Ron Rash believes that “almost all of the great books are regional books.” What, he asks, “could be more regional than James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which unfolds during a 24-hour ramble through Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904?

So Rash bristles—in a modest, gentlemanly sort of way—when people use the word regional to pigeonhole, diminish or dismiss fiction like his, which roots itself in a particular place—Appalachia, and especially western North Carolina, where his family has lived since the 1700s.

“It’s an important issue to me because I think there’s a difference between regional and local color,” Rash says during a call to his office at Western Carolina University (WCU) in Cullowhee, North Carolina. “Local color is writing that is only about difference—what makes this particular place exotic. Regional writing is writing that shows what is distinct about a place—its language, culture and all of that—yet at the same time says something universal. Eudora Welty says it better than I can. She says that one place understood helps us understand all other places better. That’s been a credo for me. I think that if you go deep enough into one place, you hit the universal.”

A point in his argument’s favor? Ron Rash’s novels, especially his recent bestseller Serena, are popular in France. He’s been invited to read his fiction in places as far away as Australia and New Zealand. His books sell well in China. And his short stories and novels have been nominated for national, not just regional, awards.

Still, there is his sense of loyalty to his place of origin. On a 10-city book tour in France, for example, Rash, a charming storyteller with a strong regional accent, remembers that “they had me go to a local high school, I think partly [so students] could hear an American speaker. The first thing I told them was not to imitate me; they certainly would not be understood in New York City if they sounded like me!”

"Landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world."

A regional setting and universal themes are definitely hallmarks of Rash’s atmospheric new novel, The Cove. Set in the small western North Carolina town of Mars Hill at the end of the First World War, The Cove uses a little-known historical incident as a stepping-off point for a haunting narrative about intolerance and redemptive but illicit love.

“Obviously I love to read about the region’s history,” says Rash, who is the first person to hold the endowed Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies Chair at WCU. “But a few years ago I was doing some research and I was amazed to find that [there had been] a German internment camp near where I live in western North Carolina during [World War I]. And this camp was not for POWs. It was for German civilians who happened to be marooned in the United States when the United States entered the war. That was fascinating to me. And it became even more fascinating to me when I started reading about the Vaterland, which was the biggest ship in the world at that time and was much more elegant than the Titanic, and these guys who ended up in Hot Springs [North Carolina] had been on the Vaterland.”

Then Rash read an account of the internment camp that mentioned in passing the fact that one and only one German prisoner had ever escaped. “Wow! I thought, boy, what I can do with that. To me there was just this incredible story here that even a lot of people in the region did not know about. At the same time, because of some things that were happening in the United States, contemporary issues, I thought there were interesting connections.”

But Rash, who customarily writes between 12 and 14 drafts before completing a novel—usually while sitting in front of his fireplace with his two dogs at his feet—could not get his story of a German escapee to fly. Not, that is, until he realized that the real emotional center of his book was Laurel Shelton, a young woman who has lived all her life in a sheltered cove near Mars Hill and who longs to escape from a life blighted by the superstitious beliefs and confining scorn of most of her neighbors. Her dilemma threatens to split her apart from her brother Hank, who has returned to the family’s hardscrabble farm in the deep shadows of the Appalachian mountains after being wounded in the war.

“To me,” Rash says, explaining his intense interest in describing the ghostly place in which his characters rise and fall, “landscape is always a character. And I would say the cove itself, the landscape, is in some ways as dominant a character as any other character. . . . It’s hard for me to completely articulate but to me it’s like landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world. I would argue that The Great Gatsby could only have been written by a Midwesterner because the kind of expansiveness Gatsby could imagine fits a Midwestern sensibility; looking out on this endless expanse gives you a sense of endless possibility. The same might be true of someone who was born at the ocean. But if you live in mountains—I’ve seen this in my own family—two things can happen. One is that you feel protected by the mountains, almost like it’s a womb that protects you from the outside world. But the other thing that can happen is that the lack of light does something physically to people who live in a cove. There’s always a sense of your smallness, your puniness and insignificance compared to these mountains that have been here millions of years and loom over you. The result can be the kind of fatalism I saw even in my own family. I think The Cove is my strongest attempt to show that.”

Though based on historical research and set almost 100 years ago, The Cove is artfully layered with Rash’s concerns about the present. One of his most persistent concerns is how easily we turn other people into enemies and go to war against them. In a remarkable way, The Cove dramatizes a hope that loving, reasonable sensibilities will prevail—and a fear of the tragic consequences if they do not.

“I don’t want to be a propagandist, but I hope the reader senses that this is in the story. Certainly there are questions of what it really means to be patriotic, what it means to go to war. You kind of lay it out there and let the reader make the connections or not.”

Then Rash returns the conversation to his interest in discovering the continuities of past, present and future. While researching his previous novel, he reports with delight, he discovered that the house he owns about three miles from the WCU campus had been in his family roughly 230 years ago. And the future? Well, he says with some pride, like his wife and himself, his 24-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son have chosen to become teachers. “At least we didn’t run them off from the profession.”

