Author: Ted Wheeler

Goodreads giveaway for the war begins in paris

| Ted Wheeler
(Photo by Vivian Lee.)

It’s Goodreads Giveaway time!

Thanks so much to my publisher, Little, Brown & Co., for giving away 75 free copies of The War Begins in Paris.

When you have a moment, please add the book to your ‘want to read’ stack on Goodreads and enter to win an advance copy. This is also a great way to help spread the word about the novel: the more people who enter win a copy, the more visibility the book will have on Goodreads, the more people will enter to win a copy…

Enter to win a copy here.

If you feel even more inclined to help out, pre-order a copy on Bookshop. Not only does that help support my new novel, but it helps support independent bookstores around the country. This way, we’re all winners.

What is foolish, what is weak

| Ted Wheeler

Last year I had a story published in Oakwood magazine. Apparently I failed to mention that here, as I was waiting on a link to the issue, so here’s my atonement. Read it here.

For fans of my first novel, Kings of Broken Things, some of these characters will look familiar. Notably, Jake Strauss. This is part of the story of why Jake had to leave his farm home Jackson County and ended up in Tom Dennison’s Omaha. The story printed in Oakwood is excerpted from a novella that tells that story, along with the story of Jake’s mother Ella. This excerpt tells part of Ella’s story.

Submitted for your indulgence: “What is Foolish, What is Weak.”

She worried that she’d asked too much of God over the years. That there was a limit to love, to clemency, to indulgence, in God as there was in man. All she wanted was to have this one and she could be done.

Ever since she was a girl she’d planned to name a daughter Emma. A name similar to her own, with double-ems instead of double-ells. And how clever that em followed ell in the alphabet, just as Emma would come after Ella. Even after her first daughter was lost, she didn’t budge from the idea. Her first girl was named Emma Helena (Ella’s given name was Helena) and this one was to be Emma Marie. She would have this one. It would be a girl. Then she would be done with the business of bearing and naming and burying kids.

Cover reveal!

| Ted Wheeler

It’s cover reveal day for my new novel, The War Begins in Paris!!!

What do you think?

I love the dark fog, those ominous birds. I’ve been dipping my toes into the literary noir genre for some time now. This cover feels like I’m squarely there at this point.

The book is also now available for pre-order, should you be so inclined. The book page here on my website has links to several popular vendors, though I encourage you to order either from Bookshop.org or from your local independent bookshop.

Might I suggest Dundee Book Company, the little shop my family runs in Omaha. If you order from us, you get the added bonus of receiving a signed copy, so please make a note about how you want your copy inscribed.

(The Bookworm will also be selling signed copies, so please make a note for them as well.)

Pre-orders are vitally important for authors, as publishers, in part, use this as an enthusiasm gauge to help determine how many copies to print and how much publicity money to put behind a book. (If you want to order from Amazon, Target, or Walmart, it all still helps, as pre-orders influence their book buyers as well.) I do hope to see many of you at a reading or book-signing event when the book is actually out running free in the world, but please know that pre-orders are a great way to help a book receive a larger platform and build excitement. (Rant over.)

More news and excitement is in the offing the next few months. I have new author photos to share; some great blurbs have been coming in; there will be events and appearances to announce.

In the meantime, here’s what one of my favorite authors, James Han Mattson, has to say about the book. Cheers!

“Propulsive, immersive, and beautifully rendered, Theodore Wheeler’s The War Begins in Paris is that rare novel that’s both contemplative and energetic, pulse-pounding and utterly devastating. Through Mielle and Jane, Wheeler deftly illuminates themes of friendship, love, sacrifice, and heroism, and shows us how loyalty and conviction can move in unpredictable patterns under wartime duress. This is a major gut-punch of a novel, and I, for one, am thankful it exists.” —James Han Mattson, author of Reprieve

New profile of dorothy thompson in lrb

| Ted Wheeler

In the new London Review of Books, Deborah Friedell has a great article about the life and times of Dorothy Thompson. It’s really fascinating stuff and you should give it a read. A towering journalist at the time, Thompson was the second most famous woman in America in the 1930s (after only Eleanor Roosevelt) and she was one of the main driving forces of getting the US into World War II as a defender of democracy. She was famously the first American journalist who was expelled from Nazi Germany, after she offended Hitler by portraying him as “the quintessential small man” and assuring the world that a maniac like him could never become a dictator, since the powers that be would never allow it.

I’ve also linked to an LRB podcast that features Friedell talking about Thompson, her life and career, that’s well worth a listen, if that’s more your jam.

Coincidentally, a fictionalized version of Dorothy Thompson makes a couple cameos in my new novel–The War Begins in Paris, out this November, by the way. I’m working on getting permission to use an excerpt from Thompson’s famous column about Herschel Grynszpan and the November Pogrom inside the novel as a way to ground the fiction in history while paying homage to pioneering journalists like Thompson and others. Fingers crossed that this comes together.

The broken marriages, unsatisfying affairs, alcoholism and psychoanalytic adventures of her male subjects kept blurring into one another, while Thompson stands apart, and not only because she was a woman. She had her breakdowns too (and three marriages), but she seemed tougher than her peers, and they knew it. ‘She could always step over the corpses and go on, steadily, resolutely,’ Sheean claimed in the book he wrote about Thompson and Lewis, Dorothy and Red (1963). Thompson almost never talked about sexism – she often pretended it didn’t affect her – though in one of her columns she admitted that if she had had a daughter, she probably would have told her not to try to have a career: it cost too much. Besides, ‘society’ had a ‘greater need of good mothers’ than it did of writers of the ‘second-rate novel’. But she never thought of herself as a second-rate anything. On the radio, she was introduced as a ‘cross between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nurse Edith Cavell’. She didn’t disagree. She wrote that her father had taught her that the world was in a ‘continual struggle between good and evil, virtue and sin’, and that ‘progress was furthered only through creative individuals, whose example and achievement leavened and lifted the mass.’ All her life, she had wanted to be one of those individuals; now everyone was telling her that she was. She had a platform; she wanted to see what she could do with it.

