With her new novel, Maaza Mengiste pushes against what is told and what is remembered.

Four years into the nine-year marathon that would result in The Shadow King, Ethiopian-American novelist Maaza Mengiste’s stunning second novel about the 1935 Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, the author hit a wall.

“I had published a novel, so when I started this one, I thought I knew how to write a novel,” she says wryly during a call to her home in Queens, New York. Mengiste came to the United States as a child after Ethiopia’s brutal 1970s-era revolution toppled Emperor Haile Selassie, experiences that formed the foundation of her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Mengiste is now a professor in the MFA program at Queens College in New York and is married to a fellow writer/professor. After four years of frustration writing the new book, Mengiste says she really had “to relearn the craft in order to do this.”

One of the problems with her first draft, she says now, is that it was too closely tied to the facts of the war in Ethiopia. For those who don’t know, Italy believed it had been denied its fair share of African colonies after World War I and, using a border incident as pretext, invaded Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) in 1934 and briefly annexed it. 

Mengiste’s early draft “was completely attached to the historical facts and the historical data. Everything that I wrote was absolutely accurate, and the book that emerged was dry, and it was boring, and the characters were wooden, and I was completely defeated by what I had done.”

Another trap for her was the Ethiopian mythology about their ultimate victory in this war. “As a child, you hear these stories of heroism. These men were poorly equipped with old guns, charging a very highly weaponized European army and winning. While doing research, I started thinking about the myths and legends of war, and I realized that if Italy had its propaganda machine, then I also had to accept the fact that Ethiopia had its mythologies about this war. I realized I needed to break apart the myths and legends and propaganda and look deeper.”

That deep dive revealed the often hidden but undeniable role of Ethiopian women in the conflict. From that realization Mengiste developed her central character, Hirut, a young, often abused servant girl who displays a shrewd toughness and rises to become a leader. Mengiste also felt free to invent the character of “the shadow king,” a poor man with enough physical resemblance to Emperor Selassie, who had gone into exile, that he could be cultivated and trained to inspire Ethiopian fighters.

“In Ethiopian culture, the emperor is always in the front line. Always. But past leaders also had a doppelganger, somebody who looked like them on the battlefield to inspire morale and serve as a decoy,” Mengiste explains.

She quickly adds, “Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy.”

Freeing herself from being factually scrupulous also allowed Mengiste to be adventurous with the form of this novel. Yes, there are standard chapters, but there are also descriptions of photographs (one of the Italian characters in the novel is a morally compromised photographer forced to document the Italian army’s horrific atrocities); “interludes,” which describe Haile Selassie in exile in Britain; and a chorus that comments on the activities of the novel’s characters. The result is an epic novel reminiscent of the great Greek tragedies.

At Queens College, Mengiste often teaches a course on the literature of conflict, and the class always begins by reading a Greek tragedy. “I love the Greek tragedies,” she says. “I don’t know how many times I’ve read [the story of] Agamemnon and the Iliad. . . . I wanted to have the chorus because I was thinking that the way history is told is not the way that it unfolded. The chorus was a way to push against what is told and remembered.”

Mengiste also looked to the Iliad for inspiration in writing her incredibly gripping battle scenes. “I would read those battle scenes and not be able to breathe because there was just so much momentum in the prose. It gave me a great sense of the movement of battle, and I wanted to emulate that the best I could. It was fun. I really let the voice go free during battle.”

Asked what she is most proud of in The Shadow King, Mengiste points to “the freedom I gave myself. I’m really proud of the structure of the book. People will either like it or hate it, but I was willing to take the risk because I wanted to push myself as a writer—not just as a thinker but as a writer. Some of my favorite writers are those who break form. I wanted to see if I could do that under their tutelage. I’m really proud of being able to combine the stories of the Ethiopians and the Italians, to force questions about both of them, about loyalty, about racism, about being subjugated by the very people who should be protecting you. These were the questions I wanted to bring forward.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Shadow King.

The answer to whether or not professional wrestling is scripted or authentic is complicated, with the protection of kayfabe—the concept of maintaining the veracity of staged events—considered to be one of the sport’s highest tenets. If the wrestlers play along, then so does the audience—even when we know it’s an act. And isn’t this wild, sweaty show better when we all play along?

Pro wrestling serves as a clever metaphor in Chris McCormick’s second novel, The Gimmicks, a complex exploration of fakery, authenticity, luck and survival. It follows two cousins in the wake of the Armenian genocide as they search for their place in history and attempt to define the extent of their loyalty. While Ruben escapes to France and beyond, Avo becomes a pro wrestler in America. Mina, a mutual friend and love interest, enlists Terry, Avo’s manager, to help provide answers about the brothers’ whereabouts.

We reached out to McCormick, who’s an assistant professor at Minnesota State University, to hear more about this engaging tale.

What is your relationship to professional wrestling?
The title of the book comes from the wrestling term for the characters a wrestler portrays in the ring. I’m interested in the ways not only wrestlers but all of us perform different versions of ourselves. When pro wrestling is done well, it can play with those boundaries between authenticity and performance in ways I find fascinating. As a fiction writer, I find it useful to learn about my own capacities for suspension of disbelief, narrative justice and sheer storytelling joy. I grew up believing pro wrestling was real, and then I learned it was orchestrated. Now I know it’s both.

“I grew up believing pro wrestling was real, and then I learned it was orchestrated. Now I know it’s both.”

