Help us write the reading guide for Masha Hamilton's new novel, 31 HOURS. Everybody who has read this book has wanted to discuss it, and here's the chance!

Come here to chime in! This interactive site allows for discussion as well as for all of us to write the reading group guide together. Cool, huh?

Jason Quinn Malott's debut novel has earned many fans, including LIBRARY JOURNAL, who starred their review of THE EVOLUTION OF SHADOWS.

In this powerful story, a war photographer named Gray Banick goes missing in the Bosnian killing fields and five years later, the three people who were closest to him gather in Sarajevo to search for him, or to find his remains and lay him to rest.

Jason answered a few questions for us here:

Why did you make Gray a photojournalist rather than a reporter?
 
Primarily because a reporter doesn't have to directly witness an event to report on it, but a photojournalist must witness the event.  And, of course, the first rule of news photography is to get as close to your subject as you can. 
            But also, I wanted to play with some thoughts about photography and memory that I was obsessed with after reading John Berger's books "Ways of Seeing" and "About Looking."  Although it might take a thousand words to describe a picture, those thousand words will carry their meaning and their weight across time and between strangers because those thousand words contain both the description and the context surrounding the captured moment.  Photographs, however, have the potential to lose their context the further away in time they get from the moment in which they were taken, and the further away they get from the owners and subjects of those photographs. 
            If Gray were a news writer, then the trail he would leave behind would be full of words, full of context and meaning. . .

 

Do you consider this a war novel? A love story? Or do you resist such easy categorizations for your work?
 
I think I would resist any easy categorization.  To put it cleanly into one category or another ignores all the other aspects of it. It also immediately cuts off a potential audience.  Is Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" a war story or a love story? What about Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"?  Trying to smash a book into a genre, I think, is part of the reason reading is in decline in America.   People can now narrow their reading down to the tiniest field, like cat mysteries, or puzzle thrillers and they've surrendered their own judgment on the worth of a book to a kind of arbitrary brand that a publisher puts on the spine.

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Jason is available to chat with book groups. Just contact caitlin@unbridledbooks.com.