Paris, 1938. Two women meet: 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 Light, 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 truth: 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.
Theodore Wheeler is the author of three novels: The War Begins in Paris, Kings of Broken Things, and In Our Other Lives. His writing has been featured in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Narrative, LitHub, and many more journals. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Nebraska Arts Council, and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
For fourteen years Theodore worked as a journalist who covered law and politics, including the last two presidential elections, and now teaches creative writing in the English Department at Creighton University. He is also director of Omaha Lit Fest and, with his wife, operates Dundee Book Company, an independent neighborhood bookshop.
Here are the details:
Date: Saturday, Jan. 13
Time: 5 p.m.
Location: Politics and Prose Bookstore
Address: 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20008
For additional information on this event, click here.
For more information on other book readings by Ted Wheeler, click here.
