Carla Malden: Playback (a novel)

Playback (A Novel) — Carla Malden — 9781644284872 — Hardcover — 216 pages — Rare Bird Books — Published August 12, 2025 — $28 — ebook versions available at lower prices

Time travel fiction is among my favorite literary genres. I’ve been reading time travel novels avidly since I was a kid. I am sure the first one I read was HG Wells’s Time Machine, probably before I was even 10 years old. And I’ve since read many more. Time and Again by Jack Finney and If I Never Get Back by Daryl Brock are two of the best books I have ever read, so good that I have read each of them more than once. Now I can add Carla Malden’s Playback to my running list of time travel favorites.

When I was offered this book to read, I had no idea of the subject. I wanted to read it simply because Carla and I have known each other since we were children, and long ago, our parents were friends. I’ve read Carla’s work in the past and knew that she is a terrific writer, but I did not know what this book would be like. As it turns Playback was a welcome treat. It’s a wonderful book.

I also did not realize that Playback is the sequel to Carla’s previous novel, Shine Until Tomorrow in which her main character, Mari Caldwell, finds herself time traveling from her modern life as an unhappy 17 year-old to San Francisco in 1967 and the extraordinary period of the Summer of Love. In that book, she becomes an influential figure in a nascent rock and roll band’s story of success.

Fortunately for me, one does not need to have read Shine before reading Playback in which Mari, now 34, travels back in time once more—this time to the fall of 1967, when in a whirlwind of activity, her life is changed again.

Previously, she experienced and believed in the idealism of the sixties but now she feels only disillusionment. She’s been divorced from what she thought would be a fulfilling marriage and she’s stuck doing photography work she does not care about. She’s disappointed in life and particularly does not feel she is doing right by her daughter. Playback takes Mari back to the Haight-Ashbury of 1967 at just the moment in her life when she needs it to be restarted. It’s an adventure story that unfolds her inner being in surprising and meaningful ways.

Playback captivated me, and brought me back to my own past in many ways. Carla’s characters are fully drawn, she deals well with the anomalies and intricacies of the concept of time and how changes in the past alter the future without making too big of a deal about it and distracting us from the emotional core of the book. I did not want it to end, and of course now I want her to write another book to finish Mari’s story and complete a trilogy.

It was great fun for me to talk to Carla about her book, her characters and the two novels that tell Mari’s story, and also to revisit the touchstone place and time that has meant so much to our cultural history. Whether you lived through the sixties or just have heard about it in stories and books, Playback will take you there and like Mari, you will find yourself torn between staying or returning to your own life, maybe changed for the better as she was.

Carla Malden was born and raised in Los Angeles. She worked in film production and development and then as a screenwriter. Working with her father, Academy Award winning actor Karl Malden, she co-authored his critically acclaimed memoir When Do I Start? Carla has written features for the Los Angeles Times, and her previous novels include Search Heartache, Shine Until Tomorrow, and My Two and Only. She is a member of the Board of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

Author website.

Rare Bird (publisher) website.

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Helen Sheehy: Just Willa (a novel)

Just Willa (a novel)—Helen Sheehy—Cave Hollow Press—978-2-7342678-3-9—paperback—428 pages—$21.95—April 13, 2025—ebook versions available at varying lower prices

As many Writerscast listeners know, I only interview writers about books I like and enjoyed reading enough to want to share with my listeners. So every episode of this podcast does represent a certain “best of” approach to my reading, since you will never hear about the books I did not love, or could not bring myself to finish.

From among those many books I like, Helen Sheehy’s Just Willa is a special one – this is a flat out just a wonderful novel. It focuses entirely on the story of one woman and her family, Willa Hardesty, and her difficult farm life in dusty, dry Oklahoma. Her story follows seven decades of one woman’s life, a twentieth century family chronicle that focuses on the small struggles of daily life, a difficult husband, the challenges of raising children and the heartbreak that goes with a large family.

