For students who had some time in between studying for midterms, Wednesday night offered the chance to hear a nationally-recognized novelist speak about interrogation and torture. For those of you who didn’t get the chance, you can still read the book.

Novelist Charles Holdefer read from his novel “The Contractor” Wednesday in the Union Pacific Room.

Originally from Knoxville, Iowa, Holdefer attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Paris. He is the author of two other novels, “Nice” and “An Apology for Big Rod.”

“My earlier books tend to be more comedy of manners,” he said. “This is a bit of a departure.”

“The Contractor” was published in 2007 and was an American Booksellers Book Sense pick. It is told from the perspective of a man whose job is to help the CIA interrogate and torture prisoners in a secret American prison.

“Like a lot of Americans, when the photos of Abu Ghraib came out,” he said, “that made me stop and take stock of some things that were going on.”

Holdefer said the idea for the book came specifically from seeing a picture of Manadel al-Jamadi, often called “The Iceman,” a prisoner who died under interrogation and was kept in a bag full of ice.

When Holdefer learned that one of al-Jamadi’s interrogators was a private contractor, he became interested in the role private contractors play in the war in Iraq. Holdefer said there are more contractors in Iraq than soldiers, some of whom do things like driving trucks and cooking meals.

“What this book particularly addresses though,” he said, “is a particular corner of this rather large story. Some contractors who have been involved in intelligence-gathering, interrogation and particularly torture.

“It’s a complicated story, a complicated mission, and I just pretend to be talking about one corner of it.”

Holdefer said the book is not intended to be anti-contractor and it is a work of fiction as opposed to be a piece of non-fiction or journalism.

“There are things that novels do, the way they can explore the human imagination, the way they can go inside people’s heads, that I think fiction writers have a lot to be thinking about and sharing with people too,” he said.