Transcript for Daniel Kraus and David Remnick podcast interview
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Episode Transcript:
Nicole Carroll (show host): This is the Pulitzer on the Road podcast, and I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I'm the chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board and a faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
Each spring, 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama, and music. On this podcast, we talk with many of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work.
This month, Pulitzer on the Road launched a new traveling exhibition in partnership with the American Library Association. The exhibition will visit 20 public libraries across the US, and this season, we'll be featuring Pulitzer winners with connections to the states along the tour.
The first stop for the exhibition is the Chicago Public Library in Illinois. So today's episode features Chicago-based author Daniel Kraus being interviewed by Pulitzer-board member and editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick.
Daniel won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, a World War I novel told in a single sentence. Throughout his career, Daniel has been drawn to writing beautifully about horror and the grotesque.
Daniel Kraus (episode guest, 2026 Fiction Pulitzer winner): I think part of it reminds us of being alive. You know, violence sort of wakes us up to remembering that death is right there. You know, there's no vitality in life without being aware of death.
Nicole Carroll: Today, Daniel and David discuss how Daniel discovered art at the video store, his varied and prolific career as the author of more than 30 books, and why he continues to challenge himself as a writer.
We hope you enjoy the episode!
David Remnick (interviewer, Pulitzer Board member): Daniel, congratulations on winning the Pulitzer Prize. Did you get a phone call from your third grade teacher?
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, pretty much. I got a call from everyone.
David Remnick: Any old friends from the past that you didn't wanna hear from?
Daniel Kraus: Every old friend and enemy from the past. All allegiances were wiped away. It was like, doesn't matter if I liked you or not. It was a great, great week of connecting back in with people.
David Remnick: I'm on the board, and I enjoyed this novel terrifically. It was incredibly impressive on a technical level, and an emotional level. But I would say this: that of the background of the people that win Pulitzers, which is very various in many ways, you've had a very different career. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the road that brought you to writing Angel Down.
Daniel Kraus: Well, I mean, a lot of it was writing. You know, coming out of college, my first job was in TV. I had studied filmmaking in college, and so I worked for TV news sort of out in the field in North Carolina. And then I was a freelance writer for magazines. I wrote for Maxim and Playboy and Cosmopolitan, and a lot of these sort of glossies. And then I briefly became a librarian and a book reviewer then eventually, so you can kind of see me bending.
David Remnick: Where were you living then?
Daniel Kraus: For most of this I'm living here in Chicago.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Kraus: And it sort of bends back towards, once I started reviewing books, back towards writing again. And you know because I was, I wanted to be a novelist all throughout childhood and growing up.
David Remnick: And what were you reading as a kid that was especially inspiring to you?
Daniel Kraus: I don't know if I would label anything particularly inspiring or not. It was more, it was volume over quality. You know? Like I read as much as I could, and that would be, you know, it was a small town in Iowa where I grew up
David Remnick: Right
Daniel Kraus: so it would be just sort of whatever books were available. The library was very small. I would read my sister's Judy Blume books. I would read Stephen King books from the library, and I would just grab whatever I could. In a weird way that's how I continued to read and how I continue to write really. I just keep skipping around the different genres and styles and it's a pattern that I haven't really been able to shake.
David Remnick: You say that horror saved your life.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah
David Remnick: Now, that's not a sentence I'd heard before from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Tell, tell me about how horror saved your life and what does that, what does that mean?
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. I wrote this book called Partially Devoured, which is all about this. About how the first things I remember seeing, like watching on TV as a child at, maybe at age five years old or so, were Twilight Zone, which I watched weekly with my mom, and Night of the Living Dead, which was a movie that was just always on TV.
David Remnick: Fantastic movie.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Partially Devoured is all about that movie and how it affected me. So I think because of my mom introducing horror to me in that way, it was a very safe space. And I sort of got in under the fear of it, and it became something to be sort of enjoyed. But then when I got a little bit older, say sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, and times got really tough, I feel like horror became a way of building a suit of armor around myself.
David Remnick: What do you mean times got really tough?
Daniel Kraus: Well, you know, bullying mainly.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Kraus: You know, again, this is rural Iowa, and there's not a lot. This is pre-internet
David Remnick: Right
Daniel Kraus: So you just feel really alone, and I was the smallest kid in my grade for years. And this was the time when VHS stores were starting to pop up, too. So, you know, I would have a lot of bullying and stuff during the day, but at night
David Remnick: mmm
Daniel Kraus: I was watching stuff that none of those bullies could take. I was watching the most intense horror films that were out there. And I felt like I was achieving a mastery over something, and somehow defeating one fear and knowing that I had this ability to withstand something that I don't think anyone else could.
