Paul Vidich's "The Poet’s Game"

Paul Vidich's seventh and newest novel is The Poet's Game. His previous novel, Beirut Station: Two Lives of a Spy, was selected by CrimeReads as one of the best espionage novels of 2023. Vidich's debut novel, An Honorable Man, was selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top 10 Mystery and Thriller in 2016. It was followed by The Good Assassin. His third novel, The Coldest Warrior, was widely praised in England and America, earning strong reviews from The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted for the UK’s Staunch Prize and chosen as a Notable Selection of 2020 by CrimeReads.

Here Vidich dreamcasts an adaptation of The Poet's Game:

The English director, John Madden, would be a good fit to make The Poet’s Game a movie. Madden directed Operation Mincemeat and much earlier in his career, he director the multiple- Oscar winner, Shakespeare in Love with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Both movies had ensembles casts and the story lines blended personal lives into an historical moment. The Poet’s Game shares those qualities: the tense political conflict between Moscow and Washington in 2018 provides the backdrop for a love story. Madden has the light touch of a director who can bring people’s stories alive and still sustain the suspense of a thrilling plot.

My main character, Alex Matthews, could be played by the chameleon-like Damian Lewis, whose remarkable range makes him a good candidate for the role. Lewis is a smart actor and has the right amount of devious sophistication to play a spy moving two steps ahead of surveillance. Against Lewis, I would cast Natalie Portman in the role of Anna, the young Ukrainian-American translator married to Matthews. Portman can move between being loving and vulnerable and cold and determined, the opposing emotional qualities that make up Anna’s personality.

The script could be written by Tom Stoppard, but if he’s not available, I would nominate Stephen Schiff, a friend, who wrote and served as executive producer on the hit TV series The Americans. Schiff understands how to pull off an actor’s seeming and being with artful dialogue.

Visit Paul Vidich's website.

Q&A with Paul Vidich.

My Book, The Movie: The Mercenary.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercenary.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (January 2022).

The Page 69 Test: The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (October 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Beirut Station.

The Page 69 Test: Beirut Station.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Anya Blau's "Shopgirls"

Jessica Anya Blau was born in Boston and raised in Southern California. Her novels have been translated into many different languages, and featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN and NPR, and in Cosmo, Vanity Fair, In Style, Country Living, Bust, Time Out, Parade, Oprah Summer Reads, Oprah Daily and other national publications. The books have been optioned for film and television. Blau's short stories and essays have been published in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies. Blau also works as a screenwriter, a ghostwriter, and sometimes as a writing professor. Currently, she lives in New York.

Here the author dreamacasts an adaptation of her new novel, Shopgirls:

A story about a young woman finding her way through life in day-glo, high-fashion, San Francisco in 1985.

Zippy is on a quest. She wants to 1. find her father as she is the result of a one-night-stand and her mother doesn’t remember her father’s name. 2. Figure out how to be an adult (her mother was no example). 3. Learn how to kiss a man and date (she was a theater geek in school). And, 4. Figure out how to make a living doing what you love (Zippy loves clothes and fashion).

The Cast:

Zippy: she’s 19 and grew up in a one-bedroom apartment above a liquor store in San Francisco. When her mother’s boyfriend moved in, she slept in the hall beside the bathroom with the swollen, un-shuttable door.

Zippy has a great eye and an excellent sense of style. She buys some clothes from the Salvation Army, fixes them up, and gets a job at I. Magnin, the most exclusive department store in San Francisco.

Zippy needs to be played by someone whose name we don’t yet know. Anyone plucky, smart, joyful, and open to the world.

The Lifetime Salesgirls: It’s 1985 so they are all called "girls" no matter how old they are, and at work they are referred to as "Miss." Some are resentful of youthful, energetic Zippy, and some love her and want to help her navigate adulthood.

They could be played by:

Parker Posey — mean Miss Yolanda

Amy Adams — confused Miss Liaskas

Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick — the snooty Miss Braughn and Miss Braughn

Lucy Liu — the phlegmatic Miss Lee

Viola Davis — the watchful Miss Karen

Da’Vine Joy Randolph — the gung-ho Miss Dani

Zippy's “family”:

Nicole Kidman — Zippy’s sweet but childish mother who works at the Hardware Depot (and loves it! She wants Zippy to work there, too).