What was your process for researching pro wrestling and the Armenian genocide? Did you research your more tangential topics, like cat breeding and backgammon?
Although fictional, the novel is heavily researched and incorporates historical characters and events. Because my mother and my extended family immigrated from Armenia, I grew up learning about Armenian history. Researching the book, though, I needed more than my family’s accounts of the genocide and of the country. I read countless thousands of pages of history, including Ronald Grigor Suny’s remarkable contextualization of the late Ottoman Empire, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide, and Michael J. Arlen’s classic personal journey to Soviet Armenia, Passage to Ararat. In addition to historical research, I traveled to Armenia myself.

Similarly, my understanding of the complex inner workings of the professional wrestling industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the end of the so-called “territory days,” when wrestlers traveled the country to keep their gimmicks fresh to new audiences, required serious research. Chief among my sources were David Shoemaker’s book, The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling, and Scott Beekman’s Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America. I’m also indebted to countless hours of “shoot” interviews online with current and former pro wrestlers, whose road stories influenced the voice and perspective of my novel’s old-school ambassador to the sport, Terry “Angel Hair” Krill.

The best part about writing a novel is that you get to use everything you’re interested in. Because I’d grown up watching the old Armenians in my family play backgammon at every gathering, I learned about the game and used it in the story. As for cat breeding, I can’t say I’m interested in it, but my character seemed to be, and I was curious about his interest. That’s where the internet comes in handy.

“Writing the book helped me map my own fluctuating hopefulness and fears, my own evolving capacity to suspend my disbelief in America.”

Describe your writing process. Specifically, how do you balance teaching and writing?
The balancing act can be stressful, but I find the attempt meaningful. When I’m teaching well—when my students and I are engaged in the turbulent fun of reading closely, when questions of craft and questions of meaning synthesize into multihearted conversations about human experiences—I find that my own writing improves, too. More controlled, my prose becomes paradoxically more adventurous; my characters contradict themselves more surprisingly, and they begin to interfere with the world as much as the world interferes with them. The big questions I find myself dramatizing in fiction—about performance and authenticity, about the costs and benefits of inherited identities—are treated both with more scrutiny and more generosity.

Same goes for the other way around. When I’m energized by a good stretch of writing, I feel better equipped to inspire and cultivate in my students a serious curiosity about the ways in which language can superimpose what’s missing onto what’s right in front of our eyes and expose our own messiest contradictions. There’s a contagious relationship between the enthusiasm my students and I bring to our reading and the energy we take home to our writing.

As for process, I focus more on consistency than efficiency. I write a little every day, and I don’t use an outline until the revision process. I need to spend a lot of time with my characters to see who I’m dealing with. What are they protecting, and why? What are they willing to give up to go on protecting it? Then I have to figure out the narrator’s attitude toward the story, the tone. With The Gimmicks, all of the above took me about two and a half years. Then came two and a half more years of working out the structure. Five years later, here we are!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Gimmicks.

Who was the most difficult character to develop?
Inventing individual characters is relatively straightforward compared to developing convincing relationships between characters. Figuring out how and why my characters depended on one another, felt confined by one another, protected and/or betrayed one another—that took years of writing and revising. It became like a jigsaw puzzle: The individual pieces were important insofar as how their shapes—their emotional and psychological contours—allowed or disallowed their fitting together with the other pieces. Of course there’s a crucial difference between a puzzle and a novel: In a novel the conjoining pieces bend and stretch each other’s shapes over time, so that what once fit perfectly no longer does.

In the book, you write that the wrestling ring is the only place where men can take real care of each other. Do you agree?
That’s not me talking. That’s a man in the novel who, after a lifetime spent building protective barriers around himself, is finally grappling with his own failures to express his love for the men in his life. Reflecting on his decades in wrestling, he realizes that although the sport is a performance of violence between men, what’s actually happening in that ring is a profound and mutual tenderness.

How did the writing of this novel change you? Did it change your mind on anything?
Writing this book brought me to Armenia, literally and otherwise. I feel a deeper connection to my own origins. But the book became a reflection of my faith in my own country, too, and its future. The American dream—reinvention, meritocracy, blind justice—is a gimmick, a fiction that can only be made real if believed in and worked toward. Writing the book helped me map my own fluctuating hopefulness and fears, my own evolving capacity to suspend my disbelief in America.

What is your favorite scene in the book?
There’s a sequence at the Black Sea I like for its tonal range and movement. And I’m grateful that the ending, which came to me one day almost fully formed, still seems to me exactly right.

What’s something people might not know about Armenia?
There are 36 letters in the Armenian alphabet, which was invented in the early fifth century after millenia of Armenian as a spoken language. Although Armenian is famously unique—it belongs to its own independent branch of east Indo-European languages—the shapes of many Armenian letters were inspired by the shapes of letters in the Ethiopian alphabet. Ethiopians and Armenians looking at one another’s books might get confused, though: the sounds of the shared symbols have nothing in common.

Can you hint at any new projects you’re working on?
It’s too early to say, but music—classical and jazz, which I grew up playing (badly)—seems to be involved.

Author photo © Jenna Meacham.

Isabel Allende is a recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award. Her latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, is an epic saga set during the Spanish Civil War that follows two young people as they escape aboard poet Pablo Neruda’s real-life ship, the SS Winnipeg.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
There were no libraries where kids could go in Chile during the 1940s—not even at school. My library was at home. I had an uncle who collected books, and I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. No censorship.

While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks?
Usually I find the most valuable help from booksellers, because I tend to buy the books I use for research for my novels. When I need original documents for a historical novel, I contact librarians from the Library of Congress.

