Nancy Kricorian's Blog

The Markaz Review Book Club, July 27, 2025

On Sunday, July 27th The Markaz Review Book Club will meet online to discuss "The Burning Heart of the World" with author Nancy Kricorian at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET. Sign up below to participate in the discussion. https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regis...


ABOUT THE BOOK:
In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s "The Burning Heart of the World" tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War. Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, "The Burning Heart of the World" is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City. Published by Red Hen Press, April 2025.

The Nightmare of Publication and the Happy Afterlife of Books

Zabelle
Dreams of Bread and Fire
All the Light There Was: A Novel


NIGHTMARE

Much has been made of the analogy between publishing a novel and giving birth to a child. Having given birth to two children and published three novels, I can say the two things have very little in common. One of the traits they do share is that the pain involved is quickly forgotten, almost erased from memory, so that one is willing to undertake the process again. When I was in labor with my first child—a labor that lasted 24 hours—at the height of the agony, I insisted that my spouse repeat this sentence, “I promise I will never let you do this again.” Of course, several years later I was the one lobbying for another child, and when I went into labor a second time, the pain of the first rose up in my bodily memory like a hammer, and I thought, “Oh no! I didn’t want to do this again.” But by that point I had no choice.

About six months before the publication of my first novel, I had lunch with a writer friend who had already published three books. He kindly offered to pen a laudatory quotation for use on my novel’s back cover, and we talked shop about publishers, first print runs, foreign rights sales, and the like. I was working as a literary scout for international publishers at the time so I knew a fair amount about the business, but I was a neophyte as an author. When he said, “The three months around publication are a complete nightmare,” I was shocked. For years I had been longing to hold in my hands a copy of a book with my name printed on the cover. Wasn’t that the whole point of writing? Wasn’t that every unpublished writer’s dream? And here he was telling me that the achievement of my heart’s desire was going to make me miserable. I didn’t believe him, and even if I had believed him, it wouldn’t have made any difference because, as with childbirth, no amount of intellectual knowledge can prepare you for the lived experience.

Yet when the novel ZABELLE was published in early 1998 I entered, as he had predicted, a dreadful realm where I couldn’t see the cover of a newspaper or magazine, including automotive trade rags, without wondering if my book were reviewed in its pages. I read all the reviews, getting a quick, temporary high from the good ones, and inadvertently memorizing the nasty bits from the bad ones. In the middle of the night the derisive comments would come echoing up in the voice of a wicked Disney Queen. The book tour had similar highs and lows—at one reading there were over a hundred people in the audience and for an hour I felt like a rock star; at the next gig only five souls showed up and I felt humiliated. I checked my Amazon.com sales rank on a daily, if not hourly, basis. I was still working in publishing then, and when I heard news about novels my editor had subsequently purchased, I was jealous if she had paid higher advances for them than she had for mine. I was, in fact, suffering from jealousy about what other “literary” (as opposed to commercial) writers that I knew had achieved: advances, print runs, foreign sales, film sales, starred reviews, twelve-city book tours, awards, honors, speaking gigs and teaching positions.

But eventually the publication ordeal was in the past, the anxieties receded, and life got back to relative normal—until the aftershocks of the paperback launch a year later. It was difficult, if not impossible, to work on another novel during the months around publication of the hardcover and later the paperback. Then I was finally writing again—working on a second book. I went through a similar process when that one was published in 2003, except that it was a less successful book (fewer reviews, fewer copies sold, no translation sales). The Armenian community had avidly embraced the first novel, ZABELLE, which was a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s life as an Armenian genocide survivor and immigrant bride. The second book, DREAMS OF BREAD AND FIRE, was a coming of age story about a half-Armenian young woman named Ani Silver who hops a freight train, has sex, experiments with drugs, and gets involved with a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who sets off a bomb outside a Turkish airlines office. Two years after the 9/11 attacks was not a great moment for a book with a bomb in it, and if Zabelle was everyone’s beloved grandmother and mother, Ani was the daughter and granddaughter nobody wanted. If I had titled the book THE BAD ARMENIAN GIRL it would have sold more copies. But my imagination resists commercial considerations.

