photo by Curt Richter Gore Vidal has been one of America's most distinct voices for more than half a century. The author of more than 20 novels, hundreds of essays, and several plays for screen and stage, Vidal is perhaps best known for the eloquent and witheringly sarcastic political commentary that has made him a darling of the American left. With dependably erudite attacks on right-wing figures, this quixotic scion of a privileged political family, friend of the Kennedys and playwright Tennessee Williams, has staked out a unique position in American political and intellectual life.

This recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar consists of an hourlong conversation between Vidal and Jay Parini, his literary executor, a poet, biographer, and critic. Vidal discusses the influences on his work as a historical novelist, his views on the American educational system, and his admiration for figures including Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. George W. Bush, then serving his final week in office, is the target of particular scorn, as Vidal levels a litany of complaints accusing his administration of "shredding" the Bill of Rights and striving "to make lying the national pastime." In a question-and-answer session,Vidal discusses efforts to bring Tennessee Williams's final play to the public, as well as his feelings on disgraced financier Bernard Madoff and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(59:09) / 27.1 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Gore Vidal and Jay Parini. Used with generous permission from Gore Vidal and Jay Parini.

Photo by Nick Vagnoni Andrea Barrett's acclaimed novels and short-stories are marked by their investigation of scientific and historical themes. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Barrett explains how she began to write about science and history in the short story form after the disappointment of writing four unsuccessful novels. "With nothing to lose," Barrett recounts, "I began to write about the thing that I actually loved the most, but had never dared to write fiction about before." She follows this account with an excerpt from "Ship Fever," the title novella of her National Book Award-winning first collection of short stories. In it, Lockland Grant, a bright young doctor who has come to the island of Gros Île in 1847 to treat the population of newly landed Irish immigrants, has fallen victim to the typhus epidemic raging through the community.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(11:13) / 5.2 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Andrea Barrett. Used with generous permission from Andrea Barrett.

photo by Curt Richter William Kennedy is best known for the novels of his Albany Cycle. A singular epic of that capital city and its Irish-American clans in the 19th and 20th centuries, the work has earned Kennedy comparisons to James Joyce and Saul Bellow. Among its novels are Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1979), The Flaming Corsage (1996), and Ironweed (1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

In this audio recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Kennedy reads two unpublished pieces. The presentation begins with a brief (5:30) essay recounting Kennedy's first short story, "Eggs," and the lukewarm reaction it garnered from his friends and family. This is followed by a reading from the opening chapter of Kennedy's unnamed novel-in-progress. A continuation of the Albany Cycle, this forthcoming novel focuses on Daniel Quinn, a reporter for the Albany Times Union and the grandson of the Daniel Quinn from Kennedy's Quinn's Book.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(29:27) / 13.5 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 William Kennedy. Used with generous permission from William Kennedy.

Photo by Nick Vagnoni Valerie Martin is the author of three collections of short fiction, including The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories; several novels, including Tresspass and Mary Reilly, which was made into a movie with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich; and a nonfiction work about St. Francis of Assisi.

In this recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Martin reads from her Orange Prize-winning historical novel, Property. Set on a plantation outside New Orleans in 1828, Property is narrated by Manon Gaudet, a slaveowner whose husband has fathered two children with one of Manon's slaves. In the passage presented here, Manon meets with her brother-in-law following an insurrection in which Manon has been shot in the shoulder, the slave has run away, and her husband has been killed.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(13:54) / 6.4 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Valerie Martin. Used with generous permission from Valerie Martin.

Photos by Michael Blades Marilynne Robinson has been named the winner of the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction for her third novel, Home. Robinson, who joined us at the 27th Key West Literary Seminar this past January, was the unanimous choice of the judges, who cited Home for the "luminous quality" of its writing, as well as its ability "to draw the reader into a world of hope, expectation, misunderstanding, love, and kindness."

The Orange, awarded at a ceremony in London last night, is given annually to the best English-language novel written by a woman. It is considered one of the U.K.'s most prestigious awards, and includes a cash prize of £30,000. Past winners include Valerie Martin, and this year's shortlist included Samantha Hunt, both of whom joined Robinson in Key West for our recent Seminar.

photo by Michael Blades


Tesla's drawing for the AC dynamo;
U.S. patent 390,721 Samantha Hunt is the author of The Invention of Everything Else, which has been shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Hunt discusses the subject of her historical novel, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, whose revolutionary inventions included alternating current and wireless technology. Briefly employed by Thomas Edison, Tesla routinely found himself on the wrong side of American capitalism and died impoverished and marginalized. In Hunt's passage, Tesla recounts his initial meeting with the financially-driven American inventor who sought to keep Tesla's inventions from reaching the public.

