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WORK TITLE: Rough Animals
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.raedelbianco.com/
CITY: Mountainside
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Duke University, graduated, 2014; attended Tin House Summer Workshop and Curtis Brown writing course in London, England.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Previously, founded a beef cattle business.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Rae Delbianco is a writer based in Mountainside, New Jersey. She holds a degree from Duke University and completed additional studies at Tin House‘s Summer Workshop and at the Curtis Brown writing workshop in London, England. She was raised in a rural community in Pennsylvania and began raising cattle for her own beef-producing operation when she was just fourteen years old.
Delbianco’s first book is Rough Animals. Set in Utah, the book begins with the killing of cattle on a small-time ranch run by twins, Wyatt and Lucy Smith. The unnamed killer is a young teenaged girl. Wyatt exchanges fire with the girl, wounding her, but she escapes. Wyatt decides to follow her. His pursuit of the girl leads him through harsh landscapes and puts him in contact with dangerous figures. Meanwhile, Wyatt reflects on his childhood and the lessons his father taught him.
Delbianco commented on the theme of her novel in an interview with Aram Mrjoian, contributor to the Chicago Review of Books website. She stated: “I come from a rural background, and watching the calluses disappear from my hands at college, I started to wonder whether, given the sterility of modern life, we lose the emotional power of doing more than just surviving by not having to ‘survive’ at all. We have soft hands and clean shoes, we eat pre-packaged chicken breasts that have no resemblance to a bird. We’ve managed to escape our daily battle with survival, but also the fulfillment that comes from winning it.” DelBianco continued: “And so I find particular enjoyment in returning to literature wherein, in the face of a fight for survival, not a single bite of food or breath of air is taken for granted.” Regarding the book’s setting, DelBiano told Mrjoian: “I spent time on the ground in Utah, conducted interviews, and read a lot of the literature of the region. But my own personal history of working the land was the most crucial thing I drew on in writing the book.”
In an interview with Corey Seymour, writer on the Vogue website, Delbianco discussed her development of the character of the young killer. She noted that she took inspiration from the work of Cormac McCarthy, in particular, the book, No Country for Old Men. Delbianco told Seymour: “As far as No Country for Old Men: I absolutely love the character of Chigurh; I think he’s the perfect villain, and I was very inspired by the utter chaos that he causes and the almost god-like power and control he has over his surroundings, when I was creating the character of the girl in this book—that said, the girl was more informed by a combination of the children I met when I was staying in Bali a few years ago in a town controlled by a local gang.” Delbianco added: “Still, the way that McCarthy is able to render violence in this manner so that you can’t look away—he gives it this visual beauty—was extremely important to this book.” Delbianco compared cattle-raising with novel-writing in an interview with Publishers Weekly contributor, Ken Salikof, stating: “There are very few experiences in life quite like getting the crap kicked out of you by an animal that doesn’t care who you are … or how smart you are, and getting back up again. Writing a novel is one of them.”
Critics offered favorable assessments of Rough Animals. A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as a “take-no-prisoners debut” that features “a backdrop of ferocious, visceral, almost psychedelically intense nature writing.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer asserted: “The novel succeeds as a viscerally evoked and sparely plotted fever dream, a bleakly realized odyssey through an American west.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of Rough Animals.
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of Rough Animals, p. 49; April 16, 2018, Ken Salikof, author interview, p. 66.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (June 29, 2018), Aram Mrjoian, author interview.
Rae DelBianco website, https://www.raedelbianco.com/ (September 10, 2018).
Vogue Online, https://www.vogue.com/ (June 5, 2018), Corey Seymour, author interview.
Rae DelBianco grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she raised livestock, founding a beef cattle operation at age fourteen. She attended Duke University on a Robertson Scholarship, graduating in 2014, and was later accepted to Curtis Brown's six-month novel writing course in London. She is an alumnus of Tin House's Summer Workshop, and lives in Mountainside, New Jersey, staying with her 88 year-old grandmother for the past four years in order to write. ROUGH ANIMALS is her first novel.