What are your bookstore rituals?
I go every day to my local bookstore (Book Passage) for coffee and browsing in the morning. First, I stop at the audiobooks shelf because I need stories for my commute. Then I talk to whichever bookseller happens to be there and get some input about new books, especially novels. Once a week, I talk to Susan in the children’s department. She keeps a list of my favorite books to give to kids when I need a gift and new releases she thinks I would like.

Read our review of A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende.

What’s the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore?
A CD of Tom Hanks’ short story collection, Uncommon Type, Ann Patchett’s recent novel, The Dutch House, as well as five children’s and young adult books for my husband’s grandchildren.

What’s your favorite library in the world?
It’s hard to name just one. I have visited several famous libraries, like the Library of Congress, where I received an award. If I had to choose, I would say the Melk Abbey library near Vienna. I was invited there to a meeting of religious leaders from all over the world and had the privilege of visiting the vault where the most valuable ancient manuscripts are kept. It was a memorable experience. I was even allowed to touch an incunable with white cotton gloves—while being watched closely by a Benedictine librarian who was almost as ancient as the book.

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet?
Two come to mind: Shakespeare & Company in Paris and El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires. The first because I have been there with no time to browse properly (it’s charming!), and the second because it’s set in a beautiful, old opera house. In a city with more bookstores per capita than any other in the world, El Ateneo is considered the most stunning.

Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature?
Probably the haunting library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Carlos Ruis Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind. But I am sure there are many more.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
I like all animals, but given the choice, I would like to have dogs at my favorite bookstore, so I could pet them while I browse and have my morning coffee.

What’s your favorite snack when browsing in a bookstore?
Hopefully excellent coffee and biscotti.

Author photo by Lori Barra

Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut, Valentine, explores the aftermath of a violent sexual assault on a young Mexican American girl by a white man in the 1970s. West Texas may be overrun by oil men, but the women are the heartbeat of this brutal and beautiful story. Wetmore answered our questions about this heartfelt novel and its explorations of racism, morality, justice, abandonment, oppression and, ultimately, hope.

What was the first spark of an idea that led you to write this brave and vulnerable novel?
I promise I’m not being coy, but I honestly can’t remember a single spark. In some ways, I feel like I’ve been listening to these stories my whole life. Don’t get me wrong: The characters and the story are fiction, but the place and the voices are real—or at least I hope they are. I guess the rhythm of the story, both the beat and the lyrics, those are the sparks. That’s a vague answer, I know. I would also add that, because I grew up in the area, I was aware of the change in the city’s demeanor when an oil boom began. I read newspapers, eavesdropped on my parents, heard rumors and stories about terrible things that happened—accidents, murders, rapes, as well as the usual bar fights and rough living that seems to thrive in oil towns.

How was the landscape of West Texas, with its glaring sun, big sky, dust and tumbleweeds, an inspiration to you, and how did it play into the novel?
I was born and raised in Odessa, the small city that provides the setting for Valentine. When I left at 18, I could not wait to get away from my hometown. I was away for many years before I began to write about it. In some ways, I think, I was waiting for the moment when I was able to see West Texas differently, and maybe even begin to long for it again, if that makes any sense. I needed to miss it, to fall in love with my hometown enough to be able to write about it. That took a long time—many years—and when I did, it was by first falling in love with land and that epic sky.

“While I hope I did justice to Glory and her family, I am also hopeful that the book shines a light on the town in ways that are complex, and nuanced, and true.”

One theme of the novel is the oil business moving to town and its toll on both the land and the people. Did you see this in your childhood?
Yes, Odessa is an oil town at the southern end of the Permian Basin. Oil, natural gas and some cattle (although those are dwindling all the time, it seems), maybe a little cotton or sorghum—those are the underpinnings of the economy. In recent years, they’ve started to see more wind farms. And of course, both the oil boom and climate change are having an impact on the little bit of agriculture there is. Fracking and horizontal drilling are changing my hometown in ways that will have long-term consequences for the people who live and work out there.

My father worked for 30 years at the petrochemical plant on the outskirts of Odessa. When I was a kid, most of the men in my family—on both sides—worked in the oil patch, at least for a few years. It was then, as it is now, terribly hard work—dangerous and poorly regulated. And I had a summer job after high school where I painted silos and cooling towers out at that same plant where my father worked. It was hot, terrifying, hard work. I’ve never forgotten it.

I loved the depth of each character in Valentine. Which character was hardest to write? The most exciting?
I have to look at things for a long time, and my first instincts are usually not my best. I thought (foolishly) that these characters would come pretty easily to me. Their voices were those of people I had spent my entire childhood listening to, especially the women’s voices. I think I believed that, because the voices were so clear to me, I would understand the women and girls behind them—and build characters and, to some degree, a story from there. But I didn’t understand them, not in ways that were meaningful enough to write fiction. It took me a long time to see each character—years. And also: I’m a terribly slow writer, so I can be loath to give something up, after I’ve worked so hard for it—even when it’s in the best interest of the book. And that can slow me down.

But if I had to choose, I’d say Glory was the hardest character to write. I was second-guessing myself the whole way with her, for all kinds of reasons and from the get-go. Her voice was the least familiar voice to me, and so I really had to question why she was my character, why I had chosen a 14-year-old girl of Mexican American heritage to be my character. What did it mean to observe her suffering? Or to ask a reader to? And most importantly, having seen that suffering, as Mary Rose does early in the book, what was my response to that? What’s my responsibility to her as a character? I’ll be honest with you: Of all my characters, she’s the one I most worry that I didn’t quite get it right.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Valentine.

