Ashland MFA Director Dr. Christian Kiefer Publishes Novel

Ashland University's MFA Director Dr. Christian Kiefer's new novel, Phantoms, is forthcoming this April from Liveright Publishing Company. The novel is described on the publisher's website as follows:

Torn apart by war and bigotry, two families confront long-buried secrets in this haunting American novel of World War II and Vietnam.

In the panoramic tradition of Charles Frazier's fiction, Phantoms is a fierce saga of American culpability. A Vietnam vet still reeling from war, John Frazier finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi. John comes to learn that in the onslaught of World War II, the Takahashis had been displaced as once-beloved tenants of the Wilson orchard and sent to an internment camp. One question has always plagued both families: What happened to the Takahashi son, Ray, when he returned from service and found that Placer County was no longer home--that nowhere was home for a Japanese American? As layers of family secrets unravel, the harrowing truth forces John to examine his own guilt.

In prose recalling Thomas Wolfe, Phantoms is a stunning exploration of the ghosts of American exceptionalism that haunt us today.

The novel has received positive reviews, including the following (visible among the book's editorial reviews published on Amazon's website) by two-time National Book Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward:

Phantoms sings from its surreal beginning to its stunning end. Kiefer's prose sweeps the reader back in time to the 1940s, to the internment of Japanese Americans, to WWII and on to northern California in the 1960s, as the narrator unravels the mystery of Raymond Takahashi. Throughout, Kiefer's writing is lovely, ripe with striking figurative language, as the story unspools in a succession of devastating encounters between two American families: one white, the other Japanese American. In the end, the reader is left with hard truth, bitter as unripe fruit: how we try every day to erase the crimes, large and small, of our pasts, how we pretend to forget them even as they shape our every breath. This is a beautiful, relevant read.

Dr. Kiefer has directed Ashland's MFA program since January of 2017. In addition to his writing, he is a professional musician and West Coast Editor of The Paris Review.