Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Myla Goldberg is a bestselling novelist, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the NYPL Young Lions award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover award, and recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. She writes and teaches in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband Jason Little and their two daughters.
Myla Goldberg's website
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Wickett's Remedy is such a departure from your first published novel, Bee Season. What sparked your interest in the influenza epidemic of 1918?
About five years ago, I came across a newspaper article that listed the five most deadly plagues of all time and the 1918 flu epidemic was one of them. I consider myself an amateur disease nerd and I'd never heard of the 1918 flu, which meant that I immediately had to learn everything about it that I could.
What kind of research did you do for the book?
Whatever I could think of! I read loads of books and articles about influenza, the 1918 epidemic, and the general time period. I read period fiction and newspapers and magazines. I visited Boston; I walked down Washington Street and all around Southie. The only place I wasn't able to get to was Gallups Island.
The structure of the novel includes primary sources, various narrative strands, and a compelling chorus of the dead. How did you piece together the novel's elaborate structure and where did the idea for a chorus commenting on the action of the novel come from?
I'm a big fan of books that tell their stories using unconventional narrative structures. One of my all-time favorite...
We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare...
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