David Remnick: And what about war movies, things like that?
Daniel Kraus: , you know, I didn't really discover that until maybe high school when I worked at a movie theater that also rented videos. So I just started renting everything, and that's how I became aware of the Vietnam War. I started renting Platoon and Apocalypse Now and, and all these movies of that vein and started, you know, without any sort of pre-knowledge of what these wars were, you know? And I was at very first plunged into just the sort of intensity of it without having any context for what these battles were all about.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm. What is it about us human beings, that while we might be repelled by violence, and we might be repelled by gore and horror, we're also deeply attracted to it. This is a question I ask myself when I'm watching yet another Netflix thing where, per show, per episode you know, 25 people are blown away. And at a certain point, you gotta press pause and ask yourself, "Okay, why is this entertaining to me and not repulsive to me?" And maybe there are people that are repulsed, but, but there is, there is an attraction that certainly that you have as a writer
Daniel Kraus: Yeah
David Remnick: to the grotesque. And you write about in this novel about the aromas of blood and something you call “gut juice.”
Daniel Kraus: I think part of it reminds us of being alive, you know? Violence sort of wakes us up to remembering that death is right there, and there's, you know, there's no vitality in life without being aware of death. Otherwise, we'd be like our dogs, you know? Like, who loaf around all day because they don't, they're not aware that death is, is coming. I think that's a lot of it. Being awake and aware all the time is important to me, and is, I think there's a sliding scale of how important it is to individuals.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm
Daniel Kraus: But I think for me, seeing that flash of red, whether it's in a movie or in real life, it sort of brings you back and wakes you up, and keeps you sharp in some way.
David Remnick: So what's the first thing you wrote?
Daniel Kraus: I mean, I started writing in first grade. Basically a friend of mine, Ben, who lived in my neighborhood, we would draw monsters.
David Remnick: Right.
Daniel Kraus: Kind of like Godzilla type or Star Wars type monsters. And then we started writing stories as a way to have those monsters fight each other. So it was a means to just do something with these drawings that we had done. I got more serious then year after year, and by middle school was probably writing what you'd call novellas. And then in high school wrote, you know, probably two or three novel length manuscripts.
David Remnick: You wrote two or three novels in high school?
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, I would say so. Yeah.
David Remnick: What were they like? What were the novels about?
Daniel Kraus: They were horror. I mean, first of all, they were horror. One was kind of a dark fantasy horror, something along the lines of Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon. That was sort of my big epic masterpiece.
David Remnick: Did you have dreams of making a living at this? At making a life of it?
Daniel Kraus: No. I mean, I guess in a sense, yes, because it's what I loved and books were kinda my thing. But at that point of time in rural Iowa, it was so far beyond what one could conceive of. Like, I didn't know any artists, working artists. I didn't know anyone who knew any working artists. It was so many times removed from my experience that I never even entertained the idea of writing full-time. Even though it was sort of my dream, it was a complete unreality.
David Remnick: When you hear people talk about horror or genre fiction, they're saying two things at once, I think. On the one hand, they're describing something that exists, but they're also saying, without saying it, that it's not, quote-unquote, "serious fiction." How do you approach that division of the serious and the genre fiction? Do you think it's, do you think it's legitimate?
Daniel Kraus: No, I don't think it's a legitimate statement. It's a ridiculous statement, actually.
David Remnick: mhmm
Daniel Kraus: my interest has always been, I think, to add a kind of high-art take on low-art ideas. You know, to take things that I loved as a kid, sort of exploitation films, horror films, and approaching them as if they were the Sistine Chapel. Approaching them as if they were these great, grand works of art, because in my heart, they were.
David Remnick: Are there examples of work by other people that could illustrate that?
Daniel Kraus: Well, sure. I mean, there's sort of famous examples. Night of the Living Dead would be an example. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would be a classic example of a low budget sort of gruesome, gritty, disgusting movie that, you know, when I watch it I just see the highest of art. You know? The gorgeously framed, every bit of detail is, is so, trenchant.
David Remnick: Do you think critics are too dismissive of that kind of work?
Daniel Kraus: I think it's less so now. You know? I look back every once in a while or I'll happen across old reviews of horror films, you know, that were in the, reviewed in the '60s or '70s, , or '80s, and they're very dismissive.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Kraus: And I don't think you see that as much anymore. Like, you don't see as many book critics or film critics just trashing something out of hand just for the subject matter it deals with.
