Colin Asher and Aaron Shulman in Conversation

“I think you go after the TV stations if you are trying to mount an insurrection these days, or if you’re a totalitarian clinging to power—literary writers are nowhere on the radar.”

Things Nelson Algren and the Panero family have in common:
Being shaped by politics
Faith in literature
Loss of faith
Taking pleasure in pissing people off

On a Sunday afternoon in April, the Believer’s Hayden Bennett sat down with Aaron Shulman and Colin Asher to discuss their new books, both of which began as Believer essays. They met at a bar called Mission Dolores in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and drank and talked while trucks coughed past on 4th Avenue and the bar filled and became cacophonous. Shulman’s book, The Age of Disenchantments, tells the story of the Paneros, a family of Spanish poets whose lives and work map neatly onto the story of twentieth century Spain. Asher’s book, Never a Lovely so Real, is a biography of Nelson Algren, a once-renowned American author who began writing during the Great Depression and became famous after World War II, when he wrote The Man with the Golden Arm. 

The Paneros and Algren share little in terms of biography, but both were affected by and influenced the politics of the eras they worked in, and so, the conversation at the bar soon focused on that commonality—teasing apart whether, and how, each subject believed writers should involve themselves with politics and what lessons their examples might hold for writers today.

THE BELIEVER: You both found a pretty obscure topic and brought it to the culture’s attention. How did you two, respectively, seize onto the Paneros and Algren? 

AARON SHULMAN: In 2012, when I first saw El Desencanto, the 1976 cult documentary about the Panero family directed by Jaime Chávarri, I felt I had discovered something singularly strange and fascinating. I had so many questions, which, I think, as a writer is when you know you’ve found a subject you should spend some real time with. 

I wanted to know about these people’s lives, their work, their politics, and what had happened to them before and after the film, never mind the story behind the film itself. And as it turned out, the whole 20th century of Spain culturally and politically was tied up in their lives. The deeper I got into the Paneros when I started interviewing people who knew them, reading their work, and tracking down archival documents, the more the family became a really expansive story that kept me engaged and challenged. 

It was a story of complicated people in a complicated country:...