JS: I don’t think of Missouri as being our neighbor, but I guess it isn’t that far from Texas-it’s only an Oklahoma away. I haven’t looked them up yet, but I’m going to. Part of the Jiles family, after the Civil War, came to Boerne-near Boerne. We also had in Missouri, the same as here, a large German contingent. PJ: The Whiteheads left Missouri in about the 1850s and drove a herd of around one thousand sheep down to Sonora, and now they’re one of the biggest sheep raisers and goat raisers in Texas. How did you work up such an impressive imitation of a native? But, in fact, you’re from Missouri and moved to Texas as an adult.

Specifically, I assumed you were from one of those Texas families that have been here forever and passes all sorts of lore down. Jeff Salamon: Your new book is so full of details about Texas history that I assumed you were Texan. We spoke to her in late August while sitting at a table in front of her modest home atop a stony ridge with views in every direction. (On October 13 Jiles will find out if she has made it to the shortlist, and if she does, November 16 is when she will find out if she is the winner.) It’s as transporting and stirring a western as you’re likely to read this year-an opinion apparently shared by the National Book Foundation, which just this morning named it to the ten-book longlist for the 2016 National Book Award in Fiction, the first time Jiles has been so honored. Set in Texas just after the Civil War, the book recounts the adventures of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Confederate veteran passing through Wichita Falls who assumes the dangerous task of returning a ten-year-old girl who has been taken captive by a band of Kiowa to her family in South Texas. This month William Morrow will publish News of the World, the sixth novel by Paulette Jiles, a 73-year-old poet, novelist, memoirist, and resident of the Hill Country town of Utopia.

News of the world jiles