An Interview with Diana Sheets: On Kindle, The Cusp of Dreams, noteworthy fiction, and Sarah Palin, a.k.a. "Lethal Weapon 2012"

Michael F. Shaughnessy - 12.4.09
Senior Columnist EducationNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

1. Diana, I understand that your book is now available on Kindle. Now, for us “ older folk", What exactly is Kindle, how does one go about using it, and why would I want to read your book on Kindle, and not in paper format?

      Yes, my novel The Cusp of Dreams is now available as an eBook in Amazon's Kindle Store.  Or go to my website, www.literarygulag.com <http://www.literarygulag.com> , and check out the excerpts that are posted there.  If you click on the novel's cover at my website, you will be hyperlinked to the Kindle Store where my book is sold and some reviews are posted.

      Kindle is the most-widely used e-Book reader in the world. The Kindle store features more than 360,000 books, a number of which may be downloaded for free or nearly free.  Most of the books sold are priced substantially lower than hardcover or paperback books (mine included).  There are three models of Kindle currently available. Kindle 2, which is capable of storing over 1,500 books, the Kindle DX, which will hold over 3,500 books, and the Kindle 2 International, which also stores over 1,500 books. 

All have (free) 3G wireless capability, enabling you to download books, typically in less than sixty seconds, directly to your Kindle.  The books and documents are easy to read even in bright sunlight.  The battery life is long.  On a Kindle you can read for four days even with the wireless feature activated.  If it's turned off, you can read for two weeks without having to recharge. 

Many readers prefer the Kindle 2 because it's light (10.2 ounces) and relatively affordable ($259.00).  I like the DX because it has a bigger screen, enables you to download PDF books and documents, and it's convenient for reading newspapers.  That's important for me because over the next two years I expect to begin reading all my newspapers and magazines either on Kindle or on the Internet. 

Indeed, Brian Stelter of The New York Times just published a column "Group of Magazine Publishers Is Said to Be Building an Online Newsstand" on November 25, 2009 announcing the formation of a magazine consortium--Time Condé Nast, Hearst, and Meredith--that will soon offer an online newsstand, the magazine equivalent of iTunes, from which consumers will be able to purchase digital magazines and download them electronically.  

      I can't overestimate the convenience of reading with a Kindle.  When I travel I don't have to go searching for my newspaper.  I have the option of downloading journals or weekly magazines that, for the moment, I still read as paper magazines.  Many people use the Kindle DX to store and organize all their PDF documents (legal, scientific, research, or personal).  The DX enables you to download copyright-expired books in PDF format free from Guttenberg or Google (though some may have to be reformatted by Amazon for a slight fee in order to be read easily).  With Kindle you have the potential to store all the great works of literature at a fraction of the price it would cost you to purchase books to create a (physical) library.  And your Kindle library is portable.  You can take it anywhere in the world.  Another great feature is that all your purchases are electronically backed up on an Amazon server, so if you don't want all your books stored on your Kindle, you can download them as needed or download them to other devices you use (keeping in mind that for the International Kindle there is a $1.99 fee for wirelessly downloading books and items from the server when outside your designated home country).  Finally, in the event that your Kindle crashes or, more likely, that you upgrade it, you can always download your personal library from the server.

      The Kindles are attractively designed.  They're the perfect device for a committed reader who doesn't want to be carting around heavy books everywhere.  I'm tired of deciding which of the ten books I want to bring while travelling on a one-week junket.  If I'm away on an extended trip, I have, in effect, my entire library at my disposal.  The Kindle has The New Oxford American Dictionary built into the device.  Move the cursor to a word, and you can read the definition.  For me, this is a "killer app".  The Kindle 2, Kindle DX, and Kindle 2 International have great features.   They offer synthetic text-to-speech, which works quite well. 

Content can, therefore, be downloaded to your iPhone or iPod Touch enabling you to listen to the audio version while jogging or doing errands.  The Kindles have an MP3 feature so you can listen to music while you read.  All the Kindles enable you to hyperlink from the body of the text to footnotes, another feature I love.  The Kindles have a QWERTY keyboard that enables you to add notations to the text, electronically bookmark passages, and even search the Web. 

