Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

We have barely sat down at Smooch Café in Fort Greene, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Swedish author and playwright, preempts my opening line: Should we do the interview in English?

The question seems inevitable coming from an author whose work has centered around language in one way or another since his debut novel One Eye Red took Swedish critics and readers by storm in 2003. A master of words who has created his very own language: Khemirish – a playful mix of Swedish, Arabic, French, English – has now been carefully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles in Montecore, his first novel to be published in the US. So specific is his language that he doesn’t think his first novel can even be translated for the American market.

Now, however, we decide on English, despite our common nationality and the fact that Jonas Hassen Khemiri isn’t so fond of his English self. As he put it at a reading in Dumbo earlier this year: “I always feel a little bit like a nerd when I speak English.”

Nerd or not, since then he has received not only a write-up in the New York Times for Montecore, but also an Obie Award, the prestigious off-Broadway prize, this May for his play Invasion!, which had its U.S. debut in February. (It has also premiered in South Korea.) Directed by Erica Schmidt of The Play Company, Invasion! had an early fall revival in New York at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. We spoke in September, during this run of the play.

Invasion! The Play Company production, Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Interview

via Folkteatern Göteborg

Katarina Matsson: Since your name is new to most Americans, let’s start from the beginning. Who is Jonas Hassen Khemiri?

Jonas Hassen Khemiri: I’m a 32-year-old granola-eating, theater-thinking Swedish writer who’s here because Invasion! re-opened at The Flea Theater – and to do some talks after the show, to sit in the audience and be very nervous, and to meet with people like you to do interviews. Then I’m going back home to Stockholm for the premiere of my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare (“Apathetics for beginners”).

It sounds like your attention is a bit divided?

It feels like my brain is in Sweden and my body is here. Hopefully I’ll make it through the day brainless! But I like to be reminded that there’s always this phase of nervousness before an opening. I remember when I had that with Invasion! – even though it was quite a long time ago.

Invasion!, your first play, premiered in Sweden in 2006. It deals with identity and the power of words. At the center is this elusive, almost magical name – Abulkasem – that takes on different meanings throughout the play. Is Abulkasem a playwright, a contradictory fundamentalist, a dorky guy in a bar, a hiding refugee – or all of the above? How do you think the piece has translated to English and specifically to an American context?

It’s difficult for me to say, because I’m not American enough to be the judge of that. According to the reactions of some of my American friends it seems like it has translated quite well, or very well, into an American context. We had some doubt whether or not to move [the play’s setting] from Sweden to the States. Now it’s set in the States. We felt that we had to do that in order to make the play immediate. This is a play that moves very fast. We did readings trying to keep it in Sweden, and it’s interesting because people had a much easier time to just laugh off the questions of fear and inequality that the play deals with, and not realize that it’s actually a play about their country also.

But when you won the Obie Award in May, the award committee said your play had “help[ed] us see ourselves, as Americans, more clearly.”

That sounds very nice. I’m happy, because it is a play mainly about fear and about how identities, individual and collective, are being constructed through vague senses of threat. [It’s also] about language and how language is used to manipulate people. That is a subject that has kept coming back in my writing in different forms.

Where and when did your interest in language start?

I think it comes from my background. Growing up in a multilingual family, and being around people who’ve been discriminated against because of their lack of language, you realize the power that a language gives you. I’ve always been in a luxurious position. My Swedish is perfect; I’ve always been able to choose between different levels of Swedish. I think that’s why these themes interest me.

What I’m doing now is quite different from what’s going on in Invasion! – or from anything I’ve done before. It’s difficult to talk about, because I don’t really know what it is. But in my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare, these themes of language and manipulation also play a big part. It begins with a national trauma in Sweden. I guess it’s even more related to the construction of a national identity. It’s actually a comedy about these apathetic refugee kids, a dark comedy. It deals a lot less with the kids than with how a national identity is constructed through the use of external elements.

One similarity between Invasion!, the new play, and a lot of things I’ve written is that they’re all trying to investigate the speed of words; how words can be transmitted very fast and how words can change meaning.

There’s a recent example that I find very interesting. Qaddafi in Libya used to call his opponents “rats,” and Assad in Syria called them “germs.” When the rebels gained power there was a tweet from Syria saying: “We the germs of Syria, salute the rats of Libya.” That tweet got a huge spread in a matter of minutes. But I also thought it was interesting that “rats” and “germs” were the terms being used to de-humanize, because they’re also something that’s extremely difficult to stop. They can spread anywhere and they will definitely outlive us. That sense, that we live in a contemporary time where words are being spread and manipulated so quickly, is something that I find a lot of inspiration in.

Yes, linguistic change is a very big part of our society. Speaking of national trauma, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 recently passed. The consequences of the attacks are apparent in Invasion!

Yes, in some ways. But I think that reading is more defined in the American version than in the French or German ones. I was never thinking explicitly of 9/11 when I wrote it. But that’s also what’s cool about writing theater, that my words can be amputated from me and put in a new setting. I’m not even in control of the actual translation, these are Rachel’s words, the translator’s, my words have been transmitted through her. And all of a sudden they start meaning something that I can’t pick up on. I’m very happy that people seem to like them, but I’m not sure I understand the reasons why people like them.

Sometimes the audience laughs at very peculiar places and I don’t understand what that means, especially politically. It wasn’t until I was here the first time that I realized it was literally performed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. And that added something to the play. The loss of that power I, as a playwright, have is actually something I really like. The feeling that “wow, I’m not in control of my words anymore, they can just mean anything,” that’s what the play is about. How a magical name is just being amputated and moved, almost like a relay baton.

These themes of language and names are also very present in Montecore, your second novel, published by Knopf in the US this spring. You constructed the story like an e-mail correspondence between a son and a man claiming to be his missing father’s best friend. Together they try to write the father’s life story, which becomes as much a clash between realities as between languages. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking.

That work is a lot more personal. It’s about the trials of writing the story of a missing father. And that story is quite, well, reminiscent of my life, to say the least. It’s a book that plays around a lot with the biographical facts of my life and then tries to show the fictionality – and the impossibility – of summarizing a life in a book.

There are definitely links between Montecore and Invasion! because both projects end in a situation where the real, authentic person – be it Abulkasem in Invasion! or Kadir in Montecore – is very hard to capture. There’s something very fleeting and impossible in the ambition to capture a life. Another similarity between the two is that the emphasis [placed] on the way that people fantasize about the missing person actually tells the story. The fantasies that they use in order to conjure an image of this missing person tell the story of who they are. So we’re never in a position where we get to know their real selves, but through their fantasies we get the contours of who they are or who they would like to be.

A lot of your work also centers on racism and a sense of in-between-ness. Growing up in Stockholm, with a Tunisian dad and a Swedish mom, did you feel any prejudice?

It’s one of those things that is difficult to talk about, because it easily becomes very victimizing. But I think that Sweden, despite a lot of Swedes’ feelings, is a country like all other countries. We have problems with discrimination and racism and homophobia and whatever. Growing up, it was much easier for me to try to put myself in an eternal underdog position. But things didn’t get interesting until I realized the [number] of situations where I was in a power position, where I was in fact in line with the power structure. Be it reading feminist thinkers, or my perfect Swedish, or growing up in Hornstull in Södermalm in Stockholm, an area that is typically middle class. The realization that I, in many settings, am enjoying privileges that I hadn’t seen before. I think my writing changed a lot when I realized that it wasn’t the underdog position that made me a writer; it was the interest in what these structures make of people.

Then came questions on how to deal with that power, what to do with it. The feeling of being powerless is something a lot of my work centers on. How can we use language to manipulate ourselves out of a world where we feel powerless? I think that’s one of the red threads through all my work. The way a lot of my characters use language to block out the real world is very similar to what I’ve been doing my whole life. Words have been my comfort zone. But there’s also a kind of sadness to that. It has always been easier for me to write about life and politics for example, than to actually take part in a more practical way.

Yes, you’re very good at standing on the outside, looking in. But writing about life is also a way of taking part.

Yes, I’m hoping to show the complexities of life. I like a lot of writing that’s completely different from mine too, but this is my way of attacking things. I’ve never been very Brechtian, you know, it’s not my style to try to inspire class struggle or give an easy answer.

How did you find your language, your voice?

I’m not sure I have. I keep wanting to find new voices. I think that at one point it would be lovely to feel like I found a voice that felt like mine. But that’s based on the idea that I would have this authentic voice inside me, and I don’t believe that’s true. I think I consist of the sum of the multiple voices I’ve invented so far, and hopefully I will be able to invent more voices as I go along.

When you started writing Montecore, you heard the voice of Kadir, the missing father’s friend who employs a very special language, a mix of French and Arabic directly translated into Swedish (with a lot of laughs as a consequence!). Is that often how your writing project starts, with you hearing a voice?

Yeah, it’s quite audio-related. It feels like I hear voices. Which also sounds like I’m crazy. I remember when I was a kid and I heard writers say, “you have to listen to the voices.” I thought they were crazy and bullshitting me. But everything that I’ve written, that I’m remotely happy with, is something where the voices have taken over and made it work. With the new play, too, the voices took over. For me, the most enjoyable phase of writing has always been to just lean back and listen to what the voices are telling me.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that you’re a very good playwright and that you would find playwriting easier than writing a novel.

