Join Elizabeth Costello in conversation with Karl Soehnlein about her new novel, The Good War.

In 1948, Louise Galle, a chemist and former Rosie-the-Riveter, is pursued by a mysterious veteran who brings a question from her deceased husband, with whom he was a prisoner of war in the Philippines. In New York City in 1964, Louise’s daughter Charlotte eschews a conventional path — falling for the butch lesbian next door and discovering an undeniable call to make art. The Good War unfolds over the course of watershed summers in the lives of two very different women who share a desire to make it new, even as they reckon with painful truths. Atmospheric, lyrical, and psychologically astute, The Good War is for anyone who knows that there is always more to the story of what America was and is. 

Elizabeth Costello’s poetry and prose have appeared in venues including Fourteen Hills, Crab Orchard Review, SF Weekly, 7x7 and Collosus: Home, an anthology that supports Oakland’s fair housing organization Moms4Housing. Her poetry chapbook RELIC (Two Way Mirror, 2020) can be found at Bird and Beckett Books in San Francisco. Costello is a collaborator with the Bay Area dance company Moving Ground’s NETWORK Project and, with poet and musician Alex Behr, she emcees “Hot Pockets” — a night of readings from rock memoirs that takes place at Portland’s Turn Turn Turn. An editor for UC Berkeley with deep roots in the Bay Area, Costello has lived in Portland, OR since 2021.

K.M. (Karl) Soehnlein is the 2024 recipient of the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. He has also received a Lambda Literary Award (novel); IPPY Award (LGBTQ+ Fiction); the Henfield Prize (short fiction); and the SFFILM/Rainin Filmmaking Grant (screenwriting). He is the author of the novels Army of Lovers (2022), The World of Normal Boys (2000), You Can Say You Knew Me When (2005), and Robin and Ruby (2010). He has been published in the nonfiction anthologies, Who's Yer Daddy: Gay Men Write about their Mentors and Forerunners; Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys; and Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and in Queery, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, San Francisco Magazine, and Out, among others.