David Remnick: What are the novels that hold the highest place in your pantheon? In other words, if, if you meet people that you
Daniel Kraus: Yeah
David Remnick: have some affection for or respect for, what are you recommending that they read so that they'll know you a bit better?
Daniel Kraus: Unsurprisingly, it's all over the place. Like, I love Butcher's Crossing by John Williams, who, you know, people know from the book Stoner. So that's sort of like, you know, established kind of high-art.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Kraus: I love Valley of the Dolls. I love Hollywood Wives, these sort of, kind of trashy
David Remnick: the Collins sisters.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, the Collinses. there's a horror novel called The Cipher by Kathe Koja, which is just brilliant. There's a weirdo – I'd like to shout out this weirdo small press book I read a couple years ago that has not left my brain called A Hand to Carve, A Hand to Hold.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Kraus: I hope I didn't transpose those.
David Remnick: Well, I'm telling you, if I was doing an interview 25 years ago and I asked a Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, you know, about early literary and artistic models, and they started going off about George Romero
Daniel Kraus: Yeah
David Remnick: or Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But now, when, when we're used to this notion of high and low, you know, where, where we don't just talk about Rembrandt, but we're also talking about Crazy Cat
Daniel Kraus: Yeah
David Remnick: it's kinda common parlance.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, it feels very natural. You know, there are certain ways people were brought up in previous generations where art was introduced to them through certain venues, and it's like, "This is what art is. We're gonna teach you about it."
David Remnick: Right.
Daniel Kraus: And then things changed, and for my generation it was the video store, where it's suddenly like, well, here's what art is. It's this whole wall of Schwarzenegger movies, and here's a whole wall of zombie movies, and art is, is actually all these things and, and you get to pick, and you get to decide what you wanna value with your $2.
David Remnick: I'm down with that, but here's what I sometimes worry about, and this is the old fart in me, and I admit to it. If everything equals everything else, then I've got a problem. In other words
Daniel Kraus: Oh, yeah, yeah
David Remnick: I don't mind you telling me The Beatles are art, Bach is art. But if you're gonna tell me The Ramones, much as I love The Ramones, are as musically inventive
Daniel Kraus: Yep
David Remnick: as Bach, that's a, that's another conversation. Is that unfair?
Daniel Kraus: I agree. I agree completely. More than fair. And that's why, like, when I read a novel, let's just stick with horror. If I read a horror novel
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: I swear to God, I can tell if that writer only reads horror novels.
David Remnick: That's what I mean.
Daniel Kraus: There's, like, a feedback loop.
David Remnick: That's what I mean.
Daniel Kraus: You know, I might read a pulp-
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: pulp horror novel, but the next thing I read is Faulkner.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Daniel Kraus: You know? And I want, I want the high art, I want the low art, I wanna mash it all up. I wanna think about it. And when my interest is so intensely on the sentence level
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: that's when we're talking about the Faulkners and the other writers who are in that sort of lofty state. That's kind of what they're known for, at least that's what I know them for. So I completely agree. I think it's, like, there are artists who are a higher caliber in my eyes than other artists, and that's a given. I read like I watch movies and like I listen to music. I just, all I want is something that's different from the last thing that I did.
David Remnick Mmm.
Daniel Kraus: And that's how I write books too. If I've just written a sci-fi book that's a, from a first person perspective, the next thing I wanna do is a Western from an omniscient perspective. I want constant new input and constant new output. It's how I think I keep my brain sharp.
David Remnick: So for readers who don't know your work or maybe only know the book that you won the Pulitzer for, describe a little bit about your professional creative project leading up to it. What was the work that you had done? Because it's, it's, it's a pretty unusual path to get to this novel. It's not the standard issue, "I went to the Iowa Writers Group…”
Daniel Kraus: No
David Remnick: “and then wrote a sensitive novel about growing up where my grandpa, they're dying," and then a sort of slow development in that, in that kinda groove. It's something different.