Racism and white supremacy appear in Valentine, and readers will likely wonder if justice would be served differently if Glory were a white girl. I recall this passage: “To speak up would require courage that we cannot even begin to imagine. Are we guilty? We are guilty as sin, guilty as the day is long.” Did you know from the beginning that white supremacy and racism were a central theme, or did that work its way in as the novel evolved?
I knew almost from the beginning that I could not write a novel about my hometown without reckoning—or at least trying to reckon—with the racism and xenophobia that I had witnessed growing up, and that lingers to this day. And that’s a complicated thing to write about, because the temptation sometimes, I think, is to believe that people who say and do racist things, who are racist, are wholly defined by that terrible, terrible sin. When, in fact, those of us who grew up in such places also know these people as neighbors, friends, co-workers, we also know them as mothers and fathers, as beloved brothers, as teachers and coaches. We know them as people who are doing their best to pay the bills and keep a roof over their heads, as hardworking and decent people.

And yet, there’s this poison coursing through the community’s veins. I couldn’t not write about that. People of color sure don’t have that luxury, and neither do immigrants or queer folks, or anyone else who doesn’t fit into this narrow paradigm, really just a sliver of space that everyone’s supposed to squeeze themselves into, if they can. It’s a completely untenable system that can’t die quick enough, but God, what damage it wreaks on those it sees standing in the way, what wrath it rains down on peoples’ heads. So I had to write about it, as best I could, and let the chips fall where they may. And while I hope I did justice to Glory and her family, I am also hopeful that the book shines a light on the town in ways that are complex, and nuanced, and true.

“Stories are everywhere, and absolutely inescapable.”

I’ve breastfed two children and read hundreds of novels. Not many novels portray breastfeeding at all, and if they do, it’s in passing. I was struck by Mary Rose’s storyline, in particular the detail you gave to her breastfeeding a young baby. How important was it for you to include those details? 
It was important to me to be true to the realities of these characters’ lives and days. If I wanted them, and their stories, to be real and to be true, then how could I pass over it? I breastfed my son for about 18 months—and I was one of those lucky, lucky people whose kid took right to it. We didn’t struggle with it at all. (We struggled with other things—like sleep. Oh God, the sleep. My kid’s 15, and sometimes I think I’m still not over those months and years of not sleeping.) And even with all that good luck, it was a major part of my life for a year and a half. During those weeks and months that you’re breastfeeding a baby, you never forget it, or at least that’s how it was for me. I found it to be an absolute pleasure, and a wonder, and also terribly, terribly wearing.

From a narrative standpoint, I was interested in that interdependence between mother and infant: the give and take of breastfeeding, and how something unexpected, like getting thrown in jail for a few hours, would add an extra layer of . . . I don’t know what word I’m looking for here, maybe low-grade trauma? Because when you’re away from a breastfeeding baby, the clock is ticking, always, and I found this to be super useful to telling Mary Rose’s story.

Teachers have a special place in my heart, and one of the characters fights to return to her teaching career at a time when most women choose to stay home with their children. What is your relationship with teaching and teachers? Was there a special teacher in your own life who encouraged your writing from a young age?
I haven’t done a lot of teaching, but when I have, I’ve loved it. It’s an honor to have the opportunity to teach (and learn) from a group of teenagers, or adult learners, or other writers in a community workshop. I guess another way to put it is: I love shooting the breeze about topics that interest me.

But like you, teachers have a special place in my heart. My husband, Jorge, is both a poet and a high school English teacher, and I witness every day how devoted he is to his students, and how devoted they are to him. And I’m a parent, so teachers are always in my orbit. I’m frequently blown away by their kindness and patience, how much they love what they do, how hard they work.

In a lot of ways, the people who taught me the most—maybe not about writing but certainly about stories—weren’t teachers at all, not in any formal sense. They were other waitresses at my jobs, some of them much older than me, or kind-hearted landlords, or neighbors, or random people I’ve met along the way—a park ranger, a stranger on a trail in the Superstition Mountains, someone I asked directions from in downtown Flagstaff and ended up hanging out with for a few hours. There were the fellow regulars at the neighborhood pub or at the library. Serendipitous encounters, I guess you’d call them.

Stories are everywhere, and absolutely inescapable. And of course, because writing is all about heart, I have also been instructed in my writing by those who held my heart, for a time, or broke it—and those whose hearts I held, or broke.

What’s your writing life like? Do you have a strict routine?
OK, but I warn you: It’s not terribly exciting. Every morning, I give my kid a lift to school. He’s 15 and could totally get himself to school, but I enjoy him (and I’m not a morning person anyway, so coffee and a lift to school is about the best I can do for at least an hour or so). And I suppose that I’ve been starting to feel a little nostalgic and mindful of the passage of time. Fifteen! How is my kid 15?! Plus, the drive to school is where I get my best information about what’s going on in his life.

Once he’s been delivered to school, I spend an hour or so dealing with assorted business—email, other correspondence, domestic whatevers. Then I put on some music and read for a bit before I get to work. I really like to read poetry in the morning. Right now, I’m toggling between Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems, Jericho Brown’s The New Testament and Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages. I almost always have something by Larry Levis close by, too, and that’s been the case for several years now.

