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David Joy is the author of The Line That Held Us (winner of the 2018 SIBA Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications, and he is the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey and a co-editor for Gather at the River: Twenty-Five Authors on Fishing. Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.
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In your fourth novel, When These Mountains Burn, you once again return to western North Carolina, which has become your literary terrain. What is this novel about?
I'm never good at answering this question and it's because I read, "What is this novel about," as a philosophical question when it's almost always a question of plot—What happens? What happens is that a father loses his son to an overdose and sets out to clean up his community when it becomes obvious law enforcement won't. In that way, it's a sort of Gran Torino look at the opioid crisis in Southern Appalachia told from the perspectives of the father, an addict, and the DEA. As far as what the book's about, though, the heart of it, I think it's a novel about cultural extinction. It's about what Maurice Manning called, "the gone and the going away."
Each of your books seems to hone in a particular timely issue. What drew you to write about the opioid crisis?
Heroin really started to take hold of the community where I live over the past five or six years. That's not to say that there wasn't a growing opioid problem before that, but it really became impossible to ignore more recently. You started seeing sharps containers put up in gas station bathrooms. ...
Greg Iles has spent most of his life in Natchez, Mississippi. His first novel, Spandau Phoenix, was the first of many New York Times bestsellers. His Natchez Burning trilogy continued the story of Penn Cage, the protagonist ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
When These Mountains Burn
Try:
Natchez Burning
by Greg Iles
The novels of the American writer Cormac McCarthy have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include... (more)
If you enjoyed:
When These Mountains Burn
Try:
No Country For Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
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