In Conversation: On The Cold Millions

Maris Kreizman is the host of The Maris Review, a literary podcast from LitHub. She’s an essayist and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Review of Books, New York Magazine, the LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, The Ringer, and more. She was previously the editorial director of digital content at B&N.com, and a publishing outreach lead at Kickstarter. As a former book editor and former editorial director of Book of the Month, she enjoys critiquing her own writing.

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets; the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. In Walter’s The Cold Millions (Harper) we meet the Dolan brothers. They live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. Sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home. His older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his money and his hold on Ursula. And then there is a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. In a starred review Publishers Weekly called it “Superb…. a splendid postmodern rendition of the social realist novels of the 1930s by Henry Roth, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos, updated with strong female characters and executed with pristine prose.”