The Kindle automatically remembers the last page you've read (of all the books you have downloaded and begun reading).  The Kindle reader is available as a Beta download for the P.C.  It will be available soon for Mac and Blackberry users.  Indeed, many electronic eReaders, including the Kindle DX, enable you to download PDF eBooks now.  The eBook market is primed to grow explosively.  If you're seeking to reach younger readers, offering eContent for their cell phones is key.  And let's not minimize the convenience of being able to read your digital books on any Kindle enabled device, thereby offering the potential to access your information from almost anywhere, anytime.  Bottom line: if $259.00 seems too expensive, try downloading the reader to your computer or phone and test the features yourself (keeping in mind that Windows 7 is the most feature-rich platform from which to test the Kindle PC reader).

      Seth Godin's Blog has made the argument that some readers are more important than others.  In this case he means eBook readers--with Kindle readers setting the gold standard--since "Kindle readers buy two or three times as many books as book readers" (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/10/some-people-are-better-than-others.html <http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/10/some-people-are-better-than-others.html> ).  So as a writer intent on reaching dedicated readers, I must sell The Cusp of Dreams as an eBook, and right now Kindle dominates that market.  How important is it?  Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney has projected as many as 500,00 Kindles sold this year with the potential of $1 billion next year http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/09/kikndle2-amazon-stephen-king <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/09/kikndle2-amazon-stephen-king> .  The introduction of the Kindle 2 has finally made the eBook viable, if not sexy.  Other booksellers are scrambling to follow Amazon's lead, although their readers have yet to compare in functionality to Kindle.  For these reasons I decided to begin the "roll out" of The Cusp of Dreams as a Kindle eBook before offering it in other formats next year when it will also become available for purchase in a digital PDF format and as a hardcover book.

2.      I hope that your book being on Kindle does not have any implications to being on drugs….But tell us about the characters in your book. What are they like?

      The Cusp of Dreams presents a terrifyingly stark portrait of what we have become.  When people are continually at risk of losing their jobs, they are capable of great treachery.  I worked in sales and sales management for twelve years in the metropolitan New York area.  During that time I saw ordinary Americans struggling to survive.  I listened to the life stories of many salespeople.  In these narratives it was apparent that our social fabric was unraveling.  Somebody had to present the lives of ordinary men and women desperately trying to keep their jobs.  In order that the truth be presented, I became convinced it must be presented as fiction.  This afforded me the opportunity to present the world of work as a microcosm of life as we know it today while protecting the privacy of individuals who afforded me a glimpse into their lives. 

     Because these stories are disturbing, I used humor as an enticement for the reader.  Otherwise, who could possibly bear to read this novel?   My desire to present this story is the reason I became a writer.  I am trained as a historian.  I felt compelled to present this narrative as a contemporary historical novel.  For better or worse I had the training, the perspective, the desire to bear witness. 

      Or as John McClure noted in reviewing The Cusp of Dreams on Amazon's Kindle website, "Diana Sheets takes a deep look at the lives of those deeply embedded in the modern American business culture. . . . She wonderfully captures the base spirit of the denizens of this culture. . . . Certainly anthropologists hundreds of years from now will have a field day with this novel. [The] Cusp of Dream is truly a modern gem depicting life in the American business world. . . ."

3.      We have covered some of the first chapters of your book in this post. Bring us up to date. What would we find in the first few chapters of your book?

      Chapter excerpts of The Cusp of Dreams are available on my website, www.literarygulag.com <http://www.literarygulag.com> .  The first five chapters of my novel present portraits of salesmen and women at  Amtech, an industrial consulting firm.  In Chapter 1 we meet sales manager Sue Maitland and her sales rep Bill.  We watch as a man blessed with talent and personality destroys not only his life but also the lives of his wife and children.  In Chapter 2 we meet Tina who is illegally working two jobs in order to make a down payment on a mortgage, what Sue terms "a life sentence masquerading as a property deed". 

