Giraldi is thrilled that Forest Whitaker has been cast as Russell Core, a wolf expert contacted by a woman whose son has been abducted by a pack that has ventured into town. Although it is his first book of non-fiction, attuned readers will find echoes of the sharp cadence of his breakneck novel, Hold the Dark, Giraldi’s thriller set in Alaska. Giraldi’s new book, The Hero’s Body, is a memoir about his father, bodybuilding, and the male myths of the Garden State. I grew up a half-hour from Giraldi’s hometown of Manville-yes, that is a real place-and taught at a nearby public high school in Bridgewater for a decade. New Jerseyans love to argue, but in the literary sense, our state has three main demarcations: the Newark found in the fiction of Philip Roth and the poetry of Amiri Baraka, the south Jersey of Stephen Dunn and Paul Lisicky, and the enigmatic central slice of the state-authentically captured by Joyce Carol Oates and William Giraldi. George Plimpton said it was New Jersey’s colorful collisions-“The mob, great prizefighters, the prisons, the world of Far Hills, the gamblers, the shore, the corridor between Philadelphia and New York”-that helps create great literature. He remains the prototypical New Jersey writer: often pulled elsewhere, but tethered to this complex state. He completed the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass there. I linger’d long and long, listening to them.” Whitman spent the last 20 years of his life in Camden, and often praised the city in his prose. amid the general silence otherways, and something in the acoustic quality of the air, musical, emotional effects, never thought of before. “I heard the echoing calls of the railroad men in the West Jersey depot yard, shifting and switching trains, engines, &c. What soothing, silent, wondrous hours, at night”-Walt Whitman paused before going home. After an 1879 ride on the Camden ferry-“What exhilaration, change, people, business, by day.