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Kristin Centorcelli, famously of My Bookish Ways and SFSignal, recently had the chance to talk with author Martin Seay about his debut novel, The Mirror Thief. The novel weaves a tale of three Venices, following Venetian glass makers in Italy and those who would control their inventions, and newer secrets and schemes in Venice Beach CA and a casino in Las Vegas. Publisher’s Weekly called The Mirror Thief “A true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story…A splendid masterpiece”. Wow! Please join me in giving Martin and Kristin a warm welcome. Let’s see what they got to chatting about.
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Kristin Centorcelli: Will you tell us a bit about The Mirror Thief and what inspired you to write it?
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Martin Seay: Sure! The Mirror Thief is a novel about Venice, although it doesn’t all happen in Venice. A third of it happens in Las Vegas in 2003, where a recently-retired U.S. Marine is searching for a famous gambler who’s gone missing; a third of it happens in Southern California in 1958, where a Brooklyn-born juvenile delinquent has come to seek out an obscure poet with whom he’s become obsessed; a third of it happens in the city-state of Venice in 1592, where a physician and alchemist is secretly trying to steal the technology for making flat glass mirrors on behalf of a certain foreign power. These three stories echo and intersect one another in a bunch of ways, some of which are clear, some of which are subtle.
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When I started working on The Mirror Thief, I had aspired for a while to write something about Venice, but that impulse was too broad to act on: I needed something to give me focus, and I found it when I learned that Venice maintained a monopoly on the manufacture of flat glass mirrors for about 200 years. That gave me the industrial-espionage plot for the 1592 sections, and the idea of the mirror led me (naturally) to motifs of doubling and iteration . . . which in turn led me to play with the odd fact that people keep trying to recreate Venice elsewhere. That was pretty much all I needed to get me going. Read the rest of this entry »
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