Jonathan Miles, author of the novels “Dear American Airlines” and “Want Not,” has just this week published “Eradication: A Fable.” As well as fiction, Miles has published essays, journalism and other nonfiction in The New York Times and toured as a musician in Jon Batiste’s band in 2024. Here, he takes the Book Pages Q&A.
Q. Please tell readers about your new book, “Eradication.”
“Eradication: A Fable” is the story of a grief-broken man who tries to mend himself by taking what he thinks is a conservation assignment on an isolated, unpeopled Pacific island. The job involves killing, something he’s never done before, and the act of it — the pain, the blood, the waste, the silence — causes a slew of questions to bubble up, about his own life and other lives, both human and animal. Soon enough, he discovers he’s not the only person on the supposedly unpeopled island — and not the only killer, either.
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Q. The book brings up the challenges of being responsible stewards of the world and addressing human-caused problems. Can you talk about why you decided to engage with this topic?
I began my writing career as an outdoors journalist, writing about fishing and hunting and climbing and river-running, so the natural world has always been close to the heart of what I think about, if not always what I’ve written fiction about. Questions about ecological stewardship and responsibility eventually boiled over in me, however. Writing novels is how I explore questions, though not always answer them.
Q. Did you need to spend a lot of time with goats to write this book?
I have two close friends who, in midlife, decided to raise goat herds, and their counsel was a crucial constant for me. I have no doubt they were often bewildered by my questions.
Q. Unlike most novelists, you’ve opened for the Rolling Stones as part of Jon Batiste’s band. Can you share how you balance your music and your writing?
Jon helped me understand that they’re manifestations of the same artistic impulse. What you’re ultimately trying to do, whether on the stage or the page, is to move people: to make them think, reflect, remember, stir, wonder, and maybe dance, sure, but most of all feel. In both instances, you hope that the art you make nudges them, even slightly, in some new direction, toward a fresh intensity.
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
“Stone Fox,” a children’s book by John Reynolds Gardner. It’s a tear-jerker about a boy and his sled dog, and I couldn’t believe, at the age of nine, the emotions it wrung from me. That ink marks on a page had gutted me so thoroughly—ink marks that described imaginary people, to boot—felt like deep magic to me. One response to encountering magic, I suppose, is to try to see if you can conjure it yourself.
Q. Do you have a favorite book or books?
“Ship of Fools,” by Katherine Anne Porter, a twentieth-century writer we don’t hear about nearly often enough nowadays. Porter belongs to that rare order of writers whose severity enlarges the world rather than shrinking it. Her prose is exacting to the point of moral pressure. Clarity, in her hands, becomes a form of mercy.
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
My mother was a voracious reader. In fact, I first encountered Katherine Anne Porter on her bookshelves. What she modeled for me was that reading was pleasure—not duty, like eating vegetables, but pleasure, a way of stealing moments from the humdrum of life, of escaping our universe, if only for an hour or two a night, for the limitless frontiers of imagination.
Q. Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend?
On rare occasions. I like the tactile nature of reading: scribbling in the margins, dog-earing pages, knowing where I fell asleep while reading because the book is face down on my chest. Recently, I listened to Gary Sinise narrating John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” The problem for me there was that whenever George was scolding Lennie, I kept hearing Lieutenant Dan chewing out Forrest Gump.
Q. What are you reading now?
I just finished a remarkable nonfiction book called “The Feather Wars,” out next month. It’s a history of the mass slaughter of American birds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—but more important, a history of the activists and forward-thinking politicians who put an end to that slaughter and saved a slew of bird species from extinction. It’s a bracing reminder that ecological activism can work, because it has.
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
By grazing, maybe like a goat. I’m constantly receiving books, buying books, accruing books, and most get stacked on an old trunk in my living room. Most nights find me dipping into one, then dipping into another, and so forth, until something hooks me. Something always does.
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