Definitely. I didn’t think about it until recently, but a lot of writers that I find inspiring are often writers who change back-and-forth between writing prose and plays. Cortázar for example and P.O. Enquist, they are both very voice-driven. One can argue that all writers are voice-driven, but I think that the writers that I really like are more concerned with trying to find rhythm or an internal order to a certain voice, rather than to transmit a certain story.

Someone asked me if a good memory is important to becoming a good writer. I think a lot of writers that I like tend to be more focused on having a good rhythm than on having a good memory. I’ve never been very impressed by writers who try to impress me with their good memory. You know what I mean?

You’ve told me before that you’re sort of face-blind. Do you think that has made you more audio-centered?

What I’ve heard is that a lot of people who have a really bad sense of faces are really good readers. I don’t know if I’m just saying this to comfort myself and if my source for this is Fox News or something … Maybe it’s just a feeling that if you’re bad with faces you need to read a lot of words for things to make sense. Or maybe it’s the fact that you read so many words that you become obnoxious and uninterested in people’s faces, haha. I don’t know what it means.

But I’ve always been very audio-focused. I dare you to one day meet me without these (he lifts the headphones that hang casually over his shoulders). You will never have seen me without my headphones since I was maybe 12. I literally don’t think I’ve stepped out of my apartment without them; I always, always have them.

Why?

Because I constantly feel the need to add something to boring, everyday life. It’s not enough to just walk down DeKalb Avenue and enjoy the sunshine. I need to have that perfect “enjoy the sunshine”-song to make it, you know, extra. It’s very internal. It’s my feeling of being in the very right position, of being where I’m supposed to be.

But it’s also a way of putting a filter, a distance, between yourself and the world.

Exactly. In a way it’s making the outside world count less. You can say that you add something to life by adding a soundtrack, but at the same time you’re also blocking a lot of things out. Maybe that’s what I’m kind of doing in writing. You have to block out certain things in order to be able to continue with this strange job.

I understand that your writing process is also very intense and solitary?

In periods, yes, but they’re also the phases I enjoy most in life. Every time I enter a phase where I know that “Wow, I’m going to be just writing the next couple of months,” that’s one of my happiest moments. I’m very happy now too, but I think those moments are the reason why I keep doing it. Like at the beginning of the summer when I realized that I had four months of just entering into my brain and trying different weird stuff out.

You also distance yourself geographically. You write a lot about Stockholm and Sweden, but you travel to all these big cities – Paris, Berlin, New York – to do it. How come?

I see myself as a very provincial writer. I’m not the kind of writer who has social, anthropological ambitions to go somewhere else. My memories and my background are extremely important for my writing. I think I was reminded of that when I came home from Berlin after spending two years there. I realized the amount of inspiration that I always get from memories. I used to have this strange idea that I could go anywhere and just make stuff up, but I don’t think I’m that kind of writer.

Further Links & Resources

credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

• Visit Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s website – Khemiri.se – for more information on his plays, fiction, lectures, links to what inspired the work, and more.
• Interested in exploring Khemiri’s writing further, but your Swedish is a bit rusty? Consider picking up a copy of the English translation of Montecore from your local indie bookseller.
• Watch a short video about the original English debut of Invasion! at The Play Company in New York, here.
• Read the New York Times profile of Jonas Hassen Khemiri from September, which describes the Obie-winning play in these terms:

If Caryl Churchill, Franz Kafka and Ali G were to goof around one night and play their music too loud until the Department of Homeland Security came knocking on their door, they might emerge (eventually) the next morning holding something like the script to Invasion!

Danticat, Credit Jill Krementz

Edwidge Danticat is a writer well known for her stirring and insightful stories about Haitian life. Her novels, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; and The Dew Breaker, are praised as much for their cultural specificity as for their poetic universality. Critics call her Haiti’s literary voice, and Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists in 1996. She received a 2009 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, so one might even say that some have even called Danticat a genius. But no one would have pegged her for a noir writer until now.

Though not commonly associated with genre fiction, Danticat was a natural choice to edit Haiti Noir, the most recent volume in Akashic Books’ groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. The author speaks widely and often about Haiti, not only of the issues facing her countrymen abroad and at home, but also of her fellow Haitian writers. She includes many of these emerging and established authors in Haiti Noir. Moreover, it’s hard not to think of Danticat as a noir writer after reading her story “Claire of the Sea Light,” which is included in the anthology. Classic elements of noir—mystery, misfortune, even a graveyard—emerge masterfully from her powerful prose. “Claire of the Sea Light” is a remarkable story in a collection with many other extraordinarily nuanced tales.

Danticat was nearly done with editing the collection when, on January 12, 2010, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake, an unimaginably destructive natural disaster that was followed by widespread suffering, flooding, and a cholera epidemic. At first, the editor worried that the stories would no longer seem relevant, but after adding three pieces about the earthquake, she found that Haiti Noir actually offered a unique portrait of the country before and after the disaster, snapshots of moments and places not often seen on the nightly news. What is more, the collection truly entertains; it is dark, surprising, and even funny. In the book’s introduction, Danticat confesses:

I can honestly say that, in spite of the difficult circumstances in Haiti right now, I have never felt a greater sense of joy working on any collective project than I have on this book . . . Each story is of course its own single treasure, but together they create a nuanced and complex view of Haiti and its neighborhoods and people.

The editor’s joy will certainly be shared by her collection’s readers.

In addition to being an acclaimed novelist and the editor of Haiti Noir, Edwidge Danticat is a prolific writer of short stories, published in more than twenty-five magazines and journals and collected in the National Book Award-nominated Krik? Krak!. She received the American Book Award for her novel The Farming of Bones, and her many other awards include a grant from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. Her moving memoir Brother, I’m Dying received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written several books for children, including Eight Days: A Story of Haiti, which tells the story of a seven year-old boy trapped in rubble after the 2010 earthquake. Her recent essay collection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, is an extraordinary manifesto that will be appreciated by both immigrant and non-immigrant artists. Beyond her prolific work as a writer, Danticat has taught creative writing at both New York University and the University of Miami. She lives in Florida with her husband and children.

The following interview was conducted by email during May 2011.

Interview

Carolyn Gan: How did you come to edit Haiti Noir?

Edwidge Danticat: Johnny Temple from Akashic Books called me one day and asked me if I would edit Haiti Noir for the publisher’s noir series. I was already a huge fan of the series, having read many of the books, so I jumped at the chance and said yes.

Haiti Noir features new stories by well-known, emerging, and even a couple of unexpected writers, including Mark Kurlansky. How were the stories collected? Were there authors or particular perspectives you sought out, or did the submissions shape the collection?

I’d like to think of the book as a kind of party. Most of the writers are Haitian and live in Haiti, but others are Haitian writers who live outside of Haiti, in Canada, Berlin, and the United States. We decided to also include two Haitiphile writers, Madison Smart Bell and Mark Kurlansky, who know Haiti well and have written about it extensively. The writers in the book range [in age] from early twenties to early seventies. There is a broad scope of experience represented. I did seek out some writers whose work I already know, and some other writers came to me via friends, particularly the younger writers. Marvin Victor, for example, was recommended by an older writer who had been his teacher. Now he has a hugely successful novel, Corps Mélés, that was published by a prestigious house in France. We got him just in time before he was huge, and he is going to be really huge among the next wave of Haitian writers.

You say in the collection’s introduction that only a few of the included authors identify themselves as writers of noir. Your own work is not typically classified as such. Are you a reader of noir?

I am a reader of noir…not an obsessed one, but if I see a name I recognize, I go at it. The beauty of this series is that it brings new writers to noir, so it’s always fun to see what they come up with. I think people have said that my work is dark, which would be the literal definition of noir, but they might not call it noir. It was interesting to see, though, how much the writers wanted to jump in and try this. It was like having an assignment, coloring outside of the lines, for them.

Themes and images repeat throughout the collection. Unreliable electric generators, for example, buzz in the background and even appear as a plot point in Kelly Mars’s story. Magic winds its way through many stories as well, especially Marie Lily Cerat’s fantastic “Maloulou.” Are there aspects of Haitian culture that are inherently noir? Or that can be understood more clearly through the lens of the genre?

I guess there are aspects of Haitian culture that you might call noir or that lend themselves easily to the genre. The police investigations that are always ongoing and may never really be solved. The mystical elements of Haitian life, class difficulties, and conflicts. The writers, I think, made great use of those elements and more. In one of our earlier reviews, someone listed all the similar tropes, including Comme Il Faut cigarettes. It was interesting to see where many of the stories overlapped.

In Josaphat-Robert Large’s hair-raising story “Rosanna,” a particularly philosophical neighbor says that “[i]t’s almost impossible to discover what’s behind a mystery in [Haiti].” Do you agree?

Unfortunately that’s often true, especially in terms of solving crimes.

In April 2000, one of Haiti’s most famous radio journalists, Jean Dominique, was assassinated outside his radio station. At the time he was a friend of the president’s, yet his murder still remains unsolved. I guess one other way to say it is that it is very easy to bury a mystery under even more mystery in Haiti.

You include your mesmerizing story “Claire of the Sea Light” in the book. Was it written especially for the collection?

