Baby Got Books

As we may have mentioned, next week we are kicking off the first in what we hope will be a long line of events in the Baby Got Books Reading Series. Our first guest is Rob Sheffield who will be reading from his excellent book Love is a Mix Tape on Wednesday, January 23, at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur (details). Mr. Sheffield graciously agreed to subject himself to a few questions about the book.

Baby Got Books: In the book, you describe yourself as someone who comes across as introverted and fairly reserved. How did you arrive at the decision to begin writing what is an intensely personal story of pain and loss? How much time went by before you started to write the book? How long did it take to get it all down?

Rob Sheffield: Yeah, I guess I was always shy, the “Shy Boy” that Bananarama sang about. When I was in my early 20s, all I wanted from life was to hide out with my records and my fanzines and my books and let the world pass me by. I used to think that was the best I could hope for, but it turned out I was wrong, although I guess I can always go back to being a hermit boy when I’m old and grey if I want. But it took five years before I could start the book, really. There were some false starts in there, but I’m glad I waited until I was ready. I started it in 2002 when I was moving into my new apartment in Brooklyn (which isn’t so new anymore, I guess, but I still love it) and I finally had shelves big enough to hold all my tapes. So I stopped putting them in those rickety Elfa shelves, and put them up in the china cabinet where I could admire them, and took others out of boxes where they’d been cooped up, and slapping them into the boombox, and every tape kept telling me, Play me—I have a story to tell. They brought those moments alive so vividly, I knew I had to write about the tapes, and the book just kind of spilled out of that, for about two years. Somehow writing about the tapes made me feel brave enough to start telling the whole story.

BGB: In the book, your description of Renee’s death and the aftermath is very powerful, because it is written in a way that feels very raw and immediate. Was it difficult to stop yourself (or others) from editing out the rough edges and gritty emotion?

Rob Sheffield: One of the reasons I’m glad I waited till I was ready is that I wouldn’t chicken out of writing about the really bad times. I knew my editor, Carrie Thornton at Three Rivers Press, and I knew she wouldn’t let me chicken out either. I was surprised (more than I should have been, because my friends warned me) how tough it was to write about them, to admit that I was in trouble, even a few years after the fact.

BGB: In retrospect, are there things that you wish that you had not included in the book?

Rob Sheffield: The only thing I regret including is that one of the tapes had a song by G Love and Special Sauce. I really should have left that one out. “My Baby’s Got Sauce,” ugh and ugh again. But I figured, once I start leaving embarrassing songs off the tapes, I’ll never stop, so I better just leave them alone.

BGB: Are there things that you wish you had included?

Rob Sheffield: There’s a lot I had to leave out—I felt like I could have gone on for a thousand pages without using up the story, so it was just a matter of where to draw the line. I wanted it to be short enough to read in a weekend, because there was so much sad stuff in the story it seemed too harsh to ask for more of people’s time than that. Yet I can’t BELIEVE I didn’t have a single tape with a Dusty Springfield song. Now that is a shame.

BGB: Were there any negative reactions from friends or family that were close to you and/or Renee for sharing your story as a couple in such a personal way?

Rob Sheffield: I was lucky to have the support of all our friends and family. I needed all I could get, really. It’s funny how since the book came out, I’ve been hearing a lot of other people’s favorite Renee stories they think SHOULD have been in the book. I guess she told her friends a lot more of our private business than I was telling them!

BGB: I recently attended a funeral for a friend. At a gathering afterward, a mix CD of some of his favorite songs was handed out, which turned out to be a fantastic idea and got everyone sharing stories. Why do you think that music is able to create such intense memories/bonds between those that share it?

Rob Sheffield: I’m sorry about your friend. It is amazing how deeply music connects to the memories of specific people in specific times and places. It’s funny, I was just up in Boston visiting my parents and we were sitting around the fire and my mom made me sing the old Irish song “Bold Thady Quill,” just like she does almost every time I’m there, because that song reminds her of my grandmother from County Kerry. No matter how old people are, or where they come from, the music they loved is something I remember, and that’s the key that puts me in touch with their spirit.

BGB: Your book and others, like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, resonate with many of a certain age that spent too much time hand-crafting what one hoped would be the ultimate mix tape — one that would be remembered for the ages (or maybe I’m just projecting). The mix tape is now an historical artifact and even CD mixes may be on their way out. Do you think that recent technologies make “the mix” a lost art? Does dropping 30 songs into an iTunes Playlist carry the same emotional weight?

Rob Sheffield: Yeah, it’s definitely a lost art. You can make ten mix CDs for ten different girls in an hour. A mix tape, that proved you put at least ninety minutes into it. You picked out the catchy song at the start of Side Two, and the slow song at the end of Side Two, and the short songs to fill up the blank tape at the end of the side—it’s a complex calling. And they were finite—the other night I had dinner with a friend and we were listening to an ipod her boyfriend gave her with 800 songs loaded on it, and I thought, that’s an awful lot of songs to try and dazzle someone with at one time. Thing is, I just plain love mix CDs too, love how fast and easy they are. I guess there’s no sound-bearing media I don’t love. This summer I got pulled out of the security line at LaGuardia because I had a Walkman in my bag. The guy was like, “What the hell is this?” They asked, Why do you have an ipod AND a cassette player? I started to explain I just like listening to “Beggars Banquet” and “Let It Bleed” on tape better than on mp3—but fortunately they let me through.