Chapter 3 is a love story between Amtech Manager Sue Maitland and her employee Mer that is destroyed by the corporate demands of the "bottom line".  Chapter 4 provides an overview of Sue's career as youthful idealism gives way to hard-bitten determination.  Chapter 5 is a divertimento, a road trip along the Mississippi Delta that concludes ex post facto when her colleague Skip is fired.  The novel begins in a relatively restrained manner expressed through past tense and an elegiac tone, building in intensity as the tense shifts to present and the narrative voice grows ever more hard bitten and forceful. 

In order to understand the repercussions of the downsizing of America on our society, the reader must persevere to the bitter end.  As solace for reading what is obviously a difficult story, I can only tell you that you won't be bored, although you may find it disturbing.

      If the first five chapters of The Cusp of Dreams are psychological profiles, Chapter 6, which has just been posted on www.literarygulag.com <http://www.literarygulag.com> , begins to immerse us in the heart of the novel.  That chapter presents a story about the sales team working for Sue.  We begin to envision the big picture.  And what is that? Salespeople believe they can beat the odds. They are inveterate gamblers who, at least in the casinos, bet against themselves (statistically speaking) out of the misguided belief that they will win.  We watch Sue's team gambling in Atlantic City.  We meet R & L (Rita and Laurie). We become acquainted with Armani Richard.  We see Mer in an entirely new context.  We discover that for R & L their gambling victory is second to none, "better than shopping, better than sex, better than marriage, better than children, better than friendship, better than love, better than wisdom, better than life itself".

4.      “The World of Bernie Madoff" might be a good title for your next book- why are some authors so possessed with writing about greed, corruption, skullduggery and cynicism?

      Jan Mark published the Oxford Book of Children's Stories (Second edition, 2001 for children ages 9-12).  In speaking to an adult audience at the Chicago Humanities Festival, she made the astute observation that the things we long for in our personal lives: love, professional fulfillment, and a certain amount of stability (however one chooses to define that) are not the things that lend themselves to great fiction.  In the stories we read we seek conflict and tension and drama and the messy world of chaos with the prospect of a narrative that makes sense of it all.  Consider, for instance, the famous opening line penned by Leo Tolstoy in his novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

      Now I would make the case both Mark and Tolstoy are suggesting the same thing: as readers we are drawn to conflict not happiness.  Ultimately, pleasure is fleeting.  As a static state it reveals nothing about the human condition.  Imagine reading a novel in which the characters are in a state of bliss from the beginning of the story until its end…You'd quit after the fifth page.  Not only would it be the most boring story imaginable, the reader would recognize it as a lie, fictive fluff that illuminates nothing about the human condition.  Ideally, novels provide us with a window to our world. 

They offer tension and resolution, surprising twists and turns, as well as the potential to bring insight to our lives.  Sometimes these stories end happily; sometimes they don't.  But "The World of Bernie Madoff" is, like it or not, reality.  To make sense of it we need, in your words, to be immersed in "greed, corruption, skullduggery and cynicism".

5. I wonder what is happening to current literary standards. I pick up Newsweek and see this “cheesy” picture of Sarah Palin on the front cover. What are these people thinking? Or are they thinking? Or have standards sunk that low?

      Arguably the 2008 Presidential Election was a watershed.  No longer was journalistic reporting intent on discovering the truth.  Instead, "news" had become political commentary pitched to satisfy the emotions and worldview of so-called journalists and their respective constituencies.  Overwhelmingly newspapers, magazines, and network television "news" is liberal. From this perspective, war, no matter what is at stake, is perceived as evil.  Power is viewed as corrupt. 

Terrorism is imagined, as in the case of Nidal Malik Hasan, as the outcome of a victimized life rather than the willful actions of a killer buttressed by a terrorist network.  In a feminized world, oppositional perspectives are shunned rather than confronted.  Thus, the Obama administration tried to deny Fox News access.  Ironically, the vocal opposition of other network news journalists--mostly liberals--forced the Obama administration to grant Fox reporters renewed access. 