Willa is tough because her world requires her to be tough. She is the daughter of a homesteader who somehow manages to be a single mother in an era that provides almost no support, then marries a bootlegging cowboy who is never honest with her. Her seemingly “small” life is really a world that is far greater than it seems, and she lives it with indomitable strength despite all her hardships and struggles to understand who she really is.

Like most great fiction, we come to realize that this novel is entirely true.

I really enjoyed speaking with Helen about her book, her writing process, and her past work as a biographer. I think you will enjoy this conversation, and I hope it might spur you to read Just Willa yourself, and because she is a really fine writer, and this book is autobiographical fiction, perhaps you will be interested in reading her biographies as well.

Helen Sheehy grew up on farms in Oklahoma and Kansas, although she’s lived in Connecticut most of her life. She’s been a dramaturg at Hartford Stage Company and written biographies of theatre pioneers; Margo Jones, Eva Le Gallienne, and Eleonora Duse.

Sheehy taught theatre and English in high schools in Kansas and Connecticut, which was the basis of her first book, a textbook titled All About Theatre. She was Adjunct Professor of Theatre at Southern Connecticut State University for over twenty years. Sheehy has also taught acting and improvisation to inmates in a maximum security prison in Connecticut.

She lives in Hamden, Connecticut. Just Willa is her first novel.

“Helen Sheehy’s masterful prose immerses you in Willa Hardesty’s world with such rich detail and emotional depth that you feel the dust of the Oklahoma plains and the quiet strength it takes to hold a family together. It’s a powerful reminder that even the women who shape our lives can hold truths we only come to understand with time. This book is for anyone who has ever known their mother—or thought they did.”—Michael Sucsy, Emmy-winning writer/director of Grey Gardens

Author website.
Buy the book on Bookshop.org

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb

Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb — Iris Jamahl Dunkle — University of California Press — Hardcover — 9780520395442 — 416 pages — $27.95 — October 15, 2024 — ebook versions available at lower prices.

“The new history is coming, if you dig through the archives with a new gaze.”—Iris Jamahl Dunkle

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Anne Enright: Actress – A Novel

Actress: A Novel – Anne Enright – 978-1-324-00562-9 – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 272 pages – March 3, 2020 – $26.95 – eBook version available at lower prices

I think it is pretty safe to say that Anne Enright is one of the best writers of our time. Her writing is so well done that you don’t notice her deft ability to portray characters and tell their stories as if you were present at the time.

In some ways, Actress is an unusual novel, structured more like a memoir, albeit a fictional one. The story meanders the way a person might when telling a story about their parents and themselves. Ostensibly Actress is the story of Katherine O’Dell, the narrator’s mother. Norah, the daughter, is herself a writer in mid-career. But as I read the book, it became clear that this book is really about Norah, and while the daughter-mother relationship is central to her story, there are more layers than initially meet the eye here. It’s not so much a fictional portrait of an actress, but a fictional portrait of a writer.

Norah, the writer, has spent her life avoiding writing about her mother. Being the daughter of a famous, even notorious actress, is something she has tried not to deal with, even though it is the grounding of her own life story. That her mother ends up in decline is also defining for her. Katherine was a difficult, mercurial, highly private and complicated person. Her daughter, our narrator, is ultimately more like her mother than she wants to believe or accept. In Enright’s telling, the writer tells the story she must tell, even if it is not always the story she wants to tell.

Aside from being a terrific writer, Anne Enright is an outstanding conversationalist, making her a great subject for an interview. It’s pretty obvious how much I like speaking with writers about their books, and a conversation with Anne Enright is a joy. I am sure that you will enjoy listening to this interview and you will find this book well worth spending some time with. I had the pleasure to speak with her in 2015 about her last novel, The Green Road, another terrific book. Here’s a link, in case you want to listen to that conversation as well.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

She has written short stories that have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. In 2004 she received the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award for her short story, ‘Honey’. She has published three collections of short stories.

