“I know the point of fiction is supposed to be to differentiate characters, but one thing you notice about the army is that the experiences one person has are often very similar to the experiences other people have, and I tried to write the novel in a way that speaks to that”: J.A. Bernstein talks with Michael Reid Busk about his debut novel, Rachel’s Tomb.
J.A. Bernstein says of Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that this might be the best novel to come out of the current carnage in Iraq.”
“More than anything, I wanted this book to take on the processed food industry. As a satirist, I wanted my novel to serve as a kind of corrective to it, if only by asking readers to question what it is they’re eating. But the food industry doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so it’s what it reveals about American life that is really at the center of the novel.”
