It’s always stubbornly rebuilt and survived. Were there any real-life (or literary) places that inspired it? I found myself thinking of the city in which Kevin Brockmeier’s A Brief History of the Dead is set, as well as the strange cities that show up in may a Steve Erickson novel…Īfter I had drafted most of the material, I was reading about the actual Serbian city of Novi Sad and was struck by how many times it had been reduced to rubble in various conflicts over the centuries. The city of Novi Sad itself becomes surreal and tangible over the course of the book.
As the great jazz musician Sun Ra once said: “It’s already after the end of the world.” How do you navigate that situation and live in that reality? It’s not necessarily a new idea.
So I was interested in how these doom-struck characters might act once their world ends. On some level we might even want the end, but it’s never going to come in the absolute way that we might imagine. There’s something not quite final in this final threat of the end of the world. For instance, the initial readers of the Book of Revelations thought it predicted end times that were just around the corner. I’m not saying things aren’t dire and certain historical situations haven’t been catastrophic, but our belief in an all-consuming apocalypse has been around a long time. I was curious about how much of the nature of the end of the world you had planned out: it comes off as a tangible event, but also as one that’s less overtly apocalyptic that one might expect.įrom the start, I was interested in exploring how the world often feels like it’s on the brink of ending, but it never actually does. Novi Sad is set in a city around the end of the world, but the end of the world is a very peculiar one. I talked with Jackson via email about the creation of this book and its relationship to his debut. It’s a powerful story told atmospherically, and it’s aided in this by the artwork of Michael Salerno. What follows involves a constantly shifting interpersonal dynamic, blurred identities, and an upending of what one might think constitutes the end of the world. In it, a group of friends take refuge in an abandoned hotel in a city and wait for the world to end. Novi Sad, Jeff Jackson‘s haunting followup to his debut novel Mira Corpora, begins in a familiar place and rapidly defies expectations.
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