Additional reading:

• BGB review 1
• BGB Review 2
• Details for Rob Sheffield’s appearance at the Baby Got Books Reading Series

Yesterday we posted Part 1 of my interview with Richard Lange, author of the short story collection Dead Boys. Onward with Part 2:

BGB: In a recent essay for the New York Times Book Review, Stephen King wrote that the American Short story is “ailing” and “apt to deteriorate in the years ahead.” He lay much of the blame for the situation as he perceives it at the feet of MFA workshops and other programs designed to teach people to write. As the author of what the San Francisco Chronicle called “one of the best short story collections of the past 50 years,” what do you make of this “controversy”?

RL: A lot of short stories are pretty boring. Hell, a lot of all writing is pretty boring. I don’t know if this stems from the MFA workshops or not. All I know is that it’s rare that I find a story that excites me, that has real energy in the language. What I’m looking for is electrifying flesh-and-blood stuff that makes me sit up and go, “Holy shit! Here’s someone who’s ready to throw down.”

BGB: Your education was in film . Does your background in film have an influence on your writing style? Do you have any plans to adapt any of the Dead Boys stories or other works to the screen?

RL: I was a film production major in college but quickly learned that the workaday side of filmmaking wasn’t for me. It’s more like engineering than dreaming. However, my screenwriting classes introduced me to the concepts of structure and pacing and started me thinking about how to manipulate them – technical stuff that was invaluable in my fiction

Producers were sniffing around “Dead Boys” for a while, but they sniff around everything. Movies have influenced my writing as much as literature – in fact, I probably know more about movies than I do about books — so I would love to be involved in a film project. In addition, screenplays pay way better than novels.

BGB: What can you tell us about your upcoming novel?

RL: It’s a crime book set in Los Angeles and Twenty-Nine Palms. I’m getting close to finishing it, three or four chapters away. It took a little longer than I thought it would to write it because I had to jigger with my style a little, open it up. I love it, and I hope my publisher does too. Otherwise, it’s back to a day job.

Many thanks to Richard Lange for taking the time to chat with us. Check out the book if you haven’t already done so.

Additional reading:

• Richard Lange’s web site
• Lange pairs each story with theme music as part of Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes.
• SF Chronicle’s stellar review (they must owe Lange money)
• My review

Richard Lange is the author of the short story collection Dead Boys.  A review in the San Francisco Chronicle called Dead Boys “one of the best short story collections of the past 50 years.”  (Read my review of the book here.)    The author graciously agreed to answer our burning questions.  Read Part 1 (of 2) of our interview with Richard Lange below.

BGB: WikiPedia says that one of your early jobs was as a copy editor for Larry Flynt Publications. What was that experience like and how did it inform your fiction writing?

Richard Lange: It was the best job I ever had. Flynt is one of only a few publishing companies in L.A., and the people who worked there were smart, cynical and absolutely hilarious. Many good writers passed through those halls and went on to do great things in the “straight” world. Technically, it was a super place to learn copy-editing. The style book was exhaustive, and all of the editors were sticklers for accuracy and proper grammar, even on the adult titles. And what other style book has 100 different ways to refer to the penis?

I was a copy editor on a variety of publications for a year or so, then became managing editor of RIP, a heavy-metal music magazine the company put out. The editing chops I picked up there have definitely made my fiction better. I learned all the mistakes to watch out for. You can’t be a good writer without being a good editor.

BGB: Dead Boys is an incredibly cohesive collection of short stories. Did you intend for the collection to revolve tightly around a few central themes or did these stories evolve organically over time that just happened to have similar thematic elements?

RL: I’d like to say that I had some sort of overarching vision for the collection, but that would be a lie. Other people are much better at spotting that stuff than I am. It was actually quite interesting to read the stories one after the other for the first time and to discover the connections between them. Regret seems to be a big theme here, the difficulties of familial relationships, and there’s also a kind of yearning that whistles through a lot of the stories.

BGB: Many of the stories in Dead Boys focus on down-on-their-luck types that have fallen through the cracks of society. What made the collection compelling for me was that these characters seemed to have arrived at their current condition through a tough break (or two). The implication seems to be that these circumstances could happen to any of us. The stories are also somehow optimistic, i.e. their situations may not be entirely hopeless - with the right luck, things might turn around for many of these characters. In your writing, how do you find that fine line between the “down on their luck” and the irredeemable?

RL: I’ve often been one paycheck or one wrong turn away from disaster, so maybe that’s where the sense of precariousness in the stories comes from. That said, I also believe that many people in dire straits are one stroke of good luck, one good decision or one epiphany away from flipping things around. “Irredeemable” is a pretty loaded word, but a truly irredeemable character wouldn’t be interesting to me. Where’s the tension if the die has already been cast? I suppose you could chart the sad arc of such a character, but that would be like watching someone jump off a building. Some of my characters may end up dead or wounded, but if they go down, they go down fighting.

Tomorrow: Part 2

If you’re just tuning in, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our interview with Dara Horn. And now,the thrilling conclusion:

BGB: The historical fiction parts of The World to Come focus on the famous painter Marc Chagall and the comparatively unknown Yiddish author Der Nister who were contemporaries in Imperial Russia. The men present almost perfect contrasts of one another. Surprisingly, I found myself drawn more to the almost hopelessly doomed Der Nister than Chagall. What drew you to use Der Nister as a central character in your novel and can you tell us a little bit about his work?