"'Capitalism! Ever heard of it?'
'Yes, I have,' I said. 'I've heard of it. I'm not certain I agree.'
"There's nothing wrong with capitalism,' he told me."
'Except that in order to sell something, a person must first own it, and how can a person own these things that we are inventing? How could I own alternating current? That's like owning thunder or lightning.'
'Men own thunder all the time. That's how America works. And please, I've heard enough about your alternating current. ... AC is dangerous, and more importantly'– Edison drove his finger once directly into the center of my chest– 'my light bulbs don't work on it.'"

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(14:05) / 6.6 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Samantha Hunt. Used with generous permission from Samantha Hunt.

photo by Nick Vagnoni David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize, is the definitive work on the life and thought of a complex American intellectual. In this lecture from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Lewis examines Du Bois's largely-forgotten work as a writer of historical fiction, whose journey "beyond the borders of social science certitude" was the result of a "poetic temperament combined with an intellectual's dissatisfaction about the limits of the historically knowable." Lewis discusses Du Bois's early historical novels, The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess; as well as the later Black Flame Trilogy (The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color). In a brief question and answer session, Lewis comments on Du Bois's persecution at the hands of the U.S. government during the 1950s, his reputation as a "ladies' man," and his early life and education in Great Barrington, MA.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(25:35) / 11.8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 David Levering Lewis. Used with generous permission from David Levering Lewis.

photo by Nick Vagnoni Eric Foner is one of America's preeminent historians, especially known for his work on the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. In this fascinating lecture from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Foner explores the social and political implications of historical inquiry, and the role of the imagination in the historian's work. Drawing on sources as diverse as Jane Austen, Friedrich Nietszche, Newt Gingrich, and Diane Feinstein, Foner says society's understanding of history is both reflected in and shaped by contemporary thought. Rebutting a popular claim regarding "facts" in the historical record, Foner argues that "the constant search for new perspectives [is] the lifeblood of historical understanding."

“The line between historical scholarship and historical fiction is not as hard and fast as we sometimes might think. ... Every novel is an expression of the sensibility of the novelist; and, as E.H. Carr wrote, 'to study history, study the historian.' The reason historical interpretations change is that historians change, as does the world around them.”

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(38:44) / 17.8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Eric Foner. Used with generous permission from Eric Foner.

Video coverage of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar has begun to air on cable television channel C-SPAN's Book-TV and is available on their website. Our entire January 10 program will air Saturday March 14, 2009, from 10:00 a.m until 3:45 p.m.; again (for the nightowls) on Sunday March 15, from 11:00 p.m. until 4:45 a.m.; and again during the weekend of April 4, 5, 6. The nearly six hours of programming from our January 10 sessions includes Gore Vidal in conversation with Jay Parini, Eric Foner's dazzling lecture "Who Owns History?," and a fascinating conversation between W.E.B. DuBois scholar David Levering Lewis and Michael and Ivy Meeropol, the son and granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Check your local listings to find out what channel Book-TV is on in your area, and the program listings for times. Links to videos at Book-TV.org are listed below. (Please note that the C-SPAN video player will launch in a pop-up window, so you may have to disable your pop-up blocker in order to see them.)

    • "Writer Against the Grain": Gore Vidal with Jay Parini
     (you can also see a shorter excerpt of this on YouTube)

    • Eric Foner: "Who Owns History?"

    • Michael and Ivy Meeropol in conversation with David Levering Lewis

    • Barry Unsworth reading from Land of Marvels

    • "How Can We Know (and Tell) What Happened in the Past": panel discussion with Eric Foner, Jill Lepore, David Levering Lewis, Megan Marshall, Patricia O'Toole.

    • "The Boundaries of History, Historical Fiction, and the Limits of Invention": panel discussion with Peter Ho Davies, Sena Jeter Naslund, Megan Marshall, Michael Meeropol, Patricia O'Toole, and Barry Unsworth.

    • Alan Cheuse reads from To Catch the Lightning

    • Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore: "Taking Liberty– Fiction and the Archives"

The San Carlos Institute panorama. Photo by Curt Richter.

As we unpack the boxes, the discs, the jump drives, and the emails from our 27th Key West Literary Seminar– Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth– we've uncovered this fine collection of pictures and quotes (thanks, Nan Klingener). Visit our podcasts page to listen to readings and talks by Allan Gurganus, Geraldine Brooks, and Barry Unsworth; and check back often for many more in the year ahead.