CORRECTION: Updated to reflect the fact that the setting of Mars Hills is an actual town in North Carolina, not a fictional one.

A decaying English country house holds menace and mystery in The Uninvited Guests, the remarkable third novel from Sadie Jones.

This is a departure from your previous work, especially the supernatural element. What made you want to explore that?
It wasn’t a conscious “departure,” but the original idea can’t be controlled. I should have loved to write an important modern state of the nation book, but I was given this to do instead! I dreamed the house, Sterne—this beautiful eccentric red-brick manor—and then, in imagining who lived in it and what the voice of the story would be, I discovered that there was a supernatural element, and also comedy.

Your last two novels were so specific about time and place. The Uninvited Guests is set more generally, in the pre-World War I English countryside. But the ambiguity felt deliberate.
Yes, it was. The action never leaves Sterne, and I used theatre to heighten the sense of unreality so that the reader might know they were heading off somewhere unpredictable. I was trying to create a magical realm akin to the transforming woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a time and place where anything might happen. It was a tricky piece of acrobatics, and it requires the reader’s trust and willingness to jump in with the book and revel a little.

What research did you do?
There was very little research compared to Small Wars, which was necessarily rigorous. I wandered the Internet, went to the National Gallery and looked at John Singer Sargent’s paintings of Edwardian socialites and read a 1920s edition of Mrs Beeton’s household management. There were wonderful descriptions of how to apply poultices to boils and what to do with a twice-boiled calf’s head that informed the more grotesque elements of the novel. The Edwardian era is a very entertaining mix of the recognizably modern and absolutely not, their delight in gelatin being a good example.

Right now stories set in England around WWI are very hot (all my friends have “Downton Abbey” fever!). Why do you think people are so interested in that time period?
I suppose it’s the zeitgeist, isn’t it? I had no notion, beginning work in 2009, that there would be a wave of fin de siècle drama or literature—or a vogue for literary ghost stories for that matter. I simply needed a time we perceive as beautiful and romantic and yet trembles on the brink of the unknown. Western civilization was at a peak, both culturally and scientifically; to me that generation sits like white icing on the dark slag heap of the century before it, looking blindly toward the new century, the mass suicide of the Great War. My little book doesn’t even begin to cover it.

You earned a lot of acclaim for your previous novels. How do you think that kind of success prepares a writer for whatever comes next? 
The benefits of having a tremendously successful first novel far outstrip any perceived drawbacks. The success of The Outcast gave me a career. I feel now that if I do good work it will be read and have a fighting chance to stand out. It sounds a simple thing, but it is as much as any writer can hope for.

What other eras would you like to explore?
I would very much like to write a modern novel—I just haven’t found one yet.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Uninvited Guests.

One of the most anticipated novels of the summer, Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone is a delight. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1920s, it stars two fascinating, complex heroines—future movie star Louise Brooks and the Kansas matron sent to chaperone her on a trip to New York City—who carve very different paths out of the choices alloted to women of the time. We talked to Moriarty about the origins of her third novel, the real Louise Brooks and the challenges of historical fiction.

Your earlier novels are set in the present or recent past. What made you choose the 1920s as a time period and a real person—Louise Brooks—as your subject?
I was reading a nonfiction book about Louise Brooks, and she was so interesting, so intelligent and confident and difficult, even at a young age. But I was particularly intrigued when I read that when she was 15—and already a handful—she left Wichita for New York City accompanied by a 36-year-old chaperone she didn’t know very well. Right away, I thought, “That poor woman.” Then I thought, “Anyone who tried to chaperone Louise Brooks would have a story to tell.”

How closely does your story cleave to Brooks’ actual story? What kind of research did you do about her early life and that life-changing summer she spent with the Denishawn dance company in New York?
I stuck to Louise Brooks’ life story closely. There is an excellent biography on her by Barry Paris, and my copy of that is pretty well used: every other page is dog-eared and marked up. Obviously, I had to invent scenes and conversations, but when I wrote about Louise, I considered what people who knew her had said about her, and I watched her old films to try to get her mannerisms right. I also read Louise Brooks’ autobiography, Lulu in Hollywood. My goal was to give a true account of her tumultuous life and personality while imagining everything else, including the details of that first summer.

Right away, I thought, “That poor woman.” Then I thought, “Anyone who tried to chaperone Louise Brooks would have a story to tell.”

You’ve mentioned that Cora is based on a real person as well. What do you know about this nonfictional woman, and what were the freedoms of creating most of her biography from scratch?
I know very little about the real chaperone. She’s sort of lost to history, but that was a gift to me as a storyteller. I liked the combination of sticking to facts of Louise’s life and having the freedom to imagine anything for Cora. I made up her name and everything else about her, though I did quite a bit of research to give her a plausible background and to make her a woman of her time.

Life at the Home for Friendless Girls is particularly shocking for modern readers. Did places like that really exist?
Yes. And there were a lot of them. I read many accounts from children who lived in similar institutions. But really, it seemed like the people who were running them were doing the best they could, trying to feed and house and clothe as many children as possible. New York City was full of children who had to fend for themselves, either because their parents were dead or too sick or too poor to care for them. The children who found a spot in an orphanage were actually lucky. The orphan trains that brought these children out of the city and to the Midwest seem cruel and strange now, but taken in the context of a time when there were so many homeless children starving and sick in the streets of New York, you can see why it was a viable solution.

