Historical Fiction: A Conversation

Hernán Díaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity. He is the managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. His most recent novel, In the Distance (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.

Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway―a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize―and editor of the anthology Writers at the Movies. He is also the author of The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics, which argues that some of our most persistent and destructive assumptions, might come from the movies. In these ten essays Jim Shepard weaves close readings of film with cultural criticism to explore the ways in which movies work so ubiquitously to reflect how Americans think and act. Shepard’s latest story collection, The World to Come(Knopf) spans borders and centuries with deceptive ease. From English Arctic explorers in one of history's most nightmarish expeditions to eighteenth-century French balloonists inventing manned flight, Shepard makes each of these wildly various worlds his own. Of Shepard, The Daily Beast writes, "Without a doubt the most ambitious story writer in America."