Boris Fishman: On Writing His Darkest Novel Yet

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, New York magazine, and many other publications. He has taught at Princeton University and the University of Montana, and now teaches at The University of Austin. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

In this interview, Boris discusses the frustrations that inspired his new literary novel, The Unwanted, his hope for readers, and more.

Name: Boris Fishman
Literary agent: Henry Dunow
Book title: The Unwanted
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: March 25, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Previous titles: A Replacement Life; Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo; Savage Feast
Elevator pitch: A family in flight from civil war in an unnamed country, the lies they tell to protect each other, and how those lies slowly destroy them as a family.

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My frustration with the simplistic saint-or-villain narratives around migrants in this country.

My frustration with how little some Americans understand or care about what’s going on in other countries, even though America’s actions often have so much to do with why people from those countries seek shelter in places like the U.S.

My rejection of the idea that an author should write only about people like him.

Four years. I began writing it in the summer of 2021. Initially, the entire novel was supposed to focus on the dramatic relationships formed by a group of migrants from different parts of the world settled in the same hotel in a European processing point like Italy. That slowly became only a part—Part II—of the current novel.

Also, the concrete place markers fell away. It became an unnamed country with sects whose primary identifying characteristics I also don’t specify.

Finally, Part III turned into a kind of revenge thriller. The earlier parts are also full of incident and move quickly, but Part III has an especially intense velocity, and a different feel to the prose. Some find it a strange graft on the first two parts. Others think it’s the best part of the book.

I wrote this novel during an impossibly unstable and trying time in life. I began it in transitional housing as a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana; the housing was so poor that our child slept in the laundry room and my mother harassed me every day that our daughter was going to become poisoned by laundry chemicals.

Then we moved into another rental, where our second child was born, and Russia’s fascist war against Ukraine began—my wife and I alternated staying up nights with the baby, and I used what little sentient time remained to try to advocate for Ukraine, and write some pages of my novel.

Then we resolved to move back to the East Coast, where we became that dubious thing known as homeowners, which is equivalent to having an extra job or child. I had spent the 35 years since moving to America living in this part of the country; I had wanted terribly to leave it, and now I was back, because after my wife followed me to two places, it was time for us to focus on her career, which was much likelier to flourish in New York than Montana. (She’s a psychotherapist.) I had given up my teaching job; I had no income; we had two very small children; I was maintaining a home I had no desire to inhabit in a place I had no desire to return. The list goes on but suffice to say there were many dark days.

Despite all this, I managed to put in my hours at the writing desk almost every day. It was among the few experiences of hope during that time—the dignity and nobility of the creative process were there to be felt if only I managed to put myself in the chair. This answer is actually the opposite of the one you’re seeking because, blissfully, there was no surprise in this. Perhaps only a good mother’s love is more generous than the generosity of said creative process, the way it waits for you with its gifts no matter how you abuse it by stress, distraction, or neglect.

I don’t know if I wrote my best novel because I was in such a bind rather than despite of it, but I know that The Unwanted is my best novel. It is also certainly the darkest.

I hope they interrogate their notions of migrants—what we owe them and what they owe us. I hope they ask themselves what they would do in the same circumstances. I hope they reflect on the origins of this country as a centuries-long process of illegal immigration and existential violence against the people who lived here before us. I hope they wonder why we excuse in our own behavior what we don’t in those who have less power than us—and whether that’s strength or the opposite. I hope they think, and say, to themselves and to another person: “There but for the grace of God go I.” I hope we all wake up and ask ourselves when we became so cruel.

Marry someone rich.