DH: Der Nister means “The Hidden One”; it was the pen name of the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitsh. I was first introduced to his work during graduate school, where I discovered his short stories and wrote about several of them for my doctoral dissertation. They are completely, brilliantly insane, so much so that merely attempting to summarize them is nearly impossible; their plot structure is nothing short of demented, though extremely careful reading reveals their intricate and purposeful design. What fascinated me about them was what they revealed about my own (and most readers’) expectations for a story. We really do demand that a story have an ending, no matter how sophisticated or “postmodern” we think we are as readers. And not only do we demand an ending, but we specifically demand a redemptive ending—maybe not a happy ending or even an uplifting one, but one that somehow provides us with a sense of completion, of restitution, of the tools for repairing what has been broken in the characters’ lives or in our own. For a long time in Jewish culture there was a belief that Jewish life could be sustained on what was called a “paper bridge,” that texts and stories alone were sufficient to ensure the survival of a community from one generation to the next. Der Nister was one of the brilliant people who recognized that that was a delusional fantasy. His own life unfortunately proved him right. After the second world war, Stalin decided to destroy Jewish culture in the Soviet Union by murdering Jewish writers and artists; Der Nister died in a gulag in 1950. Nor did his stories endure; during his lifetime, Soviet censorship forced him to change his style of writing to a more conventional one, and then his last novel’s manuscript was lost forever, or perhaps never written. And of course few people have heard of him today.

Der Nister was a roommate of Chagall’s in faculty housing in a Soviet Jewish orphanage that was built after the 1919 pogroms (a series of pogroms in which over a hundred thousand people were murdered, enough people to necessitate the construction of new orphanages). Both Chagall and Der Nister had been tremendously acclaimed as young men, but what fascinated me was how their fates diverged in a way that had no relation whatsoever to their levels of talent. Chagall lived to be 97 and died as a worldwide household name, and Der Nister died in a Soviet prison camp with most of his work censored out of existence. To me this revealed another assumption that I (and probably most people) had unconsciously believed: that what lasts is what’s best, that talent is always recognized at the end of the day somehow, and that what survives the ravages of time is what deserved to be celebrated, while what didn’t survive deserved to be forgotten. It’s simply not true. I admire Chagall’s immense talent, of course, and I am in no way suggesting that his work does not deserve the recognition it has earned. But there is a certain irony in how his work is now often regarded as a kind of kitschy representation of a “lost world”, when his own imagination is precisely what was NOT lost, while so many other imaginations were—and even foresaw that they would be.

BGB: The mother in the present day scenes of The World to Come is a famous author of children’s stories. Her writing method entails translating old Yiddish stories and passing them off as her own. As a scholar of Yiddish literature, you have access to a wealth of primary material that can be read by an ever diminishing number of people. Have you ever considered translating Yiddish works for mass consumption (with attribution of course)?

DH: Yes, I have, in a sense. I was actually recently commissioned to edit an anthology of previously untranslated Yiddish stories, though the project is in its infancy at this point (and these kinds of projects have a high infant mortality rate, so no promises). I have never tried my hand as a translator, though, and there is a whole art to that in which I wouldn’t be able to claim any expertise. There have recently been a number of new translations of previously untranslated Yiddish works published by The New Yiddish Library (Yale), among others. When I first started writing this novel, there were a few works that I referenced in it that you couldn’t find in English; by the time it was published, a few new anthologies had made pretty much everything I referenced available in English. The problem, after translation, is finding ways of introducing these works to audiences that have never heard of them, and preparing them for the fact that what they will find bears no resemblance to Fiddler on the Roof. (Don’t get me started on Fiddler on the Roof.)

What I have tried to do, through my writing and also through my teaching (I have taught college courses in Hebrew and Yiddish literature), is to introduce new audiences to the variety and depth of this literature, and I’ve been really amazed by the response. I can’t tell you how many readers have told me that they’ve finished the novel and have begun reading Yiddish literature in translation, using my list of sources as their starting point. Any way that people can become excited about this literature seems wonderful to me. I recently signed a film contract for this novel. If Der Nister ends up being a main character in a Hollywood movie, then I think we can safely say that awareness of Yiddish literature has risen from the grave.

BGB: An excerpt from your novel in progress was included in the Granta Best Young American Novelists issue. As a native of New Orleans, I was thrilled to see that the novel takes place, at least in part, in my home town during the Civil War. The location and time period seem to be a departure from your previous work, and it appears to also be a spy novel. What can you tell us about the upcoming novel and how you arrived at this location/era/genre?

DH: My next novel is about a Jewish Civil War assassin. He’s a soldier in the Union army, and his commanders find out that he has relatives in New Orleans, including a cousin who’s a Confederate spy involved in a plot to kill Lincoln, so they send him down to assassinate his own cousin. From there, things for our hero only become much, much worse.

It may seem like a departure from my previous books on the surface, and in many ways it is, but I’ve always been interested in aspects of Jewish history that are rarely examined. Most explorations of American Jewish history start in the early 1900s, when the largest wave of Jewish immigrants arrived. But I first thought of this idea while on a book tour a few years ago in New Orleans. I was there to speak at their Jewish community center, and I was wandering around the neighborhood when I came upon a Jewish cemetery there. Many of the graves were from the early 1800s, and when I began reading more about it, I was surprised by how much material I found about Jewish communities on both sides of the Civil War. It’s very common today for Americans to have family in different parts of the country, but in the nineteenth century it wasn’t so common– except among American Jews, who often had relatives who had settled in different places and with whom they maintained close ties. I was interested in the ways that choices about what home is can define who we are. You are right that it’s a spy novel, but it’s really a story about loyalty, about how we decide who deserves our devotion, and why.

Many thanks to Dara Horn for taking the time to chat with us. Now go read her books!