I started my third novel not undaunted, but definitely unbowed. By the time the ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, a novel about Maral Pegorian, a young Armenian girl growing to maturity in Paris during World War II, came out, the publishing world had undergone a sea change. While the book was a success in many regards—I earned out my advance, I sold over three times as many copies as I had of the previous book, and it was well reviewed—the process was fraught for all the old reasons and a few new ones. In addition to the mainstream reviewers and Amazon customer comments, there were now dozens if not hundreds of places people could vent their feelings about a book: Goodreads, Library Thing, and professional, literary and personal blogs. No matter how many four- and five-star reviews my book accrued, I had to train myself NOT to pay attention to the snarky one-star reviews. Then, in what seemed like an unimaginable setback, the publisher decided not to do a paperback. For a few weeks I was devastated, but rather than wallowing in despair, I followed my hero Grace Paley’s dictum, “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.” My agent was able to get the publisher to revert the paperback rights, and I approached my friends at She Writes Press about the possibility of doing the paperback with them. She Writes was in the business of producing paperback originals, but the publisher told me I was the third writer who had recently approached her with this kind of reprint saga and they would indeed be able to help me.

The paperback of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS appeared in October 2014, and the sales have been good, far outstripping the low expectations of the hardcover publisher. Now I’m starting work on my next novel, the fourth in what my editor has labeled The Armenian Diaspora Quartet. I have been researching for over a year—the book will be focused on an Armenian family in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. I haven’t started writing yet, and my psychotherapist asked me, “Are you sure, after how hard the publication process was on you, that you want to do another one?” I answered, “The writing is the good part, and the rest… I’ll deal with that when the time comes. I’m such a slow writer that it won’t be for another five years in any event.”

HAPPY AFTERLIFE

The other aspect to all this is that, despite my complaints and pains, all three of my novels are still in print. And when I reference the “happy afterlife of books,” I’m using the word happy in its original, archaic meaning. The word “hap” comes from Middle English for chance, luck, or fortune. I have the great good fortune that my books are available in paperback, in e-book versions, and in audio format. I have even recently signed a contract for a French edition of my second novel. I am lucky and grateful.

Each time after the promotional push around publication, I’ve had the feeling that my novel, which has the shelf life of yogurt in the brick-and-mortar bookstores, has been laid to rest. As far as the publisher is concerned, it’s done and they have moved on to the next season’s titles, but the funny thing is that my books are out in the world—in libraries, in people’s homes, available through online retailers, and in second-hand bookstores—and they continue to circulate and to have lives of their own, lives that I know nothing about except when I see a new customer comment on Goodreads, or when someone contacts me via Twitter or Facebook to express appreciation, or when I receive a fan letter through my agent. Another way that I’m fortunate is that I have a readership that cares about my work. I’m a minor celebrity in a minority community. At a recent Armenian fundraiser, a man seated at my table, when he found out that I was the author of Zabelle, told me that his mother has kept a copy of the book on her nightstand for many years. I love the idea that Zabelle Chahasbanian, Ani Silver, and Maral Pegorian are living in the hearts of unknown readers. It gives me the necessary drive to breathe life into my new heroine. Her name is Vera Serinossian.

Nancy Kricorian
New York City

Bourj Hammoud: Fiction as Restoration Project

My working method as a novelist has become clearer to me with each new book. Like a bird building a nest, I collect scraps and fragments of stories from people who have lived through a particular historical moment. A memory is encoded into narrative, and the narrative is anchored in a specific place and time. The historical moments that fire my imagination are, for better or worse, times of collective upheaval and violence—the Armenian Genocide, World War II, and now the Lebanese Civil War. I’m also always interested in the marginal detail, the outsider’s voice, and the version of the story that calls into question the prevailing narrative. While I love writing, I love even more the research—and the part of the research that is the most completely engaging is hearing from people their individual accounts, and then placing those personal and idiosyncratic stories within a broader historical context.

When I was in Paris researching my third novel, ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, which is set in the Armenian community of Belleville during the Nazi occupation, my friend Hagop served as my fixer. He arranged meetings for me with surviving Armenian members of the French Resistance, and other compatriots who had lived through the war years in Paris. But Hagop also introduced me to his circle of friends, all of them Armenians from Beirut, most of them from Bourj Hammoud, who had immigrated to France during the Lebanese Civil War.

The novel I’m working on now, about Armenians of Bourj Hammoud who immigrate to the United States during the Lebanese Civil War, was inspired by conversations I heard between Hagop and his friends while I was in Paris. They were the children and grandchildren of Genocide survivors who had reconstructed their lives and their communities in Beirut. Armenians, who benefited from the unofficial Lebanese policy of “integration without assimilation,” thrived in Beirut for several decades. The Armenian community in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in Beirut experienced an intellectual and artistic flowering—a plethora of literary magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, theaters, plays, and folk music. Hagop and his friends were writing, directing and acting in plays; composing and singing songs; and studying painting, sculpture and architecture. And then in 1975 the Civil War erupted tearing the fabric of the Armenian community yet again. (I must say here as an aside, recent photos from the precincts of Aleppo are devastating in the way that they reproduce images from the Lebanese Civil War.)