Clearly Cora has been sheltered by her Midwestern upbringing. But Louise is also not as sophisticated as she would like to pretend. Which character do you think is more naïve and which is more changed by her five weeks away from Kansas?
Each character is naïve in a different way, but I think Cora changes more that summer. When she goes to New York, she’s bringing years of disappointments and bottled-up emotions, and she’s thoughtful enough to be open to a new experience. Louise’s road is longer and much harder. I think her real maturity comes later.

The Chaperone addresses many subjects that were extremely taboo in the 1920s—sex, contraception, integration, homosexuality, abuse. Was it difficult writing about such things from the perspective of a woman who has no vocabulary for them?
I love how you phrased this question—while I was writing this novel, I was thinking about how so much of the way we see the world relies on our language, our names for things and ideas. It’s hard to conceive of an idea for which you don’t have a name. I really wanted Cora to be a woman of her time, not a woman with modern-day sensibilities and ideas plopped down in 1922. She sees the world the way it was taught to her, and the concepts that are familiar to a modern reader wouldn’t be familiar to her. I wanted to narrate the experience of someone struggling to come up with her own code of ethics in a way that would be true for her time. So yes, that was difficult sometimes, but that was what was so interesting about writing historical fiction—it’s the same pleasure as reading historical fiction, truly immersing myself in another world. But I’d say with writing, the experience is more intense. 

Louise and Cora both break from convention, but while the former does this audibly and intentionally, the latter is more quietly irreverent. Which method do you think is more effective?
Louise’s openly defiant behavior gets a lot of attention, and she was (and is) a role model for many women. But then there are women like Cora. She lives with compassion and she thinks for herself. She also works to instigate real change—though without any of Louise’s fame or glamour. Really, she’s just as defiant. It seems to me that the Coras of the world, once they’re roused, are the more formidable force. 

Throughout the novel, Cora is reading (and not always enjoying) The Age of Innocence. Were you influenced by Wharton’s work?
I chose it because it won the Pulitzer in 1921, so it seemed likely that it would be something Cora—wanting to impress her smart young charge—might bring along for the trip. Also, it was set decades before the ’20s, so Cora is reading historical fiction, which, for me, is a good way to consider the present anew. The Age of Innocence is very much about someone who simply can’t break through the constraints of his culture and time, and I liked the idea of Cora reading this story and thinking about it as she’s grappling with the confines of her own world.

Do any other time periods or historical figures particularly interest you? What’s up next?

Oh yes! So many time periods and historical figures interest me. I love a good biography. It’s looking like my next novel will also be historical, but I don’t want to say too much yet!

Related content: read a review of The Chaperone.

A clip of Louise Brooks in the 1929 film Pandora's Box:

In the wake of World War I, on a remote island off the coast of Australia, lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel make a life-altering choice: to keep and raise a foundling child who is not theirs. The repercussions of this decision shape M.L. Stedman’s stunning debut novel, The Light Between Oceans.

We caught up with Stedman (herself born and raised in Western Australia) for a discussion of right and wrong, moral ambiguity and an author’s responsibility to her characters.

What a mesmerizing story. Did anything specific inspire you to write The Light Between Oceans?
I write fairly instinctively, just seeing what comes up when I sit down at the page. For this story, it was a lighthouse, then a woman and a man. Before long, a boat washed up on the beach, and in it I could see a dead man, and then a crying baby. Everything that happens in the book stems from this initiating image—a bit like the idea of ‘Big Bang’—an initial point that seems tiny turns out to be incredibly dense, and just expanded outward further and further. I got to know Tom and Isabel as I wrote them, and was drawn into their seemingly insoluble dilemma, and their struggle to stay true to their love for each other as well as to their own deepest drives.

The major moral question of keeping a child that isn’t yours is posed early in the book. Do you think there was a “right” decision for Tom and Isabel?
Aha! It’s up to each reader to come up with their own answer to this one.

Fair enough. Well, you do a wonderful job of refusing to pass judgment on your characters. Was this a conscious choice and if so, was it difficult to do?
It was a conscious choice, yes. I think today more than ever we can fall into “sound-bite judgment,” reaching conclusions on the basis of quite a cursory consideration of an issue. It’s a kind of moral multitasking, that stems perhaps from being required to have an opinion on everything. If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

As to the second part of your question, the more my own views differed from that of a character, the more satisfying I found it to explore them and to put their point of view as convincingly as possible.

To this end, do you think there is a “bad guy” here? Do all books need heroes and antagonists?
I don’t think there are any “bad guys” in the book, just some poor choices made on the basis of imperfect information or perspective (i.e. the lot of the standard-issue human). Stories need tension, which can be supplied by antagonists, but here it’s supplied by fate or circumstance—the overwhelming force that pretty much all the characters are up against. One good character’s gain will be another good character’s loss, which makes the questions a lot harder. I didn’t want there to be any “safe place” in the book where the reader could relax and say, “I’m completely sure of what the right thing to do is here.”