QUOTED: "As far as No Country for Old Men: I absolutely love the character of Chigurh; I think he’s the perfect villain, and I was very inspired by the utter chaos that he causes and the almost god-like power and control he has over his surroundings, when I was creating the character of the girl in this book—that said, the girl was more informed by a combination of the children I met when I was staying in Bali a few years ago in a town controlled by a local gang."
"Still, the way that McCarthy is able to render violence in this manner so that you can’t look away—he gives it this visual beauty—was extremely important to this book."
Rough Animals Author Rae DelBianco on Breaking Bad, Raising Cattle, and Writing Her First Novel
JUNE 5, 2018 12:32 PM
by COREY SEYMOUR
Yau Ho Yi
FacebookPinterest
Rough Animals, the just-out first novel from Rae DelBianco, is that rara avis: A fiction debut at once sure-footed, almost existentially gripping, and raucously, violently unexpected. DelBianco, 25, who grew up in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and studied writing at Duke, has transformed the raw material of her far-from-the-madding-crowd upbringing—raising and showing livestock; knowing her way around a weapon or two—into a freewheeling contemporary Western set in a lonesome territory of the American Southwest populated by hard-luck ranchers, small-time grifters, violent drug gangs, and a particularly wily young girl. We wanted to ask her how she pulled it off.
When did you first start writing—and where did the first grain of an idea for this book come from?
I started writing my freshman year in college—I think you really become a writer when you look at your career prospects and ask yourself, Is this something I could be homeless over? And you say yes. But I dropped my premed plan and worked on an apprentice novel—about my college experience—for a full year after college. I rewrote it two or three times, and it just wasn’t working. Then I set that book aside and wrote the beginning of Rough Animals. It was only the first scene—these cattle, someone’s livelihood, dropping like flies—but I wanted that enormously destructive feeling to set off the story. That was all I had for several months, but then I hopped a plane to London for Curtis Brown’s novel-writing course, and for six months worked 14- to 16-hour days to finish a first draft. After that, it was another two years of intensive editing—and over 50 rejections.
There’s a description of Rough Animals on the back cover that describes it as Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men. Is that fair?
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When I was thinking about this narrative of a young man re-looking at what he really was through this course of committing an increasing amount of violence, it felt to me like a similar process of what the characters in Breaking Bad are doing—and it’s something that I take from Denis Johnson’s work as well. As far as No Country for Old Men: I absolutely love the character of Chigurh; I think he’s the perfect villain, and I was very inspired by the utter chaos that he causes and the almost god-like power and control he has over his surroundings, when I was creating the character of the girl in this book—that said, the girl was more informed by a combination of the children I met when I was staying in Bali a few years ago in a town controlled by a local gang. Still, the way that McCarthy is able to render violence in this manner so that you can’t look away—he gives it this visual beauty—was extremely important to this book.
You seem to have a real feel for the landscape you’re writing about. Did you live in the American Southwest, or is this just research?
I’ve visited the area a bunch of times, but never lived there. For me, placing someone in the scene was more about the dirt under the fingernails and the air burning your nose before you look up and see the mesas and the mountains. In my own experience, say, raising cattle, the rough, tactile feeling of being stuck in the mud or cutting your knuckles on a rope—those were more crucial to me than the idiosyncratic features of the landscape.
Tell me a bit more about this cattle-raising business. As I understand it, your parents didn’t farm or ranch. How did you go from, essentially, zero to raising cattle on your own?
I loved animals from a very young age, and I joined a 4-H club when I was 8 and got some goats. My parents didn’t farm—we did have some land—so I had to learn how to do everything myself: I bought a VHS tape from the local feed mill, and from that I learned how to make an electric fence, how to build sheds—everything had to be figured out on my own, which was an incredibly formative experience. But when I was 14, I wanted a larger challenge. The steers were the ones at the county fair that would require extra fences and caution tape because they were so enormously dangerous, and I loved the idea of taking an animal that was really such a Goliath—by the time you send them off to the butcher, they’re 1,500 or 1,600 pounds—and to work to be able to control and master that animal. It felt like such an achievement, and it really changed my outlook on a lot of things.