Why did the liberal reporters support reporters at Fox who have been challenging the Obama administration?  Because many liberal reporters had the presence of mind to realize that if Fox reporters could be summarily blocked from presidential coverage, then reporters from other news agencies might also be denied access.  But this strategic alliance is no détente since the liberal media believes its values are under assault by conservatives.  They fear that Sarah Palin threatens the ascendancy of the Democrats.  After all, she has an enthusiastic conservative constituency that seems determined to champion her run for President. 

Should the economy fail to recover, should the escalating debt balloon, should health care be anything less than a panacea, liberals are terrified that Sarah Palin will become "Lethal Weapon 2012", the dynamic force catapulting the Obama administration out of office and with it the Democratic mandate for reform.  Liberals fear a conservative regime would impose a libertarian style of self-governance coupled with a reinvigorated militarism.  The polarizing perspectives of liberals and conservatives today reflect a culture war.  The battle lines are drawn.  Therefore, every conceivable weapon is being employed by the liberal media to diminish Sarah Palin's appeal in order to prevent, as Maureen Dowd implies, "the Visceral One" from becoming "the One". 

      How is this done?  You make it impossible for Palin to perform her job as Governor, which forces her resign, thereby diminishing her credentials.  You make the lives of her children "fair game" to reduce her and her family to tabloid celebrities.  You "Photoshop" an image of the former Governor taken from Runner's World and paste it on the cover of Newsweek, a blatantly sexist maneuver, in order to humiliate her while boosting the circulation of a sagging Liberal magazine.  You assign eleven AP reporters to vet her autobiography Going Rogue: An American Life. 

Imagine if Barack Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father had been minutely investigated for its accuracy by eleven reporters from Fox before or during his run for the presidency.  The outcries of "Racism!" would have been deafening. In short, you--meaning, of course, the left-leaning media--do everything conceivable to sabotage Palin's political career in hopes of derailing a Conservative rising star.

      Don't believe Democrats are worried?  Consider the Op-Ed by Maureen Dowd "Visceral Has Its Value" published in The New York Times on November 22nd.  To date it is the most devastating assessment of Obama by a prominent liberal Op-Ed columnist while acknowledging Palin's grass-roots appeal.

It's easy to dismiss Sarah Palin….Yet Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power…. Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Palin. On Friday, for the first time, his Gallup poll approval rating dropped below 50 percent, and he's losing the independents who helped get him elected…. The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out….

     If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama's presidency so far, it would read: Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference….

      Palin can be stupefying simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static…. He struggles to transcend identity politics while she wallows in them. As he builds an emotional moat around himself, she exuberantly pushes whatever she has, warts and all--the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names.

Just like the disastrous and anti-intellectual W., this Visceral One never doubts herself. The Cerebral One welcomes doubt.

6. There is some good news—John Irving has a new book out. Who are some of the current writers you recommend to adult readers?

      These days fiction disappoints.  Fortunately, there are three novels I've read recently that defy the dismal trend.  The first is by James Elroy and is entitled Blood's A Rover (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).  For anybody who wants to see how language and plot can be transformed by the greatest crime writer of our age, Elroy is your man.  His stories are masculine prose in which language has been pared to a minimum and plot transports at sonic speed.  Don't expect a lot of adjectives.  Or adverbs. Or descriptive passages.  Or extensive interior thought.  Do expect language and story to challenge and confound your literary expectations.  Elroy is the rightful heir to Ernest Hemingway.  Blood's A Rover is the third in The Underworld USA trilogy begun with American Tabloid and followed by The Cold Six Thousand.  This trilogy is best classified as contemporary political noir.  Blood's A Rover offers an alternative history uncovering the ties between Hoover and the crime underworld set against the backdrop of the societal conflagration of the late 1960's.