If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

Speaking of antagonists, the landscape of Janus Rock and the great sea beyond is awfully unforgiving. Is it based on a real location?
No and yes. The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.

Lighthouses are always weighty images in literature. What do they represent to you?
A lighthouse automatically implies potential drama: You only find them where there’s a risk of going astray or running aground. They’re a reminder, too, of human frailty, and the heroic endeavor of mankind to take on the forces of nature in a ludicrously unfair fight to make safe our journey through this world. And they betoken binary opposites such as safety and danger, light and dark, movement and stasis, communication and isolation—they are intrinsically dynamic because they make our imaginations pivot between them.

What kind of research did you do to prepare to write?
To prepare, none at all! My research very much followed the story rather than leading it. I climbed up lighthouses, and went through the lightkeepers’ logbooks in the Australian National Archives—wonderful. And I spent time in the British Library, reading battalion journals and other materials from Australian soldiers in WWI: heartbreaking accounts that often left me in tears.

Do you have any useful tips for aspiring novelists?
Write because you love it. Write because that’s how you want to spend those irreplaceable heartbeats. Don’t write to please anyone else, or to achieve something that will retrospectively validate your choice.

Two of the 19th century’s most notable minds meet in poet Enid Shomer’s debut novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

With a novel like this, you know there was a historical fact that provided the initial spark to your imagination. What was it?
The initial spark was learning that Flaubert and Nightingale traveled the Nile at the same time. I’m not talking about approximately the same time. They were towed from Cairo to the navigable part of the river through the Mahmoudieh Canal on the same boat. That day, Flaubert wrote a description in his journal of a woman in a “hideous green eyeshade,” and we know that Nightingale had such a contraption that she wore attached to her bonnet. Their itineraries throughout their Nile journeys were almost identical. It’s kind of a miracle that they didn’t meet!

Did you know a lot about Florence Nightingale and Flaubert before you started the novel? Do you think readers need to know about them before they read the novel?
I did not know a lot. My sense of Nightingale at the outset was based on Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians, which depicts Nightingale as a shrewish and eccentric control freak. (He claims she actually worked one of her friends to death.) The more I read about and by her, the more I came to reject this depiction. She was, for one thing, blessed with a fabulous wit, a virtue Strachey ignored completely. Other early biographers painted her in saintly sepia tones. I set out to find out who the real Nightingale was.

I knew that Flaubert was an important writer and I’d read many of his books, but I was unfamiliar with his life. His journals and letters were a revelation to me. And he, too, had a magnificent sense of humor.

Readers don’t need to know anything about either character before encountering them in my novel. For one thing, in 1850 they both were unknown, confused and upset about their futures, so any notion the reader may have of who they are doesn’t apply. They hadn’t yet done the deeds that would inscribe them into canonical history. She was 29; he was 28. They considered themselves failures. Part of the pleasure of the novel for the reader is taking the journey to self-discovery with them.

It’s hard to imagine Flaubert and Nightingale together, yet there are so many similarities regarding what stage they were in their lives. Did that surprise you?
Despite the obvious differences between Nightingale and Flaubert, I always intuited that they had something essential in common, and my faith in that connection was one of the driving forces behind the book.

Certainly on the surface the dissimilarities were huge, and not just to me. One scholar of the period I consulted told me that these two lived in different lobes of her brain despite being contemporaries, and that she had never thought of them in the same breath. Of course, it turned out that they had a tremendous number of things in common, for they shared the same general culture and came from similar social classes. They both rebelled against upper-middle-class European values, and perhaps most importantly, they were both geniuses.

You based the character of Trout, Nightingale’s maid, on the real life writings of a different 19th-century servant. Why did you do that and what do you think she adds to the novel?
As part of my research, I delved into the lives of Victorian servants. Also, the real-life Trout had disappeared into the vast bone-pile of history, so I had to make her up from scratch. The only clue I had was that she and Flo didn’t always get along, that there was friction in their relationship. Reading the historical servant’s journals helped me to shape a vocabulary and a love life for the fictional Trout.

To me, Trout is an especially endearing and important character. First of all, she is amusing as well as wise in her own way. We get to read parts of her journal and thus get another view of things, one that is often at odds with Nightingale’s. The class differences between them provide insights into Nightingale’s limitations as a would-be humanitarian and social thinker. Trout forces Nightingale to grow—by example and also by challenging her assumptions. 

This is not your first foray into the life of historical person—I am thinking of your poem cycle about the first woman pilot to break the sound barrier, Jacqueline Cochran. Can you talk about the challenges of exploring a famous person’s life in prose versus poetry?
I began my writing career as a poet, but soon turned to writing short stories, and eventually, the novel. Though I wrote the Cochran poem-biography (Stars at Noon) in an attempt to deal with character through poetry, I believe that except for epic or book-length poems, poetry is not well-suited to exploring character, especially as it evolves over time. For me, poetry is primarily about language and metaphor, while fiction, though it, too, requires powerful language and metaphor, is essentially about time.