I always start out writing longhand, which is kind of new for me. It’s a habit I fell into about five years ago. I like to start by revising a bit. Actually, it’s my favorite strategy for a writing day: revise a bit at the beginning of the day, write something new, revise again at the end. When I’m just slogging it out, I’ll wrap it up at 5:00 or so. But when I feel like I’m starting to catch the rhythm of the story, the music and the lyrics, as I said before, then I’ll pretty much start ignoring everyone and everything. I’ll spend long hours hunched over my desk, working until it’s done—a draft, a story, a chapter or even just odd rambling that might eventually, someday, maybe, become something.

Can you tell us anything about your current writing projects?
I love to write short stories. I’ve been working on a new one, and revising two others. And I’m starting to turn my eye toward the first hundred (rough, rough) pages of the next book, which is going to be set a few years after Valentine takes place in . . . Odessa!

C Pam Zhang makes a splashy debut with her searingly unique novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, a Western set in the gold rush-era mid-1800s that follows two young sisters, Lucy and Sam, trying to survive on their own after the death of their father. Zhang has described her novel as “an immigrant book, a book about loss, a book about tigers and buffalo, a book asking who can claim a land, a book made up in my effing head that is now real, and weighty, and coming out in 2020. I’m crying. I hope it touches you too.”

Believe me, we were touched—and desperate to know more. Here’s what we found out.

Did you set out to write a Western? How did this action-packed story, these scrappy characters and this epic setting evolve?
I didn’t set out to write anything! The first draft of this poured out of me from a few images that came into my head; it felt more like I was channeling something. But as I worked on the novel, I realized that this book was made possible by my years of moving to and away from Northern California, and the way that particular location haunts me. I have very strong but conflicting feelings about this landscape, from awe to unease, rejection to comfort.

Did you grow up watching or reading Westerns? What sort of research or travel did you do?
I read Little House on the Prairie far too many times as a child. For a few years I lived in Salinas, California, the home of John Steinbeck, and read his oeuvre without quite understanding it. In our culture it’s easy to absorb Western tropes passively, through osmosis. While working on this book, I read up on history and took a road trip through some of the old gold rush towns in Northern California, including a place called Locke, which was populated solely by Chinese immigrants. Most importantly, I’ve spent many hours in cars traversing this part of the world, and that feeling I got, the golden-soaked sun, informed this novel. I wanted the feeling more than the fact.

“Home is, I think, a sense of complete belonging, a place where you feel your right to exist in your truest form isn’t questioned.”

Lucy and Sam’s parents are complex, enigmatic characters, and your book repeatedly asks, what makes a family a family? How does your own background inform your writing? Will you share any details about your book’s intriguing dedication to your father, whom you say is “loved but slenderly known”?
That dedication is my take on a quote from King Lear, in which Lear is described by his daughter in this way: “Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.” I think we often know ourselves very thinly, because that self changes over time. This is especially true for those who migrate, leaving old selves behind. And if it’s hard to know oneself, how much harder is it to know someone across a generational divide? Family members really only see one another in narrow contexts. To imagine a father who has only ever been a father to you as, say, a young man, or a lover, or a villain, is an enormous and mind-breaking feat.

You’ve said that for years you’ve felt both haunted and pressured to write a “Sad Immigrant Story.” On your website, you describe yourself as “Born across one ocean, dragged over another. Went willingly every time after. Strange stories. Reluctant realist. Brown / Cambridge / Iowa educated. Lived in 13 cities & still pondering home.” Tell us a bit more about your background, and how you approach another question that your novel repeatedly asks, what makes a home a home?
My family moved around a great deal, and as a kid I felt each uprooting as a trauma. Now transience has become a core part of me, so much so that I feel uneasy if I’ve lived more than a few years in one place at a stretch. Home is, I think, a sense of complete belonging, a place where you feel your right to exist in your truest form isn’t questioned. That means my definition of a home is necessarily small: a room, a smell, a person.

I’m also interested in that phrase “Reluctant realist.” Explain how you managed to make tigers such a big part of this book, and why.
Tigers were my bull in the china shop, to mix animal metaphors. They are there to fuck up the fabric of reality, to declare that this is not a straightforward historical book. I chose tigers because they’re a part of Chinese culture as I understood it growing up, and I wanted to implant a bit of my family mythology into the mythology of the American West.

Did any special talismans help during the writing process? Like a glittering gold nugget or an old photo?
I’m not talisman-keeper, but a superstitious side manifested in my writing ritual. I took the same SkyTrain ride to the same café in Bangkok every day until I completed the first draft. In that café I faced the same direction and looked out the same window. (I tried to get the same table, with its optimal mix of dimness and light, but was slightly more flexible there because I couldn’t physically remove other customers.) For a later draft, I went to the same coffee shop in Brooklyn and sat at a counter facing a long mirror. There’s something there about editing and looking yourself in the eye.

“As a woman living and working in tech in the 2010s, I think about my gender presentation and the ways I can twist it to my advantage or disadvantage—but women have been thinking about that since the dawn of time.”

The book begins with the epigraph “This land is not your land.” Did you grow up hearing the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land,” and if so, what feelings did that evoke? 
I spent some formative early years in the public school system in Kentucky, and sang “This Land is Your Land” with a hand over my heart (and spoke the Pledge of Allegiance this way, too). I was moved to tears by the majesty and beauty evoked in the song’s idyllic version of America—all those the golden waves of grain! I stopped reciting the pledge, eventually. But I am still moved by the beauty of the song, even though I now know that its images are pure fantasy in many ways, and that the desire to cling to a bucolic (very white) myth of America is toxic. That tension is at the heart of my novel.

