An article in Vulture explored Civitellian John Wray (CRF 2011)’s Brooklyn brownstone writers’ colony and how his personality and experiences come through in his writing.
“[His house is] a cross between an artists’ colony, a co-working space, and a frat house. A few years ago, realizing that he had far more room than he needed, Wray started renting out bedrooms as offices for writer friends. He currently hosts fiction writer and translator Nathan Englander, novelist Akhil Sharma, Booker Prize–winning author Marlon James, and science-fiction writer Alice Sola Kim.”
Wray’s personality, so evident in his house with his typewriter, drumkit, and ironic posters and signs that cover the walls, “is more difficult to spot in his books. With each novel, he reinvents himself anew as a writer and then disappears, chameleon-like, into the background.”
“That was clearly the case for Godsend, Wray’s fifth and latest novel (out October 9), which grew out of a trip he took to Afghanistan and Pakistan in winter 2016. He was there tracing the path of John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban” — a teenage convert to Islam from California who was captured by American troops in November 2001 while fighting alongside hard-line Islamists in Afghanistan — and thinking of writing a nonfiction book about him. Then someone he met mentioned offhandedly that another outsider had also fought with the Taliban: “the American girl.” Wray dug for more details about her but came up empty-handed. “I could never get any more concrete information,” he says. “And at some point I realized that I had the great good fortune of being a novelist and not a nonfiction writer.” So he set about writing the story as fiction instead.”
Click the link below for the full article and keep your eyes out for John’s new book realease, Godsend, on October 9th.