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 2

Yesterday we presented Part 1 of our interview with one of America’s Best Young Novelists, Dara Horn. Part 2 of the interview continues below.

BGB: You appear in a recent article in the New York Times about the Jewish Book Network, an organization that supports Jewish authors by coordinating book events nationally with Jewish Community Centers and other organizations. The results seem to be fairly impressive - the article names other authors who have participated in the network, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krausse, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, etc. How did you get involved with the group? Did you have to go through one of the “star search” style interviews described in the article? And finally, do you think that your experience with the Network was a big boost to your career when you were starting out?

DH: I was very lucky in that my first book was published in 2002, about a year or two before the Jewish Book Network began their auditioning system, so I was spared the trauma of having to pitch my book to an audience of hundreds of bookfair people in two minutes or less. At the time, the director of the program apparently just read my book and liked it, and I was invited to a Jewish Book Network lunch during BookExpo America (the annual book industry convention, which in 2002 happened to be held in New York, where I live) at which I basically ended up doing an audition—pitching the book to representatives of Jewish book fairs from around the country—but in a more one-on-one
kind of way. I think publishers have recognized what a resource this is for promoting books of Jewish interest, and as a result the Jewish Book Network had to set up the audition process because so many authors were interested in getting involved.

In my experience, the Jewish book fairs have been a wonderful way to build an audience for a new writer’s work. For Jewish communities in cities outside the northeast, these fairs are very important communal events, and they can draw pretty big audiences even for writers who aren’t so well known. People come to the fairs because of the community and to be involved in Jewish culture (particularly in parts of the country where such opportunities are rare), even if they haven’t previously heard of the author. For an author who hasn’t been on Oprah, having 25 people show up at a bookstore reading in St. Louis is usually an amazing turnout, but at the last Jewish book fair I spoke at in St. Louis, about two hundred people came. They do a remarkable job of building an audience.

It’s easy to be snobby about the Jewish book fairs, since not everyone in the audience is there solely out of a love of literature. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Jewish book fair where at least one person didn’t ask me whether I was married and whether I wanted to meet their son/grandson/nephew/cousin’s-college-roommate’s-dogwalker. Despite all the crazies who tend to show up at bookstore readings (like the reader in Boston who presented me with a handmade collage with my name pasted across dozens of newspaper clippings about local murders), it must be said that no one at Barnes and Noble has ever tried to marry me off. But in an era where everyone is always complaining about how hard it is to sell books, I have nothing but gratitude for how the Jewish Book Network introduced my work to readers. And it is really a gift for a writer to be able to meet so many readers in person who have read and enjoyed her work.

BGB: Let’s talk about your most recent book. The World to Come is a wonderful novel that combines elements of the art heist genre, a bit of historical fiction, and a profound spiritual element. Let’s start with that last bit. The book presents a very comforting
idea - our unborn children are taught in heaven about our world by their own ancestors. I love this idea of “the world to come” as somewhat circular. How did you come up with this concept?

DH: It originated with a story in the Talmud about what happens to a child before he is born. In the story, we are told that the child spends the pregnancy being taught all of the secrets of the Torah—by which is meant not merely the five books of Moses, but all of the secrets of an ethical way of life. Just before the child’s birth, an angel slaps the child across the face (which is the reason why we all have dents below our noses), causing him to forget all of the things he has learned, and then, once he is born, he is forced the spend the rest of his life trying to remember. There is something terribly haunting about this story’s suggestion that when we learn new things, we are in fact remembering them from before we were born rather than learning them new. This implies a further question: from whom did we learn them?

In developing the supernatural “world to come” as it appears in the book, I answered this question by using another strand of Jewish tradition, the idea that one’s deceased ancestors bear the responsibility of being “gute beters” or “good requesters”—that is, that they are responsible for interceding with God on behalf of their descendants. This is a very old Jewish idea that is built into the structure of Jewish prayer, which repeatedly invokes the patriarchs and other ancestors by name, as well as the promises God made to these ancestors, when asking God to intervene in the present world. In the novel, I took these two traditional ideas and combined them, so that those who haven’t yet been born are taught all of these secrets by their own ancestors.

This may seem like pure fantasy, but I believe that the ideas behind both of these stories are reflected in the reality of genetic inheritance. A person at birth is exclusively made of spare parts from people who lived before him, but despite the fact that this is all that we are, we cannot access it or “remember” those who made us who we are. But the way I have dramatized this—which you refer to as “comforting”—is in fact much more than a metaphor for genetics, because it suggests that what we might rationally think of as genetic codes are in fact real people that we (or our parents) have known, and that therefore there is a way for such people to continue living.

I am interested in the points in human experience where religion, instead of being a metaphor, becomes a genuine description of life as we live it. No matter how rational or secular we become, we remain unable to answer two fundamental questions: when a person is born, where did he come from? And when a person dies, where did he go? Being present at a childbirth or a death makes it very difficult to be satisfied with a merely physical explanation of how a person (rather than merely a body) comes into our world or leaves it. I think it is possible to imagine that “the world to come” is just what the phrase suggests—that whether or not one chooses to believe in a supernatural world beyond our own, our reward or punishment for our acts in life is also embodied in the impression that those acts will leave on our own world in the future—that is, on the world, to come.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion in Part 3…

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 3

Dara Horn is the author of two novels. Her first novel In the Image won the National Jewish Book Award, and the Reform Judaism Award for Jewish Fiction. Her second novel, The World to Come also won the National Jewish Book Award and was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. I liked it an awful lot myself. Horn was also named one of the Best Young American Novelists by Granta. In addition to all of that, she also holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University where she studied Yiddish and Hebrew literature. She’s also a mother of two.

