Subway/Metro!

Amazon.com: How long have you been writing? Is this your first novel?
Hunt: I’ve had short fiction published in magazines as early as 1990, and I was writing professionally before that for computer and RPG magazines while I was at college. For a long time my day job was as an editor, web site manager and publisher for various national newspapers and magazines in the UK, but The Court of the Air is very much my first professionally published novel by two big name imprints – HarperCollins Voyager in the UK, and Tor in the USA. I feel very flattered to be sharing my publishing roof with so many of my own favourite authors--everyone from JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis in the UK, to Poul Anderson and Robert Jordan state-side via Tor.

Amazon.com: Who would you cite as influences on your fiction?
Hunt: I was lucky that my dad has been a serious science fiction and fantasy fan since before World War Two, so I grew up with a massive genre library that began with A for Asimov and ended with Z for Zelazny. I would say they’ve all been influences, literally hundreds of writers running around in my mind, but some of my particular genre super-favourites have been authors like William Gibson, Arthur C Clarke, Michael Moorcock, EE Doc Smith, Jack Vance, Tolkien, David Gemmell, Clifford D Simak, David Weber, Piers Anthony and David Eddings. On the non-SFF front, I’d claim writers like Martin Amis, Len Deighton, Bernard Cornwall, Tom Clancy, Khaled Hosseini and Tom Wolfe. If you’re including graphic novels, Alan Moore and Frank Miller are my two personal titans bestriding the field. I originally wanted to be a comic-book illustrator: in fact, I specifically wanted to be Mœbius...but my influences list here would also include Masamune Shirow and a whole heap of the TokyoPop crowd.

Amazon.com: To what extent, by your own definition, is this a steampunk novel?
Hunt: I believe I thought of The Court of the Air in my own mind first and foremost as a fantasy novel, albeit with some SF elements blended in. Of course, the culture the novel is set in--the Kingdom of Jackals--is early Victorian/late Georgian in basis, and it has airship cities and u-boats and steammen, so steampunk is a label that lots of genre fans have been quite naturally applying to it.

I find the Napoleonic and Victorian era a lot more romantic (if you excuse the pun), than the furry pants and codpiece societies of a lot of traditional literary fantasy settings. It probably comes from reading too much Kipling, HG Wells and Jules Verne at an early age, and watching movies like Zulu on the BBC on cold Sunday afternoons. The Court of the Air was one of the ten books last year--and the only fantasy/SF novel--selected by the Berlinale bigwigs for presentation to all the producers and directors at the world’s largest film festival (60,000 movie professionals or something ridiculous), and I believe the Hollywood people in Berlin were talking of it as "Dickens meets Bladerunner," which is rather a cool steampunk’ish elevator pitch, if I’ve ever heard one.

Amazon.com: What was the hardest part of writing the novel?
Hunt: The Court of the Air never felt hard to write, more like a dam breaking, if anything. I wrote it over a whole year, but in many ways the novel felt like it just poured out over a couple of weeks, I was having such enormous fun writing it. Time was distorted more than a TARDIS caught in a washing machine.

Amazon.com: Conversely, what was fun about writing it?
Hunt: Everything...but I scored some particular guilty joy from sneaking SF themes into what was admittedly a fantasy book. My pet dislike is the cultural Balkanism practiced by the literary establishment (including Sci-Fi Fandom encircled within its own little high-powered laser fence), and anything I can to do to subvert elitism, well, I count that as work well done. The one thing that readers seemed to have focused in on with particular relish was my steammen race, mechanical ‘creatures of the metal’ that have more morality and spirituality than your typical Jackelian yeomen (the kingdom has a basically humanist, godless church). More human than human, to quote the old Tyrell Corporation slogan.

I also enjoyed sneaking in some of my own pet interests and peeves into the wider weave of The Court of the Air’s plot – writing political cartoons in the style of Hogarth and Rowlandson; having a royal family held hostage and only brought out for stoning by the republicans; creating an 18th century-style surveillance state run by transaction engines (computers); parliamentarians settling tedious matters of order in the House by beating each senseless with heavy staffs, and generally sticking a libertarian boot into the flabby underside of the dictatorial state.

