Habitats: John Wray's Clubhouse

The novelist made his Brooklyn brownstone into a genuine writers colony. Then he wrote a new book about a female American Taliban.

- Ruth Franklin

WHEN I RING the novelist John Wray’s doorbell on a blindingly hot September morning, the sound of howling wolves fills the air. “It’s permanently on the Halloween setting,” Wray explains. Slender, with the slight stoop of a tall person who spends a lot of time bent over a writing table, he is wearing an inside-out Violent Femmes T-shirt and looks more like the indie-rock musician he started out as than the 46-year-old owner of a Park Slope townhouse. He bought the place in 2011 as a “wreck and a ruin” with neither plumbing nor electricity and spent the next few years painstakingly renovating it. The downstairs bathroom, with bright geometric wallpaper and a round mirror like a portal, is an homage to the David Bowie movie The Man Who Fell to Earth. The tiles in the foyer are based on watercolors by an artist friend.

These days, however, Wray’s home is no longer entirely his own—it’s a cross between an artists’ colony, a co-working space, and a frat house. A few years ago, realizing that he had far more room than he needed, Wray started renting out bedrooms as offices for writer friends—all of whom are a fair bit better known than the average guy tinkering with his novel at a WeWork. Camp Cedar Pines, as Wray calls the place (he found a pennant bearing the name on the street and tacked it above the door), currently hosts fiction writer and translator Nathan Englander, novelist Akhil Sharma (who came to stay “for a few weeks” two years ago and has yet to move out), Booker Prize–winning author Marlon James, and science-fiction writer Alice Sola Kim, who works upstairs and lives with her fiancé, writer and BuzzFeed TV host Isaac Fitzgerald, in the ground-floor apartment.