I was thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed by Baby Got Books, which shows up in some of my rambling early questions. Don’t worry, I eventually get a hold of myself. Below is Part 1 of our conversation that spanned several weeks via e-mail. Parts 2 and 3 will follow.

Baby Got Books: You were recently named to Granta’s list of Best Young American Novelists. How did you find out? Has being named to he list become a life/career changing event? Who of your fellow honorees are you most excited to join? Who are your contemporaries that should have made the list with you?

Dara Horn: I found this out through a phone call in December, which was preceded by an email from a Granta editor requesting my number in order to ask me a “rather delicate” question. I have the pessimist’s habit of always expecting the worst, so my immediate assumption was that I was somehow about to be sued. (My last novel was about Chagall, and I had had a similar fear when Chagall’s granddaughter called the publisher for a copy of the book. Fortunately she liked it.) I was quite amazed to hear the news, though it turned out that the “delicate” part of the question was that the magazine wanted to include never-before-published fiction from everyone selected… and needed everyone’s submissions in three weeks! I’ve never written a short story, so I didn’t have anything lying around to hand in other than the novel I’m currently working on. I had never published anything from a work-in-progress before, and it’s actually been very exciting to hear responses from readers about it.

The list of writers in the Granta issue is pretty remarkable, as is the issue itself. I don’t read a ton of contemporary fiction, so the fact that I was familiar with a fair number of them was enough to impress me. One of my favorite things about the other names on the list, though, is that one of them– Akhil Sharma– lives downstairs from me in my apartment building. Apparently it’s a very small literary world. As for authors I might have liked to see included, I’ll put in a plug here for Jon Papernik, whose The Ascent of Eli Israel I found fascinating, and for T Cooper, whose surprisingly strange Lipshitz Six was even better in the thinking-about-it-afterwards than it was in the reading itself.

The Granta selection was a bit of a career-changing event for me in that most of the honors my novels had received previously had been from Jewish literary sources, so this has given my work some new attention. As for “life-changing event,” though, I’m afraid the Granta people really couldn’t compete, because I gave birth to my second child a few weeks after the issue came out.

BGB: You’ve never written a short story! I’ve read that you wrote your first novel while in the middle of pursuing a doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew comparative literature at Harvard. How did you decide to write a novel in the middle of what was surely a rigorous course of study? Having never written a short story how did you find the confidence to crank out a novel? How did you go about getting it published?

DH: No, I’ve never written a short story. That’s mainly because I never took a fiction-writing course after middle school. In the introduction to the Granta issue, the writer Elif Batuman (who happens to be my childhood best friend) is quoted as saying that the short story form is played out in American literature and is merely kept alive artificially through fiction-writing courses. I do agree with that. I also think that writing a short story and writing a novel are very different skills.

Being a writer isn’t so much a career as it is a disease, like finding out you have asthma at the age of six. After you’ve diagnosed it, you just have to find a way to work your life around it. I was always looking for ways to support myself that would accommodate this habit. When I was a college senior, I won a scholarship to spend the year after graduation at Cambridge University in England. It was the kind of set-up no one could turn down—tuition to study “anything at all,” a “scholarship suite” in an 18th century house, and a stipend big enough to pay for all the takeout Indian food one could possibly need. It should have been a dream come true, except that I got engaged a few months before graduation, and my fiancé had a job in America and couldn’t join me. I was therefore doomed to spend the year alone, crying into pints of Guinness in smoke-filled pubs packed with crazed soccer hooligans. I soon realized that I don’t like Guinness, smoke-filled pubs, or crazed soccer hooligans. When you spend a year in England avoiding these things, you have a lot of time on your hands. So even though I had begun my graduate work, I found that I still had plenty of time to write. I had never planned to write a novel, since I had never written any fiction at all before I started writing that book. I had always thought I would be a journalist, and to that end I kept a notebook where I would write down ideas for articles and essays. At some point I read straight through these ideas and realized that many of them were strangely related to each other, because of certain preoccupations I had at the time when I had written them. And I saw how they would make more sense as part of a novel. I was quite bored that year, and I really wrote it to entertain myself. The idea of publishing it was more of a dream than anything else.

The story of how I got the book published also involves something inane that happened in England. In college, I wrote a lot of magazine articles, and at one point a publisher contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in expanding an article I had written into a nonfiction book. I was then able to find an agent without much agony, since I already had a publisher lined up. The problem was that I ultimately decided not to write that book. Two years later, I was writing the novel in England, and my masters program in Hebrew literature hosted the Israeli author Meir Shalev for a lecture and dinner. During the dinner, Shalev sat at the center of the long table, and I sat on the end. I didn’t get to speak to Shalev at all, but instead I spoke to the person seated across from me: Shalev’s British publicist. At some point I mentioned that I had been writing a novel and that I had had a contact with an agent years before, but that he would never remember me now, so it seemed quite unrealistic to me to try to get it published that way. The publicist told me, “Of course he’ll remember you. It’s his job to remember people like you.” The next day I mailed the novel to this agent. He called me when he received it, agreed to represent me, and sold it to W.W. Norton.

I did write my second novel while getting a doctorate at Harvard, where graduate students generally drink a lot less beer. But the nice thing about a doctorate is that no one ever expects you to finish it. In academia, procrastination is a way of life, and I used this to my advantage. Whenever the dissertation became too frustrating, I’d procrastinate by writing the novel, and whenever the novel became too frustrating, I’d procrastinate by writing the dissertation. As a result I completed both without ever feeling like I was doing real work.