So I see Bourj Hammoud as one of a long series of places that are not just simply locations, but are also markers of dispossession and exile. For Armenians since the Genocide, it’s a difficult task to preserve a place, or at the least to hold onto some of the public buildings, homes and other landmarks that make a neighborhood or even a city. But it turns out that what preserves those spaces the most, at least for this seemingly permanently wandering community, are the stories that people tell. So I think of my novels as kinds of preservation projects, allowing us to return to those places while acknowledging their evanescent quality. Perhaps by telling stories from their past we can gain the power and consensus to help preserve their present.

In the case of Beirut, when I started asking people about their memories of the Civil War, fully expecting that the narratives would date to 1975, I was startled by the number of people who wanted to tell me what happened among and between the Armenians of Beirut in 1958, as though a comprehension of that earlier conflict was necessary to an understanding of the later one, and the position of “positive neutrality” that the Armenians adopted in 1976. Even people who were too young to have witnessed the events of 1958 told stories that had been recounted to them by their parents—family members and friends who had been killed during that fratricidal few months, women who defiantly defended a church surrounded by militiamen and troops, and a grandfather who was framed and imprisoned for a murder that someone else had committed. Then there were the anecdotes from the early days of the Civil War in the mid-seventies. One man told of watching from the highway during the massacre at Karantina in 1976, and how the scenes he witnessed that day haunt him still.

Sometimes it seems as though my work is to walk among ghosts—the ghosts of old villages, the faded photographs of lost churches, and the long-ago stories of our dead handed down from generation to generation. In July 2012 my guide in Bourj Hammoud led me across the highway overpass to what was left of Sanjak Camp, the last Armenian refugee camp in Lebanon. Half the neighborhood had already been demolished and there were trash heaps in empty lots, but there were also small scenes of nostalgic beauty--on the balconies of the houses that remained there were potted plants and several homes had family altars hanging from their facades. I was witness not only to the lives of Sanjak Camp’s present inhabitants—people without running water, many without electricity—who were being pressured to leave so a new shopping mall could go up at that location, but I could also imagine amidst the narrow streets and crumbling staircases what the place had looked like soon after it was built in the late 30’s by Armenian refugees. Shouldn’t someone save what was left of Sanjak and restore the old wooden houses, making the place a living memorial to those resilient, hard-working survivors? My guide shrugged. Too much money, no interest, and too late. But maybe what we can do is to tell the stories, and in our stories these people and these buildings will be preserved.



Nancy Kricorian, NYC, 11/13



A version of this piece was presented as a paper at BEIRUT NOW: A PANEL ON URBAN LANDSCAPE'S CONFLICTING DESIRES--on Nov. 7, 2013 at the CUNY Grad Center and on Nov. 12 at the American Institute of Architects.

"We Have So Many Stories"

Last week I presented my ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS slideshow at the Armenian Church of the Holy Ascension in Trumbull, Connecticut. The event was hosted by the Church’s Women’s Guild. Two sisters, Marie and Jean, who are members of the church and had already read the novel, spoke to me before and after my presentation. Jean said, “It meant so much to us that you have written this book. Everything was so familiar, and I have never read before our story.”

They had lived in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, a working class suburb of Paris, during the war. Jean, the younger of the two, was born just before the war started and so her memories of the occupation were hazy, but her elder sister Marie told me the story of how her mother and other Armenian women had worked at the nearby Renault factory making nets to cover the tanks and trucks that were being manufactured at that location. Because of the German war work, the Allied bombers targeted the factory. One night, however, the Armenian women, who worked the shift that got out at 11 p.m., were at the factory when the Allied fliers mistakenly dropped bombs on their civilian neighborhood. The sisters’ building was badly damaged, but no one in the family was harmed. Their neighbor fared worse—while she was at work her husband and three children were killed.

“You should have talked with us before you wrote the book,” they said. “We have so many stories.”

Secret and Not-so-Secret Acts of Resistance

On September 25th I'll be doing an online book discussion about ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS via Togather and Spreecast. My first time trying these platforms. It's free and I promise the discussion will be lively. You can sign up here:

http://www.togather.com/event/625/nan...

