![]() ![]() I was complaining about it to a friend in the workshop, who knew what I liked to read, and asked me why I wasn’t doing something fantastical instead of this straight-up realist fiction. It was like I was telling these old stories I’d heard a million times, and they sort of lay there on the page. Except the stories really weren’t very good, for the most part, and I knew it. I was an MFA student at Columbia at the time, and this was supposed to be my graduate thesis. ![]() HW: To be honest, it was sort of unintentional! Or at least, it wasn’t my original aim I didn’t say, “Hey, let’s combine these two folk traditions and see what happens.” The whole thing started with a collection of very realist short stories I was writing, based on incidents from my own family history and my husband’s. ![]() PS: How did you decide to write a novel about two characters from traditional folklores? Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni, Harper Perennial, 2013, 512pp., $15.99 Phillip Sherman talks with Helene Wecker about incorporating Jewish and Muslim traditions into her debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni. ![]()
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