In Conversation: On A Calling for Charlie Barnes

Joshua Ferris is the author of three previous works of fiction – Then We Came to the End: A Novel, The Unnamed, and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – and The Dinner Party: Stories. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Best American Short Stories. The life of the title character in A Calling for Charlie Barnes (Little, Brown, and Company) is not going well. Too often divorced, discontent with compromises he’s made, and living in a house he hates, he wants out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. When twin calamities hit him, his dreams dwindle further. Then, something goes right for a change, and with help from his storyteller son, Charlie is granted a second act. But it calls for a sacrifice. Publishers Weekly called the book a “compassionate, metafictional portrait of a flawed father and his crumbling notion of the American dream. … The story is often quite funny, and the themes at its core are those that will forever preoccupy humankind: purpose and death, but, mostly, love.”

V.V. Ganeshananthan is a writer, journalist, poet, and the author of Love Marriage (Random House). She also co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on LitHub Radio with Whitney Terrell. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post, among others, while her short stories have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014.

Whitney Terrell is a writer, educator, and the author of The Good Lieutenant: A Novel, The Huntsman, and The King of Kings County. His nonfiction appears in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, Slate, and other publications. He is also an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the co-host of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast at LitHub Radio, with V.V. Ganeshananthan.