Thank you. It’s part of a longer book I am writing about how a child’s disappearance affects an entire small town in earth-shattering ways—earth-shattering in the sense that as the people of the town remember their last interaction with the child, they realize that they are all connected in more ways than they knew. It’s one of those tricky books, and it has a different ending than the story, but that story is the first chapter of that book.

“Claire of the Sea Light” is structured in reverse chronological order, which adds so much suspense. What inspired that choice?

I love playing with time in fiction. That’s somewhat noir inspired. Noir film inspired. I wanted to go back and forth in time but focus on one day, this girl’s birthday. Because her birthday started out so tragic—her mother dies in childbirth—she is never allowed to be happy. The entire plot of the book also happens in one day, in one night, really.

Do you always write fiction in English? How have your first two languages, Creole and French, affected your writing?

I moved to the United States when I was twelve. I speak French and Creole and write both, but I have always written creatively in English. It’s not even a commercial choice as people sometimes think. It’s just that when I got here and started writing, I started writing in English. If my family had moved to Spain around the same time, I would probably be writing in Spanish as one Haitian writer, Micheline Dusseck, does. Maybe English also offers a veil, some kind of distance that makes me bolder, but that’s just the way it’s always been. Always behind my English, though, are Creole and French certainly. I sometimes think I am doing simultaneous interpretation while writing: the characters are speaking Creole, and I am interpreting for them.

I’ve always admired that you never hinder the flow of your narrative with awkward translations. Somehow your translations enhance the rhythm. When do you know that a line in Creole or French is necessary?

When I use Creole and French it is easy, I think, to understand contextually. If you read carefully you should get what it means. However, I try not to do literal translations because I know a lot of people are reading the book who speak both languages, so I try to add a bit of extra nuance for them.

There is a heartbreaking moment in “Claire of the Sea Light” when the little girl sees a child’s tombstone near her mother’s and ponders “who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.” It reminded me of Anne in your novel The Dew Breaker, who holds her breath when passing cemeteries because she imagines her drowned brother searching for his grave. Can you talk a bit about that intimate relationship between the living and the dead in your work?

It’s a morbid fascination for me, this fine line between the living and the dead. When I was little, my uncle was a minister and presided over a lot of funerals, so I often heard that death is not the end, and that there is something else, and that the dead are always with us. I believed this deeply and grew less afraid of the dead and less afraid of death. I was just telling a friend the other day—who is obsessed with past lives’ experiences—that my childhood made me totally unafraid of death because of all the post-death possibilities it provided. I only became afraid of death again, I think, when I had children. My only fear is of leaving them. Writing a story like “Claire of the Sea Light” is almost like getting those fears out of yourself, placing in someone else’s life a moment that personally terrifies you and then taking it out of your nightmares and putting it on the page.

You mention the idea of “leaving them”—that is, death as separation from your children. Of the father in “Claire of the Sea Light,” you write: “It took watching another child die in her mother’s arms to make him realize how very much he’d miss Claire when he finally gave her away for good.” Is separation just another kind of death?

Separation when you’re a little kid, I think, can feel like death, which is also something you are struggling to understand. In Haiti when people say someone is lòt bò dlo, they can mean that the person has died or that he or she has migrated, has gone to live in another country. After my first book was published, I met a woman who was five when her mother left Haiti for New York. She was asleep when her mother left, and no one had prepared her, so when she woke up and was told her that her mother was lòt bò dlo, she thought her mother had died. She was twelve when her mother sent for her. When she got to New York, her mother had changed, and she had changed, and she told me at nineteen years old that she never quite believed that her mother was really her mother. In her mind, her mother is dead, and she was tricked into an adoption of some kind. This is an extreme case, but it feeds my nightmares about parental separations when they are badly handled. Some families can be severed by that kind of separation forever, even when they are physically reunited.

In your recent essay collection Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work, you wrote that “All artists, writers among them, have several stories—one might call them creation myths—that haunt and obsess them. [The historic public execution of revolutionaries Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin] is one of mine.” What are some of your other creation myths?

There are some new ones now, which I talk about in Brother, I’m Dying. My father’s death. That was and still is so painful. My uncle’s death, the death of my minister uncle who raised me. The birth of my daughters. Slowly I think your foundation myths change as your foundations shift under your feet.

You also write in Create Dangerously that “I used to fear [my parents and uncle] reading my books, worried about disappointing them.” When did you stop worrying about disappointing them? Did that worry extend to your larger Haitian audience?

Thankfully I worry after the writing is done, and the book is about to be published. While I am writing I give myself free rein. Yes, I used to worry about a larger Haitian or Haitian-American audience that they would recognize nothing of themselves in my work. But then I know, too, that we all have the stories we have, and those are the stories we tell by various means. It’s foolish to try to accommodate your story to any audience’s taste. The most important thing I can do as a writer is tell the truest story I know with the most love and passion and respect I possess. The rest will just have to take care of itself.

You’ve spoken and written widely about the situation in Haiti since the January 12th, 2010, earthquake, including conversations with NPR and articles for the New Yorker. Do your Haitian readers approach you to share their own stories?

They often do, but not forcefully. When I am in Haiti, I just observe. I don’t badger people for their stories. They go though enough of that. I just observe and live the moment I am living because, especially with family members, there are so few of them.

Could you talk a bit about your last visit to Haiti?

It was a private visit. Most of my visits are. There was still a lot of devastation. A lot of people without homes as another hurricane season is approaching. The visit before that I went with a group of women activists from an organization called We Advance that was co-founded by the actress Maria Bello. We visited one of the first women’s clinics in Cité Soleil, where they do rape recovery and counseling. Rape has become a very big problem in post-earthquake Haiti. We also met and broke bread with and sang and cried with some extraordinary women who had run for parliament at great risk to their lives. These women were just exceptional, some of the most amazing women I have ever met in my entire life.

Part of the profits from Haiti Noir will be donated to the Lambi Fund, a non-profit organization. Could you talk a bit about their work and why you selected Lambi?

The Lambi Fund works in the rural sector in Haiti, and they work with women, which was very appealing given as we often say that Haitian women are the poto mitan, the middle pillars of our society.

Haiti Noir was almost complete before the earthquake struck in January 2010. How did you select the three stories in the collection that reference the earthquake?

I thought we had to represent the earthquake somehow in the book so I asked a few folks if they had written some stories since the earthquake, and we got the three wonderful stories in the book. I think it’s really hard to write fiction so soon after a tragedy, but our writers did an amazing job, and I am really glad we made that choice.

Was the completion of the project part of your own healing process after the tragedy?

Those stories, as disturbing as they are, were indeed healing. I think a year, ten years from now, this is a book that you will be able to read and appreciate in terms of how it’s represented Haitian fiction in general and the post-earthquake moment in which the book was published.

Thank you so much for your work and for your time.

Further Links & Resources:

Every few weeks, we launch a new Fiction Writers Review “Flipbook.” During the past two and a half years, we’ve featured more than 50 interviews with authors established and emerging. They’ve had such valuable insights into the writing life—from thoughts on process and craft to ideas about community and influence—that we wanted to find a way to further these conversations within our community. Each Flipbook highlights some of the very best of the conversations on our site, centered around a particular topic.

Our latest Flipbook is now up on the FWR Facebook page, with an exclusive slide right here on the blog.

This Flipbook’s theme is “Culture”, featuring reflections from Marie Mockett, Ron Carlson, Joshua Furst, Peter Selgin, and Yiyun Li. Flip through, share with your friends and fellow writers, and most of all, enjoy!

We’re also hoping that you’ll add your voice. Let us know how you approach research for a new project, or pass on favorite quotes from writers on the subject.

Here’s an exclusive slide from Allan Gurganus. Head over to our Facebook page for the rest of this album.

Click to enlarge!

Have you noticed that more and more often, writer bios emphasize everything about the author’s life but writing? Authors list their credentials from the odd jobs they’ve worked: door-to-door knife salesman, pig farmer, department store perfume-sprayer—okay, I made those up, but pick up virtually any book by an up-and-coming author and you’ll see that they’re not far afield.

Writer Edan Lepucki discusses this phenomenon in an insightful essay on The Millions:

Or is my annoyance at the non-standard bio about something else? With the authors who have held a dozen, motley jobs, I worry that book writing is just a hobby for them, a one-off thing, another occupation in a long line of them. God damn the dilettantes multi-talented! Or is it because such a bio suggests that writing, and the devotion to that pursuit, isn’t worthy enough for its own three-line biography? Maybe it’s that tired idea that writers are lame, sheltered wimps who haven’t really lived. “Please!” these bios call out. “I’m more than just a writer! I am worthy of your admiration and respect!”

I’m sure this is all stemming from my own insecurities. Part of me is embarrassed by the fact that I’ve pursued writing since I was a kid, that I did not have a long and colorful life before I put pen to paper. I’m probably just envious. I can’t blame the writers whose bios spotlight a different kind of life, a different part of life. As I said, it’s all branding, in the end. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

For some writers, I think Lepucki is exactly right: such bios might be an attempt to pre-empt the perennial criticism that the author hasn’t lived a real life or worked a real job.

But perhaps there’s something more. I wonder if some authors use their author bios as a way to assert their bona fides, especially when the author’s biography and the character’s life overlap. Are you writing a novel about a time-traveling ninja? Be sure to mention your history degree and your sixteen years of studying karate. Working on a story about a traveling circus? Tell the audience that you can juggle seven balls at once, or that you used to perform as a clown at children’s birthday parties.