Leonardo DiCaprio — Zippy’s mother’s boyfriend, Howard, who is hapless, kind, and loves watching PTL club and eating Tang out of the jar. He slips into what he thinks of as Elizabethan English when he’s been drinking, which he does every night.

Jenna Ortega — Zippy’s smart, worldly, rich-born roommate, Raquel.

There are other characters, too, but they’re a surprise when they show up, and I don’t want to give anything away!

Learn more about the book and author at Jessica Anya Blau's website, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Coffee with a Canine: Jessica Anya Blau and Pippa.

The Page 69 Test: The Wonder Bread Summer.

My Book, The Movie: The Wonder Bread Summer.

The Page 69 Test: The Trouble with Lexie.

My Book, The Movie: The Trouble with Lexie.

Writers Read: Jessica Anya Blau (June 2016).

The Page 69 Test: Mary Jane.

Q&A with Jessica Anya Blau.

Coffee with a Canine: Jessica Anya Blau & Baby.

--Marshal Zeringue

Natalie Jenner's "Austen at Sea"

Natalie Jenner is the author of the instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls. A Goodreads Choice Award runner-up for historical fiction and finalist for best debut novel, The Jane Austen Society was a USA Today and #1 national bestseller, and has been sold for translation in twenty countries. Jenner is formerly a lawyer and independent bookshop owner. She was born in England and raised in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family.

Here the author dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Austen at Sea:

I had the idea for my new novel Austen at Sea for many years, ever since learning of two Boston women in 1852 fangirling over Jane Austen to the point of writing to her last surviving sibling, Admiral Sir Francis Austen, and asking for her signature--which seemed to me a pretty bold gesture at any time in history!

When I eventually sat down to write a very fictional version of this anecdote, I immediately pictured the two female protagonists as the older Dashwood sisters in a 2008 BBC adaptation of Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. British actress Hattie Morahan had the angular looks I imagined for Henrietta Stevenson, the older, more restrained sister in my book—and Charity Wakefield the blonde, blue-eyed ones of younger sister Charlotte (which doubly came in handy when she takes part in a shipboard performance of A Tale of Two Cities as Charles Dickens’s Victorian angel, Lucie Manette).

A lot of movies inspired my book as well, especially Somewhere in Time with its famous opening scene line of “Come back to me". I reconfigured this in my own story as “May we come to you?" from the sisters’ second letter to Sir Francis, a line which will constantly refrain in his lonely ninety-one-year-old’s head. I even named my theatre impresario character Richard Fawcett Robinson in reference to Christopher Plummer’s theatre character of the same surname in that film, imagining the latter as a possible descendant of my own. The bedroom set design of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was another huge inspiration, leading not only to the bow window study of the admiral but also the large brass telescope on a stand, which turned out to become an even bigger plot point than this "pantser" knew setting out.

Finally, the romantic lead in Austen at Sea is the youngest member of the Massachusetts state supreme court, Justice Thomas Nash, who finds himself a most reluctant chaperone on board ship to my two female leads, daughters of his colleague Justice William Stevenson. I had only one actor in mind the entire time I wrote: Johnny Flynn from the 2020 Autumn de Wilde adaptation of Austen’s novel Emma. I spent the first few weeks of the pandemic in March 2020 watching this movie on repeat as a huge source of comfort while waiting for, and worrying over, the imminent release of my debut novel The Jane Austen Society at a time when bookstores everywhere were closed. I had been initially—and stupidly—resistant to the idea of Flynn’s casting in that film when it was first announced; since then, I have learned to trust the movie-making gods a bit better. In a way, using Flynn's performance in that film as inspiration for my romantic lead in Austen at Sea was my very whimsical and writerly attempt at atonement!

Visit Natalie Jenner's website.

Q&A with Natalie Jenner.

My Book, The Movie: The Jane Austen Society.

My Book, The Movie: Bloomsbury Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue