Ischia is Burning is a novel I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write.

Set in the autumn of 1986 on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia, the novel concerns four scientists who have spent eighteen years raising sixteen children inside a constructed Iron Age village, withholding twenty-four years of European history from them on the principle that the children will benefit from being raised inside a controlled epistemology. In September 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin's groundwater, and the four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking.

The novel runs thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum that reproduces the original 1990 screenplay unaltered, preserving the small infelicities of a twenty-five-year-old beside the moral attention of a sixty-one-year-old working on identical material thirty-six years apart.