Daniel Kraus: It's eclectic, you know? It's, it's just sort of the ongoing theme of this interview. It's really just my background and my interests are eclectic. So, you know, my very first book, which was called The Monster Variations, is in a way the book you just described. It is sort of a sensitive
David Remnick: Mm-hmm
Daniel Kraus: coming of age thing in a way. But I followed that up with this horror epic about grave robbers, you know, called Rotters, that to this day, is one of my most popular books. My first few books were young adult books. At least they were released as young adult books. I don't know that any of them really were. Like, they always felt to me like adult books that just sort of by happenstance were being published as young adult books because they had a young protagonist. There was a lot of horror in there, and then a little bit of fantasy came in. I did a couple books with Guillermo del Toro. I finished a couple manuscripts that were left behind when George A. Romero died. He's the director
David Remnick: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
Daniel Kraus: of Night of the Living Dead.
David Remnick: Sure.
Daniel Kraus: But then I began to expand, too. I started expanding in all directions, in all genres. Like at this point, I've done almost every genre. But they all, they all share a certain darkness. Like, the one thing that I always say that I haven't done yet, and I'm a little afraid to do, is something comedic. My tendency is to go very serious and very, very dark, and to go deep. I know Angel Down is the book that won the Pulitzer, and that's very awesome. And it is my favorite book of mine, so I, if I had to give one of my books the Pulitzer, I would have chosen Angel Down, too. But you know, I think you can go back into my catalog and see things that I wrote a long time ago. Like particularly, there's this two-volume project called The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, that might be the best thing I've ever done. It just didn't happen to get read by very many people. And these things, as you know as being on the board – these things are, there's so much luck and chance to it. Does the right person at the right time pick up the right book? Like, everything's a one in a million chance.
David Remnick: What was your life like when you were writing those books? In other words, how are you making a living? Are you making a living because you intersect with the entertainment industry? Tell me a little bit about that.
Daniel Kraus: For about the past 15 years, I've just been writing. So I write full time as a novelist. And yeah, I do occasional stuff in the film and TV industry, but not much. It's mostly novels. Prior to that, I always had jobs. I did all, all sorts of stuff. But as of about 15 years ago, I went full time as a writer, and it was a good choice.
David Remnick: What allowed you to do that?
Daniel Kraus: Success, honestly. Like, I had a full-time job as a book reviewer, and I kept that job even as my books started hitting and making more and more money. I still kept the job, and so I was able to sort of build up my bank account a little bit.
David Remnick: Did you have a model in mind?
Daniel Kraus: No. I don't think I had a model in mind, either as a business
David Remnick: Not Stephen King.
David Remnick: Not
Daniel Kraus: No
David Remnick: George Martin
Daniel Kraus: No
David Remnick: or whoever. Yeah.
Daniel Kraus: Mm-mm. Stephen King and, and people like that weren't a model definitely as an artist because they were, they were doing one thing sort of over and over.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Daniel Kraus: And maybe they were doing it really well, but I knew early on that I wanted to choose the most difficult possible career path as a writer, which is to change my genre constantly, which is a nightmare for agents, for readers.
David Remnick: Total nightmare. I mean, most people don't do that
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, it's the worst possible way to run a career.
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: Definitely. But, like, I think that was another advantage of having a full-time job for a while, is that that job was paying the bills. And so, you know, why not do whatever I want as a writer? And eventually, that caught on.
David Remnick: So you sit down and you say, "I'm gonna write a World War I novel." Now, there's a big tradition of World War I novels, whether it's Pat Barker or Erich Remarque or Wilfred Owen in poetry. What made you decide to write about this period in history, and a theme, and a, a phenomenon that is, let's just put it this way, not been unremarked upon by
Daniel Kraus: Yeah
David Remnick: by literature or film or, or poetry?
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, in some ways I'm drawn to things that, that I'm not the first person to think of, that I'm the thousandth or millionth person to think of.
David Remnick: Right.
Daniel Kraus: In the same way that I'll watch, you know, my millionth zombie movie or something. Like, it's interesting to take new spins on things. You can look at Angel Down. And this is where genre is powerful. You can see how by hanging on to a few recognizable archetypes, in this case the sort of ragtag bunch of soldiers that we've seen in a, in a thousand movies and books. By incorporating that and giving the reader something to grab onto, a genre iconography to grab onto, it frees you up in the prose to go wild.
David Remnick: Well, and you really do. I mean, not that there's no precedent for it, but you made a formal decision in terms of a continuous sentence. Did you do that in your first draft?
Daniel Kraus: No. I wrote the first 20 or 30 pages of Angel Down repeatedly and, you know, it wasn't bad. It was sort of a more traditional format, and it was working well enough, but it wasn't, like, setting my, my head on fire. Like, I knew it could be better.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Daniel Kraus: And these days I always try to match the writing style, and I always did this, but I'm more hardcore about it now, is, like, really thinking about how can the writing style mirror the themes of the book.