BGB: I agree to a point that modern short stories can often come across as annoyingly didactic, writer-ly exercises. There is also a sense that short story writing is akin to the literary minor leagues. Some of your fellow Granta “best young novelists” had not actually written a a novel and were honored based upon the strength of their short stories. The idea being, I suppose, that they are headed for the major leagues. I’m not sure I agree with that thought process. However, there are some great writers that are doing wonderful things with short stories. Can you not imagine that there will come a time when you would want to tell a story that would be perfectly captured in a short story or novella form?

DH: Well, I recently wrote an extremely short story (three paragraphs) on a cocktail napkin, for Esquire magazine’s “Napkin Fiction Project.” I assure you it was quite “minor league.” But the short story and novella forms are far from “minor league” in the literatures I study, Yiddish and Hebrew; the great modern masterworks in both those languages are all stories and novellas, not novels. So I’m not against the concept of short stories. I just don’t have any reason to think that I know how to write them. What motivates me in writing novels is developing characters and following the plot to see what happens next, since I don’t plan the books in advance. It’s my impression that one has to have some slight preconception of where one is going in order to write something shorter, though I may well be wrong about that. I’ve also grown very accustomed to writing novels; I like creating characters that I can live with for a long time and get to know really well, since you generally have to spend a few years with these people when you’re writing a book. It’s therefore hard for me to imagine doing what I would want to do with less time and space. But there was a time when I would have said that I had no idea how to write fiction at all, so why not?

Come back tomorrow for Part 2!

Interview Part 2

Interview Part 3 

And now, the thrilling conclusion of my interview with Steven Hall. If you missed them, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2.

BGB: Earlier, you mentioned that you are hard at work on your next novel. What can you tell us about that? Other than attempting to carry less of the pieces around in your head, is the process of writing this new novel different from Raw Shark?

SH: It’s very early stages; I’m still very much figuring things out. That’s a fun place to be after all the fact-checking at the end of Raw Shark. Now I can go back to experimenting big ways - putting in whole characters, ideas and subplots and seeing how they fit, whole new directions even. The Raw Shark Texts is still talking up a lot of my time too, that story probably won’t be all-the-way finished for a few more years.

I’m also focusing on my next big ambition, which is to persuade someone at the BBC to let me write and episode of Doctor Who! In fact, if anyone from the BBC is reading this, do give me a shout. Seriously. Please. I have my own dalek and everything.

BGB: So there you were with one month’s rent left in the bank when you sold Raw Shark. How did you get from there to owning your own dalek? Where does one find a dalek? Does it talk?

SH: Ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted my own dalek. I always cheered for the daleks (I was one of those children who cheered for the bad guys, especially if they were monsters). Anyway, I’d sometimes keep my spirits up when I was writing Raw Shark by imagining different, outrageous and very cool things I could buy myself if the best case scenario actually happened – if I sold the novel and got a decent advance. A dinosaur egg and a Samurai sword were also on the list, but in the end, it was always going to be a dalek. My dalek came from the good people at www.thisplanetearth.co.uk Yeah it talks. It says lots of different things. Mostly about killing.

BGB: You mentioned to me earlier in an e-mail that you’ve been working on some updates that will be in UK version of the paperback. When will the US paperback hit the shelves, and will you be setting out on another stateside book tour to support the paperback? We’d love to get another crack at welcoming you to Atlanta.

SH: Thank you! I tried really hard to get down to see you folks as part of the last tour. You spoke to Jamie Byng about sorting something out too, didn’t you? I told my US publishers I’d do whatever to fit it in, but they already had me booked up pretty solid and I had events directly before and after my US tour so there was no way of extending my visit. Next time I’m over, I’ll make sure I can stop by.

That said, I’m not sure when I’ll next be in the States. The US Raw Shark paperback isn’t going to be out until next year and, as far as I know, there isn’t a paperback tour planned. My publishers are going easy on me tour-wise at the moment, I think because they want me to write another book!

BGB: Last Question: My journalist friends advised me to end the interview with a “bar question” - a question that I’d ask you over a pint. So have a few before answering this one.

You’ve sold the movie rights to Raw Shark already, and there is a famous story about Nicole Kidman calling you to see if you’d be willing to change your character Eric Sanderson into a woman so that she could play the part. You weren’t. Surely you’ve already assembled your dream cast for the movie in your mind. Who do you imagine playing the roles of your characters on the screen?

SH: I’m quite hung-over at the moment, does that count? You know, I really don’t have any actors in mind for the Raw Shark film. No one believes me when I say this, but it’s true. I try not to think about it because I know I’d start with the actors, then I’d be thinking about scenes, then I’d end up writing the script and shooting the whole thing in my head. I really don’t want to go down that road, because ultimately I can never 100% have that film, so it’s better for me not to even start thinking about it.

I want to let the people I gave the film rights to go away and make it how they want to make it. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come back with and hopefully I can enjoy it as someone else’s work based on what I did. I think that would be the best thing at this stage. That’s not to say I wouldn’t love to get more involved in film in the future though…

That’s it. Even as I was wrapping up the interview, I had another dozen questions swirling around my head. That’s the beauty of this book. Months after reading it, I’m still thinking about it. Be warned: It begs to be talked about. So make sure to get a Raw Shark Reading Buddy™ if you’re just setting out to read it.