The story is narrated in a unique staccato style that you’ve described as “a made-up voice that’s a mix of Wild West slang and pidgin Mandarin in the mouths of immigrant orphans in a speculative Gold Rush California.” How did you come up with that style, and was it difficult to maintain?
The style was born of constraint: I have a character whose gender identity is uncertain to the narrator, and so the narrator avoids using gendered pronouns. This omission radically changed the shape of the sentences, the construction of thought. That rhythm became so intrinsic to the book that I can’t imagine any other way. The introduction of pidgin Mandarin and Old West lingo also felt natural to this family that exists at the juncture of cultures—it felt inevitable to these characters in this place. Style is so intertwined with the fabric of this book—its location, its characters—that I honestly don’t think I could write in quite this way again.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How Much of These Hills Is Gold.

Despite being set in the past, this book tackles many modern themes of sexuality, gender identity and secret-keeping, as well as, of course, issues of prejudice and immigration. How did current-day issues inform your version of the Old West?
It’s true that these are current-day issues, but they’re also very, very ancient ones. As a woman living and working in tech in the 2010s, I think about my gender presentation and the ways I can twist it to my advantage or disadvantage—but women have been thinking about that since the dawn of time. It’s like pouring the same water into different-shaped containers: The containers may change with the era, but it’s all the same water. Women have always been taken advantage of; families have always kept secrets; there has always been prejudice against immigrants. In setting my book outside of the present day, I could shine a light on common struggles and make them feel timeless, make them feel epic.

What’s one question you wished I’d asked about the book?
In a lovely Instagram post, [BookPage’s fiction editor, Cat Acree] described the book as a “eulogy for the land.” That resonates deeply. I sometimes worry that the classification of “historical” or “immigrant,” overshadows another crucial theme of the book: how human activity in the name of profit has ravaged the land. I wrote the book while California was either in drought or on fire.

Lastly, I love your book’s gilded cover. Could you share any stories about the book’s physical evolution? Or about its title?
The very first version of my cover had the golden evocation of sun and heat, and it had the colors, and it had tigers. The designer and art director, Grace Han and Helen Yentus, did an incredible job of portraying the book’s themes on the cover: historical but modern and sharp, vital and alive and haunted by place. But those tigers were a journey! We went through many iterations to find the perfect ones. I ended up finding a friend of friends, the illustrator Maggie Han, to paint them in watercolor under Riverhead’s guidance. I love that my tigers are graphic and blue—it feels as modern and bold as I hoped, not at all what you’d expect with a straightforward historical novel. I’m so, so grateful to have worked with women, immigrant, and Asian American artists along the way.

Author photo by Gioia Zloczower

An intrepid pigeon and a patient war hero are at the heart of this sweet and creative novel set during World War I. 

Kathleen Rooney knew that writing half of her new book, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, from the point of view of a pigeon was a risk. But to the self-described animal lover, assuming a bird’s POV made perfect sense.

“A lot of people dislike and malign pigeons, but I never have,” Rooney says from her Chicago home, where she lives with her spouse, author Martin Seay. She rejects the idea of pigeons as rats with wings. “If you watch them, they’re such good fliers. . . . They’re really clean and smart. And rats aren’t that bad, either. They’re doing the best they can!”

Rooney, perhaps best known for her 2017 bestseller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, says her interest in a feathered narrator was sparked by one of her students at DePaul University, where she is an English professor. “A student named Brian referenced Cher Ami in a poem and said to me, ‘Look it up!’ Of course, I did—and it blew my mind that this pigeon was so heroic and is stuffed and on display in the Smithsonian.”

Her researcher instincts activated, Rooney learned that Cher Ami, a British homing pigeon, helped save a group of American troops known as the “Lost Battalion” during a horrific, multi­day World War I battle. The story of this amazing pigeon, the terrible conflict and the extraordinary man who commanded the beleaguered battalion—Major Charles Whittlesey, the other narrator of the novel—is strange, true and, in Rooney’s hands, altogether haunting and compelling.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

“Once I learned about Charles, I was fascinated with him—how good he was at some things, yet how ill-suited he was to be a war hero,” Rooney says. In her reading about the era, she was intrigued by the cultural fixation on masculinity, a complicated issue that we continue to contemplate a hundred years later. “It was the early 20th century, people were moving from rural to urban, and there was a real fear of men getting soft,” Rooney explains. “Going to war was something you had to do if you wanted to be a man.”

In Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, Charles reflects on his happier prewar days in New York City, where he ran a law firm with a college classmate. Many an evening, he visited parts of the city where he could spend time with other closeted gay men and truly feel like himself. When it came time for battle, though, he focused on strategy and survival as he and his men, positioned in trenches in a section of the French Argonne Forest known as “the pocket,” found themselves cut off from supply lines, surrounded by enemy German troops and subjected to so-called friendly fire.

Carrier pigeons were the group’s only hope of contacting headquarters and getting the other Americans to stop dropping shells on them. Cher Ami flew through gunfire to deliver Charles’ message, which finally stopped the onslaught. (Incredibly, the note ended with “For heaven’s sake, stop it.”) She lost an eye and a leg, among other wounds, but was eventually able to hobble around on a tiny wooden prosthesis that the Army made for her. She lived another year before dying of her injuries in 1919, but in the novel she continues speaking to readers from her perch behind glass at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where she’s been since her death.

“In so much of the world, there are those who have an enjoyable life built on violence they don’t see. I hope it makes people think about that.”

