On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews author Ben Pladek about his debut novel Dry Land. It is 1917, and a young forester in the north woods of Wisconsin has just discovered he has a magical gift: his touch can grow any plant in minutes. Through this thought-provoking novel, Pladek brings us on a eloquent journey that explores the possibility that such a magical gift could actually be a curse, testing and uprooting the character’s beliefs of nature, love, and self-sacrifice.

Ben Pladek is a literature scholar and writer based in Milwaukee, as well as Associate Professor of English at Marquette University.   He has published short fiction in Strange Horizons, Slate Future Tense Fiction, PodCastle, and elsewhere. 

Dry Land comes out this month (September 2023) from the University of Wisconsin Press.