There’s nothing wrong per se with this kind of author bio—as Lepucki points out, it’s just another form of author branding. And there’s nothing wrong with drawing on your life experience, either; after all, don’t all fiction writers do that? However, bios-as-credentials suggest that a writer is somehow more qualified to write the story than another writer. It implies that only a writer who knows about gang life (for example) can truly write about gangs, or that only a writer who climbs mountains could write about a Mt. Everest expedition. Or—taking this a step further—only an Indian writer can (or should) write about an Indian character, or only a woman can (or should) write women characters. But shouldn’t fiction writers be able to imagine their way into experiences they’ve never had?

When you read an author bio like those Lepucki highlights, does it change your perception of the book—especially for fiction?

Richard Ford, © Robert Yager

Hailed by Michiko Kakutani as “one of his generation’s most eloquent voices,” Richard Ford is the best-selling author of six novels and three short story collections, including Rock Springs and The Sportswriter, both widely considered modern classics. His novel, Independence Day, was the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, his stories have been widely anthologized. His most recent novel, The Lay of the Land, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006, and is the final book in the Frank Bascombe triology.

The interview that follows was conducted by e-mail in early 2011.

INTERVIEW

Travis Holland: With The Sportswriter, you introduced readers to Frank Bascombe, a character you’ve continued to follow in two more critically acclaimed novels—Independence Day, and most recently, in 2006, The Lay of the Land. What was the genesis of Frank Bascombe? Can you speak perhaps to what inspired you to write about a writer who’s essentially walked away from writing—at least, writing fiction?

Richard Ford: Oh, the first genesis of Frank is probably like the genesis of most fictional characters—complicated. But then whatever “he” was in the first novel has to be re-genesis’d in the next. And so on. It’s not as if “he’s” waiting around intact, like Charley McCarthy, to take his next turn on stage. The “Frank” in one book differs from the “Frank” in the next – even though I might’ve felt he was, and wanted him to be, the same when I started to write about him again. But after all, his creator—me—is older each time I take him up again; my interests are different from the prior time I wrote about Frank (I’m giving up putting him in quotes now….you get the point); my purchase on writing sentences is different (and Frank is nothing if not just a bunch of sentences strung together). So first he had one genesis, then he had two more (although the subsequent two were certainly somewhat based on the prior). Have I made him confusing and pretentious enough now?

You probably just innocently mean, however, what was his genesis the first time I came to imagining him. Well, first I had a bunch of things I wanted to tell—that is, raw materials I wanted to put into a book I would try to write. I began casting around for some way a telling voice would sound, a voice that would let me get in all the diverse stuff I wanted to have in my prospective book—serious stuff about a child’s death, comic stuff about sportswriting, brainy stuff I’d supply along the way about both of these previous matters. And plenty more: writing about New Jersey, for instance, and about marriage. I’d read some novels that offered clues to how this complex and capacious facility might be achieved. I’d read Something Happened, by Joe Heller; I’d read “A Fan’s Notes,” by Frederick Exley; and I’d read The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. In their own ways—in first person, mostly, with present tense verbs—these books did something I wanted to do. So I started writing sentences just in a provisional way—in notes—that used their basic strategies, and I played the strategies over the material I wanted to put in the prospective book. One thing led to another. It began to seem attractive that a character-narrator would be a sportswriter, and that in trying to tell (for instance) what a sportswriter did and why a person might like doing that as a job, the telling began to sound the way it did. I tried that sound out over the whole set of concerns I had stored up for the book-to-be and it seemed to have that necessary facility, suppleness, comic and serious capacities. Frank was just the accretion or the accumulation of a particular way of telling and what that telling sounded like.

What’s it been like to write about Frank over the course of three novels? As readers, we’ve had the unique experience of accompanying him from his late thirties into his mid-fifties, with all that entails. And it entails so much, as any life does. What has that experience of deeply immersing yourself in the imagined life of a character been like for you as a writer?

I’ve liked that experience of immersion; I’ve felt friendly to the enterprise of making Frank up; I’ve (as little as I ever “believe” my characters are remotely human) liked and enjoyed his putative company—although his company is just me feeling cozy, amused, and challenged with writing him. I guess I think it’s what every writer wants and wants to do—fortuitously to come upon a big subject with agreeable formal terms that can consume an immense part of one’s life with a good outcome for the reader. When John Updike died, Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker that John was a writer who “got it all in,” who rendered himself “fully expressed.” Writing this piece of artifice called Frank Bascombe has allowed me to do the same. It’s quite lucky, and quite satisfying.

Reading your novels—particularly the Frank Bascombe novels—one comes away with a remarkably vivid and complex portrait, not only of your characters but of middle class America. In terms of narrative time, the Bascombe novels cover only a relatively short span of days, and yet each book manages to pin down a particular moment in American culture. Such is the case in The Lay of the Land, which really nails down what it felt like to live in the United States in 2000—a liminal moment indeed, between the rather heady exuberance of the 1990s and what would turn out to be a decade of deep pessimism. Was it your intent to do this? Do you see this pining down of place and time as being in any way the responsibility (among the many responsibilities, perhaps) of a novelist?

It was my intent to do this. It was part and parcel of each novel’s big-ness: that each one take on some salient bits of our time and culture and politics, and render them vivid and vividly considered, and perhaps try to say something fresh. I don’t, however, think that doing what I did is anybody else’s novelistic responsibility. In writing novels a writer is utterly free to do, or not do, whatever she or he pleases.

What is the primary responsibility of a writer? Is it to oneself or the reader?

Oh, I don’t like questions like this. Or maybe I just don’t like the answers they usually elicit. When I was a young man my responsibility seemed to be to see if I could write a novel at all. I hadn’t any readers. Then when I got some readers (quite a while later), I began to think about what I could do to interest those readers and maybe bring in some more. Now, at age 66, I think a lot about readers. I mean, I’m a reader. I know what it takes to interest and divert me. I have a very exalted working definition of what literature is. It’s Leavis’s dictum: that literature is the supreme means by which we renew our sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. That’s literature from the reader’s point of view—as if the reader were the final destination and ultimate decider about what literature is. So I’m raising that readerly question with myself most of the time: am I satisfying Leavis’ injunction for a reader? Am I trying to do that? Am I failing to do that? And I know this: that if I didn’t have some readers now—if someone told me I didn’t have any—I’d goddamn hang it up. Umberto Eco says writing is an act of love. I don’t know if I’d quite go that far. But it’s sure an act that bespeaks respect for the reader who’s destined to read what I write.

La pause, via Flickr - Arslan

So if literature is the means by which the reader renews his or her sensous and emotional life and learns a new awareness, and if, as so often seems the case these days, people are reading less, or at least reading less literature that seeks to live up to Leavis’s dictum (I’m thinking here about the fiction that tends to populate most best-seller lists, much of which seems to be attentive to the dictum of the empty calorie: fast and forgettable), what do you think that says about our times? Has there been a shift in what readers tend to seek out, in terms of literature? Does our current literary culture say anything about America in 2011?

This asks for a generality, a social scientist’s response. I don’t know. At this point I shift from concern for the reader to thinking what I can best give to a reader—using my little “value system.” I give a reader what I think a reader needs, and I’ve always thought the reader needs (and perhaps secretly wants) books that subscribe to Leavis’ injunction. Readers need that no matter what else they’re reading; so I go on trying to give it to them, unworried.

How do you go about your research? Particularly with novels like Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, where Frank Bascombe is neck-deep in the real estate business, I imagine you must have done a good deal of research. Is this an aspect of fiction writing—that is, the work that orbits around the writing in order for the writing to occur—that appeals to you?

Actually, I’m probably a novelist in part because I detest anything having to do with reporting. That is, research. I just lack the basic fact-finding instinct. So I found a way to be a writer that doesn’t require exhaustive research. For instance, I wrote a novel about real estate because I decided if I wanted to write a second novel with Frank Bascombe as its narrator, I had to change his job. I’d gotten, I felt, all I could out of sportswriting in the first novel. So, I cast around for what I already knew anything about and was also interested in, and that a person like Frank could “become” in mid-life without going back and doing a lot of training (read: that I’d have to do a lot of research for). I already knew—from life—a lot about real estate. So I made him be a real estate salesman. To completely muscle up for that writing I spent most of a year noting down and rigging around all I knew and could casually learn about real estate, including reading the New York Times, and making the rare but painful fact-finding call to the National Association of Realtors. And also I went on with my life’s preoccupation—which is looking at houses that are for sale, now and then renting a house in some far-flung place, talking to realtors. In other words, I just began to take seriously something I’d always done for pleasure—think about houses, architecture, selling houses, the economy.

In another instance, writing The Lay of the Land, I decided Paul Bascombe, Frank’s recalcitrant son, ought to be a greeting-card writer. And (but again, it was really just for fun) I called up the Hallmark people in Kansas City and persuaded them to let me spend some days hanging around their card-writing departments. This was wonderful in more ways than I can describe. I loved it. I sat in on writing meetings, I wrote my own cards, commented on others’ cards, all that and more. I found I had a kind of low-impact passion for it. And it was such a lucky instinct for me. I came away with a huge respect for the Hallmark writers, which then allowed me to write Paul into the book in a way that was full of sympathy, but was also fairly well informed. You have to get lucky in making these sort of decisions. I could never just do a lot of cold research and expect to have any emotional purchase on the material. The emotional purchase comes first.

