EVENTS
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Meet the Author
6:30 pm
Theodore Wheeler | The War Begins in Paris
@ Beaverdale Books
From the author of Kings of Broken Things and In Our Other Lives comes a provocative and stylish literary noir about two female war correspondents whose fates intertwine in Europe.
Paris, 1938. Two women Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist.
When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her.
Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality.
About the Author
Theodore Wheeler is the author of three novels, most recently The War Begins in Paris (Little Brown, 2023). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Nebraska Arts Council, and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. He worked for fourteen years as a journalist who covered law and politics, and his fiction is often influenced by real life and historical events. Wheeler and his family operate Dundee Book Company, an independent neighborhood bookshop, and he is a professor in the English Department at Creighton University. A native Iowan, he now lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Author Rachel Mans McKenny will join Theodore “in conversation” following his reading. She is a writer and humorist from the Midwest who has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Elle, InStyle, and other outlets. She is the author of a debut novel, The Butterfly Effect.