Her novels are The Wig My Father Wore (1995), shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize; What Are You Like? which was the winner of the 2001 Encore Award; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002); The Gathering (2007) which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction; and The Forgotten Waltz (2011). Her most recent novel, The Green Road (2015) won the Irish Novel of the Year.

Enright is also the author of a book of humorous essays, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). She lives in Ireland.

You can buy Actress online from RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut where it is a current Staff Pick.

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Arthur Phillips: The King at the Edge of the World

The King at the Edge of the World – Arthur Phillips – 9780812995480 – Random House – Hardcover- 288 pages – $27.00 – February 11, 2020. Ebooks available at lower prices.

At Writerscast, there is a strict rule that I only talk to authors whose books I like. So every book that appears here is one that I truly enjoyed reading. Given that fact, it is important to note that Arthur Phillips’ novel, The King at the Edge of the World, is a book I loved reading. It is a great story by a writer in full command of his craft.

I hate giving away plot so I won’t even come close to doing that. Suffice to say, this book takes place at the end of the Elizabethan era (the first Elizabeth, that is). It involves a series of events that lead inexorably to a glorious and satisfying conclusion, beginning with the arrival of a Turkish doctor to England as part of a diplomatic mission and going through a series of sometimes unfortunate and even tragic events. What develops from this quiet beginning is what makes this book so pleasurable to read. And it is full of ideas, ruminations, wonderful characters, all woven together to create a fabric that wraps around you like an old and very comfortable shawl.

“The book is a delightfully rich fruitcake and an old-fashioned pleasure to read; its plot is an intricate set of intersecting mechanisms and locks and keys, which, when they finally all fall into place, provide the reader with the gawping satisfaction of having been well and truly fooled,” Dominic Dromgoole writes in his review. “Simply writing for the reader’s pleasure seems to be increasingly rare these days, and to pick up a book like The King at the Edge of the World, which contains teasing philosophical and theological ideas within an unapologetic entertainment, is a small mercy for which much gratitude is due.”

A New York Times Editor’s Choice selection

I’ve spoken to Arthur before. In 2009 – so long ago, it seems – we talked about an earlier novel of his, The Song is You, another wonderful book. Arthur is a distant relative of mine and it is a wonderful thing to have such a terrific writer in the family.

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a failed entrepreneur, and strikingly, he as been a five-time Jeopardy! champion.

His first novel, Prague, was a New York Times Notable Book, and received the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was an international bestseller in 2004. His third novel, Angelica, made The Washington Post list of best fiction of 2007 and that paper called him “One of the best writers in America.” The Song Is You was a New York Times Notable Book, and Kirkus wrote, “Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged in the present decade.” His fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, was published in 2011 to critical acclaim, and like its predecessors, and was named a New York Times Notable Book.

The play taken from that book received its world premiere reading at New York’s Public Theater in 2011 and became a full stage production in 2013, under the auspices of the Guerrilla Shakespeare Project. His short story, Companionship, was adapted into an opera by Rachel Peters and debuted at the Fort Worth Opera in 2019.

The film version of Angelica was released in 2015, and other films based on his work are currently in development. His work has been published in twenty-seven languages.

He has written for television, including Damages (FX/DirecTV), Bloodline (Netflix), Tokyo Vice (HBOMax) and he has further television pilots in development.

Arthur lives in New York City with his two sons.

Reading Arthur Phillips novels is always a deep pleasure for me. Talking to Arthur Phillips about his writing is similarly always a pleasure.

Learn more about Arthur Phillips at his website.

The wonderful bookstore, RJ Julia, in Madison, Connecticut, carries all the books we talk about here. You can purchase a copy of The King at the Edge of the World from them right here.