David Remnick: Which were what? What were the themes that you were setting out to get to?
Daniel Kraus: Well, when I sat down and really thought about it, and I literally did that. I and that's, I don't remember ever doing this in a book before. Like, I was frustrated enough to just sit there at a desk and, and think, "What are the themes of this book?"
David Remnick: Hmm.
Daniel Kraus: "What am I trying to say here?" Sometimes that comes out organically, and sometimes I have to stop and think about it. And it was, by my amateur hypothesis, that World War I was the start of sort of this industrialized warfare that was self-perpetuating, and that once it began, it had a reason to create its own infinite cycling.
David Remnick: What is the infinite cycle?
Daniel Kraus: The infinite cycle as I, as I saw it was once there is a sort of economic, mostly, reason for wars to continue, there are parties that will have incentive to keep war going. And we are gonna create situations where a war is just gonna beget another war, and there's going to be sort of a cycle of it that we're not really ever going to get out of. And it becomes easier and easier the further we get from, like, face-to-face combat, you know?
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Kraus: Like, World War I, I think, is really the beginning of, like, push-button killing, which leads to sort of where we are with drones now. Like, when you don't have to look someone in the eye, it becomes all the easier to just kill people.
David Remnick: And you make an angel a central character of the book. Was that right there at the beginning? Did you conceive of that right away?
Daniel Kraus: Yes, yes. That was sort of the high concept idea, let's drop an angel into the battlefield. But it came from a kind of a real place in a weird way.
David Remnick: How do you mean?
Daniel Kraus: You know, just as the size of a whale mouth told me what kind of main character for Whalefall had to exist, had to be someone small enough to fit into a whale mouth, the reality that World War I was debuting all this new kind of high-flying artillery fire led to the idea that, well, what if it flies so high that it hits a range in the sky that was previously filled with angels, you know? And now we have invaded their area, and one of them falls.
David Remnick: Does that angel come from any religious rooting?
Daniel Kraus: Not really. I mean, I was raised religious, but not in any kind of intense way. Like, we went to church on Sundays.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Kraus: Like, we were Presbyterian, I suppose. It was a Presbyterian church anyway.
David Remnick: You still go?
Daniel Kraus: No, I don't. I was never into it. I remember being in church and, like, hiding inside the hymnal, horror novels.
David Remnick: Man, you were deep in. You were deep in.
Daniel Kraus: I was deep in. And you know what? Like, I was really young. Like, I'm, I'm guessing I was maybe seven or eight when I was in church and hearing, you know, the pastor, talk about things that happened in the Bible, and thinking to myself, "This is ridiculous."
[MIDROLL]
David Remnick: You say somewhere that you're not that interested in plot. "I don't care what a book is about, I want to be surprised by the next word in the sentence. Being surprised by the next word is way more interesting to me than being surprised by a plot twist." How does that apply to this novel?
Daniel Kraus: Well, having said that, I think I'm good at plot, and I like plot. So I don't wanna say that, you know, those are things I would discard. I think I'm just more interested in the surprise of sentences, and I think that's just a result of being so obsessed with writing like I am. You know, I've written 30 books, more or less, in 15 years.
David Remnick: Did you write this one quickly?
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, I probably wrote this book in five months maybe.
David Remnick: Is that coffee powered, or is it just making sure that your ass is in the chair everyday?
Daniel Kraus: It is somewhat coffee powered.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Daniel Kraus: There's a coffee element to it, yeah.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Daniel Kraus: That, I'm not, I'm not joking. I dole out my caffeine sort of dependent on what I'm writing.
David Remnick: Okay, I wanna know everything about that. What's, what's, what's your formula?
Daniel Kraus: Well, I mean, I drink coffee, but the amount of coffee I drink, it is sort of specifically engineered to what I have to do. So if I know that I'm writing this big battle scene
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: and I really need to get to a place where I barely know what I'm writing, and that's the best writing, is when
David Remnick: Right
Daniel Kraus: the faster I'm writing, the better the writing is always for me. So if I can sort of get myself so caffeinated that I can't hardly see straight, sometimes, not always, I'm sure there's exceptions, sometimes that really works. And I've written 4,000 words and I don't remember any of them, but I can clean them up, and they've got a velocity. And for a book like Angel Down, which doesn't have really sentences, the rhythm and the speed of it is everything, and so it's all about rhythm.