I’m trying to picture you writing greeting cards, and imagining the greeting cards you might have created. Oh, I’d like to see those. What was it you liked so much about this particular experience?

Image Credit: Flickr - Mr. Tea

I wrote (that is, I amateurishly participated in the writing meetings for) “Shoebox” cards—a line of Hallmark cards that are witty and wry and clever. Someone just gave me one for my 67th birthday, in fact. I liked being in on the writing and analyzing and discussing of these cards because the people in the meeting were immensely smart and witty themselves, and the cards gave vent to a genuine sense of humor—not the factitious, cloying, un-humorous humor of most greeting cards. And I liked that because even though the cards weren’t striving really for much more than wittiness (pun-ish plays on words, switcheroos, deft absurdities), they weren’t the least cynical, and they seemed to give vent to the writers’ real sense of what was funny. I like that sense that the cards allowed their writers to be fully-expressed, and that their work gave them rich satisfaction. The ones I semi-wrote, it should be said, were distinctly inferior.

As an author, you’re known for having moved around quite a bit while still being able to get your writing done. You’ve written stories on airplanes, in hotels; you’ve produced fiction here in the States and abroad. Was this way of working—whenever and wherever the opportunity arose—one you consciously and deliberately cultivated, or have you always been able to write like this?

Image Credit: Flickr - ishane

I’m just practical. Life comes first for me; art second. Sometimes art comes even later than second. If I was going to live the way I wanted to (going hither and yon), it was going to be necessary that I be flexible about where I write. These mandarin-precious-princess-and-the-pea notions about a writer’s “special place” just didn’t match my life. Which isn’t to say I don’t normally have a room where I write in the house where I live, and that I don’t like that room to be quiet, with no distractions. I do. But that isn’t always the opportunity life affords. There used to be a writer, whose name I won’t mention, [Raymond] Carver and I used to laugh about. He’d take journalists into his inner sanctum of a writing room and say, “This is where I make the magic.” Well, I make the magic wherever I can. I don’t know if that’s conscious or accidental.

How have your stories and novels been influenced by the places in which they were written?

Not uniformly. I grew up in Mississippi and Arkansas, and arrived at the idea of writing a novel crippled with the unquestioned assumption that I was supposed to write either about those places, or about people who lived there. Or else I was supposed to set my novel there, which I did. Or that I was supposed to write for a southern audience. Anyway, I did it. And eventually, along with other dissatisfactions, I concluded I didn’t have anything new or fresh to say by following those suppositions. I needed therefore to set my books elsewhere, where I might be able to bring some news, and to write for a much wider audience than just southerners—which I’ve done.

Image Credit: Flickr - Hugo90

Another way of thinking about this is that I wrote about suburban New Jersey and set the Bascombe books there because—at the beginning—I was living there and it seemed available and rather un-worked-over by other writers. I wrote about Montana—or set stories and novels there—because I’d been there and was persuaded I could appropriate things about that place to make the stories I was writing more persuasive. I also set two novellas in Paris because I loved Paris and thought that Americans writers were free to set stories there.

I would only say, however, that once I left off writing stories set in the South, I never felt that the places where I set my novels were at all genitive. I was never seeking to the “find the essence” of a place. I don’t think places have essences any more than people do. The places as they contributed language to the stories, and settings, were always (in my mind) subordinate to what the characters were doing. They were background—even, as in the Bascombe books, New Jersey becomes a subject of Frank’s musings. When in Independence Day, Frank says, “place means nothing,” I was (and he was) trying to say something along the lines of Auden’s famous, and famously misused, remark about poetry. It’s not that it’s not important. It is important. But its importance is subtle and probably less pronounced and maybe less weighty than one might imagine.

Bottom line: place never made any story happen—not the ones I write.

Can you talk about some of the books and writers who continue to serve as touchstones for you. The writers, books, or stories, you find yourself rereading, revisiting, or simply like to have around as you do your own work.

I’m a disorderly reader. Books come randomly into my life, exert themselves on me, then pass on. Last year I read Vasily Grossmann’s cables from the eastern front, and immediately wanted to appropriate individual lines from it (it’s translated, of course) as titles to a book of stories I was writing. Now I wonder why I wanted to do that. Most of the “greats” from my young writer-hood I never revisit: Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Bellow, Babel, Dostoievski. [Eudora] Welty’s an exception. I read her still. Cheever, too. I’m a slow reader; and going back to books prevents me from going forward to new books. And then books come along that would seem to have nothing to do with anything I might write—like Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?. I deeply admire it and have it by my table while I’m writing this book set in Canada. Touchstone books….I don’t know. So Long, See You Tomorrow; The Moviegoer; A Fan’s Notes; Alice Munro’s stories. These still resonate audibly.

You mentioned Eudora Welty. You were friends, yes? I wonder, what is it about her work that continues to resonate with you? (I ask this, having only recently reread her story “No Place for You, My Love,” which just knocked me out.)

Well, “No Place For You, My Love,” is one of the greatest short stories of the century, unquestionably. But it isn’t especially typical of Eudora’s work, either. Although when I say that I start thinking of other atypical stories of hers, and it makes me think there isn’t a typical Welty story. What I like, what endures for me, is the rich mixture of humor in all of her work. She’s very, very funny—her writerly eye seizes on such a wealth of detail that often makes its way into her sentences as subtle humor; but she’s also being funny often at the service of being very serious. Flannery O’Connor (also a great story writer) was both funny and serious at once. But O’Connor was so scathing about experience and life. You leave her stories always shaken. Whereas Eudora is tolerant, her intelligence supple, her sympathies wide and widening, her personal pleasure (glee, often) at being a source of readerly pleasure so palpable. I sometimes say that growing up in Mississippi one learned that human discourse—conversation, say—was largely about keeping your fellow conversationalist amused. Spending time with Eudora was always to be amused. Nothing was lost on her. Language was always in play. Drama—tiny and large—was popping up everywhere. Her stories are just the same. Even in this New Orleans story [“No Place For You, My Love”]—a very steamy story about an almost-romance—there’s humor everywhere you look. And the effect is to enrich the steaminess.

I’m thinking again about Leavis’ dictum, how, as you said earlier, literature is the supreme means by which we renew our sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. And it seems to me that short stories, when done well, are a near perfect representation of this ideal in action. Certainly your stories (from Rock Springs, Women with Men, and, most recently, A Multitude of Sins) have had this very impact on a great many readers, including myself. What is it about the short story as a form that continues to engage you as a writer and a reader?

You know, I’ve made a lot of valiant and failed attempts as an anthologizer/editor to come up with an idea about what makes a short story such a winning form. Again, generalities may not be my best rhetorical mode. Being a fiction writer, I’m kind of wedded to the particular, not the general. “The hard brown nut-like word,” as Barthleme writes in “Indian Uprising,” is where I position my pennant. I mean a bad short story is not engaging at all. The form doesn’t preserve it. I’m not sure the form means much—especially since it’s practiced in all kinds of ways, with all possible assaults on verisimilitude, at many lengths, with endless effects. Basically a well-written short story—were you to excerpt one paragraph—wouldn’t read any different from a well-written novel. The level of verbal felicity seems about the same, genre to genre. So, I guess I have to say—and I’ve said it before—it’s the length. And nothing especially exotic about the length. A short story—if it’s good—gives you very good writing, and you don’t have to commit your life (or your week or your month) to reading the whole thing. It’s a lesser form for this reason. It has less avoir du poids. My dear Carver can be heard now objecting from his place of rest. I used to taunt him about the short story being a lesser form. And of course in his hands it almost wasn’t. But it is. No offense intended.

Yet you’re certainly a champion of the short story. In fact, a new anthology you just edited called Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work, is coming out in just a few days, the proceeds of which benefit 826michigan. Can you talk about why this project was so important to you?

It’s important to me for several reasons, the chiefest of which is to be able to assist 826michigan in its noble mission to serve the youth of southeastern Michigan by teaching kids to write, giving them confidence to do better in school, helping them with their homework after school hours, and addressing many other really critical needs of kids trying to succeed in a demanding world. 826michigan performs these services free to the kids. So the proceeds of the sale of this anthology all go to that good end. Beyond that, editing an anthology gives me a chance to find a few new readers for my colleagues’ excellent work. And the premise of the book – stories about work – seemed apposite to all that Michigan means to your average American: a place where work matters. And, of course, doing the book allowed me to renew my long-standing affiliation with the state, which has meant so much to me in my life and given me so much.

Finally, how do you hope these stories might appeal to readers?

I don’t think the premise of the book overshadows the stories themselves. I’ve identified the stories as having to do with work, and insofar as the premise is a fair one – and I believe it is – the stories will turn the diamond of work this way and that and show work’s various facets to advantage: principally its consequence in peoples’ lives, its centrality as a legitimate subject of contemplation, its simple interest to us as a force in our lives. But in saying that, I’m just pointing out what excellent fiction routinely does to any subject it seizes: it shows us where importance lies when we might’ve thought we knew better; it elevates in importance a human concern or pursuit that might’ve been taken for granted; it pleases and informs us about subjects of genuine moral interest. To me, these are gifts of literature which have rather enduring appeal.

