idiot.

neurotic and entirely without manners, prone to despair-inducing bouts of obstinacy.

He was scratching the dog's ears when the thought came to him.

Rabies.

Bats carried rabies.

Why hadn't he remembered this? Warnings were posted everywhere in their neighborhood, which was named for the bridge that housed the city's bat colony.

Hadn't he stood on that bridge on their first night in town, shoulder to shoulder with all the teetering bachelorettes and Midwestern grad dads to watch the column of clicking bodies course out into the night sky? He stared down at the dog.

I'll be right back.

Here is Tea Obreht reading from her new novel, Sunrise.

Hi, my name is Tea Obreht, and this is an excerpt from Sunrise, which is available from Random House.

Sunrise is a novel of three very different lives in very different periods of American history.

It starts in twenty twenty-four with a small engine plane crash in the Wyoming mountains.

Nina is the only survivor.

She's a grad student and a nanny from New York and is probably the least equipped person to survive such an event.

She's armed with a few protein bars and a phone that has no signal.

How did you end up in Wyoming?

That's a great question.

So I came to Wyoming as a newlywed with my husband, Dan.

But it was something that in my mind was bound up in the... mythos of America and in the core identity of America from when I was a kid when I was little and growing up in Egypt on Friday nights one of the three channels that was available back then because it was 1995 I guess one of the three local channels would show a National Geographic special and now there was also there was just a rotation of three National Geographic specials Lions and hyenas, eternal enemies.

Snakes and eagles, also eternal enemies.

And then Yellowstone, right? And so I grew up, I was so spellbound by this old documentary about Yellowstone and its landscape and its extraordinary beauty and its vastness and the fact that it seemed to be completely devoid of people.

And I... for me it became inextricably linked with a vision of America, you know, and the myth of America as I saw it, like this was America.

hello, it's time to go because

So take us into this origin story for the book.

Yeah, this has been a funny one to work on.

I started writing about Anton Vargas more than 10 years ago in 2015.

I was spending a lot of time out West.

I was reading a lot of dime store novels.

I was very interested in the Western as sort of a mechanism of propaganda.

And in particular, these sort of early origins of it in the lives of people like Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok.

dissemination of information is really complicated.

So how did you write Sunrise? How did the story come to you? Did it begin with one section or did you see the entire history before you wrote your first words?

This book for me started with the story of Anton Vargas.

I wrote the first draft of it for the first time in 2015, maybe even started in 2014.

So it's been with me for a really long time.

I was reading a lot about the Old West then.

I was reading a lot about the mythologies of nation and nationalism and how the Western sort of functioned as a kind of propagandistic movement text to draw people westward and to make people familiar with, you know, what the Western expanse of the United States looked like.

And gunslingers in particular, these dime novel heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok were of great interest to me.

And maybe this might be a time to tell us a little bit more about Nina's mother and their relationship.

These are like, you know, almost full narratives of in and of themselves.

Totally.

You climb in and then you climb out.

So it's A, B, C, B, A.

But there are no sort of orienting devices inside the book.

So the reader sort of advances through not knowing how long the sections are going to be or whether you're going to come out of them or not.

And there's just sort of the promise of it.

And I wonder if you'd talk about Louise and her place as a kind of historian and a different kind of storyteller within the constraints of the novels.

I'm like, well, actually, it's all fairytales.

And because of that, I think because of... that fairytale reality, it does represent who we are.

Ironically, right? Yeah, you're not wrong.

You're not wrong.

Because its foundations are in, the foundations of the Western are in the dime novel, right? Like this sort of pulpy, exaggerated, often really cinematic, overwritten purple prose story.

propaganda material, right? Material propaganda that was intended to show the West in a very particular light as a place to achieve glory for the country, right? For yourself and for the country and grow the country.

Nobody's here, right? We're not taking it from anyone.

I love a good hike, but then I like to go somewhere with a door.

So for our listeners and our viewers, do you have an elevator pitch for Sunrise?

I do.

Well, I think I do.

I feel like I'm still learning it.

So this is a book that starts with a plane crash.

Nina is a 24-year-old nanny for a rich New York couple.

She's also an art grad student, and she is the least likely person to survive the ordeal that happens to her.

So to me, so much of this is about the construction of the book.