Did you invent this world of the book out of whole cloth, or is this something you’ve lived in—or a combination of both? I’m thinking about the description of what the inside of a split-open box elder tree looks like; how long fresh animal hides have to be salted.
A lot of it comes from personal experience—from the guns to the description of trees and wood to the animal hides—but I did have to, say, reach out to a butcher to know how much a fresh hide weighs. There’s a scene in which a character is carrying two hides up from a bonfire, and I realized that I knew how much they weighed dry, but not wet. I do get challenged a lot along the lines of “Where could all this come from?” or with people wondering if I have the experience to write about some of the things I write about. And I used to answer that by saying that I probably have had more hands-on in-the-wild experiences than most people writing books like this—but when it comes down to it, you don’t need permission as an artist to create what you want.
I understand you’re already at work on another novel. What’s the next one about?
I’m looking into the world of professional bull riding, as well as the opioid crisis and the world of livestock showing. There’s been a huge scandal recently in Texas and Oklahoma—they’re drug-testing the animals after livestock shows and they’re finding out that 8-year-old kids have been working with animals that have been illegally doped with clenbuterol, which redistributes calories from fat to muscle—it’s basically a steroid. But it’s hard for anybody to take action—a lot of times it’s the parents doing the injecting, but in a crowded fair it could be anyone. Do you ban an 8-year-old from showing for life? It’s hard situation to get a handle on.
In addition to writing, you used to work a bit as a model. Is that something you considered as an alternate career, or was it always in addition to writing?
It wasn’t something I was pursuing full-time. I’m short enough that I can’t really model much here, but I can model in Asia. I tried here anyway, and when I was going through a lot of rejections in writing, traveling up to New York and getting rejected to my face by modeling agencies again and again and again actually was a big turning point in my being able to accept rejection as a writer. It’s easy to hide from an email, but when somebody’s in your face telling you to get out of the room, you have to finally confront those feelings of rejections—and if you want to be a writer, sometimes you have to eat rejections for breakfast.
I assume you’ve moved on to healthier breakfast foods by now?
[Laughs] Yeah. I saw the book in a bookstore for the first time the other day—I just kind of stood there and stared at it for a good 20 minutes. I teared up a little—it was super-weird.
QUOTED: "There are very few experiences in life quite like getting the crap kicked out of you by an animal that doesn't care who you are ... or how smart you are, and getting back up again. Writing a novel is one of them."
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Print Marked Items
Cattle Running and Writing: PW TALKS
WITH RAE DELBIANCO
Ken Salikof
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
DelBianco's debut novel, Rough Animals (Arcade, June), is a gritty contemporary western in the vein of
Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy
You started your own cattle company at age 14. Can you explain to a tender-foot what that entails?
I'd select steers from a feedlot and, over the course of 10 months, raise them to finishing weight. I focused
on animal welfare and both economic and environmental sustainability, producing above-prime meat, in a
program that earned my acceptances into MIT and Duke University. As a member of the youth organization
4-H, I showed cattle competitively. For a teenage girl in a conservative rural community, livestock showing
was the great gender equalizer. When it comes to controlling a 1,600-pound animal, strength of arm is
irrelevant.
Are there any ways in which running cattle prepares you for writing a novel?
There are very few experiences in life quite like getting the crap kicked out of you by an animal that doesn't
care who you are, where you're from, or how smart you are, and getting back up again. Writing a novel is
one of them.
You live in Bucks County, Pa. How does that affect your process?
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Sometimes, flinging oneself into the middle of nowhere, with silence, solitude, and maybe some hay to
shovel is what needs to happen to get the writing done. That's Bucks County for me.
What about your stints living in Paris, Bali, Saigon, and Stockholm--were any of those places helpful in the
writing of your novel?
Distance has always aided me in writing about my own experiences, especially cultural distance, but my
experience in Bali is at the heart of Rough Animals as much as my cattle-wrangling past is. It was a 14-
year-old ecstasy dealer who worked the local clubs, who I met while living in violent, gang-run Seminyak,
that inspired "the girl" in my novel.
Do you find that there is a different set of expectations for a female writer writing in what might be
considered a male-dominated genre?
