How Roddy Doyle turned the isolation of the pandemic into ‘Life Without Children’.The mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie fuels new book ‘The Christie Affair’.With a phone, especially when people are walking, they just have their head down and don’t see anything until they arrive at their destination and they miss everything along the way. When you use a paper map, you look at it then you look at the world to compare it and you keep looking back and forth and it’s very interactive. I did want to say something about the difference between the two. Were you worried about writing a book about the power of paper maps when we all just look at our phones? Even when I try to be as realistic as possible.īut no matter how cool the premise and how neat a spaceship or a dragon is, you still want to identify with the characters and feel their struggles. I got my MFA because I have a love and appreciation of literary fiction but during the program, everything I turned in was a little bit weird in this way and my professors would say, “This is good but can you just write something normal?” I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy. What do you like about tilting the world to tell your stories? That’s what I wanted the reader to experience It starts with mapmakers concerned about a competitor who put in a copyright trap, which is mundane and normal and it gets weird from there, with every detail becoming more unbelievable. I felt the story called out to be more subtle and to let the magic happen more slowly – that’s what happened in real life. This one is based in reality – family secrets and strife, New York City budget cuts and crime – for much longer. In the dystopia of “The Book of M,” where people are losing their shadows, their memories and their souls, the world tilts way more than three degrees… and it does so from page one. I’m using the town of Agloe, which was real, because I want the magic to feel so so possible. I write about the real world but tilted three degrees to the left, so when you can recognize specific details it makes the weird things more believable. Why is it so important in a book like this to include real places like Jimmy’s Corner, one of New York’s great dive bars, and real maps in the New York Public Library’s collection? Shepherd recently spoke by video about why she just had to add the speculative and supernatural to that original true story, why uses real details to balance that out, and why she loves yaks. She becomes obsessed with uncovering the past and the truth, drawn into a mysterious and dangerous world and drawing back in her parents’ oldest friends, The Cartographers. (Her mother had been trapped in a fire when Nell was a baby.) Seven years later, her father dies suddenly, and Nell finds that one of the old General Drafting maps may contain more secrets than anyone knew. She was following in her parents’ footsteps until her father inexplicably had her fired from their place of work at the New York Public Library and cut her out of his life. “The Cartographers” revolves around Nell Young, the only child of two of America’s leading map experts.
“About seven years ago, I was in a conversation where people were talking about how they do this copyright trap in dictionaries, hiding a word, usually in letters like X or Z with a fake definition and then someone mentioned the story of Agloe in passing,” Shepherd recalls.įor the author, whose debut was “The Book of M” and who likes writing about the world “tilted three degrees to the left,” this idea of a fictional town manifested into reality was “magical” and pure inspiration for a book about family and secrets and obsession. Even years after the store closed, the town still showed up on maps… including Google Maps until 2014. That inspired Delaware County to register the town as existing on paper. Someone had seen the town on a map and opened Agloe General Store on the spot. But Rand McNally had a good defense: Agloe did indeed exist. General Drafting pounced, taking them to court. Sure enough, this fictional place, Agloe, showed up on the next Rand McNally map.
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