David Remnick: You say it has no sentences or it has a continuous sentence. I mean, this is a big risk. You know, the reader's not used to that. What was the purpose behind that propulsive single-sentence writing?
Daniel Kraus: I mean, thematically, it goes back to the idea that we're stuck in a cycle of war and violence, so the idea was to write a book that is one sentence.
David Remnick: Which, which is a great formal or fancy explanation, but it can also frustrate the hell out of a reader.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, it could. It could. But there were fringe benefits to this format, like it's kind of a high-minded idea where
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: We're gonna do this thing that represents the theme of the book. But as luck would have it, it also creates this real pell-mell velocity that feels like being in war, where it's one thing after another, and it never ends, and even when you're sleeping, you're not really sleeping. You've got one ear open to the sound of the next shell coming, and there's a breathlessness to it. And I always think of it as when you're driving along a highway and you hear the, the highway, the cement under your tires, and it goes ba-dp, ba-dp, and it speeds up, and it slows down, but there's always this, this sort of heartbeat-like rhythm that never stops. And so every day when getting to the computer, it was a matter of just finding that rhythm again.
David Remnick: Mhmm. What's your experience of war?
Daniel Kraus: None really. I mean, no, no personal involvement in it. But it is interesting, and I never thought about this before, how we were talking about, you know, the war movies that I watched as a teenager, and how that came directly out of a time where I was watching all those horror films. And so I segued right from Nightmare on Elm Street into Apocalypse Now and Platoon, and the thing that struck me about it was the horror. It was still, they were shelved differently in the video store. They were shelved in sort of action, adventure
David Remnick: Right
Daniel Kraus: or drama or whatever, but it still felt like horror films to me.
David Remnick: I thought of you. Recently I watched a German language, I think it was a German language version of All Quiet on the Western Front
Daniel Kraus: Yeah
David Remnick: And it keeps going and going and going and going and going until it doesn't. There's that kind of sleepless, nerve-jangling, endless amount of death and horror that it brought back to mind that velocity of Angel Down. And you got readers on board doing this and didn't alienate them. That's a mean trick. That's skill
Daniel Kraus: That was the trick, is, you know, when I finished the book and went back to revise it, I've never had such a heavy revision before because what, all the speed was there, like the underlying melody was there, the rhythm was there certainly, but what I'd lost was clarity. Knowing who was in what scene and where they were, and just all the logistics were lost. And so a lot of the revision work was just clarifying kind of like the lyrics of the song without messing up the music of the song.
David Remnick: You know, people love to know about this stuff, and even though I'm in the same world that you are, I do too, are these kind of Paris Review type questions about, for want of a better word, process. You wake up in the morning on a workday, then what?
Daniel Kraus: Oh, I go right to work. I get up and I immediately go to work. I take a shower, whatever, brush my teeth
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: and sit down to work, and I work eight hours a day, and I work six days a week. And I've trained myself to not have any kind of, depend on any kind of environment or special candle or or anything that I need to work. I don't want any magic feathers involved. I wanna be able to, you know, I've had all those rough jobs where you do not get to not work if you don't feel like it.
David Remnick: Right.
Daniel Kraus: And I feel like I owe the past me the respect of operating in that fashion still. Like, it doesn't matter if I don't feel like writing today. I've gotta go to work. That's my job, that's my responsibility, and I'm gonna put in the hours whether it's good or not.
David Remnick: I work with a lot of writers, and I find that there are writers who write as an occasion, you know, a special occasion. And that, I don't relate to that at all. It, what you're describing is somebody who brings his lunch to the desk knowing that Monday and Tuesday might be crap, and Wednesday something good happens at the desk. But without having had the bad days, without having had Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday does not happen.
Daniel Kraus: Right.
David Remnick: And I don't understand, or it's harder for me to understand that it's all divine inspiration, and I only sit at the desk when it's divine inspiration.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. I want the divinity to come through sweat. You know? Like, I want to work so hard that I sort of generate my own gods. I don't know what the hell that even means, but it
David Remnick: I get the idea, yeah.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, it, it sounds right. Like, I wanna create my own miracles-
David Remnick Mm-hmm
Daniel Kraus: and do that by the sheer vole of words. And at some point, I'm gonna lose myself in the sheer volume.
David Remnick: How much do you fill up the garbage can with junk?
Daniel Kraus: Less than you would think. Like, I think over the years I've gotten better at getting to the meat of it
David Remnick: Right away
Daniel Kraus: more quickly
David Remnick: Uh-huh.