"The true parts of my story are the least probable, the most unbelievable," said Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis, shown here with Dominion author Calvin Baker. Photo by Nick Vagnoni.


Michael Meeropol after a discussion with his daughter, Ivy about the complicated legacy of his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Photo by Nick Vagnoni.


Andrea Barrett, at left, responding to a question about what she's working on now, said she started researching the delay and eventual spread of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, aided by Sir Arthur Eddington, which led her down many pathways of reading ("To say I start incoherently would be generous," she said)– and one of her major realizations so far is that "everything begins with an E." This would include Einstein, eclipses, Eddington, the ether of space (which she said started her off on the first place) and, of course, e=mc².

Samantha Hunt explained the genesis of her novel The Invention of Everything Else– she was at a museum exhibit that included a reference to Alessandro Volta, realized she didn't know much about him and should look him up when she returned home. But once in front of her computer, she found herself instead looking up Nikola Tesla, the man who invented radio and AC electrical technology and is at the center of her novel. She said she thinks she looked up Tesla because she was thinking of "the 90s hair metal band." "I actually sent them copies of the book, but never heard back from them," she said.
Photos by Nick Vagnoni.


"History is told from the present and that present changes."– David Nasaw, historian and biographer, at the opening of the second session. Photos by Nick Vagnoni.


Rachel Kushner and Chantel Acevedo discuss Cuba and the politics of historical fiction. Photo by Nick Vagnoni.


William Kennedy reading from a work-in-progress. Photo by Curt Richter.

For the writers who join us each January, one of the highlights is the Friday night writers' party. Seward and Joyce Johnson hosted this one at their southernmost home. Photos by Curt Richter


Thomas Mallon and Phyllis Rose


Calvin Baker and Andrea Barrett


Barry Unsworth and Lily Prigioniero


William Kennedy

We should have some pictures and words about Session 2 later today. In the meantime, check out Chauncey Mabe's coverage in Off the Page, the books and culture blog for the Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Here's a recording of Allan Gurganus delivering a laugh-out-loud lecture titled "A Still Small Voice Under the Cannonade: Field Notes towards Fiction's Pact with History," during the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar. We'll amend this post with complete liner notes after the Seminar.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(42:31) / 38.9 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Allan Gurganus. Used with generous permission from Allan Gurganus.

An innovative collaborative project, combining Curt Richter's Key West portrait photography and the literary talents of over a dozen writers, is now on view at the Key West Armory, 600 White Street. Entitled "Still and All," the exhibition comprises 18 exquisite images, each with an accompanying biographical text panel. An opening reception will be held on Thursday 15 January from 5 to 9pm, and the public is invited.

Still and All has been produced as a partnership between The Studios of Key West and the Key West Literary Seminar, and began during Curt Richter's initial visit to the island as Artist-in-Residence in January 2008. Based at the Mango Tree House, on the campus of The Studios of Key West, Richter shot over 60 subjects ranging from local shop-keepers to notable visiting writers. As a first-time visitor to the island, he found inspiration in both his new subjects and his temporary tropical home.

"I came to Key West without any preconceived goal or ambition. I began meeting people, and then started asking them to sit for a portrait with my 8 x 10 camera. After the first dozen, I realized how special this place is. My entire understanding of the island, and its sense of place, emerged from the experience of taking these portraits."

Back at his home base in Helsinki, Finland, Richter processed and printed his Key West portraits throughout 2008. And after editing hundreds of images, he began planning a new body of work to coincide withe the 2009 season.

"The Literary Seminar announced its upcoming theme, 'Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth', and that inspired us to invite writers to contribute new biographies for each portrait," says project coordinator and director of The Studios, Eric Holowacz. "We wanted to play around with the notion of what is being perceived and what is considered true, and we wanted to add a strong literary component to the exhibition. We wanted new, impossible stories."

Here's a recording of Geraldine Brooks reading from March, during the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar. We'll amend this post with complete liner notes after the Seminar.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(20:14) / 18.5 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Geraldine Brooks. Used with generous permission from Geraldine Brooks.

Here's a selection of photos from Session One of the 27th annual Key West Literary Seminar. See more– by photographers Curt Richter, Oliver Parini, Michael Blades, and Nick Vagnoni– and upload your own photos on our facebook page.


Gore Vidal and Jay Parini onstage for the John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Event. Photo by Oliver Parini.


This year's stage was designed by Michael Boyer with portrait painter Elionora Hinds. Photo by Curt Richter.


