Hernan Diaz, Jill Bialosky & Karen Joy Fowler: A Conversation

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels, including two New York Times bestsellers, and four short story collections. She is a PEN/Faulkner and California Book Award winner, has been a Dublin IMPAC nominee, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. In 1822, a secretive family moved into a cabin some 30 miles northeast of Baltimore to farm, hide, and raise 10 children over the next 16 years. Junius Booth is the breadwinner. A celebrated Shakespearean actor and master of the house, he is a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. The children arrive as the country draws closer to secession and civil war. As the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their secret lives to cement their place as one of the country’s leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with a specious promise of an early prophecy. Booth (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) is a portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make – and break – a family.

Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  He has also written a book of essays, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. In Trust: A Novel (Riverhead Books), it’s the 1920s and everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth – all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Diaz puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another, and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Jill Bialosky is the author of The Players: Poems; The Prize: A Novel; The New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life; and Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir, and other titles. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and The Paris Review, among others. She also co-edited, with Helen Schulman, the anthology Wanting a Child. In Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections (Knopf), Bialosky builds a narrative sequence from more than 100 elegant poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore both darkness and sustenance. Her calling as a writer, her sister’s suicide, the horror unleashed by World War II, the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, the woods where she seeks asylum – they form a moving story, and offer a form of hard-won grace and an awareness of the cost of extreme violence, inexplicable loss, and the miraculous cycles of life. Katie Couric suggested that as “we grapple with a new normal, Jill Bialosky’s poetry might be the antidote we all need. Her new book Asylum, a compilation of prose and poetry, evokes despair, survival – and most importantly, hope.”