My first real conversation with David Leo Rice took place at the Schlafly Pasta House inside the Lambert St. Louis International Airport. We were both waiting for connecting flights after a rather zombified cusp-of-COVID writer’s conference, and we talked about Boston (where David had gone to undergrad and where I was finishing grad school), about being Jewish, about the Kabbalah, and about all kinds of books. It was a lovely conversation despite the increasingly bleak news that kept leaking out over the noise of the terminal. I soon after that read the first volume of A Room in Dodge City, which was easily one of the most fun and bizarre books I have read in a long time, and after reading an advanced readers copy of A Room in Dodge City, Volume 2: The Blut Branson Era, forthcoming this January from Alternating Currents, I was excited to (virtually) sit down with David, talk about the second volume of the trilogy, and continue our conversation about literature, Jewishness, and (perhaps) an end to a certain kind of world.