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Further Links and Resources

The articles’ tones vary drastically. The WSJ’s Katherine Rosman and Lauren A. E. Schuker offer a measured view of Frey’s operation, noting how little Frey pays the young writers he employs (“they get $250 upon signing and another $250 upon completion of a book”) as well as how successful its first major product, a story called I Am Number Four that’s being adapted into a movie by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, has been. New York Magazine’s Suzanne Mozes, by contrast, is unabashedly negative in her (much-longer) piece. She accuses Frey of rampant exploitation and implies that the bestselling author is an insufferable, amoral egomaniac (“he’s in it to ‘change the game’ and ‘move the paradigm’; he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world,” she writes).

As Busis points out (and Mozes writes about in her own article), Mozes has a personal ax to grind with Full Fathom Five – they were once in discussions with Mozes to write a book for them, which fell apart after she tried to negotiate the contract.

Regardless of how comfortable you may be with the idea that a team of writers can come up with “the next big thing,” do you draw a line between fiction written specifically to the market, and a book written because the author feels he must, regardless of its marketability? Of course, most writers want to be read, some even dream of making a living from their writing. So, where does art end and commerce begin?*
*Read more about this question in Scott Parker’s two-part essay, “The ReCorrections”.

Brady Udall’s novel, The Lonely Polygamist (W.W. Norton), follows Golden through his four-wife midlife crisis. Faced with a waning construction business, he’s forced to commute two hundred miles to build a cathouse which he claims is an old-folks home. Meanwhile, youngest wife Trish fights to find her place among the older, more fertile sister-spouses. His outcast son vacillates between suicidal tendencies and acute horniness. While away on the job site, Golden catches a glimpse of a beautiful Guatemalan woman—who happens to be married to his employer—and stares down the barrel of infidelity times four.

Those who’ve waited years for the follow-up to The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint will not be disappointed. The Lonely Polygamist belongs among the great big American family sagas, alongside The Corrections and The Grapes of Wrath. Told from multiple points of view—Golden’s, his youngest wife’s, one bomb-building son’s, even the old family houses’—this is not the story of an individual struggling against others, but of many imperfect people struggling to live together.To paraphrase one of the Richards kids: growing up in polygamy, you learn fast that you’re not the center of the universe. Though set in the landscape and culture of the American West, this novel feels like an entirely new type of Western. Golden is no lone hero out on the frontier. He is part of an intertwined community, in all of its damaged glory, trying to balance their separate happiness against their shared principles.

via jmsmytaste

Like John Irving in his prime, Udall manages to weave together the quirky and the profound in a way that feels organic and effortless. Yes, Golden does wrestle ostriches and keep a piss-bucket in his closet. But he also faces the greatest of parental nightmares: to watch a child suffer, to face a child’s loss. Like the highest forms of comedy, Udall’s humor is able to soar because it’s tethered to sorrow.

Perhaps the novel’s greatest achievement is that it reserves judgment. In a time of partisan extremity, when marriage is used to rally bases on both sides, Udall never preaches nor defends. These characters in The Lonely Polygamist are not remarkable for their oddities or their quirks, but for their humanity. The men are not gun-mongering child-abusers; the women are never passive brainwashed victims. They’re all complicit in an institution that does them some good and does them some harm—not so unlike monogamy.

American Gothic, detail. Grant Wood.

Though centered on what’s often considered an anachronistic practice, this book is as timely as any you’re likely to read this year. The Lonely Polygamist makes us question our fundamental assumptions about the family unit, in the same way that Blade Runner forced us to re-examine our idea of what it means to be human. As we revise and update our definition of marriage—something the human race tends to do every so often—stories like this one remind us that it’s not the labels or laws that count, but the lives they are meant to enrich.

Further Reading:

Brady Udall, Cr. Hector Udall

• Visit Brady Udall’s website to read more about his two novels, The Lonely Polygamist and The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, and his debut story collection, Letting Loose the Hounds.
• Read Udall’s 1998 article for Esquire, also titled “The Lonely Polygamist,” about an ex-Mormon named Bill. In it the author writes:
  

  A life of polygamy is not a joyride, a guiltless sexual free-for-all. Being a polygamist is not for the easygoing or the weak of heart. It’s like marine boot camp or working for the mob; if you’re not cut out for it, if you don’t have that essential thing inside, it will eat you alive. And polygamy doesn’t just require simple cojones, either. It requires the devotion of a monk, the diplomatic prowess of Winston Churchill, the doggedness of a field general, the patience of a pine tree.

• Hear Brady Udall discuss the non-salacious side of polygamy, and the surprising intersection of feminism and sharing a husband:
  

Soli has created an epic war novel, with an ambitious scope that spans years, characters, and countries. Her book belongs in the upper eschelon of the Vietnam canon. Here, Vietnam is more than a war. We see urbanites and expats in Saigon, farmers and fishermen in small villages, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, journalists with a range of motives, as well as protesters and grieving parents in the States.

With a strong woman behind the lens and under fire, Soli bridges the gap between the soldiers in the field and the observers around the dining room table. The book is at once a tremendous document of a historical era and a timeless story of love and aspiration. The Lotus Eaters isn’t just about how we fight wars; it’s about how we live with them, how we watch them, and how we turn them into history.

From the author’s website: Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Salzburg, Austria, she attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her stories have appeared in The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly, and North Dakota Quarterly among other publications. Her work has been twice listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize, the Dana Award, finalist for the Bellwether Prize, and received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives with her husband in Orange County, California, and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

Interview:

At the risk of sounding obvious: Why Vietnam? What is it about that war that captured your imagination?

My mother worked as an interpreter for NATO in Italy in the late sixties. From there, we moved to Fort Ord in Monterey, CA. As a young girl, living on a military base, I was surrounded by this frightening thing that was happening. My friends’ fathers would be shipped off, and there would be tears. Sometimes a car would pull up to a house, and I remember the dread on all the faces around me. A few days later the family would disappear. So the war in its mysteriousness haunted me from an early age, and when I grew up, I read every account I could, trying to come to some conclusion about what happened.

Why do you think that episode in our history continues to fascinate us and demand reinterpretation?

Marine Crossfire by Eddie Adams

Well, there are still plenty of novels being written about WWII. But Vietnam is unique in that it made people distrust their own government, totally reject the establishment. People became cynical and disillusioned by the lies they were fed about the necessity of the war, about the sacrifices being made, but there was also this great power in knowing the truth, in agitating for change. The access photojournalists had in that war was one of the reasons the truth came out. That freedom, by the way, no longer exists. I see many parallels to the situation today in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is an apathy on the part of the public compared to the 60’s and 70’s.

As far as reinterpretation, the seminal works about Vietnam for me are Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and Michael Herr’s Dispatches. All focus on the disconnect between the official line our government gave us and the reality those on the ground faced. Those writers moved past the obvious “war is hell” theme. For me, the reinterpretation came with introducing the particularities of place into the war. War doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it occurs in someone’s birthplace, it destroys their home, their family.

I’m really glad you mentioned the “lies about the necessity of war.” One of the things that I find most interesting about The Lotus Eaters is Helen’s agency—the fact that she chooses to go and to stay and to go again. So much of our mythology of Vietnam (and other wars) is wrapped up in the draft—young Americans who have no choice. In your novel, many of the characters are opportunists who choose go there to advance their careers. In fact, the only characters that truly have no choice in the matter are the Vietnamese. Were you trying to show that a sort of adventure/glory-seeking is a part of war? That there is always a choice, on somebody’s part?

War photographer James Natchwey

Journalists are a special case, and one of the reasons that writing the book fascinated me. They go of their own volition; they put their life on the line on a daily basis. And the reasons are as complex and varied as the individuals. The biggest reason I came across, again and again, both in Vietnam and in more recent conflicts, is this desire to be there to record history in the making. The adventure/glory of getting the image, the story, that comes to define an event. It’s almost become a truism that without the recording of an event, it disappears. Margaret Moth said that in her opinion it was the best job in the world. But there is a price to be paid: the danger physically, the burnout mentally. You have to make that part of your choice. And if you go back knowing the risks, is that addiction to danger, or acknowledging that the risk is worth the greater good of knowledge? I’m immensely grateful to the men and women who take these risks, who bring us back these stories that perhaps wouldn’t get told otherwise.

Could you talk about your research process for this novel? It feels incredibly well-informed. Was there a historical Helen Adams? Were any other characters based on real people?

In retrospect, I would say that ignorance is bliss. Not only did I have to figure out how to write my first novel, but then I had to write about a time and culture that required extensive research, and then because this is well-known territory, I had to be accurate for people who had actually experienced the war, but still make it my own.

Dickey Chapelle

I spent almost a year gathering facts, tidbits, ideas, pictures, music. I filled notebooks and notebooks, wrote a first draft that was fairly dry. And then I kind of let it all go, allowed myself to remember the research that stuck with me, forget the rest, so that it became more organic to the story. I went back to telling a story, creating characters, and that changed much of the plot, did away with lots of hard-won research. Painful, but necessary. Research has to be in service of the story, and not vice-versa.

