Author Interviews

  Mark was a PCV in Paraguay from 1978 to 1980. After the Peace Corps he earned a doctorate in English from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, then joined the Foreign Service in 1984 and served in Latin America, Turkey, and Spain. Today he spends about five months a year going abroad on teams inspecting American embassies. Over the years he had published a number of books, A Cast of Spaniards, a collection of story with Talisman House; Stone Cowboy a novel from Soho; The Liberation of Little Heaven, another collection of stories and published again by Soho; the novel  A Handful of Kings, from Simon and Schuster; and Forty Wolves, a novel published by Talisman House. He has also published somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 stories in magazines including Playboy, The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Kenyon Review, and The Idaho Review. Stories of his have won the Iowa . . .

  Why is Donald Trump popular? Travelling around America’s south for his most recent book Deep South, the writer Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) got some ideas. “It’s the gun show guys,” he says, sitting in his Hawaii home. “Virtually everything Donald Trump says, you can find on a gun show bumper sticker. Anti-Obama stuff, anti-Muslim stuff, anti-Mexican stuff, anti-immigrant stuff.” The 74-year-old warms to his theme. “Gun shows are about hating and distrusting the government … people who have been oppressed by a bad economy, by outsourcing. They have a lot of legitimate grievances and a lot of imagined grievances. There is this paranoid notion that Washington is trying to take their guns away, take their manhood away, take this symbol of independence away. They feel defeated. They hate the Republican party, too. They feel very isolated.” Alexander Bisley writing in The Guardian interviewed Theroux about his new book. Read the article . . .

Jonathan Weisman (Philippines 1988-90) is the Washington based economic policy reporter for The New York Times.  He has also worked for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal , and USA Today. Now he has written a novel, No. 4 Imperial Lane. • What was you college background and reasons for joining the Peace Corps? I went to Northwestern University with a year abroad at the University of Sussex, double majoring in journalism and history with a concentration in Africa and the Middle East. I was torn in those years between my love of old-fashioned newspaper writing and my interest in economic development. I actually had been thinking of the Peace Corps for years — I had a romantic vision of myself in an arid village in the Sahel struggling against the elements. But in the end, I applied more to use it as a tie breaker. My experience in the . . .