Building Beirut in My Mind

When I was in college, I worked with a poet and short story writer who gave me an instruction that still echoes in my head: “Respect your process.” But my “process” has always been a changing one. When I was a young poet, I wrote a poem by hand, then typed it, made corrections on the typed copy, rewrote it long hand, then typed it again. This process was often repeated up to twenty times.

After graduate school, when I started writing fiction, the technology had changed. I was no longer working on my Olivetti Lettera 100 portable typewriter, nor on the IBM Selectric machines I had access to in my administrative assistant jobs on campus. I was now using a computer, which made the drafting process at once easier and yet harder to keep track of.

The idea of writing a novel was daunting so I thought of it as producing interconnected short stories. Going from writing a one- to two-page poem to a ten- to twelve-page short story was tough, but it didn’t seem impossible, and my first novel "Zabelle" grew out of this endeavor. Having done it once, the thought of a second novel seemed manageable. My first two books required some research, but they were based in family and personal history so the worlds I described were not so difficult for me to imagine and create.

With my third novel, I was no longer writing about family experience, and it was set in a foreign country and in a time before I was born, so the research process was long and extensive, although fully engrossing. I set out to learn everything I could about Paris during the Nazi Occupation, and as much as possible about the Armenian community in France. Slowly, as I read my way through over one hundred books and talked with dozens of people, my characters’ world became a place I went to in my head each day as I wrote. It was as vivid as the world that I myself inhabited. But after ten years living with the Pegorian family in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood, "All The Light There Was" shipped to stores and it was time to move on to my next novel, which would tell the story of Armenians in Lebanon during the Civil War.

Last summer I visited Beirut for the first time. I had read a tall stack of books, including novels, histories and guidebooks, in preparation, but my process works best with immersion and so I went. Knowing no one in Lebanon, I was armed with a list of the names and contact information of friends of friends. They were mostly Armenians, and they without exception welcomed me as though I were a long-lost cousin. I stayed in Dbayah for the first few days to be close to a friend's sister, and then moved to a hotel near Hamra for the rest of the visit. I spent five afternoons wandering around the streets of Bourj Hammoud with a new friend who had lived his whole life there and who introduced me to shopkeepers, actors, musicians, jewelers, bankers, and array of other local people. Another new friend took me on a walking tour of the East Beirut neighborhoods of Sanayeh, Zokak el Blat, and Watwat. An acquaintance drove me to Ashrafieh for an hour just so I could have sense where the Armenian churches were in that quarter, and what the houses looked like. I took photos and made copious notes.

Since that trip, I have continued researching, and I have started informally interviewing people about their experiences. As I read novels set in Beirut during the Civil War—such as Rawi Hage’s "DeNiro’s Game," Ghada Samman’s "Beirut Nightmares," Zeina Abirached’s "A Game for Swallows," and Mischa Hiller’s "Sabra Zoo"—I feel as though I am visiting a familiar landscape. Beirut is slowly becoming a place I go to in my head. I have begun sketching out my characters and choosing names for them. The plot is slowly emerging. As I’m working on my fourth novel, I recognize that my current process will require some additional months of research, more thinking, and internal building. But when I hear the voice of Vera Serinossian for the first time, I’ll know it’s time to start writing.

ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS featured on Author Buzz

My new novel ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS is featured this week on AuthorBuzz. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is giving away 5 copies. You can find out how to enter to win here: http://www.authorbuzz.com/dearreader/...

Everyone's A Critic

In the old days, publishers sent out bound galleys or proofs to a limited number of reviewers, journalists, film and translation scouts, and booksellers in the hopes of drumming up early interest in an upcoming title. Now there is Net Galley (https://www.netgalley.com/home/tour), a platform where a publisher can upload an electronic version of the galleys that provides early access to reviewers, bloggers, journalists, librarians, booksellers, educators and other “readers of influence.”

From what I can tell, people who have accessed ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS through Net Galley (https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/sho...) include members of the Amazon Vines reviewers program and a wide array of bloggers, some of whom posted ratings on Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com).
So far I have come across reviews from a young woman in Indonesia (http://bukunyasapi.blogspot.com/2013/...), on a blog called “A Sweet Spot Home”(http://asweetspothome.com/tag/all-the...) that features posts about entertaining along with book reviews, and on a blog called “BooksNFreshAir” (http://booksnfreshair.blogspot.com/20...). I have no idea how many people these advance reviews reach and how much they help the launch of a title, but my editor said, “They can’t hurt.”