Daniel Kraus: And I think that's why I've been so productive as far as just a number of books I've written, is that I've, I clue into the idea, I figure out the approach, same thing as Angel Down, kind of figuring out what is the tone of this.
David Remnick: uh huh.
Daniel Kraus: And then I go hard. And to me, it's all a confidence game. And I don't mean a con man game, I mean a practice of convincing myself during the writing of the book that I've got this, and that I'm the only person who can write this, and to maintain that level of confidence so that every day when I walk in and sit down at that computer, I'm brash, and I'm energetic, and I'm on fire, and I'm leading the charge, and I can do no wrong. And of course, I do tons of wrong, and I'm always wrong, and the book is a disaster always after the first draft. But I wanna have that, that fire behind me to create, to burn things down, whatever I need to burn.
David Remnick: Are you hell to live with when this is going on?
Daniel Kraus: No. No. I mean, the nice thing about this factory setting is that I work really hard for eight hours, and then I can, I can more or less cut it off. Now, that's a slight exaggeration. I'm always thinking about the books and
David Remnick: Yeah
Daniel Kraus: but I think I become hell to live with when I'm not doing it. You know? Like, not being able to write after I've been writing for eight hours for so many years every day, and for most of my career, I was writing seven days a week.
David Remnick: Well, what made you decide to become a slacker and take off one day a week?
Daniel Kraus: I was convinced to by my partner to take off Sundays.
David Remnick: I see. Was that a hard sell?
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. Yeah. For months, Sundays were really difficult for me. I would just pace around like a caged lion.
David Remnick: I was lucky enough to win one of these prizes long ago, and for two days it was really pleasant.
Daniel Kraus Yeah.
David Remnick: And then I realized I had to write another book and another piece, and it changed things a little bit, but not, not all that much.
Daniel Kraus: To me, it's changed a lot.
David Remnick: Tell me.
Daniel Kraus: First of all, I immediately had less time to write. I have books on contract, on deadline, and I was scheduled so tight that to suddenly not work for two months because I won the Pulitzer and now I'm traveling around and doing interviews, threw a major wrench in
David Remnick: Uh-huh
Daniel Kraus: work I had to do, and so I say half jokingly but half realistically that I've penciled in like June 2027 to be happy about winning the Pulitzer. Like, I'll, I'll be happy next summer.
David Remnick: Will there be a movie of Angel Down?
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, I think so. I've written the script. We're settling on a director right now. So yeah, I think so.
David Remnick: You collaborated with Guillermo del Toro on The Shape of Water and Whalefall has been adapted and is out as a movie. And now you've got Angel Down as you're looking around for a director. What's that work like as opposed to writing a novel for X number of months?
Daniel Kraus: It's very, very different. I've done some comic books and graphic novels over the years, and it feels much more like that, where it's almost completely different half of the brain. It doesn't feel like novel-writing at all. And so for me, that makes it a nice palate cleanser. Like, in the same way that I'm always shifting genres, shifting format gives me, I think, the same recharge.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm
Daniel Kraus: It's really fun. It's much more of a, I think screenplays and comics, it's much more of a puzzle in a way. Like, with novels there's no certain page count you have to hit. The chapters can be however length you want. Format can be outrageous. But in screenplays there's like, you know, it can only be so long. You have to sort of be aware of
David Remnick: Mm-hmm
Daniel Kraus: the weight in a weird kinda way because people are gonna consume it all in one sitting.
David Remnick: What do you mean by the weight?
Daniel Kraus: the weight of what traditionally they would call acts, you know? Like
David Remnick: Sure
Daniel Kraus: first, second, third acts. And you don't have to really follow that stuff stringently, but you do have to be aware that people, when they sit down to watch a movie, are watching it all at once, and there's a certain expectation they build up
David Remnick: Right
Daniel Kraus: whether they want to believe it or not. Otherwise, it's experimental film, which is fine, but it's not what people are gonna spend millions of dollars to make.
David Remnick: Right. You know It's not unprecedented that some writers start repeating themselves a lot. Literary careers, creative careers have stages. They're different, but very often it's apprentice work, original work, repetitive work, and decline. I hate to be so brutal about it, but
Daniel Kraus: No. yeah makes sense
David Remnick: I'm probably describing myself as much as anybody else. Do you think about those things?
Daniel Kraus: I definitely think about it. In fact, there was a book of mine about a third of the way into my career where I was writing a book, and at some point I realized, "This feels like a Daniel Kraus book." And I was repelled by that idea.