       The best recent social satire of America, for my money, is the third novel in Bruce Wagner's "cellphone trilogy".  Still Holding (Simon & Schuster, 2004) takes you to Hollywood where everyone is a "wanna-be" celebrity, where the alternative reality, the Silver Screen, is the only realm that matters.  America can't be understood today without an immersion in L.A. "culture" and our obsession with celebrity, and for that you must read Still Holding.  Or in James Elroy's words, "Still Holding is Bruce Wagner's masterpiece. It's the place where his razor-eyed contempt melts, and he extends to his Hollywood doomed and damned a horrible empathy and pity. It's a primer and a Baedeker of the corruption of media and the human cost of playing the game…. It's a Hollywood novel that embraces everyone who has ever wanted to be someone else".

      Then there is Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (HarperCollins Publishers, 2009). Littell is a bilingual American who wrote the novel in French and now lives in Spain.  The Kindly Ones won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize.  The novel is a sophisticated reimagining of Germany's actions in World War II set against the specter of the Holocaust.  The narrative is presented by means of the fictive memoir by Dr. Maximilien Aue, a Nazi officer, who symbolizes the monstrosity of the Nazi regime while possessing the intellectual refinement that causes the reader to give pause.  The Kindly Ones has been characterized by Le Nouvel Observateur as "A new War and Peace…. Never, in the recent history of French literature, has an early work been so ambitious, so masterfully written, so meticulous in its historical detail or so serenely horrifying".  Or in the words of Anita Brookner, a highly respected literary writer in Britain, "The novel is diabolically (and I use the word advisedly) clever. It is also impressive, not merely as an act of impersonation but perhaps above all for the fiendish intelligence with which it is carried out….This tour de force, which not everyone will welcome, outclasses all other fictions and will continue to do so for some time to come. No summary can do it justice".  Contrast the breath and sophistication of The Kindly Ones with the smallness of scope expressed in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (1995), a love story (more recently a film) set in post-World War II Germany in which a young (German) man subsequently discovers the older woman with whom he had an affair was, in fact, an SS guard complicit in the deaths of Jewish women.

       Finally, let me recommend the biography by Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf, 2009).  Never was a literary writer's life documented in more excruciating detail.  It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  The biography should be read in conjunction with The Stories of John Cheever, one of the finest collection of short stories written in the Twentieth Century (though Bailey should be chided for his perspective that all fiction has a direct corollary to the actual life of the author under investigation).

7. Of course, our adolescents are busy reading Twilight. But what would you recommend to some of the more scholarly erudite adolescent readers?

      One of the joys of being an adolescent is the discovery that adult fiction is within your grasp.  That it offers you a way of sneaking up on adults and discovering their untold secrets, which in turn will profoundly enrich and inform your life.  At age twelve I began reading adult fiction and never looked back.  So my suggestions are offered in this light. My recommendations here are fabulist stories, adult fantasy of the make believe at a remove from hard-bitten realism (think Harry Potter for adults).

      Steven Millhauser, all his fiction.  Begin with Enchanted Night (a novella) about the inchoate yearnings of girls who walk the city streets at night.  And if you're charmed read The Knife Thrower, Dangerous Laughter, and all the rest.

      Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions takes place in England.  It is the story of Francis Orme, a 37 year-old living with his parents in an apartment in a building that was once the family mansion and is now subdivided and occupied by an ensemble of eccentric renters.  However, none is more engaging than Francis, who has created a "museum" of worthless objects.  Or read Carey's Alva & Irva, a story of identical twins living in the imagined city of Entralla. 

      Italo Calvino (William Weaver's translations please!) commencing with Invisible Cities and then If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (and if charmed read his others).  No description does justice to these stories, which are best described as illustrious inventions of the mind.

8.      What have I neglected to ask about your current endeavors?

      Readers who have an interest in novel excerpts from The Cusp of Dreams or literary criticism (V.S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe, Ian McEwan, Junot Díaz, Doris Lessing, Norman Mailer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Watchmen, and more) or political commentary (particularly an analysis of the 2008 Presidential campaign, Sarah Palin, and how personal narrative framed that election), should consult my essays archived at my website www.literarygulag.com <http://www.literarygulag.com> .