Catherine Leroy

There were a handful of female photojournalists in Vietnam. The ones that particularly intrigued me were Dickey Chapelle and Catherine Leroy. But I took my character farther in terms of being consumed by the war, consumed by the country, the complexities of combat photojournalism. There was a real Vietnamese spy, Pham Xuan An, who worked undercover for Time magazine that I used for part of the story of Linh. But these “facts” are peripheral to the main thrust of the story.

I have received many letters from people who served in Vietnam, both in civilian capacity and military, who said that the book brought the time back to them. I’m incredibly proud of those letters. But I’ve also received letters from people who had fathers, uncles, husbands, etc. who served, and they said that the book helped them understand what those loved ones went through.

Did you travel to Vietnam (and/or Cambodia) in the course of writing this book?

I traveled in Asia briefly with my husband years before I thought of writing the book. Once I was deep into the research, I planned a trip to Vietnam that had to be cancelled due to a family emergency. But then a strange thing happened once I had the first draft down—I had this particular place so strong in my head, it was literally feeding the story. I was afraid that if I went to Vietnam that the difference between what was in my imagination and what I found in contemporary Vietnam would break the dream of the story for me. Going back to your research question, I found the right detail set off a chain of events; that was its value rather than strictly providing verisimilitude for the book. I liken it to the movie Apocalypse Now. That is a fever dream of Vietnam, Coppola’s dream of Vietnam. You aren’t going to find that place on a tour. The Saigon of the book is one made from my characters: Helen, Linh, and Darrow. I’m happy beyond belief when I have people tell me that they were there, and the book brings the time back to them, but the setting is foremost an organic thing intertwined with the characters. I’m planning on finally taking the trip this winter. I think it will be an amazing experience.

This must’ve been a very daunting project to undertake. Did you find it intimidating to write about a subject that (a) had been tackled by so many literary heavyweights, and that (b) many of your readers might have experienced firsthand?

I did find it intimidating. But I really believe that if the story is important to you as a writer, you will find a way to make it your own. I don’t think you can cynically choose a subject because it is topical and hope to pull it off. It has to come from inside, be a passion. Actually, I had the opposite problem with Vietnam. Both agents and editors told me it was a small, niche market, dominated exclusively by military books for a male audience. But that was precisely the reason I thought there was room for a bigger, more inclusive story, that I could tell.

I think readers who actually were there firsthand accept the book because of whatever story truth I was able to convey, which is different than fact truth. Although I tried to be faithful to the general facts, this is not a non-fiction book. The primary focus here is on the effect of the war on characters, who are entirely fictional.

Speaking of characters, I was hoping we could talk a little about Linh—who I found to be remarkable. I guess what fascinates me is how much he defies any sort of easy categorization—in terms of his role, his allegiances, etc. What was the origin of this character? What can he tell us about the Vietnam War and other, subsequent conflicts?

Little Saigon via heatkernel

Linh was really central to why I wanted to write the book. It seemed obvious that in a war that dragged on for over a decade, there would be much contact between the cultures, especially off-duty in Saigon, and yet I found very few accounts of a Vietnamese point-of-view. Linh by no means stands for every Vietnamese, in fact his situation is so complex he ends up a very isolated character, and yet he is the heart of the book. Before and during the novel, I had written a lot of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants in California, and he was the natural starting point for that story. In the early drafts, it was simply about his trying to survive the war, but in the way of a novelist complicating the lives of her characters, one day Mr. Bao showed up. People, including his own, assign Linh roles that have nothing to do with who he is inside. Historically, there was a famous Vietnamese spy, Pham Xuan An, who worked as a reporter for Time, and who the Americans were shocked to learn was a spy after the war was over, but Linh’s situation is both less sensational and more complicated than that one.

The one common thread in most accounts of vets returning to Vietnam is how accepting the Vietnamese people are. There is very little hostility over the war. And the vets often find healing by exchanging stories with their military counterparts, realizing that under all the slurs, the stereotyping, these people are essentially the same as they are. What was amazing about the access that journalists had in Vietnam is how it did at least show us to some extent the civilian toll. From what I’ve been able to read from various journalists in today’s wars, that freedom no longer exists in the same way. I worry that we are not getting the equivalent of Linh’s story in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Could you tell me about the title of The Lotus Eaters? That’s from Homer, is it not?

The title does come from The Odyssey:

Those who ate the honeyed fruit of the plant lost any wish to come back and bring us news. All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return.

17th c. etching Lotus Eaters

For me it was a metaphor for what the war does to all the characters. They literally lose themselves inside of it. You go to war with all these plans and goals, and you end up not caring about any of it. Just like the soldiers, many of the journalists could not imagine going back to “normal” life. It’s much more complicated than a simple addiction to danger, an addiction to the adrenaline of war. For Helen in particular, it’s a stripping away of naïveté, of innocence. How can you go home when you’ve become a different person? When you no longer fit?

To take things in a bit of a craft direction, I wanted to go back to what you said earlier about the emphasis on character as opposed to fact. What would you say is the novel’s role, in a world where narrative nonfiction—and unreliable journalism—are so prevalent? Do you have any advice for writers who struggle to incorporate history (or current events) into their work?

books via austinevans

I don’t mean to mislead — I absolutely think that the burden is on the writer to be as historically correct as possible. But that is just the baseline, the beginning, if you will. Then storytelling goes on top of that, and the storytelling has to be just as compelling and character-driven as a fiction that didn’t require research. No one wants to read your research—they are looking for story. That’s why they are reading a novel, to be immersed in time and place and character. The temptation as a writer is to include these inert sections of facts simply because you’ve gathered them. Just guessing, I’d say I used less than five percent of the material that I had available to me. Inefficient, yes, but also necessary for my process. You don’t know what you are looking for until you find it.

Speaking of research, your descriptions of photography are very well-informed and convincing. Was this another area of research for you? Have you worked as a photojournalist or photographer?

via Dan Newton

I did do research on basic photography, and, especially, tried to convey the hardships these photographers worked under. Film got destroyed all the time – whether under the conditions out in the field, or back in the less than optimal darkrooms. Often film was sent out on planes to avoid censorship. Sometimes it wouldn’t make it through. So the medium almost became a metaphor itself. And what is really fascinating is that this is all historical research now. With digital photography, a picture can be sent around the world in seconds. An amazing change. Although apparently the desert conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan wreak havoc with computer equipment.

You mentioned that you wrote several short stories about Vietnam before writing The Lotus Eaters. Do you feel a sense of closure on this subject? Will you write about Vietnam again?

That’s funny that you ask that because until recently I would have answered that I had finished with the war. But a new non-fiction book came out that I had missed, and I started reading it and immediately I plunged back into that time. It felt like home.

I wrote many stories about the Vietnamese immigrants as I gathered my research for the war. I had so many ideas that the original book started splitting in two different directions, which my editor wisely convinced me to delete. But I still have those hundred pages in my files. I would love to develop that story some day. Right now I’m finishing up my second novel set in contemporary California, but at some point in the future I’ll definitely go back to Vietnam.

Can you tell me a bit about the new novel?

Well, I had bitten off so much with the first book, so intense in research in so many different areas, that I wanted a completely different challenge as a writer this time. I’m superstitious about saying too much, but it is set on an isolated citrus ranch in Southern California. Although it is an entirely different kind of book, I think some of the same themes are there: issues of race, dislocation, healing. It’s providing the right kind of stretch for me as a writer in terms of content and craft. I’m very engaged with the story, which I kind of doubted after the obsession of writing the first book. The great gift of writing a second novel is that even when things feel hopeless, you know you’ve gotten through it one time before.

Do you have any advice for aspiring fiction writers and novelists?

Hemingway at work via LIFE

Well, I’m not the most practical writer so I’m not sure how useful my advice is. But I think most writers are idealistic, otherwise why be in such a problematic business? I really wrote the book I wanted to write, regardless of its marketability. It was a hard sell, but I was lucky to have a great team at St. Martin’s who really advocated for the book. So I’d say risk it, write what’s in your heart. Write with the big picture in mind. I’m proud that this was my first book AND my first published book. The realities of the marketplace, of the publishing world, are so complicated that there is no controlling that part of the equation. But you the writer can write the best book you are capable of. That’s the only thing in your control.

I definitely understand the temptation to chase trends, to write something with an eye to an audience, but ultimately, I don’t think that it will fulfill you over a whole career. A short story writer who I interviewed for an article on the writer career track works as a doctor, and his belief is that you’ve got to have a career that financially sustains you other than writing. If you give up that dream, you are free to write what you want and not worry about your bank account. He also makes the point that having a life away from the computer is a good thing. By necessity, most of us have that, but I think rather than resent these intrusions into our writing time, which I know I did, look at that time as making you the kind of person who has something to say when you get to the keyboard.

Further Resources:

• Tatjana Soli will appear at the Carmel Public Library on Saturday September 7, and as part of “Between the Pages” at Town Hall in Seattle on September 16. For full details of those events and 7 more appearances on the West Coast visit her website.
• Read Soli’s essay for Three Guys One Book, titled “Loneliness, Love and Hemingway,” about the influence of The Sun Also Rises on her as a reader and writer.
• Listen to Soli discuss The Lotus Eaters and some of the history behind it, including archival footage of the Vietnam War, in this video:

Prague / photo credit: Pablo Sanchez

What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national, identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent? What to make of the contiguities of the stories, that seem at times to overlap the national boundaries so as to “say something about that place”? The very assemblage of stories is frustrating, and self-confounding. What you could comfortably say about “Europe” after a summer abroad and a few hostels in Prague sounds positively Mrs. Mortimer-ian after the reflexivity (On se voit) and pure strangeness of these narratives (?): even naming them calls for fresh punctuation and some superior method of notation, a more fertile subjunctive.