What did you discover about this time period or any of the characters that you couldn’t or chose not to add to the novel?
I learned a lot of surprising things about the period and my characters. For example, in the late Victorian Age, nearly one in four persons in England was a servant. There were juicy bits, too. Richard Monckton Milnes, the first biographer of Keats and the man Nightingale refused to marry, amassed the largest collection of pornography in England. (It is now housed in the British Library). He was also part of a group of prominent Victorian men who wrote pornography together as a hobby. They composed it round-robin style, and published under pseudonyms, always attributing their books to publishers in exotic locales—Constantinople, Cairo or Aleppo in Syria. Nightingale would not, I venture, have approved. I think she was right to refuse to marry Milnes. She would have been much better off with someone like Flaubert.

Have you been to Egypt and if not, did writing this make you want to visit?
I have never visited Egypt, though I have lived in two countries in the Middle East. Egypt is currently at the top of my travel list. I especially want to travel down the Nile.

What’s next for you?
I am currently working on a project that involves two stories: a contemporary one set in the early 1990s, and an historical one set in 1599. I love doing research, which, after all, is just focused reading and travel.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

Tara Conklin didn’t always think of herself as a novelist. Sure, as a kid she always kept a journal and was, as she puts it, “scribbling stories.” And as a corporate attorney living in New York City, she loved her job in part because it included so much writing. But she wasn’t a writer.

“I was still writing just as a hobby,” she says. “It was my dirty little secret—I was a closet writer.”

Conklin spoke with BookPage from her home in Seattle. On the day we spoke, she was busily packing her young family for a trip to London, where her husband is from. Even so, the gracious Conklin spoke passionately about The House Girl, the luminous debut novel she has been writing on and off for several years.

After she started early drafts of the book, Conklin wasn’t quite sure what would become of it.

“I didn’t think I was writing a novel,” she says. “It was just another story but it kept getting longer and longer. There were many times I set it aside. I had two young kids. I didn’t have time to be spending on this pie-in-the-sky dream of writing a novel.”

But she couldn’t get Josephine Bell out of her head—she even had dreams about the character. A teenage house slave on a Virginia tobacco farm, Josephine dreams of freedom and plots an escape to Philadelphia, away from the cruel master who permanently hobbled one slave who tried to run away by slicing his heels.

The House Girl intertwines Josephine’s story with that of Lina Sparrow, a modern-day attorney who is helping with a lawsuit seeking reparations for slavery. Her work leads her to Josephine, who may have been the real artist behind paintings attributed to her mistress.

Conklin's novel toggles between centuries and characters who are searching for love and meaning in their lives.

As Lina dives deeper into her research, she struggles not only to find out what happened to Josephine but also to convey the breadth of slavery’s intergenerational impact—the “nature of the harm,” in lawyer-speak. And Lina has some mysteries in her own past she needs to confront, too, like what happened when her mother disappeared so many years ago.

Conklin played with the story for several years, but it was only after she quit her job in Big Law and moved to Seattle that she decided to commit to being a writer.

“I was sort of done with big cities, and we wanted to think of a good place to live with kids and where I could write,” she says. “It was definitely touch and go for awhile. People thought we were crazy.”

As she got deeper into The House Girl, it wasn’t lost on Conklin that another young white woman—Kathryn Stockett—was getting some pretty significant pushback for writing about black women in 1960s Mississippi in The Help. That was part of the reason Conklin chose to write in the third person and not try to accurately capture the diction of a 19th-century slave.

“When I was writing this, first of all, I never thought anyone would read it. I was just interested in the person,” she says. “Josephine is a character with universal human experience—she is someone who wanted all the same things we all want: freedom and love and meaning in her life.”

At this point, Conklin loses her train of thought and can’t pluck the word she wants off the tip of her tongue.

“Can you tell my baby is teething and I didn’t get much sleep last night?” she laughs.

Though Conklin concedes that writing while parenting can be a challenge, “It’s one of the few careers that really lends itself well to being a parent. It’s not like you have to be in an office. I’m very unprecious about my writing time and space. I can pull the laptop out and write for 20 minutes while the kids play. I can write in a moving car. We have a very strict bedtime of 8 p.m. and then I sit down and write everything I thought about that day.”

The House Girl is the rare novel that seamlessly toggles between centuries and characters and remains consistently gripping throughout. It would appear that thoroughly modern Lina—self-sufficient, unattached—is everything the women in her research are not. But Lina feels a kinship when she reads a letter from a Virginia woman whose family helped slaves escape and run north, a woman who has realized she only wants a simple life full of love and kindness.

“Lina closed the biography. For a moment, Dorothea was present with her in the office, layered in skirts and petticoats, with her convictions and resolve, talking to Lina. Is it too much to wish for such a life? Is it too little? Lina laughed with tears in her eyes because the words written 150 years ago by a young woman she would never meet seemed truer than anything she’d read in her textbooks, anything she’d been told by her law professors. . . .”