In the crowd for Gore Vidal. Faces, left to right, include Peter, Marc Mewshaw, Mike Mewshaw, Linda Mewshaw, Donald Stewart, Luisa Stewart, Peter Matthiessen, Marie Chaix, Harry Mathews, Lincoln Perry. Photo by Michael Blades.


At the Sunday conch chowder luncheon in the garden of the Oldest House: Allan Gurganus, John Wray, Sarah Sarchin. Photo by Curt Richter.


Fabian Bouthillette and Oliver Parini at the lighthouse dinner Friday evening. Photo by Curt Richter.

Photo of Peter Matthiessen onstage at the Key West Literary Semianr by Michael Blades. Story by Nan Klingener.

Peter Matthiessen, winner of the 2008 National Book Award for fiction, returned to the Seminar with a talk and reading about Shadow Country, the novel that reworks the story he told in the Watson trilogy, Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone.

Matthiessen said it's not a revision but a distillation and in some ways an entirely new work. "Virtually every sentence is changed," he said.

He spoke about the research and imagination that went into telling the story of Edgar Watson, who was gunned down by the residents of Chokoloskee in 1910. "Very little is known about him, but a great deal was written about him," Matthiessen said. "It was all myth and legend.... The only hard facts, literally, were what I could find on gravestones."

Watson was reported to have killed dozens of people, and he did get into a lot of disputes– especially when drunk, Matthiessen said.

"He was very good about everything he did except keeping his temper," Matthiessen said. Some of those fights took place right here in Key West, where Watson would come to trade and buy goods. "He had a notable fight on Duval Street with somebody or other," he said.

Watson usually behaved respectably in Fort Myers, where his daughter was married to a banker. "When he was in Key West or Tampa, he was a demon– especially in Key West."

Photo of Barry Unsworth by Nick Vagnoni. Story by Nan Klingener.

Barry Unsworth made it worth getting out of bed Sunday morning with an illuminating talk explaining why and how he writes historical fiction, and why we read it. The talk was titled "Why Bother With the Past?"

"We haven't got any choice in the matter," Unsworth said in answer to that question. "The past is being forged moment to moment as we live."

Each of us is the result of choices made in the past by our parents, grandparents, and beyond– in Unsworth's case, his father's decision to leave the mining work where sons followed fathers under the ground, go to the U.S. and Canada, and, upon returning to England, work in the insurance business. With those decisions, "he rescued my brother and me from that long chain of continuity, which is what happened in mining villages," Unsworth said.

In his own life, he can trace back the influences not only of his father's choices but of 1930s economic conditions, the aftermath of World War I, 19th century labor disputes, and beyond. Everyone has these "tracks and traces behind us which give us our identifty," Unsworth said.

Our understanding of the past relies on and requires narrative, lines that we can follow to understand who we are, why we're here. "Without this facility, without this necessity of story, we would be lost in the labyrinth," Unsworth said. "We wouldn't find our way."

Unsworth said he writes historical fiction because he has lived outside of England for at least half his life– in Greece, Turkey, and now in Italy– so he doesn't feel the flavor of contemporary English life and chooses not to write about fellow expatriates. And in the places he has lived "the past is always there, lying in wait for you, just around the corner. It's screaming out at you," he said.

In his work, Unsworth said he looks for "patterns in the past which can be applied to the present, given the differences" so that "contradictions and paradoxes serve to illuminate in some way the present."

"The past is another country, we know. It's not recoverable," Unsworth said. Each of us realizes this about our own lives in remembering childhood. "But we know at the same time that we never lost it– it belongs to us; it made us what we are."

Thanks again for the following to board member Nancy Klingener. Photo by Curt Richter.

"The line between historical fiction and historical scholarship is not as hard and fast as we might think."
–Eric Foner, Columbia history professor

"History is not and should not aspire to be a science."
–Eric Foner

"You actually get a time and place if you get their jokes."
–Jill Lepore, Harvard professor, New Yorker writer, and Red Sox fan

"History has so little inevitable about it."
–David Levering Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner

"Truth is often stranger than fiction, but it's worthwhile pursuing it. I don't like arranging marriages for my historical characters."
–Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winner and KWLS keynote speaker

"Trouble is our subject matter and it's never-ending."
–Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Thanks to Greg Needham for permission to reprint the following from his blog. Greg's agency, Needham Fatica, designed our site.