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Fred Waitzkin: Deep Water Blues, a Novel

Deep Water Blues: A Novel – Fred Waitzkin – 9781504057745 – 160 pages – Open Road Media – paperback – May 28, 2019 – $17.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

Fred Waitzkin’s Deep Water Blues is a surprisingly affecting short novel based to a great extent on his personal experiences in a small boat on the open water and islands of the Caribbean. Because it is based in so much lived experience, it has an authenticity that shines through in every page. In Deep Water Blues three older men (including the boat’s owner) and one younger man, a painter who has never been to sea, leave Ft. Lauderdale on an old boat heading for a Bahamian island that has an almost mythical story and appeal. Each is there for a different reason and each will gain something different from their adventure. But the story is really about the island and the mysteries of what happened there.

When I first started reading this book, I did not expect to find it as compelling as I did in the end. There’s alot more here than initially meets the eye, and this is a book I can recommend to readers.

Waitzkin calls his book a “curated blend of real-life experience and fiction.” Deep Water Blues tells a compelling story about an unusual man in an exotic place, an almost mythical story whose hero suffers a classic fate and redemption in a mysterious and beautiful location, bringing to mind Shakespearean and Biblical storytelling. Waitzkin writes in spare prose that carries his story through to its exciting end, and makes a short book impactful beyond its length.

Fred Waitzkin was born in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was an English major at Kenyon College in Ohio, then taught English at The College of the Virgin Islands, where he also got to pursue his love of fishing for big game fish. Fred and his wife moved to New York City, where Waitzkin wrote feature journalism, personal essays and reviews for numerous magazines including Esquire, Forbes, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Outside Magazine, and Sports Illustrated.

Waitzkin’s first book was Searching for Bobby Fischer. Published in 1984, it’s the story of three years in the lives of Fred and his chess prodigy son, Josh Waitzkin. The book became an internationally acclaimed best seller, and the film based on it was nominated for an academy award.

Mortal Games, his biography of world chess champion, Garry Kasparov was published in 1993, and was followed in 2000 by The Last Marlin, a memoir. The Dream Merchant, Waitzkin’s first novel, was published in 2013 – Deep Water Blues is his second published work of fiction. Fred still lives in Manhattan with his wife Bonnie, and still spends as much time as possible on his old boat, Ebb Tide.

It was my pleasure to speak with Fred, and while we talked about the book at hand, our conversation went into a variety of related coves and channels.

Visit Fred Waitzkin’s website to learn more about him and his writing.

“Deep Water Blues does what all fine literature aspires for – it transports readers to another time and place, in this case, to a sleepy, lush island deep in the Bahamas. Fred Waitzkin writes about life, sex and violence with aplomb, and Bobby Little is a tragic hero fit for the Greek myths. Hope to see everyone on Rum Cay soon.” – Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood

“Fred Waitzkin effortlessly recreates a singular world with uncanny insight and humor. His language is remarkable for its clarity and simplicity. Yet his themes are profound. This is like sitting by a fire with a master storyteller whose true power is in the realm of imagination and magic.” – Gabriel Byrne, actor and director

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Peter Rock: The Night Swimmers (A Novel)

The Night Swimmers – A Novel – Peter Rock – ISBN 9781641290005 – Soho Press – Hardcover – 272 pages – $25.00 – March 12, 2019 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

As I have said here before, one of the things I like best about doing the Writerscast interviews is that it’s introduced me to the work of many writers I would not have discovered on my own. The Night Swimmers is a perfect example. Peter Rock has been writing extremely fine fiction for many years, and yet I had never run across his work before, which still seems quite surprising to me, given the nature of his work.

Peter’s autobiographical novel captured my imagination from the outset. The writing is luminous and personal, dreamy, yet descriptive. His narrator is a young aspiring writer living temporarily in beautiful Door County in the northern reaches of Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan coastline. He’s bit lost, maybe stuck in his inability to see himself as an adult. He meets a young widow, Mrs. Abel, who is, like him, not exactly clear about herself and who she wants to be. She is older, attractive, smart and mysterious. The narrator finds himself swimming with Mrs. Abel at night without really knowing why, although there is a strong undercurrent of attraction between them, a tension that defines the essential mystery of their relationship, and the way they swim in the depths of the lake across large distances is similar to the ebb and flow of the narrator’s own life. And then Mrs. Abel disappears.