Amazon.com: What was the UK reaction to the novel like?
Hunt: Outstanding and far more than I had hoped. In commercial terms The Court of the Air was Tesco’s best-selling fantasy novel that wasn’t Terry Pratchett (oh, the irony). In mainstream literary terms, the novel got glowing write-ups in The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Time Out, SFX, Deathray and the like. Going to genre cons as a guest and meeting my own favourite SFF authors and having them say they loved the book was definitely the thing that meant the most, though.

Amazon.com: You also run SFCrowsnest, an extremely popular news and reviews site. Can you tell us more about that? How time-intensive is that?
Hunt: Since I deployed a proper content management system, I spend less than a Saturday a month keeping the wheels turning on the SFcrowsnest.com bus (PHP coding, mainly). It’s a distinctly volunteer-driven beast, with about 50 regular contributors of book and film reviews, comment pieces and articles – everybody from talented SFF authors like Ken MacLeod, Joe Abercrombie and L.E. Modesitt, to US-based uber-fans like Mark Leeper and Frank Ochieng, as well as our erstwhile editor, stout Somerset cider-quaffing lad Geoff Willmetts. There’s some seriously good individuals involved, and so to the likes of reviewer and critic Pauline Morgan who was SFcrowsnest’s official judge on this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Awards--and who had to read fifty five novels in a few months to get to the shortlist (and will be doing the same for the 2009 awards next year)--we salute thee.

My own story is that I had the incredible dumb luck of being in on the ground floor of the internet revolution, having been a pre-web SysOp on Steve Job’s AppleWorld BBS system, whose resounding failure I’m sure I helped contribute to in so many ways. Despite having totally mastered HyperCard, I failed to realize I could get nearly as rich as Bill Gates by peddling smutty .jpgs or online gambling, then totally missed catching the next bus to insane hypertextual wealth by failing to create Date.com, Netscape.com, Yahoo.com, eBay.com or any of the others web sites that came whizzing by my Mac SE’s wallet-sized screen.

My sole lasting legacy to the Net is http://www.SFcrowsnest.com, its highly financially unprofitable fourteen-year history of bringing science fiction and fantasy to the web and its 800,000 users and 45 million hits a month. That and the fact that I’m fairly sure I invented search engine keyword stuffing, prompting AltaVista to get very angry in the early days of the Internet. I may also have had something to do with prototype spam, but it really didn’t seem so evil in those prehistoric days, honest. Sadly, this interview has just made me realize that I am in fact the Chuck Batowski of the science fiction and fantasy world.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Hunt: Well, on the back of the success of the first book, HarperCollins have just extended the original three book deal they won in the London auction to a six book deal--all to be set in my Jackelian universe. My second novel, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, has just come out in hardback in the UK (it’ll be splashing state-side June 2009 from Tor). The third novel in the series, The Rise of the Iron Moon, is completed now and will be coming out May 2009 in the UK, and I’m currently a busy little beaver bashing out the next three novels of the six-book deal.

I’m about fifty percent through my fourth Jackelian book, The Fires of Jago. That title is a working one, though, so will no doubt change. The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, which is the next book that US readers are going to be able to get their hands on, focuses on one of the minor characters from the first novel--Professor Amelia Harsh--and her obsession, which is finding the blueprint to a lost utopian civilization. Unfortunately for her, winning the keys to the perfect pacifist society proves a lot more deadly than she has anticipated. And rightly so, as it transpires.

The second novel’s got a deadly u-boat voyage, jungles filled with dinosaurs, an insane steamman safari guide, talking lizard men, beautiful female mercenaries, and a face-changing Scarlet Pimpernel-like character to boot (my firmest apologies to Baroness Emmuska Orczy). Fantasy? Certainly. Pulp? Oh yeah. Steampunk? Well, this probably ain’t your grandfather’s steampunk, but in the immortal words of a certain mild-mannered police station janitor that used to grace the cels of Hong Kong Phooey… Could be!