This is Nebraska – Books that tell our story

| Ted Wheeler

Check out this wide-ranging conversation with the incomparable Pat Leach on All About Books from a few weeks ago

We talk about our favorite Nebraska novels, how we tell stories about ourselves, the differences between writing contemporary and historical fiction, how to make space for (and why to remember) oral storytelling. So much good stuff! This is going to be a very interesting series. Thanks, Pat, for including me in the series, and for all you do!

You can listen at the link above, or download the file if you want the podcast version.

The war begins in paris

| Ted Wheeler

While things may have looked slow around here the last couple years, I’ve been busy writing away on a new novel. With that in mind, I couldn’t be more pleased to share that my fourth book will be published by Little, Brown & Company! 

The War Begins in Paris is a suspenseful work of literary noir, equal parts Patrick Modiano and Lara Prescott, about two female foreign correspondents—a provocative American fascist and an introverted young pacificist—whose fates intertwine behind enemy lines during World War II. As hostilities intensify following the November Pogrom, Mielle’s life is propelled by a series of prophetic visions that take her from a Mennonite farm in Iowa, to a job as a foreign correspondent in Paris, to what she comes to see as a secret mission to assassinate a Nazi propagandist in wartime Germany. Similar to my previous work, The War Begins in Paris blends historical and fictional characters amid a backdrop of true events. 

I started writing this book in earnest in 2020. The project was aided by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nebraska Arts Council, which funded research trips to Paris and Germany. The War Begins in Paris will mark my “Big Five” publisher debut and a reunion with editor Vivian Lee, whom I previously worked with at Little A. Vivian made the move to Little, Brown a couple years ago, and I feel very lucky to be following her.

More to come. Much, much more. In the meantime, CHEERS!

In Conversation with The Rumpus

| Ted Wheeler

Check out this new interview of me in conversation with Ryan Borchers that’s up on The Rumpus. Thanks so much to both Ryan and the editors for making this happen. The Rumpus has been kind enough to publish reviews of my two previous books (here and here). That kind of support means so much.

This was an interesting one to revisit, as our conversation took place last January, then we edited the interview over February and March. I was really interested to see if my thinking was noticeably different here in a pre-pandemic way. Nothing stands out too much, really. But it’s worth thinking about how the notion of cyber-security and privacy from the government has evolved considerably over the last year. In the rush to find ways to keep people safe and get the economies rolling, we’re also in the process of giving up even more of our privacy than before. In that way, among many, we’re transitioning to a post-9/11 zeitgeist to a pandemic zeitgeist. It will be worth watching how the issues of privacy rights evolve as we one day move into a post-pandemic world. As I’m fond of saying, the government isn’t in the habit of giving back powers that it assumes in emergencies.

The interview itself has plenty of gems about the craft of writing novels and what it means to be an Omaha author. Please give it a glance.

Here’s a taste:

Rumpus: That’s what’s so interesting to me; the book makes the reader rethink their relationship to the characters in any novel. You think you’re reading about somebody’s life, and you feel like you’re getting into that person’s skin, but this novel almost makes me stop and think, Well, how close does a reader get to any fictional, made-up character? Does that make sense?

Wheeler: I think so. There are moments in any novel—and any person in real life, too, you know—when you’re not the same person you were three years ago and the person you’re going to be in three years is different from the person you are now. Thinking about that in terms of character, it comes off false when we make our characters too consistent, instead of just letting them go through their trials. And doing that from the point of view of surveillance, where you have these transcripts of what people said in emails and phone calls, then letting them be unreliable within that, too, letting them change or contradict what the record suggests, that was exciting for me. The narration is meant to be very self-aware and playful in how it plays out on the page. And maybe the perspective helps us feel more human in a way, because even with a catalogue of all existence, there are still mysteries, exceptions, things we can only feel and not know. For a novel that’s suspicious of religion and fanaticism, this nod to the unknowable was important to do.

NAC IAF

| Ted Wheeler

Some bright news as the worst of winter settles in. This week I was awarded a literature fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council! It’s really such an honor to be included with so many great Nebraska authors whose work I admire and who I consider friends.

The program recognizes “exemplary work by Nebraska artists” and rotates through different art forms on a three-year cycle. This is the fourth time I’ve applied for the fellowship. Only a decade of futility there before breaking through–so not too bad!

I’ve been hard at work on a new novel over the past year, the last few months especially. This recognition is a great validation of that project and will help me with research at some point. Of course, this comes a year after I won an National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to work on the same project. Hopefully someday soon I’ll be able to use these awards to fund the travel for which they were intended. Last March I made it to Paris just before everything shut down, with that trip having to be cut a few days short because of uncertainty that I’d be able to get back into the US. I’d had things lined up to return to Paris and visit Bad Nauheim and Stuttgart toward the end of 2020, but you know the rest. Someday–hopefully before the book is published–there will be some travel to Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Salzburg, and maybe the Extremadura region of Spain.

Thanks so much to the Nebraska Arts Council for helping to make those trips possible, once they’re possible again. Cheers!