In Conversation: On Three Novels: Ruthie Fear, Adana Moreau & Disappearing Earth

Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine. As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript. Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious manuscript written by Adana Moreau. With the help of his friend Javier, he tracks down an address for Adana’s son in New Orleans, but as Hurricane Katrina strikes they must head to the storm-ravaged city for answers. What results in The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Hanover Square Press) is a brilliantly layered masterpiece–an ode to home, storytelling and the possibility of parallel worlds. The New York Times Book Review called it “Hypnotizing…Zapata reinterprets the extent and toll of exile on Earth, the gulf between universes of human experience.

Julia Phillips’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Moscow Times. She studied Russian at Barnard and secured a Fulbright scholarship to visit Russia. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of Kamchatka, a peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls–sisters, eight and eleven–go missing. In the ensuing weeks and months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Julia Phillips’s debut novel Disappearing Earth (Knopf), a finalist for a National Book Award in Fiction, takes us through a year in Kamchatka, visiting in the process the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty–densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and glassy seas. But this is a region as complex as it is alluring, a place where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered. Disappearing Earth reveals the intricate bonds of family and community in a Russia we have not seen before. The New York Times Book Review called Disappearing Earth “A superb debut—brilliant. Daring, nearly flawless. […] Phillips describes the region with a cartographer’s precision and an ethnographer’s clarity, drawing an emblematic cast . . . There will be those eager to designate Disappearing Earth a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the

Maxim Loskutoff is the author of the story collection Come West and See. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review. Ruthie Fear (W. W. Norton & Company), the first novel from Maxim Loskutoff, captures the destruction and rebirth of the modern American West with warmth, urgency, and grandeur. Raised in a trailer in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley by her stubborn, bowhunting father, our heroine, Ruthie develops a powerful connection with the natural world but struggles to find her place in a society shaped by men. Development, gun violence, and her father’s vendettas threaten her mountain home. As she comes of age, her small community begins to fracture in the face of class tension and encroaching natural disaster. The Technicolor bursts of action that test Ruthie’s commitment to the valley and its people invite us to look closer at our nation’s complicated legacy of manifest destiny, mass shootings, and environmental destruction.  Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, noted that Loskutoff “writes the various violences of the contemporary American West (development, extraction, racism, misogyny, and guns, guns, guns) unapologetically, unromantically, and with a razor-sharp clarity that’s like a punch to the gut.”