Gore Vidal spoke in Key West last night and it was a magnificent event. He was here for the 27th Annual Key West Literary Seminar and he packed the house. Vidal was generous with both his thoughts and his time, speaking on the topic of historical fiction for some time, then taking questions from the audience for a good deal longer. C-SPAN was there covering it, so you should be able to see a rerun at some point on one of their three channels.



Gore is one of those towering figures who can relate anecdotes that span such a great swath of American history that you find it hard to believe the man in the stories is sitting in front of you. Last night he told tales of helping his blind grandfather into the Senate Chamber during the Roosevelt administration, chatting with Amelia Earhart and looking over a map of her flight route over the Pacific and of sending a note to Barack Obama, urging him to focus on restoring the Constitution.

He was witty, sharp, caustic and devastatingly funny when he wanted to be. In the midst of the Earhart story mentioned above, he said, off-handed and almost off stage, "She really wasn't that great a pilot... (pause a beat) ...and that was a problem."



He saved his most vicious remarks for the Bush administration and its follies and crimes. When asked about Sarah Palin, the republican vice presidential pick, he was dismissive, saying he felt "she talked like she thought the working class talked, which ended up sounding like she was talking down to them." And although he reminded the audience that he had predicted many years ago that Bush would leave office the most hated president in history, he wouldn't be brought out on predicting the future of the economic crisis. "I don't do that kind of black magic," he said.

Allan Gurganus delivered a talk Friday morning called "A Still Small Voice Under the Cannonade: Field Notes toward Fiction's Pact with History." Photo by Nick Vagnoni. Thanks to [Nancy Klingener](http://boneislandbooks.wordpress.com/) for the following

Allan Gurganus's talk Friday morning was part literary lecture, part stand-up routine. Sources cited included Homer, John Cheever, Grace Paley, Oscar Wilde and, most liberally, Rodney Dangerfield. For anyone who missed it, or wants to recapture the full context, keep a look out for the podcast but here are some excerpts:

    "Liars like historians and politicians tend to overdocument."
    "Myth is gossip grown old."
    "History is agreed-upon hearsay granted tenure."
    "American history is so recent that you can still, from a seated position, touch either wall."
    " ... the term historical fiction sounds as pitifully redundant as, say, creative writing. ... It's like having 'oxygen breather' stamped on your driver's license."
    "History's reason needs fiction's dreams."
    "If I had happened to have been born heterosexual with a trust fund in Akron, Ohio, would I have even been a writer?"
    "Unlike in life itself, in literature powerlessness can win."
    "Who could not love this mutt, history?"
And the all-important closer:
    "We need history so much, we historians and novelists, we keep making it up. And history returns the favor."

The view from the balcony of this year's set, designed by Michael Boyer, working with portrait painter Elenora Hinds. Thanks to [Michael Blades](http://michaelandkathy.blogspot.com/) for the photo.

We've asked some friends and family to help post to Littoral for the next week and a half while the Seminar is underway. Here's the first, from Nancy Klingener, a member of our board of directors and creator of the Bone Island Book Blog. –ed.

Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of "March" and "People of the Book," opened the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar with a terrific keynote address Thursday evening, and she opened the address with a terrific line. "You don't have to be a necrophiliac to write historical novels," Brooks said. "But it helps." In giving the John Hersey Memorial Address, Brooks paid tribute to Hersey, whom she never met but who is buried on Martha's Vineyard, where Brooks lives with her husband, fellow writer Tony Horwitz. (Brooks noted that she loves graveyards and was encouraged to move to the island by one stone with the inscription "At Last, A Fulltime Resident.") Hersey, she said, was a model for her as a journalist and a novelist. "He wrote about heroes but never about heroics," she said.

The address was followed, as always, by a gathering in the lovely gardens of the Audubon House from which we sincerely hope everyone made it home safely before one of Key West's regular, if inexplicable, power outages darkened the island.

The 27th annual Key West Literary Seminar is underway. We got things rolling Wednesday night with a small party for Gore Vidal on Duncan Street, at the former home of Tennessee Williams. Here's a few pictures; you can find more or upload your own on our facebook page.


Gore Vidal and Robert D. Richardson


The Kaufelts, our founding family: Lynn, Jackson, and David


Jane Holding and Allan Gurganus


Bob Richardson, Megan Marshall, and Miles Frieden


Arlo Haskell and Mark Hedden


David Levering Lewis and Evan Corns

Rachel Kushner writes frequently for Artforum and coedits the literary, philosophy, and art journal Soft Targets, whose focus is political inquiry, poetry, and literature-in-translation. Her debut novel, Telex From Cuba, was nominated for the 2008 National Book Award.