I've been a huge Alastair Reynolds fan ever since I read Revelation Space--a big, sprawling space opera that showcased an amazing imagination. Reynolds knows how to plot, and his characters have more depth than some critics give him credit for, but I read his novels because of the core strangeness in them. Somehow, Reynolds manages to convey the true alienness of life in a far-future in which humans have spread out beyond the solar system. Endlessly inventive, endlessly weird in the best possible way, Reynolds' novels satisfy the page-turner in me and also the reader who wants something more than that.

Now he's back with The Prefect, set in the same milieu as Revelation Space. It tells the story of Tom Dreyfus, a policeman who patrols the Glitter Band--the vast array of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, a teaming hub of a human interstellar empire. An attack on his area of responsibility leads to an investigation that uncovers all sorts of intrigue. It's a perfect summer novel. If you like SF, you need this book.

Stretto, the fifth and final book in L. Timmel Duchamp's stunning Marq'ssan Cycle has just been published by Aqueduct Press. Taken as a whole, the Marq'ssan Cycle is one of the most ambitious political SF series to appear in the last twenty years. novels have received praise from the likes of Samuel Delany and Cory Doctorow, with Doctorow calling them "a refreshing read and a rare example of deft political storytelling."

Unfolding over a span of 22 years through the perspective of eleven viewpoint characters, the Marq'ssan Cycle envisions radical social and political change, from dystopia-- our current political reality of plutocracy and a savagely exploitative capitalism-- to a desirable situation in which to live, one that boasts a viable, vibrant polity and a minimum of hardship and suffering for the many rather than the few. The story begins with a global intervention by extraterrestrials, who assume that humans can simply be led like rational beings to change--and quickly discover just how deeply they are mistaken; their role then becomes one of facilitating change that humans must bring about themselves. The story explores how such a change might come about by unpacking the infinite detail, the fractalness of thought, in human relationships, laying them bare. Political reality is located not in a "system," but in the human beings who produce and keep it running. And so the story the Marq'ssan Cycle weaves is really the story of people processing change in their most intimate, daily lives.

Here's the most complete answer Duchamp has yet given about the origins of the series and how they came to be published. (Excerpted from the Broadsheet interview by Cat Rambo.)

The Marq'ssan Cycle is five books--I'm reading the third right now, but I can best describe them as a mash-up of old-school sf, hard-core feminism, and spy thriller. They're also written much earlier -- can you talk about the decision to revisit, revise, and publish those books? What prompted it, and what has the experience been like as you systematically re-encountered your earlier writing?
You’re right to talk about their being an amalgam of several subgenres and styles of writing informed by and alluding to several knowledge-sets. Because the books borrow from so many different narrative styles, readers not familiar with all or most of them may well become frustrated, since they’ll be reading these books, variously, as feminist dystopia, spy thriller, a rousing old-fashioned tale of leftist revolution, a story of different sorts of lesbian (non-utopian, semi-separatist) societies, a Gothic-without-a-male hero, and so on. And the books just don’t work that way. If I had had the technical experience and accomplishment back then that I have today, I probably would not have even tried to pull off such a narrative. On the other hand, a feminist versed in standpoint epistemology would probably have little trouble reading it (now, anyway), even if she hadn’t read much science fiction.

At the time, I wrote at white heat, about a million words in a little less than two years, driven by passion and guided entirely by instinct. I became a far more conscious writer in the late 1980s, a couple of books after Stretto. My fiction still demands sophisticated reading, but I hope I’ve become better at helping the reader to figure out how to read my stories...because US culture in the nineties seemed ever more set on declaring the death of feminism and the end of the Cold War had segued into an exuberant love of a US-dominated global corporate economy, I believed the books would strike most people as politically and culturally passé. All that changed, though, with the installation of the Bush Administration, which has openly embraced naked unprovoked military aggression, torture, surveillance of citizens, and economic and fiscal policies likely to eliminate the middle class altogether. So I dragged the big box of old manuscripts out of storage—not only to determine their publishability, but to see if my memory of the acuteness of their political critique would be borne out.

