Listen to Will Eaves discuss Murmur and tune in to actor Blake Ritson’s dramatic reading from the opening section of the novel at the BBC.
Read an interview with Will Eaves about Murmur.
Congratulations to Wolf Season, a Firecracker Award Finalist and National Reading Group Month “Great Group Read” selected by the Women’s National Book Association. Find additional resources for the novel—including an interview, excerpt, reviews, discussion questions, and more—at BookBrowse.
Read Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Chronicle of Higher Education feature, “Visions of the Impossible,” which is the basis for The Flip.
Watch Jeffrey J. Kripal’s TEDx Talk on science, religion, and paradoxical ways of thinking.
Read an excerpt from William E. Glassley’s A Wilder Time at Longreads.
Helen Benedict discusses her novel Wolf Season and the challenges of writing about women and war on KPFA’s Bookwaves on Cover to Cover, KMSU’s Weekly Reader Radio Show, and Woodstock Booktalk Radio, and with Publishers Weekly, Stay Thirsty Magazine, Neworld Review, the Michigan Daily, West Side Spirit, HuffPost, Read Her Like an Open Book, Snowflakes in a Blizzard, authors Caroline Leavitt and Katey Schultz, Powell’s Books, and the Columbia Journalism School.
The Kansas City Public Library and Kansas City Star have selected Helen Benedict’s novel Wolf Season for the “FYI Book Club.” Join the discussion, read an excerpt from the novel, and find an interview with the author in the Kansas City Star.
Wrath-Bearing Tree, an online magazine established and maintained by combat veterans, has selected Wolf Season for their “Monthly Fiction” feature. Read an excerpt from the novel and an interview with author Helen Benedict.
Helen Benedict talks about war literature with authors David Abrams, Cara Hoffman, Matt Gallagher, and Dalia Sofer in the “Life During Wartime” panel at the Center for Fiction, and with authors Seth Brady Tucker, Jesse Goolsby, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, and Samuel Snoek-Brown in the “Duty and Dilemma: 100 Years of Writing About War” AWP Roundtable.
Helen Benedict shares her recommendations for the “Best Contemporary Iraqi Writing About War” with the Literary Hub, where her novel Wolf Season is also “Making News.”
Read an excerpt from Pascale Kramer’s novel Autopsy of a Father in the Brooklyn Rail.
Find out how Rose-Lynn Fisher’s The Topography of Tears inspired the cinematography in First They Killed My Father in British Cinematographer and read about Darquer’s “Tears and Lace” haute couture line, which was also inspired by The Topography of Tears project, at Lingerie Francaise.
I have been writing since the late sixties and though my writing has taken many forms—history, novels, essays, book reviews, pamphlets, leaflets, songs—all of it has been shaped by my determination not to oversimplify or hide behind irony, but to write about women and politics in a voice that reaches beyond intellect to feeling.
My most recent publication, Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, calls for a politics based on human rights, a politics complex enough to oppose Western invasions and fight bigoted attacks on Muslims, and at the same time be unafraid to act in solidarity with movements in the Global South that fight the Islamist oppression of women, religious minorities, gays, and freethinkers. In it, I applied the method I developed for my first book, The Rising of the Women, combining storytelling, close reading of sources, and a search for patterns—an approach I am also using in A Road Unforeseen, this time for current history.
When civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, and Assad viciously attacked his own people, I watched in horror, but I was not surprised that the Islamic State took off like wildfire, for I could see no force with sufficient political strength and enough military experience to stop them. This remained true until the summer of 2014, when Daesh swept down upon the Yazidis, a Kurdish minority in Sinjar, promising genocide and sex slavery. The vaunted Iraqi peshmerga had agreed to defend the Yazidis, but melted away when the time came. Out of nowhere came a miraculous rescue—Syrian and Turkish Kurds, including special women’s militias, who cut a passage through the Sinjar mountains to get the Yazidi out, fighting Daesh as they went.
They came from the Rojava cantons, a place I had never heard of. Racing to learn all I could about Rojava, I realized its people were putting core feminist, ecological, and cooperative ideas into practice, based on pluralism and separation between religion and the state, with a bottom-up democratic form of governance, with at least 40% of every organization being women, and co-leadership positions in everything, one male, one female—all in the middle of a fight to the death with Daesh and other Islamist militias, while under siege and unable to even get medical supplies because Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan had closed their borders.
For twenty years or more, my colleagues and I had been saying that only unity between leftwing movements and feminists could provide enough strength to take on both a rising tide of fundamentalism and an increasingly oppressive form of globalized capitalism. Because poor women in the Global South are the real “wretched of the earth,” we said, any movement for transformation had to make their needs central. But no leftwing movement I ever saw took up the challenge until Rojava. As I came to understand what they were trying to do, I knew their experiment was vitally important to all of us, and that I must help them get their story out, so they could get the support they need to survive.
A Road Unforeseen is a feminist reading of the war against Daesh, whose rule by rape and genocide is so akin to an adult-film version of Mordor that I felt the title had to come from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring: “We must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.”
We are a nation given over to consumption. The predilection for novelty is everywhere present, not excepting in our art and our literature. For much of my writing life, I believed that the works of the past belonged there. Romantic novels by Hawthorne and Melville or naturalistic ones by Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were to be endured in pursuit of a degree (even if sometimes secretly enjoyed). Once having been examined on past literary achievements, I hurriedly put them behind me in favor of fiction produced by Modernists and Postmodernists. I tended to judge art and literature by its novelty and its stylistic beauties (never mind their worth).
Late in my career, I have taken up the thread dropped forty years ago and am attending to the stories of the American past—that is, of course, how it has come to be known (how it is always coming to be known by successive generations of readers) by its literature. Through my American novels, I hope to understand, a little, the present American era by what came before and shaped its thought, beliefs, prejudices, virtues, vices, and emotional undertow. I want to believe that I am serving a purpose higher than aesthetics, which also has its place in my writing. I love to fashion beautiful sentences, but I hope that they are expressive of the state of my feelings about the world around me and of the truth, as I grasp it, of that elusive world, acknowledging that it is only an approximation.
The literature of the past conferred on readers and writers a larger view. It seems to me that this amplitude of time and space encouraged a corresponding amplitude of theme and purpose. In general, nineteenth-century literature was not small nor did it consider ethical, political, social issues outside the jurisdiction of fiction. It is precisely this old-fashioned grandeur of thought, moral intent, spaciousness, and comprehensiveness—in its breathtaking view of a continent being made and remade—that I hope to emulate in my American novels. Such an ambition is certainly presumptuous, but, with his or her every sentence composed with the intention that it be read, the writer presumes.
*The books of Norman Lock’s The American Novels series include The Boy in His Winter (2014), American Meteor (2015), The Port-Wine Stain (2016), A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017), The Wreckage of Eden (2018), and Feast Day of the Cannibals (2019).
Find out what haunts Brian Booker about Dan Chaon’s story “Here’s a Little Something to Remember Me By” at Beatrice.