Telex from Cuba takes place in Oriente Province and Havana, Cuba, during the 1950s. We learn about the American businessmen in charge of the country's sugar and nickel mining operations, and the Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians who work in the mines and cut the cane in a form of indentured servitude. Meanwhile, from their base in the mountains above the sugar and nickel operations in Preston and Nicaro, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army battle the forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose surrender on New Year's Day fifty years ago introduced hope to the Cuban underclass and fear to the businessmen who relied on their cheap labor.

Kushner will join us for the second session of the 27th annual Key West Literary Seminar, January 15-18, in the theater of the historic San Carlos Institute, which stands today as a museum to an earlier Cuban revolutionary, José Martí. In this final interview of our 2008 series, conducted by email over the holiday season, Kushner talks about the experiences of her mother's family living in Cuba, the real Christian de La Mazière, and the process of creating fiction from the Cuban revolution.


Littoral: From the book jacket, we know Telex From Cuba is based in part on your mother's experiences as a child in Oriente, on land owned by the United Fruit Company. How much of the book is family history? Are there characters that are closely based on your mother's family, and the people they knew?

Rachel Kushner: The original spark, my idea to write the book, was due to the fact that my mother had lived in Cuba as a child, and I'd gone there with her and two of her sisters to see the strange, former American colony in northeastern Oriente Province where they'd spent part of their childhood. The historical circumstances upon which I attempted to build my novel– an American colony in Cuba, and the various roles the people who lived there played in the revolution– was a fictional schematic that I borrowed from real life, the lives of my mother's family and the people they knew and that I discovered, independently, through my own research. I did, at least initially, draw heavily from the mountains of archival material my grandparents had left behind: every letter they'd written from Cuba had a carbon, they saved every calling card and receipt and budget book and party invitation– I mean everything– so I had access to this very rich archive of the lives of the Americans who managed and controlled Cuba's sugar and nickel– the country's most valuable resources. But the novel itself is a work of fiction. I am a fiction writer, not a memoirist, not a historian. As a literary figuration, it is ruled by the imagination, and structured by it, too. If the book were simply a fictionalization of my family's history, it would have been a rather dreary exercise– not because their lives were in any way dreary, but because fiction has to rise up organically and reconfigure the past on its own terms, via a logic that's aesthetic, not factual. I learned this the hard way. At first, I was rather attached to some of the details I found in my (long-deceased) grandparents trove. But those details so often caused problems. They weren't invented, and so they lacked the suppleness of context. The invented detail fits with the mind's own contextual logic. The "real" detail, by contrast, is often so much less believable. Much of what creates "my" Oriente Province is a synthesis, a false reality I was only able to generate after sifting through the details of the real place.
    Overall, the proposition of Americans of various sorts leaving the States to live in a colonial outpost, running away to become more themselves, or get their share of what they think they deserve, and the tacit race and social hierarchies they encounter, and comprise, is a proposition I worked out after having thought a great deal about my own grandparents' lives. So in that sense the whole project is subtended, or ghosted, by the experiences of my family. But as I said– fiction is fiction, and not "about" any real person's life. And because of the mysterious process of writing fiction, and its special integrity, I wince a little when people describe my novel as "based on." Publishers rely so heavily on back-story to promote novels these days– because they think it sells, and maybe it does– but novels don't simply enact the real as it took place. They do something else, stranger and more complicated.

L: Where did your mother's family go after the revolution? Did they ever return? Did you grow up with an awareness of Cuba and Castro, or did this come later?