Many thanks to Steven Hall who has been so wonderfully so generous with his time. Here are some additional Raw Shark Texts links that you might want to check out:

• Steven Hall’s MySpace
• Raw Shark Text Forums
• Raw Shark wiki
• Large Hearted Boy’s Book Notes with Steven Hall
• My review of The Raw Shark Texts
• Raw Shark “Prosecast”
• BGB’s Weezie reports from the author’s reading in San Francisco
• Interview with the author on YouTube

We continue on with our interview with Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts. If you missed it, read Part 1 here.

BGB: A San Francisco Chronicle review/interview says that you’ve “engineered three complete readings of the book and worked very hard with [your] editor to make each function on plot and character levels”. It goes on to mention that you provided your editors with a supplemental 200 pages of notes to ensure that your text was faithful to each of the readings. How did you keep three separate readings of the novel clear in your mind while writing and revising the text? Did you have a difficult time preventing one possible reading from stepping on the proverbial toes of an alternate reading?

SH: This was one of the reasons Raw Shark took so long to write. I wanted the book to be open to different readings and, even more than that, I wanted the nature of the book itself to be up for grabs. I wondered if I could write a book that one person could pick up and see as a literary novel on the nature of grief, identity and memory, or on books, language and storytelling but that the next person would read as a genre adventure thriller, or romance, sci-fi or horror story. Could one book do all those things? So yeah, it was a big balancing act.

Keeping everything up in the air as I wrote didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. It’s only afterwards, when I think back to it that I realise just how much stuff I was carrying around in my head. I didn’t really make any notes before Raw Shark but for the next one I’m already into pages of spider diagrams and flow charts to work out exactly what goes where and how. After the last year, my brain doesn’t seem to have as much space in it as it did.

BGB: I’m interested in finding out whether you’re willing to shed some light on some of your more offbeat characters. The first character I’d like to ask about is the sinister Mycroft Ward. In just about every review that I’ve read that mentions the character, a reference is made that the name is very similar to a certain popular computer word processing program. That interpretation would seem to be in keeping with some of the themes of the novel. Then, in an essay that Joyce Carol Oates wrote about “amnesia lit” (in which she called your novel “ingratiatingly literary”) she says, “Hall would seem to be alluding to Mycroft Holmes, the elder, obese genius-brother of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.” That assumption would also seem to be in keeping with the novel’s themes. While writing, did you have one or both of these ideas in mind (others?)?

SH: This is where I start having to be very careful. I made a promise to myself very early on not to say too much about my readings of the book, because I wanted to make it as open as possible for readers to find whatever they find. But I think I can say that yes, both interpretations were intentional (and I’m keeping whether there are others to myself!). Like Mycroft’s name, most of the book is set up to do two or three jobs at once and hopefully what you see depends on where you’re looking from.

I should go on the record and say that one of the things I’m most pleased with about Mycoft is that, like Gavin, he never shows up personally in the story. The main characters never have a direct confrontation with him. There’s a couple of big reason for this, both of which can go some way to unlocking different readings of the book. Some critics saw his no-show as some sort of absent-minded plot hole – I have to say made me spit out my coffee in surprise. When you’ve spent a day counting every instance of the word ‘blue’ in a book for stupidly complicated multi-plot reasons, it’s quite something to read that you must have forgotten to include your main villain!

BGB: The second character that I’d like to ask about is Ian the cat. Ian provides comic relief in the novel, and the descriptions of his expressions are some of my favorite pieces of writing in the book - if you don’t mind my saying so. In my reading of the book, Ian seems to also serve the role of Eric Sanderson’s conscious or “conscious mind” - as though Ian was Eric looking at himself from outside of himself. The unexplained loss of the other cat, Gavin, also seems to mirror the loss of Clio. What can you tell me about the cats? And do you have a cat that served as a model for Ian’s expressions?

SH: Thank you. That’s a nice reading. I couldn’t/shouldn’t comment further

Ian certainly has a lot of jobs to do, maybe even more than the shark. He’s central in a lot of ways. As you say he works as comic relief and also to ground the book in some sort of reality. But he’s a slippery customer too. If you look carefully you’ll see that he does have a habit of walking through closed doors… There’s more to Ian than meets the eyes and more on him still to come.

Oh yeah, I grew up with huge grumpy tomcats so I’ve always had a love for that sort of feline bad attitude. I don’t have a cat at the moment because we live in an apartment but my folks do have a cat called Dave. He’s quite a piece of work.

BGB: Thanks for the insights on the characters. I won’t push my luck by asking you to reveal more…

I came across this statement in a review of the book in Paste Magazine: “Hall is clearly having the time of his life with this book. He’s jazzed about the concepts of memory and death and self that he’s exploring, and he carries us in a headlong rush to test the very edge of what a novel actually is.” Would you describe the process of writing this book as “having the time of your life” and being “jazzed”? On your MySpace page you recount the story of writing a complete novel prior to this one that you attempted to publish, but that you ultimately scrapped. You mention that the book served the purpose of teaching you how to write a novel. How did the writing experiences differ between the two novels? And will we ever see that first novel?

SH: Would I describe writing Raw Shark as ‘having the time of my life’? You know, that’s such a tricky question. On the one hand, it was a lot of hard work - as any writer will tell you, writing novel is a tiring, scary, stressful, frustrating process. On top of that Raw Shark is also a pretty complex book and there were some specific challenges associated with that that we’ve already chatted about. There was also the small problem of me rapidly running out of cash as I tried to finish the book. I had just one month’s rent left (from a maxed-out credit card) when I sold Raw Shark Texts, so there were a lot of sleepless am-I-going-to-get-evicted nights. But, on the other hand, I really was so excited about what I was doing, the concepts I was playing around with and the things I was trying to achieve. I loved Raw Shark and I still do, I’m proud of it. Hmmm. Worryingly I seem to talk about it as if it’s a child. I guess in a way it is.