Conklin’s debut novel is a quiet book; she never sends Lina breathlessly chasing down leads, and Josephine suffers her heartbreak not with The Color Purple-esque monologues but with unending dignity. But it is that very quietness that makes The House Girl so powerful.

In Joyce Carol Oates’ chilling new novel The Accursed, a curse has befallen the small town of Princeton, New Jersey, where a young bride-to-be has mysteriously disappeared before her wedding and a stranger who just might be the devil has come to town. In a Q&A with BookPage, Oates talks about the research process and her experience with writing historical figures.

The Accursed is billed as a “history” and includes many asides and jumps in time. What made you choose this unusual form and what do you think the story gains by the choice?

The novel is one of several "postModernist gothic" novels I have written—Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, Mysteries of Winterthurn, My Heart Laid Bare. It is an epic of a sort, requiring space, time, depth, meditation and analysis.?

You began this book in 1984 and then abandoned it for other projects. What made you pick the manuscript up again?

I'd begun revising a manuscript titled The Crosswicks Horror several times, but was not satisfied with the authorial voice. Every few years I would rewrite more pages, then turn to other projects. But last year, an idea came to me of how to proceed, and I rewrote the novel quickly, in a "white-hot" siege of inspiration. Revising/rewriting is the writer's happiest time—first drafts are the difficult.??

The book takes place in Princeton, where you’ve lived and worked for years. What were the challenges and benefits of writing about a setting you know so intimately? Did you uncover anything about Princeton's history that surprised you?

Much research into local history and into the history of Woodrow Wilson's presidency at the University were required, of course. Some of the books I've listed in the Acknowledgments, but there were many more into which I glimpsed.?

The narrator claims he has perused at least a full ton of research materials to create his history. What kind of research did you do to write the book?

Research in Firestone Library, originally; plus books on Woodrow Wilson which I'd discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Cranberry, New Jersey.?

What sparked the idea for the curse?

My realization that the failure to intercede in racism—the failure to repudiate publicly such racist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan—was the sin of the "good" white Christian community not only in 1905-06 but through the decades. To do nothing, to say nothing, to try nothing—this was nearly as great a crime as willful acts of violence like lynchings.?

Many well-known historical characters show up in the book, including Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland. What are the challenges of including real-life people in fiction? Which of them was the most fun to write about? The most difficult?

It is always challenging to create a character, whether historical or imagined. The most "fun" to write about was Theodore Roosevelt, whose portrait is more or less true to life. Some individuals, like Roosevelt and Jack London, are larger than life, inimitable. There is also a cameo appearance by the man who was the model for Sherlock Holmes, who was enjoyable to bring to life.?

Many of the characters in your book carry deep social prejudices that were common in the time period. How did you manage to write sympathetically about characters whose beliefs would be considered unconscionable today?

I tend not to judge people harshly—I present them, with their flaws and virtues, and allow the reader to make his or her own assessment.?

Is there a message you hope readers will get from this book?

I don't write "message" novels but would hope that the reader comes away from The Accursed with a deeper sense of our American past, and an awareness of the often astonishing interplay between figures we now consider historical and even iconic. Essentially, they are human beings just like us—perhaps, in some cases, more flawed and reprehensible. And the novel's underlying urgency has to do with the evolution of our democracy—the gradual interaction, and integration, of the races—as well as the strengthening of women's rights.?

What are you working on now?

My next novel, Carthage, portrays the situation of an Iraqi war vet returning to his upstate New York town; his difficulties returning to civilian life, and the difficulties his fiancee and family have as a consequence. It is a realistic novel in a way that The Accursed is a surrealist novel, but both are grounded in psychological realism and in American history.

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Popular understanding of Zelda Fitzgerald has her pegged as something between two of F. Scott’s notorious female characters: devastating Rosalind from This Side of Paradise and vacuous Gloria from The Beautiful and Damned. Add a dollop of insanity, and that’s our Zelda. But as Therese Anne Fowler reveals in her new novel, Z, that’s not the whole story.

F. Scott’s legendary wife, as defined by media, literature and time, is less a real woman and more a mythical flapper creature. She is remembered as impulsive, usually drunk and eventually schizophrenic, and together she and Scott ruled the Jazz Age as American royalty. That’s the myth, and when Fowler first considered writing Z, it was all she knew.

“All I thought I knew about her was that she was Scott’s crazy wife,” Fowler says from her home in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I just couldn’t imagine that writing about a crazy person would be very interesting except in a Mommie Dearest sort of way.”

As it turns out, Zelda wasn’t crazy. She was probably misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and more likely suffered from bipolar disorder. Her wild behavior in New York has also been exaggerated over time (though she did jump from a table down a flight of stairs). “She’s made out to be this sort of diva,” says Fowler. “I have included some of those incidents, but I think they do not stand out quite as vividly because I’m offsetting them with day-to-day truths of her life, the struggle.”

