“The Only Conspiracy is the Conspiracy of White Supremacy”: An Interview With Brian Castleberry

Brian Castleberry

In his debut novel, Nine Shiny Objects, Brian Castleberry peels back the veneer of a rosy, postwar America, exposing the messy inner workings beneath. The novel is divided into nine hefty sections, each with a different protagonist whose life intersects in one way or another with a mysterious UFO cult. The book begins in 1947 with Oliver Danville, a small-time Chicagoan hustler, who, after witnessing a murder and reading about a strange UFO sighting, feels compelled to head west to investigate. Danville eventually establishes a group called “the Seekers,” and what follows is one chance encounter after another, as the story wends from coast to coast, spanning four decades, and all the while explores the limits of utopian dreams and the reactionary forces poised to strike them down. A whole world populates this richly woven novel: farmers, rock stars, city folks and suburbanites, a poet, a salesman, a conspiracy radio talk show host, and more. This is an American novel with heavy American themes, and at the same time, Castleberry reveals the humor in the absurd. In an email exchange, the author discussed with me some of these themes and how the book came to exist.

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“The Structure of the Book is a Bad Trip”: Joshua Wheeler On Writing “Acid West”

I got a chance to have a conversation with Joshua Wheeler, my teacher and friend, upon the release of his debut book of essays, Acid West, just out on FSG Originals. Joshua writes with a rhythm and comic timing reminiscent at times of John McPhee—a younger, more irreverent McPhee—who has definitely never set foot on the campus of Princeton like our aged master. Wheeler’s world is John Wayne and dive bars and adobe motels and thrift stores and desert dirt […]

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Belief, Disbelief, and Truth: On Zachary Lazar’s “Vengeance”

The roman à clef (a true book disguised as fiction) is a long-established category of literature going back to the eighteenth century with the nearly forgotten work of the French writer Madeleine de Scudéry, who is said to have invented the form as a way to write about politics and other sensitive matters without landing herself in jail. A literary cousin—let’s call it a “fictional memoir”—goes back just as far, at least to 1722, when Daniel Defoe published A Journal […]

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