Next week, he returns to town to speak at the Literary Lions Luncheon, presented by the Friends of the Dallas Public Library to raise money and support for Dallas’ libraries. Ahead of the event, we checked in with Fountain, who says he used to be a regular at the Preston Royal library branch, to chat about his career, the internet, Trump and his upcoming novel, Rasputin Swims The Potomac.
“The public library is an institution for good,” Fountain says. “More specifically for the public good. It is not a profit-based enterprise. It exists solely for the benefit of citizens and the common good.”
These days, Fountain rarely accepts speaking or writing gigs unless he feels he can learn something or advocate for a just cause. Supporting Dallas’ public libraries was an easy sell.
“To be a citizen in a democracy, it gives you rights but it also gives you obligations,” Fountain says. “We’re obligated as citizens in a democracy to be as well informed as we can be. To be as sharp and critical thinkers as we can be in order to make the right decisions about our national life. Libraries sit at the very core of this.”
Fountain has been writing for decades, long before the internet. But with his latest, 2023’s Devil Makes Three, and his upcoming novel, he’s cautiously adjusted to the times.
“The internet is a great servant, terrible master,” he says. “They’re compulsion machines. You’re on one thing, and they want to channel you to the very next thing. It’s like they’re compelling you to get that quick hit and move on. Whereas physical books give us the time and space to be human. They are not compulsion machines; they are thought machines. They are reflection machines. They are imagination machines. So while all the electronic stuff can be a great resource, I use it a lot, but if I really want to do hard thinking, I’ll go to physical books, and I’ll go to the library.”
A Lifetime of Writing
“I wrote for 17 years before I got a book contract, which is completely insane,” Fountain says. “Any rational person would have said, ‘This isn’t working out.’ I had to get very zen about the fact that I was an obscure writer who had published a handful of stories in small, obscure literary magazines. I was turning 40, and I was thinking, ‘Man, I never thought I would be a failure, but in the eyes of the world, I’m a failure.’ It took some real soul-searching for a couple of years. It was a long, slow process of coming to terms with myself, what I wanted out of writing and what I wanted out of life.”Timing is unpredictable. Fountain’s debut collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevera, came out in 2006 when he was 48. Six years later, his first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was released to national acclaim and was adapted into a 2016 film of the same name, directed by Ang Lee.
Since his first publication, Fountain has maintained a steady publishing cycle every six years, with four books published. Though no official date is set, Rasputin Swims The Potomac appears to be breaking the mold and is set for a 2026 release.
“As far as I know, it’s the first novel ever to be set in Farmers Branch,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not Paris, it’s not Brooklyn. But it deals with the here and now.”
The book's premise seems scarily possible. It takes place in the near future as Trump finishes his second term and begins running for a third after permission from the Supreme Court. Also in the campaign mix is a professional wrestler named Rasputin, who has legally changed his name and never breaks character. He is literally running as a proxy for the early 20th-century Russian mystic.
“I started this book in April of 2023 and turned it in September of 2024,” Fountain says. “I didn’t know he was going to win, but I had a feeling, so I wrote a whole damn novel based on the premise anyway. It is a pretty crazy, surreal book that will probably be marked as satire. I consider it straight-up realism. This is who we are in this country right now; the surreal has become the real, and it’s a pretty wild ride.”
Last summer, when momentum seemed to flow to the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Fountain’s book was on the verge of becoming a fantastical alternate reality. But upon Trump’s win in November, Fountain’s work quickly veered into an uncanny touchstone for modern politics. There's little doubt that eager readers will check out the upcoming book from a library many years later to taste how surreal American life was in the 2020s.
“One of the pleasures of writing this book was staying in the moment,” he says. “Day-to-day just seeing things play out in the national life and kind of scratching my head and thinking, how would this work in the novel? Sometimes, things are taken directly from real life. Other times, they’re riffs.”
Literary Lions Luncheon happens 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, at the Arts District Mansion, 2101 Ross Ave.