I reject the notion that, with the limitless expanse of literary voices in the world, there's any value in
gendering them. Members of the publishing industry have asked me many times about my "authority" to
write this book. My answer used to be, "I've lived more of those experiences than most of the men who
write them," but the more important answer is that in literature, as in any art, an artist needs no permission
to create whatever it is in the world he or she is inspired to create.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Salikof, Ken. "Cattle Running and Writing: PW TALKS WITH RAE DELBIANCO." Publishers Weekly, 16
Apr. 2018, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532686/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8f3c917d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532686
QUOTED: "take-no-prisoners debut" "a backdrop of ferocious, visceral, almost psychedelically intense nature writing."
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DelBianco, Rae: ROUGH ANIMALS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
DelBianco, Rae ROUGH ANIMALS Arcade (Adult Fiction) $24.99 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-62872-973-3
When a feral 14-year-old girl kills four of his cattle, a Utah rancher not so much older than she chases her
into the physical and spiritual wilderness for 12 blood-soaked days.
This take-no-prisoners debut from DelBianco--"that redneck kid author," according to her Twitter profile--
has been compared to Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Ron Rash, Donald Ray Pollock, and Jim
Thompson, and rather than argue, we'll just throw in Gabriel Tallent. Against a backdrop of ferocious,
visceral, almost psychedelically intense nature writing, the two main characters participate in a series of
gunfights, murders, fires, and drug deals gone wrong. They journey on foot, by pickup truck, muleback and
horseback through the desert, barely outrunning the coyotes and drinking the blood of dead animals to avoid
dehydration, stealing antibiotics from the pet aisle of Walmart for their suppurating wounds, all the while
warily deciding--and then reconsidering--whether they are enemies or allies. The young rancher, Wyatt
Smith, is a twin, and this quest for revenge has forced him to leave his sister, Lucy, alone at the wilderness
homestead where they were orphaned as teenagers in an incident which has left Lucy permanently
damaged, an incident revisited in ever more revealing flashbacks. "Killing's not an end but a transfer of
power," explains the mysterious, unnamed, remorseless, wily, and preternaturally articulate girl killer. "If
you kill sincerely, it's impersonal, it's done without hesitation, and with the intent to use it to its fullest
purpose." Wyatt's life would be a lot simpler if he could find a way to agree with her.
Man, this "redneck kid author" can write.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"DelBianco, Rae: ROUGH ANIMALS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294114/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac7d4cc2.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294114
QUOTED: "The novel succeeds as a viscerally evoked and sparely plotted fever dream, a bleakly realized odyssey through an American west."
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Rough Animals
Publishers Weekly.
265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Rough Animals
Rae DelBianco. Arcade (Two Rivers, dist.), $24.99 (296p) ISBN 978-1-62872-973-3
In DelBianco's furious and electric debut, a contemporary western, Wyatt and Lucy Smith are twins living a
hardscrabble existence on a cattle ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. Early one morning, Wyatt discovers
that one of his steers has been fatally shot. The killer is a barely-teenaged girl, who, during a brief shootout,
wounds Wyatt and kills three more of his cattle before escaping. Knowing the entire ranch enterprise
has been economically doomed by the shooting, Wyatt decides to go after the girl, who is wounded herself,
and demand restitution. With Lucy holding down the fort, Wyatt follows the girl south towards Salt Lake
City, tracking her through an inhospitable desert of armed outlaw bikers, camouflaged meth labs, drug deals
gone wrong, and hungry coyote packs. Interspersed with Wyatt's narrative are flashbacks to the twins being
raised by their father, who schools them in the cruel lessons of nature. Although clearly influenced by the
prose styles of Cormac McCarthy and the late Jim Harrison, DelBianco nevertheless develops her own
distinct voice, alternately laconic and roughly poetic. And though the girl is more device than actual
character, the novel succeeds as a viscerally evoked and sparely plotted fever dream, a bleakly realized
odyssey through an American west populated by survivors and failed dreamers. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rough Animals." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 49. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099927/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c7848ab8.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099927
QUOTED: "I come from a rural background, and watching the calluses disappear from my hands at college, I started to wonder whether, given the sterility of modern life, we lose the emotional power of doing more than just surviving by not having to ‘survive’ at all. We have soft hands and clean shoes, we eat pre-packaged chicken breasts that have no resemblance to a bird. We’ve managed to escape our daily battle with survival, but also the fulfillment that comes from winning it."
