Bruce Omar Yates and The Muslim Cowboy

"This book is begging to be written...It has this a frontier-ness to it..."

Bruce Omar Yates is here to discuss his upcoming novel published by Dead Ink Books, THE MUSLIM COWBOY . 

In a contemporary and entertaining novel set in aftermath of the Iraq war, a man who is obsessed with old Western movies dresses in double denim and roams a lawless landscape in search of his own Western story. 

Rippling Points

1.32 - Bruce's family and how these fed into ideas about a 'muslim cowboy'
4.30 - Nameless and speechless: playing with the archetype of the cowboy
6.20 - Song writing in Nashville to writing this novel
8.40 - Iraq as the setting for the novel
12.00 - Removing binaries around what is good and not good
17.33 - A camel and child - the other characters
20.53 - The novel as a sandbox
25.30 - The act of making his characters watch westerns

Reference Points

Aladdin (1992. Dir: John Musker and Ron Clements)
David Foster Wallace
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes 
Lucky Luke - Goscinny
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969. Dir: Sergio Leone)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Shane (1953. Dir: George Stevens)
True Grit (1969. Dir: Henry Hathaway)
Zadie Smith