Episode 42
“…I think, yes, it’s important to pay attention to your sentences in the way they sound. I wish more people would do that. But I think it’s equally important to train yourself how to think very critically about what you read, to articulate a response to it, and engage with it in dialogue and stop treating books, and movies, and albums, and other such things as consumer products to reject or consume…”
An NPR Most-Anticipated Title of Summer 2024
Patrick Nathan is a Minnesota-based writer. He is the author of Some Hell, a 2019 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Gay Fiction.
His second book, Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist, was published in 2021 from Counterpoint Press. He has written for the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and published short fiction and essays in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review Online, the New Republic, Gulf Coast, the Baffler, Boulevard, Pacific Standard, the Paris Review Daily, Ninth Letter, Real Life, and elsewhere.
We were honored to speak to Patrick about his new novel, The Future Was Color, to be published this June. The book, a Los Angeles Review of Books Summer 2024 Book Club title, takes place mostly in mid-1950s Los Angeles and tells the story of a closeted Hungarian emigré screenwriter, his past and future, and life in Hollywood during the McCarthy era.
A fellow writer described it as “a love story; it’s a thriller; it’s an essential novel about creating art during war.”