Olympic Rings in Berlin / photo credit: Will Palmer

How to avoid taking roll? Three collections of unrelated vignettes, present. Three stories tangent upon a famous person and his or her actions as reflected upon the world stage, present.

Zinedine Zidane, in a Camus-worthy cameo penned by Bruxellois Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is gripped by nausea as he feels his presence–in the existential sense–at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on July 9, 2006. Toussaint, a cinematographer as well as an author, cites Freud among his influences, but it is a stunt double of Camus’s “dark wind” that seems to draw Zidane from the future that has become the present, and to the absurd act that will become immortal: the headbutt to Marco Materazzi’s chest. Like Meursault, ennui and pure fatigue lead him to the “unscripted action,” the endpoint that his entire career has determined for him. Everyone and no one has seen the action: there is only the “Italian player” on the ground, and Zidane’s own head, forever covering half the distance to his opponent’s chest, without ever arriving. What better characterization of the action shots, the contortions of perpetrator and victim immortalized on Google? How much of what we claim to know is based on circumstantial evidence about what we’ve missed?

Suspended almost dead center of the volume, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė lays out a handful of answers in her five criteria for evaluating texts. In a collection like this, the gesture is reminiscent of a primary-school exercise book: tear out this ruler, and use it to solve the problems on the other pages. The tenets–in short, memorability, connection to lived experience, immersibility for the reader, revelation of the banal, and the impossibility of formulating any assertion without doubt–hover over the rest of the stories, inducing the reader to flip back, like a dutiful student to the endnotes, even after moving on to a new region. Connection to lived experience? Check. Revelation of the banal? Half a check. Immersibility? Perhaps not; here we are, flipping around, taking measure.

Back to the roll call for a moment. (What is about this collection that calls forth the spirit of the schoolroom? Do we, with an anthology, become students again? Do we read it because we assume it’s good for us, because there is some moral good in having read it, in the plus-que-parfait, like “the classics” our Brit-Lit teachers upheld?) A pair of stories about futuristic death-obsessed bureaucracies, present. Now this is the sort of gritty, dubbed stuff we expect to tune into when we delve into the European humanities scene. Flamand Peter Terrin tracks pro-/ant-agonist Ferdinand, noir-style, through his unauthorized murder of a loud and boorish neighbor. Haunted by some indistinct memories that he may have already drilled through more than his allotted share of murders (two per citizen, thanks), Ferdinand has some “Tell-Tale Heart”-ish moments as he attempts to sneak out of his victim’s house. His reasoning, though, about his neighbors, about others in general, is purely modern: “They’d rather see me dead than alive.” We all sort of feel this way about each other, in a way, which makes the two-murder ration seem at once gratuitous and not quite enough. If “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” then “le ciel, c’est la solitude.” It is in this solitary utopia that Ferdinand lurks farther and farther afield, into les quartiers difficiles, waiting for the sound of the punitive shot, knowing that the actual bullet to the brain will have preceded it. It’s a dim and sardonic story, one where you wonder more about what it’s like to off someone than get off with them, and where the two-murder-per-person method of population control is considered kinder than asking people to cut back on their childbearing.

Over in futuristic Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov reports on the anesthetic–literally, flowers no longer have scents and the sky gapes at the seams like an old baseball–conditions that follow our depredations upon genetics and the ozone layer. Castor P., an elderly astronomer who still remembers real bees and who, way back in 2011, discovered the universe’s smallest black hole, is about to sign over the last several decades of his allotted twelve and a half. He’s only waiting for the arrival of his son, on some other star; the silent recipient of his brief telegrams. As he waits, Castor arrives at the conclusion that loneliness has become the only organic substance, having escaped from its container like a gas and filling the vacuum where air used to be. His son never does arrive, and Castor is extinguished, mortal as his namesake. We’re left to wonder: who is his twin? Is the reader meant to be his double? There’s an Oedipal universality to this narrative: we can picture our old fathers, in their felt shirts, sending us voice mails and shakily lettered cards from our old ZIP codes. We only respond ceremonially, when we have to go back because they are sick, or dying or, finally, when we have to sort through their crumbled old papers and photographs of a world where they were at ease. He’s touching, this untwinned Geminorum, because he doesn’t want to make a fuss; he doesn’t tear up in front of the young woman clerking at the death office, still hoping his son will take a shining to her when he gets there.

Not everyone is so moving: in the other corners of Europe, a john runs off from a bust in a public pay toilet, leaving his homeless young servicer unpaid and beaten by cops; children kill a dolphin in a salt-water novelty tank during a dinner party, and the adults laugh it off; a girl rejects a boy during a secluded picnic and makes him drive her back to town; and a couple, lost on an idyllic bike ride, tie their dog to a tree and abandon it just before the husband proclaims his affair with his wife’s half-sister. But what’s the difference, anyway? In the first collection of vignettes, Austrian Antonio Fian’s narrator confesses to an eerily similar act with a friend of his wife’s sister who, surreally, turns out to be his wife–and every other woman in the world–after all. “So, all the women in the world know about us?” asks the adulterer, unsettled. They might as well–as in Gregory Corso’s poem, “Marriage,” we’re all alike–”All streaming into the same cozy hotels/All going to do the same thing tonight.” The only rebellion we might possibly enjoy is to remove ourselves from the honeymoon suite altogether: “Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!” Sexuality, so fascinating and individual to the self is, in reality, one of our most banal habits.

Another of humanity’s more banal projects, pop culture, finds an apt definition in Victor Pelevin’s description of “the merely comfortable selling the poor fantasies about the lives of the rich, the very rich, and the fabulously rich.” One immediately visualizes the same photos duplicated and recaptioned in the high-budget celebrity mags down to the press-release reprints in the low: if magazine layout was still analog, these images would be peeled bare by masking tape. From Professor Potashinsky, pioneering theorist of “Friedmann Space,” we learn that there is a whole field of quantum mechanics specific to wealth; apparently, the wealth-traveler, or “lucrenaut” (take that, Laika) ceases to perceive time and cannot recall any lucreventures if he or she is once again separated from the critical mass of wealth. Not for lack of trying, though–lucrenauts live it up, eating and drinking and–here is Pelevin’s most brilliant line, at least in translation–”transferring their genetic material to gentle creatures who sold themselves so expensively that the transactions already resembled love.” At the end of the experiment, the brain images of the lucrenauts’ perceptions during these brave ventures are uniform: a green corridor. The proletariat struggle, the rise and fall of communism, the corruption and trafficking, and drug-cartel stabbings for wealth, and what does it feel like? A waiting room in a third-rate clinic.

It would be a Short-Story-210, too-clever-by-half reader who would state that the motifs of overmanaged, generic nation-states and transactional, interchangeable relationships–and the substitution of celebrity gossip for village tongue-wagging–directly correspond to anxieties about the European Union and any amalgamating tendencies it might have on the cultures within its borders. Without putting words in anyone’s mouth, it’s fair to assume that no one wants the mother country to turn into the Epcot version of itself: a souvenir stand with a few snack specialties–extra points for chocolate, fried stuff in cones, and sausage. It’s limiting, though, not to mention a little boring, to read literature symptomatically, and we’re often so immersed in our era that we tend to overdesignate themes as specific to our own time. Reading with an inflection is one thing; “getting the news through poems,” or short stories, for that matter, is another.

Europe isn’t the only continent where people are overwhelmed by market psychology and looking around at each other to define themselves. The laments that nothing is genuine anymore, that style is winning over substance, that there’s nothing original left to do or say, are almost as old as recorded history–or, cynics might say, as old people themselves. Somehow, there have been new utterances and new pastimes and, much as the new is always indebted to its antecedents, the breath hasn’t been entirely snatched from us yet. In fact, if anything, there’s a little too much breath–together with text and bandwith and airtime and any of the other major transmitters. Of course, surplus doesn’t equal substance, and language doesn’t equal an utterance. We’re watching the same shows, in different languages: celebrities are whittling their faces and bodies down to the same androgyn; music is so produced it’s hard to name the instrument; and food–at least the affordable, available stuff–is so processed you can’t name the food animal or the preservative. The vacuum-inflating loneliness and ersatz bees may not be far behind.

Further Reading and Links

Aleksandar Hemon

- In this interview, World Books talks to series editor Aleksandar Hemon about the challenges of promoting first-rate European fiction to American readers.

- Here on Fiction Writers Review, read a review of Hemon’s most recent story collection, Love and Obstacles.

- Read interviews with some of the anthology’s contributors: The Quarterly Conversation talks to Jean-Philippe Toussaint; Dalkey Archive Press talks to Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria), to Antonio Fian (Austria), to Peter Stamm (Switzerland), to Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark), and to many others.

- Via BookBrowse, read an excerpt from Best European Fiction’s preface (by Zadie Smith).

- If you’re shopping for a copy of this book, support indie bookstores by ordering it from Powell’s.