About
Theodore Wheeler is a writer, bookseller, and college professor from Omaha. He is author of the novels In Our Other Lives and Kings of Broken Things, and the collection of short fiction Bad Faith. His fourth book, The War Begins in Paris, published by Little, Brown & Co., was named a national bestseller by USA Today, was longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize, and won a Nebraska Book Award.
He has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, a Nebraska Book Award, the Marianne Russo Award from Key West Literary Seminar, and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude.
For seven years he and his family ran Dundee Book Company, a neighborhood bookshop, and he currently is an assistant professor in the English Department at Creighton University.
Featured Work
The War Begins in Paris
A provocative and stylish literary noir about two female war correspondents whose fates intertwine in Europe.
Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist.
When World War II makes landfall in the City of Light, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her.
Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality.
Other Works
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In Our Other Lives
2020
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Kings of Broken Things
2017
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Bad Faith
2016
Awards and Recognition
- National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship
- Nebraska Book Award