That’s the side of Zelda that has been forgotten by history, memorialized only in letters—her diaries cannot be found—and resurrected now in fiction: She was a mother and a wife, grappling with an identity separate from her marriage, split between the Southern sensibilities of her youth and the modern, feminist ideas she encountered in Paris. “Zelda is sort of hamstrung by being raised a traditional Southern girl, and then she lived in this world of rapid women’s rights developments and never seemed to be able to be one or the other of those women,” Fowler explains. “She would’ve been much happier if she’d identified one way or the other.”

This humanized Zelda is markedly less glamorous and therefore less of what we might want her to be. But Fowler maintains that the inexperienced, lost Zelda depicted in Z is much closer to the truth. “I have not taken liberties with the story or characterization in any case, in any character throughout the book,” Fowler says. “[The story] that pop culture has shown [readers] previously is an over-hyped misrepresentation. Zelda will get the fair shake that she didn’t get in her own lifetime.”

Zelda tells the story in her own words, in what could be called a “fictional memoir” that begins with a siren call: “Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we have seemed.” From there, Zelda takes readers to her childhood home in Alabama, where she first meets a dashing young F. Scott, and then to New York City, where they decide to act like characters from his first novel to draw the public eye, thus beginning their scandalous reign over NYC.

It is not until they move to Europe that the label of “wife” starts to conflict with Zelda’s own aspirations, but when she seeks careers in dance, art and writing, Scott’s jealousy creeps in. Throughout her life, Zelda’s identity is inextricably aligned with Scott’s career—Scott defined the Jazz Age as a whole, and Zelda’s identity in particular, and she could never disconnect from that. This is her great tragedy.

Juicy scenes, such as boozy stunts and rumors of an affair between Scott and Hemingway, add spice to a relatively simple story of a disintegrating marriage. Perhaps the only scene in which Fowler takes fiction’s liberties is when Hemingway propositions Zelda.

“[That scene is] deductive based on everything that I could find about their relationship,” says Fowler, who could find no historic evidence as to why Zelda and Hemingway never got along. “I wasn’t ramping it up, so to speak, for the purpose of story. I thought, ‘This is just something this guy does.’ ”

Z introduces an arguably more flattering Zelda, but Scott loses his golden-boy veneer (as Hemingway does in Paula McLain’s novel, The Paris Wife). At his worst, he is an obtuse bully and an insecure fool. “We have these preconceived ideas of him partially based on anecdotal stuff . . . and also [from] reading his work,” explains Fowler, who filtered Scott’s worst out of the book. “We see this thoughtful, compassionate, tender person behind the story. Nobody who writes the kinds of things he wrote could be otherwise, but the truth of it is, he was a man of the times and he did have some struggles.”

While Fowler blames neither Scott nor Zelda for the ruin of their marriage, she has found that readers often take sides, and she expects criticism from “Team Scott.”

“For me to tell this story and to give it the verisimilitude that it deserved, if I wanted to stand up against the critical eye that’s going to be brought to it, I couldn’t make it a polemic in the way biographers seem to get away with,” Fowler says. “I didn’t think that would be fair to either of them.”

No matter which side they’re on, readers will find Z to be an intimate look at the collapse of a fascinating celebrity marriage through the eyes of a woman who defies expectations. “Her voice, her letters, her essays and her short fiction were all so clear and accessible and humorous and wry,” Fowler says. “She wasn’t out there trying to be anyone’s hero except maybe her own, and not doing such a great job at that, either. I think she fought the good fight in the end. I think that’s one of the reasons I admire her.”

Philipp Meyer's second novel, The Son, is one of the most anticipated literary releases of the year. A true epic that encompasses generations and traces 200 years of Texas history, it challenges our own creation myths and explores the costs of survival. We asked Meyer a few questions about the book and how far he'd gone in the name of research. 

To reduce it to its most basic, The Son is a creation story—the creation of a family dynasty, a state and even a country, since as Jeanne argues, America would not be what it is without Texas oil. Versus your debut, American Rust, which is the story of an America in decline. How do you see the two books in relation to each other?
When I started writing The Son I wanted to do something that was the opposite of American Rust—I didn’t want to be seen as a guy who only wrote about one class or one group of people or one set of problems. I was interested in the American creation myth, the story that we all believe about how our country (and by extension, ourselves) came to be. The more I read and researched the more I realized that almost everything I’d believed about our creation myth or national narrative or whatever you might call it—was wrong. The John Wayne version we all learn as a child (noble Anglo goes into the wilderness, fights off vicious Indians, etc.) was clearly wrong, but the version I’d learned in college, which I might roughly summarize as: “Europeans all bad, Native Americans all good” was also wrong. The truth is actually much simpler, which is that regardless of their race or cultural background or skin color, people are just people, and they mostly act the same—for better and for worse.

If I didn't trust the book knowledge I would go out and do the real thing. For instance, because the Comanches and other plains tribes depended so heavily on the buffalo, I knew I needed to understand what the inside of a buffalo actually smelled like, what the blood actually tasted like, etc.

You grew up in Baltimore, and now live in Austin, Texas. Was your move what drew you to write about the state's history?
When I was doing an MFA at the Michener Center I took a Texas history class. The more I learned about the state, the more I saw that the history of Texas is like a very compressed version of the history of America as a whole. I did not, and do not, really think of this as a “Texas book.” It’s a book about the way our country was founded and settled.