RK: My family actually left before the revolution. I think my grandfather was fired. He was very disappointed to leave Cuba. My grandmother, far more closed-minded, was happy to leave the "natives" and their lack of love for iceberg lettuce and proper English. The episode in my book of the Americans who get rescued by aircraft carrier because the town is being strafed by Batista's military planes is drawn from a situation that really occurred in Nicaro, but my own family was not there for it. They ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after having first moved back in with their own parents, in St. Louis. They had to split up their children because my grandfather was unemployed. Although this occurred before the Cuban revolution that ejected the Americans from Nicaro, the predicament is in some sense the same: having escaped the US only to wind up returning, jobless and on some level estranged.
    After my grandfather regained his footing, got a job and re-established a life in Tennessee, I know that he was very amused by Castro. He saved all kinds of clippings from the early sixties, and paid attention. He'd spent his time there, of course, and he was not surprised by the comeuppance– especially because Nicaro played a particular role in the whole thing. The rebels were right above Nicaro, and Fidel later railed against the Americans for owning and controlling Cuba's incredibly valuable nickel mines.
    My mother and aunts are all quite far to the left, politically, which is unusual for Americans who lived in Cuba, but for them, it is that experience that politicized them. I had heard about Cuba my whole life, my mother always cooked Cuban dishes, played Cuban music, talked about her childhood as this wonderfully free time in her life. I went with them to Cuba, for the first time, in 2000, which is when I started writing the book. They were the only ones of the Americans who had lived in Preston and Nicaro ever to go back to the United Fruit and nickel enclaves, respectively. Most of the people who lived there were unsympathetic to the revolution and had no desire to see what became of their once-elegant world, the sovietization, the pollution, the shabby state of their country club and manager's row. But my mother and her sisters still feel very connected to the place. Quite simply, they're rather pro-Fidel, because the people they saw working in the canefields and the nickel mines and as servants in their parents' homes have all benefited from the revolution. Obviously this is a sticky issue, and not everyone feels this way, but my mother and her sisters lived there, and I respect the context in which they have made their political judgments. As a student of Latin American politics, my awareness of Fidel, growing up, was that he was the first Latin American leader to stand up to the U.S., and as a child, this impressed me greatly, lack of political freedoms and embargo-related privations notwithstanding.

L: How much time did you spend in Cuba? Where? How did you get around the travel ban?

RK: I spent about two months there, all told. Mostly in Nicaro, which is in the Nipe Bay region. But also Havana, Santiago, Holguín and that whole province: Preston and Banes, the two United Fruit towns; Moa, the other nickel-processing town; Birán, where Fidel grew up. Professional researchers may travel legally under a general US Treasury License, a far easier way to go. I flew direct from Miami.

L: Your Christian de La Mazière is a real villain– an execution instructor and a double-dealer involved simultaneously with the Castros, Batista, and Prío, as well as the notorious dictators of neighboring Hispaniola, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. What is known about the real La Mazière? What made him appealing as a character?

RK: I'm so glad you asked about La Mazière, who takes up a good portion of my book, and is the character whose interiority is most exposed to the reader, and yet so often my novel has been described as being told by the two young Americans, as if the French Nazi were this curious blind spot. To me, he is very much at the center of things. While I'm amused that you call him a villain, as the designation is an acknowledgment of his affective role, I don't quite see him that way myself.
    At one point Everly has a kind of musing on her little sister's amorality and the difference between that and immorality, and in a way it echoes La Mazière (although perhaps the distinction would be his own– that he is not in opposition to morals but outside of them). In fact, you're probably right that he is a scoundrel. Certainly the "real" La Mazière, upon who my character is based, is very much of a scoundrel. He was an aristocrat who wrote for a fascist newspaper during the war and then, in August of 1944, just before the allies rolled into Paris, he fled east and enlisted in the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS.

"Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth" is now less than a month away. Writers of historical fiction, historians, and a few hundred guests will come together for two long weekends of readings, panel discussion, and lectures at the historic San Carlos Institute; while informal gatherings and parties will take place each evening at local cultural institutions and lush gardens.

The first session, as expected, has been completely sold out. Tickets are still available for the second session, which opens with a keynote address by Booker Prize winner Barry Unsworth on Thursday January 15, and closes on the afternoon of Sunday January 18. Unsworth, who begins the book tour for his new novel Land of Marvels at the Seminar, will be joined by Marilynne Robinson (Home) and Rachel Kushner (Telex From Cuba), two of this year's nominees for the National Book Award; as well as Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Thomas Mallon, and many more.

Admission for the entire weekend, including receptions (with open bar and passed hors d'ouevres) and a light continental breakfast each morning, is only $495. If you have any questions about the Seminar or would like to register, please call Miles at 888-293-9291, or send an email to mail@kwls.org.

We endeavor to make our website as useful and informative as possible to anyone who is planning to attend the Seminar. Here is a brief guide.

    • Complete Schedule of Events for the first and second sessions.
    • Complete list of Speakers, with biographies, bibliographies, and links to resources on the web
    • Key West Lodging Guide, including discounts at hotels and guesthouses for Seminar registrants
    • Our Interview Series– with Barry Unsworth, Geraldine Brooks, Thomas Mallon, and more
    • Our podcast series: free, downlowdable recordings from past events, perfect for the drive or flight to Key West

Congratulations to our friends Peter Matthiessen and Mark Doty, who each picked up a National Book Award at the ceremony in New York last night. Matthiessen, who also won the award in 1979 for The Snow Leopard, was honored in the fiction category this year for Shadow Country. The now-definitive overhaul of his so-called Everglades trilogy was cited by the judges as a "masterpiece" and "an epic of American rise and descent." Doty, our keynote speaker this past January, received the committee's esteemed award for poetry for his Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems. The NBA citation calls Doty a "master" whose work conveys "ferocious compassion."

