Books

"I'd also recommend famed KC sellout James Ellroy. I think our town is much the sadder for his leaving. I love American Tabloid, and whenever I read it, it takes me about a week to shake it out of my head. I start writing in that voice — it's like hanging around with somebody who has a really profound accent. It's a great sleazy pulp novel but written by one of our greatest novelists. It's completely compulsive, like potato chips."

Gabriela Lemmons — or SENORA ELM GIMBAL, as she might be known anagrammatically — comes from a family of migrant workers. Influenced early by storytelling traditions passed down by her father, she performs her bilingual poetry and memoir as a member of Kansas City's Latino Writers Collective, a group of poets and writers affiliated with the Writers Place.

"I read Mark of the Lion — it's by Suzanne Arruda. She's from Kansas. It's the first of a series. It's a mystery novel about a character named Jade del Cameron.

"It has mystery and adventure — the first novel takes place during World War I. It's almost like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jade is an ambulance driver attached to the French army. There was a whole group of women who drove ambulances, picking up the wounded. Her boyfriend, David, is a pilot, and his plane is shot down. She goes to rescue him. Right before he dies, he tells her to find his brother.

"I am not a big mystery fan, but this captivated me. Arruda did the homework, lots of research. She learned to shoot a gun. She just came back from a research trip to Africa. She learned how to shoot a bow and arrow so she could portray it in a book. She used to be a zookeeper.

"In the early 1900s, women weren't supposed to be doing these things. It wasn't proper for women to be chasing around, trying to solve mysteries and have adventures."

Brian Shawver is a novelist and an assistant professor at Missouri State University, where he teaches fiction writing. A graduate of the world-famous Iowa Writers Workshop, he is the author of The Cuban Prospect and Aftermath. Anagram: BRAINWASH REV.

"I'm sort of evangelical about the Flashman series. Have you heard of Tom Brown's School Days? It's a Victorian novel set in a public school for boys.

"The villain is a bully named Flashman. And this 20th-century writer named George MacDonald Fraser decided to write these novels where Flashman, the bully from these old Victorian novels, is the protagonist.

"He's grown up to be a soldier and a hero, even though he's still a pretty horrible guy. He's completely repugnant but sympathetic, because it's told in the first person. He's always in the right historical place and time — the Crimean War, the Zulu War, all these pivotal moments in Victorian military history.

"Flashman's always getting praise as a hero despite blatantly running from trouble and taking credit for other people's heroism. Flashman and the Redskins is my favorite. Fraser is a history military buff, and the books have elaborate appendices. I can't recommend them highly enough. People will thank you for introducing them to these books."

Whitney Terrell was born and raised in Kansas City and educated at Princeton and the Iowa Writers Workshop. A writer-in-residence at the Rockhurst University School of Professional Studies, he is the author of the novels The King of Kings County and The Huntsman. THEREIN TRY WELL is one possible rearrangement of the letters in his name.

"I hope you're mentioning Cross-X by Joe Miller. I read it and blurbed it when it was in galleys. Joe sold this book on the basis of articles he wrote for the Pitch, and it's extremely well-done. It's about the debate team for Central High School. It's about this terrific debate team — the young kids and the coaches are basically abandoned by the school system. Joe's portraits of these public-school kids who start beating these really good prep-school kids across the country are incredible. It's not an Oprah book — the kids can be irritating and they make bad decisions, but all kids are like that. And Joe gets across how unpredictable they can be in a natural way. It's an important Kansas City book.

"The book that I would recommend to a kid would be Catch-22. I recently got back from Iraq — I was doing an embed with some soldiers, a piece for The Washington Post. Just going through the bureaucratic process of getting to Iraq as a writer, dealing with people who have desks and never go outside the wire, that was the most revelatory thing to me about Iraq. Many soldiers will tell you Catch-22 is a completely accurate picture of how Army bureaucracy works.

"Most war novels — even anti-war novels — treat war seriously, as a serious, soul-defining, changing experience. In a way, as Tony Swofford says in Jarhead, presenting war seriously makes it attractive. The interesting thing is that [Joseph] Heller takes another tack by refusing to take it seriously. Yossarian's no hero. It's amazing that Heller wrote that book about the one war that everyone considers to be the most noble in our history."