I [then] revised them to reflect the major shift in global politics since the time they had been written. I also decided to set them later in the twenty-first century. The characters and their relationships, of course, all remained the same. How could they not? They’ve always been so real to me that every now and then I spot their ringers in Real Life. I could have sworn a historian giving a presentation on low-intensity warfare in the Philippines (that was back in the late eighties) was the spitting image of [my character] Kay Zeldin. Or to take another, more recent example, a couple of years ago I met someone at a convention who viscerally reminded me of David Hughes as he followed me around buttonholing me after I’d been on a panel he’d attended. (Add to that, he identified himself as a surveillance expert who worked for a military contractor.) It’s virtually impossible to alter characters who’ve taken on that degree of reality in the author’s mind.
 
Though preparing the books for publication didn’t entail major revisions of narrative structure or even terminology, I found the process tricky, vexatious, and—as I approached the end of the process—poignant. Vexatious because as I read the five mss I could literally see my writing improve and the style in which the books were written grow in sophistication, even as I recognized a certain crude vitality and intensity absent from my more mature writing. Tricky because I realized that I couldn’t tamper with the structure and style of the books without wrecking them and so had to confine myself to stripping them down as far as they could stand (while never having a clear sense of how far that might be). Poignant because for the two years I spent writing these books, they possessed me body and soul in the way nothing has ever done before or since. Imagine it, on my best days I would write forty or fifty pages at white-heat intensity, barely pausing to eat...And poignant, of course, because after having kept these books to myself for twenty years, they’re now no longer mine to do with as I wish. Stretto is at the printer as I speak. The possibility for alteration is gone. And most important, those characters and their stories are no longer my own private preserve. I feel both liberated of a burden and bereft of a secret that has been part of who I am for most of the time I’ve been a writer.            

Urban lit: Too racy, or just too "uneven"?

School Library Journal's cover story this month is all about urban lit, and how it's become increasingly popular with teens, but not so much with librarians:

"The most troubling thing about street lit isn’t necessarily its graphic descriptions of sex, violence, and drugs or its occasional fondness for gangsta rap’s explicit language or even that it seemingly glamorizes thug life. No, what many librarians may wince at is the uneven quality of its content."

If you're not too familiar with this genre, the article provides a full retrospective from the pulp novels of the '50s and '60s to Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever and K'wan's Gangsta, books that helped kick off the current wave of popularity. They also cover tamer teen series like Bluford High and Kimani Tru and include a list of urban lit titles for both adults and teens.

What I'm reading this week: Cycler
Nothing sets up comedy like an inexplicable, middle-of-the-night gender-swap. Lauren McLaughlin's debut, Cycler, is a whirl of hormonal confusion, featuring a 17-year-old girl who has a slight problem--every month she turns into a guy for four days.

Once I finally figured out what was happening (the first, somewhat dizzying scene drops you directly into a cycling transformation), I totally bought off on the character(s), Jill and Jack, and now I can't wait to see where she takes it (I'm about 40 pages in). The dialog is fun and movie-like, not too surprising since McLaughlin is also a screenwriter. In fact, she is working on a screenplay for Cycler (as well as a sequel to the book).

In a recent interview on Sybil's Garage, McLaughlin offered one of the more straightforward answers I've seen to the question of "Why YA?" (found via BoingBoing):

"I never knew the category of YA existed until I started meeting science fiction writers who were suddenly being shelved in the YA section. I'm not an expert in publishing, but my sense is that it's a new category. My original idea for Cycler dealt with the main characters at age twenty-five. But as soon as I started writing it I realized all the juicy identity stuff was being shoved into the backstory, so I simply backed up and wrote it from the teenagers' points of view."

About a punk rock girl
Stephanie Kuehnert is having a busy week. She's hosting a week-long "cyber extravaganza" to kick off the release of her first novel, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (from MTV books). She's interviewing writers, musicians, and filmmakers on her Blogspot blog, Life, Words, and Rock 'n' Roll, as well as her LiveJournal and MySpace pages. (See the big ad on her website for more info.)

I like this tidbit about the author, from her website bio, about things she did in high school:
"She wrote several feminist zines including Kill Supermodels, Goddess Defiled, Hospital Gown, and Do Not Go Quietly Unto Yr Grave."

You can read an excerpt from the beginning of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone here (scroll down...if you love music, I dare you not to get hooked).

The book has already received raves from Bust, YABC, and Teen Book Review, as well as an extensive review from the L.A. Times that describes the writing as "punk on the page":

As a fictive artifact of an aggressive, didactic genre in which shades of gray are often obliterated by black and white beats of rage, Kuehnert emerges as a true subversive -- retaining her cred while expanding the form.

And if the title alone makes you nostalgic for Sleater-Kinney, here's some concert footage of them performing I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (and, weirdly, the YouTube comments also talk about this book.)

What's your YA beef?
Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray is inciting YA bloggers to riot--or at least write about aspects of teen publishing that frustrate them. The big YA debate kicks off on July 20th.--Heidi

It all started so harmlessly...

A few weeks ago, Daphne suggested I stray from my nonfiction comfort zone and check out Pulp writer Charlie Huston.  Crime thrillers have never been my cup o' tea, but I recently read (and loved) John Connolly's The Reapers, so I figured I'd give Huston a shot.  She lent me a copy of Caught Stealing and that was that. 

Or so I thought.

Less than a month later, I've come to the realization that I'm now a Charlie Huston addict.  Not just because I've torn through the entire Hank Thompson trilogy (Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, A Dangerous Man) AND the stand-alone The Shotgun Rule, but because of the crazed way I devoured each title.

The need to satisfy my Huston fix gave birth to duplicitous behavior, as I literally couldn't put these books down.  Their action-packed narratives made it impossible to find a stopping point, as Huston refuses to ease off the gas until the final page has turned. 

As a result, here's just a sampling of what I've resorted to over the past week alone thanks to Charlie Huston: 

• Reading in our dark garage after telling my wife I was fixing a broken lawnmower
• "Accidentally" taking the wrong bus home so that I could sneak in a few more chapters with a longer commute
• Faking a stomachache in order to crash on the couch with Six Bad Things
• Downing four-shot lattes each morning to compensate for a late night spent reading

And I'm not even bringing up the planned-but-not-executed "I'm going for a jog" scheme.

Thankfully, I've broken this vicious cycle and am back on track with a fantastic bio on Roald Dahl, but that doesn't stop me from sneaking glances at the copy of Already Dead on my bookshelf.

Maybe just one chapter before calling it a night tonight?

*Sigh*

--Dave

Here's an intriguing mix of post 9-11 modernism: Jessica Z, a near-future novel that Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Black Out says "offers an intense and startling vision of the near future where a young woman struggles to find a roadmap for life beneath the thunderheads of terror, lust, and art. Perfectly capturing the ubiquitous sense of dread in a post- 9/11 world dominated by violence and mass media, Jessica Z. is gripping, unsettling, and dreamlike. A dazzling debut that kept me anxiously turning the pages—and stayed with me long after the book was closed." I was honestly going to give this one a pass, but the "mix" alluded to by Unger intrigued me. I'm about half-way through the novel and it's tight, well-written, and fairly unusual. It's an audacious move to add terrorist acts to a story about relationships and eroticism, but it seems to be working. Shawn Klomparens is at the very least a genuinely original new voice in fiction. Definitely check this one out.

I'm a sucker for anything related to dogs: Television shows (I can't wait for "Greatest American Dog" to air this Thursday), movies, dog blogs, events and especially books. One of my favorite books of all time (along with millions of other dog lovers/readers) is Marley & Me. But, a new book by Seattle author Garth Stein has entered the scene and I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. Why? Because it is written from the perspective of a dog. This can go two ways. One, we get a baby-talking, cutesy interpretation of a dog's world, usually involving high jinx and other adventures. Or, as with Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain, we get a contemplative, philosophical look at life and what it means to be human (yes, human).

In Racing in the Rain, Enzo the dog takes us on a heartbreaking journey through the life of his owner and racecar driver Denny Swift. Stein does an amazing job of capturing a dog's unconditional love for its family, with a sweetness that is not syrupy. Without giving too much away, let's just say a concerned flight attendant had to ask if I was okay on my flight from Vienna to London. Thank you British Airways for your concern over my stifled sobs. Alas, no real tragedy; just a fabulous read.
 
--Brandie Ahlgren, CityDog Magazine

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NYT bestselling author Michelle Richmond is a bit of a chimera: her novels certainly have mainstream, commercial appeal but there's often a dark core to them, along with influences that include Italo Calvino and Paul Auster. This gives them a lot more depth than the breezy covers might suggest. Her latest, No One You Know, is as much Borgesian mystery as it is the story of a complex relationship between a woman and her sibling. Twenty years after the murder of Ellie Enderlin's sister, Lila, Ellie acquires a strange book of mathematical equations that might hold the key to finding out who killed Lila. What follows is a fascinating exploration of the past, of family secrets, and of a centuries-old mathematical puzzle.

Richmond's other books include The Year of Fog and Dream of the Blue Room. Her stories and essays have appeared in Playboy, Kenyon Review, and the anthology Logorrhea. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son. I recently interviewed her via email. She replied from her home office, "which is a small room in a small house ten blocks from San Francisco's Ocean Beach. It's chilly and foggy today, as it is most days in June, and there's a bit of sea air coming in from one of the bedroom windows at the back of the house, which I had to open because I just burned a pan of cornbread. Really! I'm thirty-something years old and spent the first twenty years of my life in Alabama, and yet I haven't mastered the art of not burning the cornbread. Books everywhere. Papers scattered about. The closet door has come open, and various things are falling out of it: a kiddie croquet set, an exercise step, and a Trader Joe's bag filled with books I need to send out to people who have been nice to me. I've got Lloyd Cole playing on the computer speakers."

                          

Amazon.com: This is your second novel for Delacourte. Does writing a novel get easier each time?Michelle Richmond: A little, maybe. There's no formula for writing a novel, so in a way one reinvents the wheel each time. But I definitely write more efficiently now. I've become more focused over the years, less likely to write an entire chapter that is ultimately expendable. With The Year of Fog I cut upwards of a hundred pages in editing, but with No One You Know I ended up omitting only about fifty pages in the final draft. I rarely know how the novel is going to end when I begin it; I tend to figure out the plot as I go along. However, from the moment I begin, I do have a very clear idea about characters, theme, and structure, as well as a strong handle on what the emotional and intellectual centers of the book should be.

Amazon.com: Was there a particular spark or catalyst for the writing of No One You Know?
Richmond: It's difficult to pinpoint a specific catalyst. However, I knew from the start that I was interested in the fine line between fact and fiction, and the way stories shape our lives. I was interested in the idea that the stories others tell about us can have enormous repercussions. I knew that I wanted San Francisco to be the setting for the book, but not as much a character in its own right as it was in The Year of Fog. And I also decided at the outset that I was going to tackle something I've avoided my entire life--math. The narrator, Ellie, is a coffee buyer, but her sister, who was murdered 20 years before, was a math prodigy. While I didn't want the novel to hinge too much on mathematical esoterica, I did want the flavor of mathematics to be part of the book; so while the narrator is as math-phobic as I am, she is able to appreciate some of the stories behind mathematics with a layperson's eye. I have always been drawn to "found texts" in fiction, so it was great fun for me to have Ellie come across Lila's math notebook from her days at Stanford.

Amazon.com: Would it be correct to call this a lit. mainstream novel that happens to contain a mystery, or do you see it as a mystery novel?
Richmond: I see it as mainstream literary fiction that happens to contain a mystery. One of the reviewers called it a "literary thriller," which surprised and delighted me. While I never specifically set out to write a mystery, there's definitely a strong element of mystery at play in the book. I think there's room in the world of literary fiction for writers to play with all kinds of genres. Fortunately, that's something that is a lot more readily acknowledged and accepted these days--a blurring of the lines between mainstream, literary,  fantasy, mystery, science fiction, erotica, etc.

Amazon.com: There's a centuries-old mathematics puzzle involved in the plot. That strikes me as a slightly Borgesian element. Are there any ghosts of other writers lingering behind the pages of No One You Know?
Richmond: Ah, yes, I've been in awe of Borges for many years. Talk about fictional labyrinths, stories within stories! I was also reading Paul Auster at the time I was writing the book, and was fascinated by the idea of coincidences that he explores in The Red Notebook, as well as in his fiction. In the first chapter of No One You Know, Ellie runs into someone from her pas