Visit our podcasts page to hear Doty's 2008 keynote address, and his reading of several Key West-inspired poems. To see and hear Matthiessen reading from Shadow Country, visit the Seminar in person this January.

We are delighted to announce the winners of our three named scholarships. April Puciata has been awarded the Scotti Merrill Memorial Scholarship; Martha Otis has received the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award; and Patricia Engel has won the Marianne Russo Scholarship.

The annual scholarships are given by the Key West Literary Seminar to recognize excellence in a manuscript submission from a new or emerging writer. They provide full tuition to our 2009 Seminar and writers' workshop program, financial support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West, and an opportunity to appear onstage at the Seminar. We are sincerely grateful to Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida for the endowments which will continue to make these scholarships possible for years to come.

April Puciata, a poet, lives in New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Mangrove, and Salonika. This will be her fifth visit to Key West and her first to the Seminar. Martha Otis lives in Miami and first visited Key West two years ago with her daughter. She teaches writing at the University of Miami and has published fiction in Best New American Voices 2000, the Indiana Review, and Moment Magazine. Patricia Engel also lives in Miami; she learned about the Seminar last year and attended a few of our free-and-open-to-the-public events. Her fiction has been published in Harpur Palate, Driftwood, Slice, and the Boston Review (here and here). In 2007, Engel was selected by Junot Díaz as Featured Emerging Fiction Writer at CLMP's "Periodically Speaking" at the New York Public Library.

Congratulations to April, Martha, and Patricia. We look forward to meeting you this January in Key West.

This year's National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday. Among the fiction nominees are Peter Matthiessen, who will join us during the first session of our January 2009 Seminar; Rachel Kushner, and Marilynne Robinson, who will each join us for Session 2.

Matthiessen, who has been nominated four times for the award (winning in 1978 for The Snow Leopard), is nominated this year for Shadow Country, a new novel which consolidates his trilogy about legendary Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson. Robinson is nominated for Home, the successor and sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. Kushner receives the esteemed nomination for her debut novel, Telex From Cuba, a portrait of the American colonies in pre-Revolutionary Cuba and their collapse in the face of revolutionary change.

Tickets are still available to see Marilynne Robinson, Rachel Kushner, and a host of other distinguished writers during Session 2 of our 2009 Seminar, "Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth." Click here to register.

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. In our third installment of the series, we hear book recommendations from Valerie Martin, Chantel Acevedo, and John Wray.

• Valerie Martin has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kafka Prize, and Britain's Orange Prize:
    "I can't recommend Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger highly enough. It follows the passage of a doomed slave ship from Liverpool to Guinea to a strange and wonderful Utopia on the Florida coast where women, for better or worse, briefly get to run the show. Unsworth's new novel, Land of Marvels, takes place in Mesopotamia just before World War I, when it has dawned on the West that the oil is in the Middle East. This novel is both a thriller and a timely cautionary tale; not to be missed.
    Of my own books I'd choose Property, a novel narrated by a slave-owning woman in Louisiana circa 1820. I like to describe it as a tour of hell with a guide who works for the management. I'd also choose Salvation, a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, constructed of visual scenes from the saint's life which travel backward in time from his macabre death to his delirious moment of 'conversion' as a young bourgeois in 13th century Assisi."

• Chantel Acevedo teaches English at Auburn University. Oscar Hijuelos called her first novel "enchanting:"
    "Marilynne Robinson's Gilead should be required reading among writers. This spare and graceful book set in the 1950's about a minister with a secret teaches us that a historic backdrop doesn't have to pound readers on the head. Rather, it can serve as a quiet and powerful canvas.
    My debut novel Love and Ghost Letters focuses on Cuba before Fidel Castro, a time fraught with political upheaval. While the characters are wholly wrapped up in their own complex relationships, the march of history impacts their lives, despite their desire to tune it out."

• John Wray was selected by Granta as one the twenty best American novelists under thirty-five:
    "While both of my novels could be considered historical, I think Canaan's Tongue might be most interesting in the context of this seminar, due to the extreme liberties it takes with its historical subject matter. Its ostensible subject– the outlaw James Murrel and his vast criminal empire– was for me, first and foremost, a way to write about current American politics. How well suited is historical fiction to social and political protest? How much room for experimentation do the confines of the genre permit?"