Of visiting Cher Ami at the museum, Rooney says, “I found it profoundly moving. The conflicts killed 10 million solders, 10 million civilians, and untold animals were lost. The fact that she was so important that they saved her, when normally pigeons with those injuries would have just been discarded, shows what she did and how important it was.”

There’s an interesting lesson to be learned from Charles’ decisions in battle, too. “He was famous for something we’d describe as passive,” Rooney says. “Once they were in the pocket, he waited as hard as he could. I’m an impatient, active person. . . . His act was stillness, waiting, keeping everybody’s spirits up. The way he did that was amazing.”

Although Charles was able to save 194 members of his 500-man division, he couldn’t save everyone, and the experience took a heavy toll. He and his compatriots were given medals, held up as heroes and reminded of their wartime experiences daily, in a time when PTSD was only just beginning to be acknowledged.

“The only cure [for PTSD] is prevention,” Rooney says. “War has been around forever, but I think it can end. It breaks people, and the way to not break people is to not make them [go to war] in the first place.”

With Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, she hopes “to make people think about why we still do this. To what extent, as a civilization, are we complicit? In so much of the world, there are those who have an enjoyable life built on violence they don’t see. I hope it makes people think about that.”

Rooney also hopes the book, with its portrayal of the charming and brave Cher Ami, will boost appreciation of our furry and feathered friends. After all, she says, “What aerodynamically is really happening when a bird like that goes into the air? Pigeons are really miraculous animals, and I think if you pick any animal and go really deep into how does it work, no matter your belief system, it makes you aware of something outside yourself.”

Author photo by Beth Rooney

It’s been 30 years since the publication of The Pillars of the Earth, Welsh author Ken Follett’s enormously beloved novel about the building of a Gothic cathedral, and the publication of its highly anticipated prequel, The Evening and the Morning, is cause for much fanfare. Set at the end of the Dark Ages, the nearly 500 years of incredibly slow progress that came after the fall of the Roman Empire, it follows three figures during this period of immense change. It’s a hefty, expansive epic worthy of deep reading by history fans. To celebrate this momentous release, we reached out to Follett to learn more about his literary life.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
I’d say that the first big thrill of my life was joining Canton Library in Cardiff at age 7. Canton Library—found on Library Street—is an absolutely stunning building. The philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated the money for the library, around £5,000 at the time, and it was built on the site of an old market. Carnegie, a Scottish American industrialist, gave away a huge proportion of his fortune, funding more than 650 libraries in the U.K., plus more than 1,500 in America. Undoubtedly, he transformed lives. Canton Library certainly changed mine.

What is on your “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet?
The Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. It’s architecturally stunning and contains 40 million items.

While researching your books, has there ever been a surprisingly relevant discovery among the stacks?
When I wrote Eye of the Needle in 1977, I had never been to Scotland, but half the book is set there. However, I could not afford to go on a research trip. The public library in Farnborough, Surrey, had a touring guide to Scotland, which was helpful for a special reason: It was out of date, having been published 30 years earlier—which was perfect for me, because the story is set during the Second World War.

How is your personal library organized?
My own library at home is not big enough for all my books, so the whole house has effectively become a library. I’ve arranged novels alphabetically by author and history books chronologically by subject. This makes everything easy to find. But I periodically run out of space.

What’s the last thing you checked out from your local library or bought at a bookstore?
I haven’t been to a bookstore since March, for obvious reasons, but the last thing I bought was The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English [published in the U.S. under the title The Storied City].

When you enter a bookstore, where do you go first?
The bestsellers table. I want to see who is doing well.

What is your ideal bookstore-­browsing snack?
I’m afraid I think it’s bad manners to eat while browsing. Sorry.

Bookstore cats or dogs?
I’m a dogs man.

Author photo © Olivier Favre

Jess Walter may not be the first writer to come out of Spokane, Washington, but he has certainly put it on the literary map. In his latest novel, The Cold Millions, the bestselling author draws readers into a tale set just after the turn of the 20th century, as modernity and labor strife collide in the mining, agricultural and railroad hub of Spokane. It stars two young brothers, “tramps” named Rye and Gig, but real historical figures such as activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also make appearances.

You have some strong personal connections to this story, being from Spokane but also with your family history, your grandfather’s experiences as a rancher and your father’s role as a union officer. Tell us something about the inspiration for the story and how you developed it—not just the setting, but also Ursula and the villain, Brand.
I used to be ashamed of my working-class roots, but my family and hometown inform much of what I do. The Cold Millions is about two hobos just after the turn of the 20th century; a generation later, both my grandfathers were vagrant workers. My dad’s dad, my namesake Jess Walter, arrived in Spokane on a train he’d hopped in the Dakotas. My dad was a steelworker and a union guy, and labor equality was as close to a religion as we had.

I often start with divergent goals for a book and then try to connect them. Here, the impulse was to tell a story about social justice and youthful activism and pair it with a rollicking adventure story, part Western and part noir. The thrill is often in finding characters you never imagined in your original conception of the book, like Ursula the Great. You’re doing research, bent over 110-year-old newspapers, when you notice the ads for vaudeville shows, and next thing you know, this salty woman is taking over, singing to a wild cougar.

“Put me in Paris, and I’d probably write about meth addicts trying to pawn a stolen bidet.”