That first novel was ambitious and exciting to write in its own way. Problem was that I didn’t really know what I was doing and the book didn’t work out. No, no one will be seeing that book although there’s a chance a character or two will crop up somewhere else in the future.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3.

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 3 

If you’ve visited our blog much over the last year, you know that we are huge fans of Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts. Our first contact with the author began many months ago when I (wrongly) accused him of belittling the blogging community. He responded the very next day on the Powell’s blog and extended a generous olive branch, which he made good on. In May, BGB West Coast correspondent Weezie reported on Hall’s reading in San Francisco. We’ve pointed to many of the book’s reviews, reported on the near theft of a special delivery of the book by Cracky, and have otherwise brought up the book at every available pretext. Despite our stalker-ish antics, Hall agreed to let me interview him over the last few weeks via the safety of e-mail and an ocean between us. Here’s Part 1 of the interview:

BGB: Your MySpace page says that after your US book tour you were off to the Hay-on-Wye Book Book Festival and then to to Australia. The Hay-on-Wye Fest sounds like a magical literary Shangri-La from the accounts in The Guardian and various blogs. Can you tell us a bit about your travels? Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think that things would work out this way - write a novel and see the world?

SH: I had to head off to Australia, so I was at Hay at the very beginning of the festival, on the first Friday. Most people arrive at the weekend but it was still really great and far from empty. It’s a wonderful place deep in the British countryside where mobile phones don’t really work, every other building is a bookshop and great cultural icons of our times queue with everyone else at the ice cream van. So yeah, a literary Shangri-La for sure.

Australia was really great. The Sydney Writers Festival was wonderful and the people there are so friendly, and so funny. I loved it. They have fruit bats in the botanical gardens in Sydney. I came home with about four pictures of the opera house and maybe a hundred blurred shots of fruit bats. I was impressed beyond all reason by the fruit bats. Did I ever think it would work out this way? No, not at all. It isn’t something you can plan for! I wrote Raw Shark with the hope that I might be able to get the book out through a smallish cult publisher and maybe 50 people or so would read it. That’s a realistic ambition when you’re writing a book, I think. The last year or so has been so far beyond anything I could have imagined.

BGB: Some of the early articles about your book were not about the book at all but focused rather on some of the marketing behind the book. It seemed as though it was considered somehow unseemly for an author to be working on the marketing campaign of his own book. The New York Times ran a positive toned article about the marketing of your book, but then had what I’ve called “the laziest possible review” of the actual book. What did you make of this interest in the marketing aspects of your novel and what impacts do you think it had (if any) reviews? Do you think that you’ll take a similar approach with your next novel?

SH: I’m really interested in the way programmes like Lost and Skins (where viewers created some of the characters online) are promoted now. Actually, it’s not really fair to call it ‘promotion’ in the traditional sense, it’s more about involving the viewer in the creative process, letting them role their sleeves up and dig into the mythology for themselves rather than just staring at a screen for one hour a week. It’s about making the viewer active. That interactivity is exciting to me and I think it’s something that books already have as part of their DNA, reading being a more active process than watching. I wanted to push that aspect of books with Raw Shark, try to make something where the reader would take a very active role in deciphering the story. It seemed logical to extend that beyond the covers of the book.

It’s never been about selling lots of books for me - it was always about finding new ways to tell a story and look at the how a story can exist and evolve in the world we live in today. Some of the things I wanted to do got picked up by the marketing people and found a budget, others I’ve been happily doing myself – like printing off bonus, hidden pages on the backs of envelopes, that sort of thing. Nobody may ever find or notice some of the things I’m doing, but then that’s part of Raw Shark too. The idea of lost and missing things.

You’re right, there has been a lot of coverage of the marketing. Sometimes, when there’s a lot of noise around what you’re doing, it feels like you’re starting from -10 in the eyes of some people rather than zero. There seems to be a lot of cynicism around the marketing of books at the moment. Until recently book marketing has been very old-fashioned compared to TV, films and games. That’s changing now, so maybe there’s a friction there. Perhaps it’s also because there are concerns that the big corporate publishing houses are increasingly controlled by the money managers rather than editors. Who knows? I’m lucky to have a small independent with a great list controlling my world rights. Hopefully, now the noise has died down a little, people can just engage with the story.

The beyond-the-cover elements I have planned for the second novel are on a much larger scale, although I’ve got a feeling that far fewer of them will fall under the marketing banner this time.

BGB: Paul Auster is frequently cited as one of your literary influences, and there is a specific reference to Paul Auster in the novel - your character Eric Sanderson finishes an Auster novel while vacationing in Greece. When did you realize that your novel and Auster’s latest, Travels in the Scriptorium, would begin with essentially the same setup - man wakes up in room with no recollection of who he is or how he got there? Was it alarming knowing that your first novel would inevitably be compared to Auster’s?

SH: I saw the opening to Travels in the Scriptorium the morning after The Raw Shark Texts launch in London. I read the first page in a bookshop when my girlfriend and I were out exploring and trying to shake our hangovers. That was a pretty odd moment (and the hangover really didn’t help). I remember feeling a little like an Auster character, coming up against one of his strange, disturbing coincidences.

If anyone compares me to Auster then that’s hugely flattering. It’s not alarming, The New York Trilogy is a work of genius. Being mentioned in the same sentence in any context is a great result!

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the interview tomorrow.

Interview Part 2

Interview Part 3