"And so I find particular enjoyment in returning to literature wherein, in the face of a fight for survival, not a single bite of food or breath of air is taken for granted."
"I spent time on the ground in Utah, conducted interviews, and read a lot of the literature of the region. But my own personal history of working the land was the most crucial thing I drew on in writing the book."
The Fluid Morality of Survival in ‘Rough Animals’
BY ARAM MRJOIAN
JUNE 29, 2018
COMMENTS 0
Rae DelBianco has a knack for writing action. In her debut novel, Rough Animals, she cuts to the chase. Twins entering adulthood, Wyatt and Lucy Smith, are struggling to hold onto the family farm in Box Elder County, Utah. Their father died five years prior and the siblings are utterly alone. Within the opening pages, Wyatt and four cattle on the ranch are shot, the animals left dead while Wyatt is clipped in the arm.
From there, things quickly go south for Wyatt and his sister. Wyatt manages to capture the shooter, a violent and unafraid adolescent girl, but she fights her way off the farm, sending Wyatt on an epic hunt to claim the money they would’ve earned from the killed steers. Once Wyatt is on the road, DelBianco showcases her talent for rich descriptions of the natural landscape, as well as a lack of abashment in approaching brutality head-on.
Via email, I asked Rae about the difficulties of writing about violence and survival, inhabiting unknown landscapes, and playing with genre conventions.
Aram Mrjoian
If I had to narrow down the main theme of your novel, I’d say it’s about survival, both psychological and physical. You place your characters in unforgiving landscapes and dire circumstances. What interests you in this subject matter?
Rae DelBianco
I come from a rural background, and watching the calluses disappear from my hands at college, I started to wonder whether, given the sterility of modern life, we lose the emotional power of doing more than just surviving by not having to ‘survive’ at all. We have soft hands and clean shoes, we eat pre-packaged chicken breasts that have no resemblance to a bird. We’ve managed to escape our daily battle with survival, but also the fulfillment that comes from winning it. And so I find particular enjoyment in returning to literature wherein, in the face of a fight for survival, not a single bite of food or breath of air is taken for granted.
Aram Mrjoian
Your prose, in particular, seems interested in the natural landscape, animals, and what I would consider environmental terror. The elements can be both critical and detrimental to survival. Several of the prominent characters are faced with blood poisoning, dehydration, and coyote attacks. What considerations did you have to make in talking about what the human body can handle? In other words, for lack of a better way to phrase it, how do you decide when your characters have had enough?
Rae DelBianco
Humans have an amazing ability to adapt. Survival has a lot more to do with mental strength than physical strength. So while there are limits (especially in a world of shotguns and TEC-9s), usually the question of how much a person’s body can take is determined by what their mind will allow them to do—whether they can ignore social norms, move past their old ideas of what is honorable or ‘right,’ and even dismiss logic when it says they should already be dead.
I’m fixated by the true story of Mauro Prosperi, a marathon runner who survived ten days in the Sahara by drinking bat blood. After five days, not dehydrated enough to die any way but slowly, he slit his wrists to hurry it along. It turned out he was dehydrated enough that his blood was too thick to bleed out. After that, he made it another 100 or so miles to rescue. Survival is not brute strength in the head or in the body. It’s not pure relentlessness either. But survival is a series of choices—choices that grow increasingly difficult when your canteen runs dry and it’s bat blood or nothing.
Aram Mrjoian
This novel also examines a specific region with distinct geographical features. Having been raised in Pennsylvania, how did you get a feel for the landscape of Utah and the surrounding area?