This is a novel that truly deserves the description "epic." Each of the three main narratives could have been a novel on its own, and Eli's captivity story in particular contains an incredible level of detail about Comanche customs and culture. What sort of research did you do for this book?
In total I read between 250 and 350 books, of which I still have about 250. Of course I interviewed dozens of people as well. And I walked and camped and slept out in most of the places I describe in the book, took careful notes about flora and fauna, read archeological studies about how the flora and fauna have changed over time. I read every single first-hand account of early Texas I could find. From an environmental or natural history standpoint, Texas has changed enormously over the past 150 years, and those early narratives are crucial for figuring out how. One very obvious thing is that back then, nearly the entire state was a grassland. 

I also took several weeks of tracking classes and spent a lot of time in the woods learning how to track and study animals. I taught myself how to hunt with a bow and arrow, killed (and ate) several deer and tanned their hides, helped a rancher with his buffalo harvest (which meant dispatching buffalo with a hunting rifle—when you buy grass-fed buffalo steak at your local supermarket, it comes from ranches like that one). I also drank a cup of warm blood straight from the neck vein of one of the animals, which I would not recommend to anyone.

For some of the battle stuff I took a bunch of classes at Blackwater, the private military contractor. I wanted to know how do you actually win (or lose) a gunfight, how do you clear a house, what happens to your mind in those situations and how to people who kill for a living (professional warrior types) deal with it. Most of the philosophical stuff about combat—"you have to love other people's bodies more than your own"—comes from these retired Special Forces guys, particularly one guy from Seal Team Six who I became friends with.

In terms of my process, I would basically write and write and every time I hit a gap in my knowledge I would stop writing and go and read everything I could on that subject. If I didn't trust the book knowledge I would go out and do the real thing—learn the actual skill or sleep in the actual place. For instance, because the Comanches and other plains tribes depended so heavily on the buffalo and used the animal so completely, I knew I needed to understand what the inside of a buffalo actually smelled like, what the blood actually tasted like, etc. I learned how to start a fire with two sticks, to twist cordage from plant fibers and sinew. I became friends with some Comanches and they made me a traditional bow and arrows—which turned out to be much harder to shoot than even a modern bow. I went hunting with blackpowder rifles and acquired some old blackpowder pistols to figure out they worked and how reliable (and unreliable) they were. I’d ridden horses a few times before, but didn’t know much about them, so I hung around horse people and took lessons until I felt comfortable enough to write about horses.

Texas was built on the destruction of two previous cultures, the Native Americans and the Mexicans. At one point, Eli says that "There was nothing you could take that had not belonged to some other person." Is it possible to create without destroying?
It is not just Texas that was built on the destruction of other cultures. It is every other single state in America. There were likely about 20 million people living in North America when modern Europeans began to arrive in the 1500’s. In New York State alone, there were dozens of native American tribes and nations. Of course a few individuals survived here and there, but for all practical purposes, we (of European descent) wiped them all out. We have this national mythology that our ancestors carved out a country from the wilderness, but in fact there was no wilderness. The entire continent, every square inch of it, was already claimed. There was no “free” land—the whole place had been settled for 10 or 15 thousand years. 

The book is told mainly from three different perspectives, always in the Eli-Jeanne-Peter order, rather than in the order those characters appear in the family genealogy. Why did you choose to order the chapters in this way? Do you see Jeanne as being more of a direct descendant of Eli than his own son?
Most of the reason you do that is because you want to alternate the sound and tones and rhythms for the audience—the same way a composer might. And of course you also have to make sure you are telling the story in a sensible way. But this was not something I decided on at the beginning. I changed the chapters around constantly as I wrote the book. It’s useful to make plans and outlines, but you have to be willing to discard them as soon as you see the truth of what comes out on the page.  

What was it like writing from a female point-of-view? Did Jeanne's position as a woman in a man's world—and a woman who doesn't particularly identify with other women of her time—make it easier for you to imagine her inner life?
I think with any character, male or female, young or old, modern or historical, you know almost nothing about them when you start writing and you always looking for some commonality you have with them. When you find this, it becomes the thread you use to pull yourself inside them. To paraphrase Eudora Welty, our job is to inhabit the skins of all our characters, whether they are saints or serial killers. I think actors go through a very similar process, though of course they are working with a character who has already been invented.

Your work has been compared to a lot of literary greats—Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, just to name a few. Were any of these authors a particular inspiration to you, and if not, who is?
I think the people I mostly look to for inspiration are the big modernists. If I had to pick three, it would be Woolf, Faulkner and Joyce. Of course there is a lot to learn from Hemingway and Steinbeck, from Welty, from Flannery O’Connor. But I’m pretty omnivorous. I’ll read the postmodernists. I’ll read detective fiction. I’ll pretty much read anything until I see I’m not going to learn from it. 

What are you working on next?
I think it’s time for me to take a break from this modernist stuff, so the new book is leaning a lot more toward magic realism.

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Read our review of The Son.