Evoking a gritty world that’s at once weirdly familiar and utterly a “world unto its own, a world vividly and powerfully brought to life by a literary stylist who packs a punch” (Philadelphia Inquirer), Donald Ray Pollock’s 2008 debut story collection, Knockemstiff, won the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for its startlingly lurid and black-as-coal-humored tales of the stunted but resilient denizens of a southern Ohio town. He followed up three years later with The Devil All the Time, a novel about the entangled and inevitably violent journeys of an orphan, a preacher, and a pair of serial killers. In his latest offering, Pollock tells the story of three bank-robbing brothers’ reckoning with the citizenry of a small Ohio town.

In conversation with Jason Freeman