Rae DelBianco
I build my landscapes from the molecular level, starting with the tactile feelings of dirt under fingernails, the heat of the air in your nostrils, to the crunch of boots in dry sand. In real life, it’s the sensory details that tend to register first—long before the grandeur of mesas and red rock and vast distances. I’ve always been enraptured by the West and big mythological spaces. I spent time on the ground in Utah, conducted interviews, and read a lot of the literature of the region. But my own personal history of working the land was the most crucial thing I drew on in writing the book.
Aram Mrjoian
Rough Animals is perhaps best classified as a contemporary hybrid Western, billed as “Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men.” How are you trying to work within a genre and how are you trying to subvert conventions?
Rae DelBianco
I love the omnipotence of nature in Westerns. I’m fascinated by the unwrapped psychology that comes from isolation and by lives in which each passing day is hard-won. There are times when I think that society is the enemy of sincerity. What interests me is an unfiltered look at the soul.
Westerns are typically good guy versus bad guy, but in real life, the lines of good and evil are rarely so clearly defined. When survival requires transgressing social norms and laws, morality begins to work on a sliding scale. It’s easy for a Western to call a man a hero when he kills evil men to save his family. But when those he kills aren’t evil (and I find “evil” a difficult definition to actually apply in real life), what has the man become?
I also found myself upending the genre’s portrayal of women. Westerns often give women a fleeting, unsatisfactory moment of strength—riding in on horseback or firing a gun—before demoting them to love interest or damsel in distress. But my own experience of rural life had greater gender equality than most corporate offices do today. I raised beef cattle as a teenager, and to a steer that weighs nearly a ton, the difference between a man’s strength and a woman’s is unconvincing. You need strategy, tenacity, and the ability to think like an animal. You need to be the kind of person who’ll spit on your bloody knuckles to clean them off before picking the halter rope back up again. The young women in the West I wanted to write about are active and competent participants in their own survival.
Aram Mrjoian
A follow-up to my last question: what books were integral to writing this one? The language in Rough Animals is stylized in a very particular fashion. Who influences your general aesthetic? Is this novel trying to nod to any others?
Rae DelBianco
Cormac McCarthy is a core influence. He tends to render violence in a kaleidoscopic visual beauty that makes it impossible to turn away. And because a central goal of my novel was to take an honest look at the violence within us, paying homage to Blood Meridian, as well as to Outer Dark and Child of God, was essential. The bond between Wyatt and Lucy was inspired by Henry and Judith Sutpen in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, my favorite novel. Henry and Judith are defined only by one another, and I wanted to examine the idea of a two-person self in my own work. But in the end, my deepest aesthetic inspiration comes from what might seem like an unlikely source, which is Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Capote describes seemingly mundane things—a tobacco box on a kitchen table, a sleeping cat, or broken window—with as much visual force as McCarthy describes a sunset over a mesa. Other Voices, Other Rooms proves again and again that beauty is not reserved only for the elevated or grand.
Aram Mrjoian
I noticed in your acknowledgements you thanked the reading community of Instagram. How does social media influence your artistic process? What attracts you to Instagram as a writer?
Rae DelBianco
The community of readers on Instagram, affectionately called “Bookstagram,” gives me an opportunity to have a conversation on any book at any hour of the day or night. I discovered Bookstagram when I’d moved home from London and was missing the reading communities I’d been a part of there. Great books have the power to create bonds between strangers—and now I regularly discuss books with a lifelong Faulkner reader in Texas, a James Joyce expert in France, and an avid gothic literature fan in Kenya. It’s the largest, most diverse, and most accessible group of readers I know of.
To be clear, I don’t show my unfinished work to anyone on Instagram. Art can’t be made by consensus. Bookstagram has led me to some great books that have changed me forever, but the reading of my unfinished work and the editing of my writing is reserved for my editor, agents, and a few other trusted readers.
9781628729733_b9d0c
FICTION
Rough Animals by Rae DelBianco
Arcade Publishing
Published June 5, 2018
Rae DelBianco graduated from Duke University on a Robertson Scholarship in 2014, and was later accepted to Curtis Brown’s six-month novel writing course in London. She is an alumnus of Tin House’s Summer Workshop, and lives in Mountainside, New Jersey. Rough Animals is her first novel.