It’s been eight years since your previous novel, Beautiful Ruins, was published. Can you give us some insight into the creation of the two novels? How was the process different?
It always takes a while to realize that nothing I wrote before can help with this book. Eventually, familiar patterns and themes emerge, but early on, every novel feels like a first novel. The Cold Millions required more research than most of my books, so I spent months reading old newspapers and tracking down obscure books, articles and academic papers. Finally, at some point, I had to fire the whole research department (me) and rely more heavily on the fiction unit (also me). I guess if anything carried over from Beautiful Ruins, it was my interest in a more expansive kind of storytelling, in not being limited to a single point of view.

Spokane has become your Yoknapatawpha County. How do your fellow residents feel about being spotlighted in your books?
I love Faulkner’s invented settings, as I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo or Louise Erdrich’s Argus, but my fictional setting is also a real one, more like William Kennedy’s Albany or Elena Ferrante’s Naples (in an aspirational way). I loved how John Steinbeck wrote about Monterey with such heart (“Cannery row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise . . .”). And because I also venture out in my writing—to Italy, to Hollywood, to New York—writing about Spokane always feels like coming home.

What do my fellow Spokanites think? Most are appreciative, I think. I do hear from some who wish I wouldn’t focus so much on crime and poverty, that I maybe I might set a story on Spokane’s swanky South Hill for once, perhaps at the Manito Country Club. But I’ve never lived there. I’ve always lived in the flats just above the river. Although it might not matter anyway. Put me in Paris, and I’d probably write about meth addicts trying to pawn a stolen bidet.

You’ve described this book as “the last Western.” How is that so?
Yikes, did I say that? Such self-importance! I should’ve included the word gasp, as in last-gasp Western, because the period I’m writing about—1909, cars sharing the roads with horses, a certain frontier lawlessness around the edges—marks the end of this mythic Western period. But with the class divisions, the blatant unfairness, the social unrest, I also felt like I was writing about now. Maybe what I meant was this was my last Western (my only Western). I used to demean that whole genre as “horse porn.” But all I seem to do as a writer is break my own aesthetic rules and reverse every formerly unshakable opinion that has ever escaped my mouth.

You’ve now published crime novels, a 9/11 phantasmagoria, a Hollywood love story and now a historical novel. What impels you to try new genres?
A phantasmagoria! I don’t really think of genre when I’m writing. The story I’m telling just proceeds from the voice and the characters I create. I hope a wry wistfulness connects them all, a sense of jaded, bemused compassion. I do take pride in not repeating myself creatively. But that’s more to avoid boredom than to honor some artistic pledge I’ve made. I just try to write the next book I want to read, and since I read across genres, it’s always made sense to write across them, too.

I noticed the name “Tursi” (a character in Beautiful Ruins) popped up in The Cold Millions. Is that a nod to your fans? To your characters?
It’s probably more a nod to my characters. I imagine a distant great-uncle of Pasquale’s making his way to the United States and settling in Spokane’s Little Italy (where my wife was raised, and where I worked my first job as a dishwasher and busboy at Geno’s Fabulous Pizza). In The Cold Millions, Rye makes the observation that the world is “becoming one place,” and I kind of imagine my fictional world that way, too, as one place, full of coincidence and serendipity.

“If it’s true you cannot have racial justice without economic justice, then the opposite must surely follow.”

Aside from the research you did, did you read at all for pleasure when writing the book?
Of course! I read Wolf Hall for the first time and thought it was terrific. I went on a glorious Alice Munro bender and then reread James Baldwin. I read Denis Johnson’s great The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, and because he mentioned Leonard Gardner’s Fat City in an interview, I read that, too. Olga Togarczuk’s Flights, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House and Percival Everett’s Telephone haunted and illuminated. Oh, and poets: Christopher Howell’s The Grief of a Happy Life, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition and Dorianne Laux’s Only as the Day Is Long.

I understand you are a younger brother. Did your relationship with your older brother influence your portrait of Gig and Rye? If there is a movie, who would play them?
Actually, I’m a classic middle child, with an older sister, Kristie, who is a county library director, and a younger brother, Ralph, who is a newspaper sports editor. I’m close with both of my siblings, and my brother is probably my best friend. Ralph and I share the gravitational mix of camaraderie and responsibility that Gig and Rye feel for one another, but little else of our relationship appears in The Cold Millions. A novel about my brother and me would be only six pages long, and four of those pages would be dialogue lifted directly from Caddyshack, with the rest being boozy smack-talk about who is the better basketball player. (I am.)

As for movies, I have never been able to “cast” my books—my sense of Hollywood is stuck in about 1974 (and I don’t think Steve McQueen is available). But in a movie about my brother and me, I would be played by George Clooney, and he would be played by a potted plant.

Is any of the socialist, revolutionary spirit still alive in Spokane?
Sure. The city of Spokane, like most urban areas, is reliably blue now (about 60% for Hillary Clinton in 2016), but the city is surrounded by the reddish counties of eastern Washington and lies within the larger, liberal Pacific Northwest. There are veins of individualism on both the left and the right here that come together in places like barters fairs and survivalist expos—a kind of leave-us-the-hell-alone libertarianism. There are also thriving anti-fascist groups, and the Wobblies are still around, having been revived by the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. Like everywhere, I think the real revolutionary spirit right now lies in the protests sparked by Black Lives Matter. As it should be. If it’s true you cannot have racial justice without economic justice, then the opposite must surely follow.

What’s next for you?
Creatively, a book of short stories, which I’m pulling together now. And I’m having fun working on the next novel. And later today I’ll play my brother in a social distance basketball game (we shoot at opposite ends of a full court) that I am certain to win.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Cold Millions.

Author photo by Rajah Bose