Some twenty years later, the narrator, who is now married, living in San Francisco and the father of two daughters, finds himself trying once again to understand what happened that summer, his psychic history rising to capture him like a deep lake current he used to swim in. He reads old letters and notebooks from the past, explores his relationship to a former lover, tries to understand through a sort of personal archeological expedition the world he once lived in and still cannot fully understand. Back in Door County once again, he tries to find out what happened to the elusive Mrs. Abel, and again he enters the deep lake waters to swim across the night.

Scattered throughout the book is the evidence of the narrator’s archeological exploration of his own history, pieces of paper, old emails, quotations from poets, and references to the extraordinary and strange psychic photographer Ted Serios. This book is a sort of literary pastiche that really could exist in multiple forms and formats, reflecting the author’s psychic imagination crossing over time and space through the medium of memory.

The Night Swimmers is a beautiful, complicated and challenging work of literary inspiration I found completely engaging. And it was a pleasure then, to have the opportunity to speak with Peter Rock about his fine novel.

“Peter Rock has written a weird and haunting story about a younger man and an older woman who like to swim in the dark. Happily The Night Swimmers is no male coming of age story. Instead their secret nightly practice in a dark and foreboding lake shimmers as a queer refusal for either of them to grow up right.”
—Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow

I recommend visiting Rock’s website, and follow the link to The Night Swimmers page, where there are some great visuals related to the book.

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. He is the author of several novels SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. Leave No Trace, the film adaptation of My Abandonment, directed by Debra Granik, premiered at Sundance and Cannes and was released in 2018.

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Aharon Appelfeld has passed away

The New York Times reported that the wonderful Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld passed away on January 4. I had the great pleasure to interview Appelfeld about the novel Blooms of Darkness for Writerscast in 2010. You can listen to that conversation here.

Appelfeld was the author of many books in Hebrew and at least 16 of his novels were translated into English from 1981 to 2011, the Times noted. Appelfeld’s works include Badenheim 1939 (an extraordinary and beautiful work), The Age of Wonders, To the Land of the Cattails, The Immortal Bartfuss, For Every Sin, and The Skin and the Gown. Schocken will publish The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping January 31, and To the Edge of Sorrow in January 2019.

Appelfeld was described by Philip Roth as a “displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.” Critic Eva Hoffman wrote, “In his call to break the concealed silence, he has courageously begun to illuminate regions of the soul usually darkened by secrecy and sorrow.”

He was a warm and generous man whose life and work touched readers around the world. Tablet magazine published the last interview with him recently.

The great writer Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison has passed on. Not too long ago he said “at my age you don’t think about the future because you don’t have one” but that is true only in the narrowest sense. His future is assured, because his words are still with us. I don’t think Jim really saw time as finite anyway. He was too busy experiencing life and thinking about how it felt and how to express the beauty of the world and all of us in it.

His novels are beautifully written and always humane. He loved people, but understood their foibles, failures and ultimate transcendence. He loved the natural world as only a person who lived in it can do.

I’m not sure there are too many writers like him anymore. Nor will there be.

Though best known for his fiction and essays (and large appetites), Jim was first and foremost a poet: “in poetry our motives are utterly similar to those who made cave paintings or petroglyphs, so that studying your own work of the past is to ruminate over artifacts, each one a signal, a remnant of a knot of perceptions that brings back to life who and what you were at that time, the past texture of what has to be termed as your ‘soul life’.”

His latest book of poems is Dead Man’s Float, published by Copper Canyon Press, in which this poem is found.

February

Warm enough here in Patagonia AZ to read
the new Mandelstam outside in my underpants
which is to say he was never warm enough
except in summer and he was without paper to write
and his belly was mostly empty most of the time
like that Mexican girl I picked up on a mountain road
the other day who couldn’t stop weeping. She had slept
out two nights in a sweater in below-freezing weather.
She had been headed to Los Angeles but the coyote
took her money and abandoned her in the wilderness.
Her shoes were in pieces and her feet bleeding.
I took her to town and bought her food. She got a ride
to Nogales. She told us in Spanish that she just wanted
to go home and sleep in her own bed. That’s what Mandelstam
wanted with mother in the kitchen fixing dinner. Everyone
wants this. Mandelstam said, “To be alone is to be alive.”
“Lost and looked in the sky’s asylum eye.” “What of
her nights?” Maybe she was watched by some of the fifty
or so birds I have in the yard now. When they want to
they just fly away. I gave them my yard and lots of food.
They smile strange bird smiles. She couldn’t fly away.
Neither can I though I’ve tried a lot lately to migrate
to the Camargue on my own wings. When they are married,
Mandelstam and the Mexican girl, in heaven they’ll tell
long stories of the horrors of life on earth ending each session
by chanting his beautiful poems that we did not deserve.

Craig Johnson: The Cold Dish (The Walt Longmire Series)

978-0143123170 – Penguin Books – Paperback – $15.00 – ebook editions available

What a great discovery!  This is really about an entire series of novels, not just this first book, The Cold Dish (which is exceptional, by the way).  As soon as I started reading this novel, I was hooked, and knew I would be reading and enjoying many more of Craig Johnson’s novels.  Out of the seven he has published thus far, I’ve read four this summer, and I would have read more of them if I had not been distracted by a very busy period with lots of intense work.  So I am actually looking forward to this fall and winter when I can sit by the proverbial fire and read three more really good books.

As Craig said when we talked, this series of books is driven by his characters, and it’s true enough, everyone in these books is vividly drawn and incredibly alive.  That’s what got A&E Television to buy the books to turn into their latest successful television series, a story Craig definitely enjoys telling.  Walt Longmire, the Sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, is one of the great modern heroes, full of flaws and the kind of intrepid it’s impossible not to love.   And unusually for me, at least, I don’t mind at all the way these books have been adapted for television.  A&E wisely kept them character based, and while it is plainly impossible for any video medium to be as imaginatively rich as a great novel, they’ve done a terrific job with Longmire.

Author Johnson is plainly having a great time writing these novels, and well he may.  He’s created a cast of characters it’s impossible not to be attracted to.  The Cold Dish introduces us to Walt Longmire, a twenty-five year veteran sheriff in the least populated county in Wyoming, his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, and his favorite deputy, Philadelphia-born Victoria Moretti.   Longmire is not an altogether happy man, having lost his beloved wife, and now lives alone in what might loosely be called an unfinished house.  His daughter is away in law school and he is mostly alone.  His peaceful unhappiness is interrupted by the death of Cody Pritchard, a young man who had previously been involved in an ugly incident of rape two years earlier with three other high school boys, all of whom had been given suspended sentences for raping a local Cheyenne girl.  He’s shot at long distance by an unusual and historic 45-70 Sharps buffalo rifle.  Thus starts an adventure that can only be called gripping and powerful.  As one reviewer said: “Longmire faces one of the more volatile and challenging cases in his twenty-four years as sheriff and means to see that revenge, a dish that is best served cold, is never served at all.”

Johnson is a fine literary writer taking on a popular form and making it his own.  The Longmire series is the kind of book series readers love, and it’s just as attractive to those who are seeking adventure between book covers.  Talking to Craig about his books was a true pleasure for me.  Craig lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population 25, where he truly lives the kind of life he writes about.

Author website here.  A&E Longmire site here.

The book series:

The Cold Dish

Death Without Company

Kindness Goes Unpunished

Another Man’s Moccasins

The Dark Horse

Junkyard Dogs

Hell is Empty

As the Crow Flies

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