David Remnick: Give me the specifics. What, what did that mean?
Daniel Kraus: It meant that I felt like I was writing something that I knew how to write. And I hated that idea, and it made me feel lazy and redundant, and it made me feel like this was the space where I was heading into, where I'm just gonna write X number of iterations of the same basic idea, you know?
David Remnick: Did you junk that project?
Daniel Kraus: No. It came out and people liked it. Like, it's not that, that's the thing is this is how most writers forge a career. You pick a genre, you pick a lane, and you do variations on the thing. And I love plenty of those writers. Like, some of my favorite writers kind of do that. But as a creator, it felt like death to me. Like, it felt like there's something in me that revolts against the idea of being boxed in. I remember I went through a phase where I was really into metal music, and I used to go to concerts wearing my C-SPAN hat. Just because it felt like, it felt discordant, you know? And it’s like I'm not gonna go to this crowd with all these metalheads and dress in a metal shirt like everyone else. And so that book, which is, I think most people consider it a decent book, that was the point where I was like, "I will never do this again. I'm gonna keep making left turns and changing genres, keep changing styles."
David Remnick: Does your agent complain about that?
Daniel Kraus: No. I mean, he has come to terms. think early on you know, he would gently say, "You know you, you could make your life easier by, by doing this or that” or
David Remnick: What was the writer he wanted you to be? A pure horror writer or what?
Daniel Kraus: Well, I think any agent, like, knows the realities of the publishing business.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Daniel Kraus: Like, if you have a success somewhere, you follow that success with things that are sort of like that.
David Remnick: Right. You don't think about audience
Daniel Kraus: No. No, I really don't. I just focus on, like, what will keep me interested, and I think if I'm interested in something, it'll come off in the pages, and I think that's what attracts people at the end of the day. It certainly attracts me as a reader, and a watcher, and a listener is, like, the passion of somebody else.
David Remnick: Now, this is obviously rooted in my life as an editor, but it doesn't go missing on me that a lot of writers like having written
Daniel Kraus: Oh, yeah
David Remnick: but they don't like writing. They find the activity unbelievably painful, arduous. They would rather be chewing rocks than writing. And I'm talking to you. I'm talking to a guy who sounds like he loves. He can't wait to put his pants on in the morning.
Daniel Kraus: Love it. Love it. Most of the writers I know, I would say two-thirds of the writers I know fit what you just described
David Remnick: Oh, my God
Daniel Kraus: where they seem to hate writing.
David Remnick: And is your reaction sometimes like mine, like, "Then why do you do it?"
Daniel Kraus: I think the feeling of having written is so, is such a high that it's like, it's they, they keep going back to that well. And for some people, you know, it seems to work. They put out great books. But to me, you know, I'm still writing like I wrote in middle school, which was, or in high school, to write these books, and you know who I shared them with? Nobody. I wrote them. I was like, "Ah, that was fun," and I put them in a drawer. And I built up this model where writing itself was the end goal. Like, I wrote like other people play video games or something. Like, it was just really fun, and I had no interest in sharing it with anyone. I never even considered it, and I'm still like, I sort of understand the J.D. Salinger mindset of writing a book and putting it in your safe. Like, I feel like I have to sort of publish to make a living and
David Remnick: Right
Daniel Kraus: make sense and put food on the table. But it's the writing. Like, when a book comes out, I wouldn't say it's an annoyance, but it's like, it's like, having written does not have much appeal to me.
David Remnick: That's so interesting
Daniel Kraus Like, but writing, I love writing, there is nothing in the world that I would rather do.
David Remnick: Dan Kraus, it's been a pleasure talking with you.
Daniel Kraus: It's been really fun to meet you, man.
David Remnick: Thank you. This was a pleasure
Nicole Carroll: That's it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road. Thank you to Daniel Kraus and David Remnick for joining us.
To find out about all of the libraries hosting the Pulitzer on the Road traveling exhibition, and for details of special events along the tour, go to pulitzerontheroad.pulitzer.org.
Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
The show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll. Our senior producer is Justine Daum. Our engineer is Davy Sumner, mixing by Davy Sumner and Jason Richards. Special thanks to Alejandra Dechet and Max Balton at The New Yorker, and Andy Pergam at Arizona State University for sharing your studios with us. Music licensing by APM and Epidemic Sound. At the Pulitzer Prizes, promotion and other support by Sean Murphy and Gabe Kawugale. Pamela Casey is our producer, and Marjorie Miller is our executive producer.