What does it mean that there are now thousands people weighing in on a book through blogs, customer comments, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads and dozens of other platforms? Neil Gabler had an interesting piece in The Guardian a few years ago called “Everyone’s a critic now” http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/201...) that examines the effects of online community commentary on reviewing. He sums up his argument thus: “The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing—not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity—that the traditional critics can do about it. They have seen their monopoly usurped by what amounts to a vast technological word-of-mouth of hundreds of millions of people.”

Publication is only a few days away, and the early reviews will soon be joined by mainstream outlet reviews along with a cacophony of amateur reviews and customer comments. Bring on the vibrant, noisy, and democratic conversation.


Nancy Kricorian

P.S. You can read the first chapter of the novel via The Armenian Weekly nianweekly.com/2013/03/08/all-the-lig..., and a brief interview I did with Boston-based editor, writer and writing teacher Lynette Benton on her blog http://lynettebentonwriting.com/2013/....

Extended Family: When Fictional Characters Show Up in Your Living Room

We hear that for many writers, the characters they create "come alive" during the writing process. But in what ways is that phrase more than a simple metaphor? And how is a writer supposed to manage the expanded household as it begins to fill up with progeny spilling over from the pages of a work in progress?

My third novel, All the Light There Was, which is set in the Armenian community of Paris during the Nazi Occupation, took ten years to research and write. In part I needed a decade because I had a great deal of research to do, but it was primarily due to the fact that I was juggling a few other jobs-running a household, raising two daughters (and it turns out that dealing with kids between the ages of eight to eighteen takes more space in your head than was necessary from zero to eight) and working for a women's peace group trying to stop multiple U.S.-funded wars and occupations.


In order to recreate the atmosphere of the working class neighborhood of Belleville during the period the French refer to as Les Années Noires (The Dark Years), I read voluminously from histories, journals, collections of letters, and novels penned during and immediately after the war years. I went to Paris to tour the lycée that my narrator and protagonist Maral Pegorian had attended, and to interview octogenarian and nonagenarian Parisian Armenians who had lived through the war.

Through the research, several salient material details were impressed upon me again and again: during the Occupation ordinary people were hungry most of the time, during the four winters under Nazi rule Paris apartments were generally without heat, and Parisians were often in the dark both literally and metaphorically. Germany used France as its wartime breadbasket, making off with the lion's share of French butter, milk, wheat, vegetables, fruit and meat. Food was rationed and even with ration tickets in hand shoppers were often unable to procure their due. Rutabagas and turnips, which had been used before the war as cattle fodder, were now a staple of French cuisine. The Germans also requisitioned French coal and other fuel, leaving Paris apartments unheated in winter. Nighttime blackouts meant the streets were dark and curfews often kept people in their homes after nightfall.

Once the bulk of the research was done, I disciplined myself to write two hours a day, five days a week, aiming for two pages a day. This schedule was mostly successful, except when one of the kids stayed home sick from school, or there was an emergency street demonstration.

While I was writing, I traveled back in time and across the ocean to Occupied Paris. I could not only hear the voices of my characters, but I could also feel the cold air seeping in the cracks around the window frames, and smell the dreaded rutabagas cooking in the kitchen. I fretted with Maral over her lack of bath soap, and shared the frustration of her cobbler father about his inability to get leather. But it wasn't until the day that my husband asked me why we had seven jars of mustard in the pantry that I realized how deep this shared experience had gone.

It was true—there were seven jars of mustard in the pantry, and six jars of jam, along with more canned goods than we could eat in a winter. Without being conscious of what I was doing, I had stockpiled the foodstuffs that Maral's family lacked in Paris in 1942. I had always thought of myself as spending hours living in the Pegorians' world; what I hadn't realized was that the characters had moved into my apartment. They were haunting our pantry, showing up in conversation through the Armenian proverbs I cadged from Maral's father, and occupying my thoughts when I was supposed to be helping with the science fair poster. Once I became conscious of their presence as part of the family, I was better able to balance their demands with those of my real world children.


Ten years on, once the novel was completed, the manuscript handed over to my editor and the rest of the publishing team, the characters started to recede, and I missed them. But I'm glad too that they are soon heading out into the world and into the homes of my readers.

Now I've begun work on my next novel. It's about an Armenian family in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. I'm excited, but a little anxious, about what life will be like with them in the house.

Nancy Kricorian

New author site

Check out my new author web site:
http://nancykricorian.net/

Have posted 3 blogs, and will be adding a new one each week right up until the March 2013 launch of my third novel.