Tottenville Review

Claire Messud’s brilliant new novel, The Woman Upstairs, has attracted controversy over the concern that its narrator, schoolteacher and frustrated artist Nora Eldridge, is not “nice.” There are all sorts of things wrong with this complaint, but one of the more interesting is that one of the things troubling Nora is the social expectation that women be nice. Another thing troubling Nora is  the Fun House, which is her term for America’s media culture, its obsession with celebrity and appearances. She thinks she has found a way to realize her dreams and escape from the Fun House when she becomes entangled with a student’s parents, the Shadids—Skandar, a Lebanese professor trotted out on television to give his thoughts on the rolling tragedies of the first decade of the 21^st century and, even more crucially, Sirena, an artist who represents everything that Nora thinks she could or should be. Nora finds that it’s not so easy to tell the difference between a longing to create great art and a longing to achieve—or at least be close to—celebrity and glamour. In other words, it’s not so easy to tell the difference between what’s inside the Fun House from what’s outside. Continue reading "Being Nice is Tiring: An Interview with Claire Messud"…

I met Jessica Soffer at the end of the summer of 2007, during our first day of class at Hunter College’s MFA program. All of us were nervous. It was brutally hot outside and brutally cold in our air-conditioned room. We became close almost immediately, on a walk around SoHo—I think I was looking for a dress to wear to a wedding, and I don’t think I was successful—and since then she has become an important friend, a confidante, a writing partner, an associate, a mind-reader. Jessica Soffer is generous with her time and her brain. Jessica Soffer enjoys laughing at jokes. When she laughs at your jokes you feel brilliant. Jessica Soffer just got a puppy [see below]. Jessica Soffer makes delicious tea. Jessica Soffer puts together a killer guest bed.  Jessica Soffer has nicknames: Jess to most of the world, an assortment of terms of endearment to her boyfriend, funny affectionate epithets to her college friends, Jessie to me. Jessica Soffer just published her first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, and she granted me an e-mail interview, which we completed over the course of a month, in between all the other e-mails we send each other on a daily basis.

 –Liz Moore

INTERVIEWER

In your novel you write about food with a sense of nostalgia and warmth and fondness. It seems like the antidote to suffering. Do you have your own fond, familial memories of food? If so, what are they?

 JESSICA SOFFER

I come from a long line of people who believe in the curative powers of food. My father was born in Baghdad, Iraq in the 1920s and his mother was a healer. She believed in eating for one’s well-being, to strengthen and fortify and enrich the body by eating particular things. Iraqi Jews of that time also believed in eating by color: yellow fruits and vegetables for happiness, rose petals for love, shunning black and unlucky foods, such as the skin of eggplants. When my father came to the United States, he was forced to abandon his family, his Jewish faith, his national pride, and so food and the flavors of his childhood were the way he reestablished a home in New York, by replicating his mother’s recipes.

Growing up, the smell of his cooking is my strongest memory: of cumin and cardamom and cloves. There was nothing processed in our home: no sandwich meats or soda or chips or, heaven forbid, gummy fruit snacks. There was no cough syrup during cold season. There was ginger and garlic and terribly smelly teas. Notions of how to properly nourish the body were innate to him: drinking room temperature liquids to avoid shocking the system, well-spiced stews to warm the limbs, and lots of citrus to cleanse were things that he did intuitively, without fanfare or explanation—and how I learned to eat, and live. In a way, the two are inextricable: we eat in order to live. It’s the most obvious thing in the world. And yet, I think that a childhood like mine, with such emphasis placed on eating for one’s well-being is likely to turn out a person particularly attuned to that connection—and of food generally, which I am.

  INTERVIEWER

I love this answer. I also see so much of that in you: your first question, every time I walk into your apartment, is, “What can I get you? Tea?” (I’ll overlook the part about how you then ask me if I want hemp milk in it, the thought of which chills me to my bones.) I think food, offerings of food and drink, are such a beautiful part of friendship. I think I have told you about how weirdly sentimental I get when people split fruit with me—like, “here, want half of this orange?”—because it’s such a primitive gesture and triggers some uncanny ancestral memory in my cerebrum, and it also speaks to the fundamental good of human beings. We humans have been splitting fruit with each other for millennia. I know some animals do it too, but we split fruit with people outside our family, or herd. This is not a question yet. I guess my question is, do you feel that way too? Do you offer food as a gesture of something?

JESSICA SOFFER

I have three things to say to that. First, asking about the tea has to do with you. How I want you to stay a while, forever, always. And tea is a good start. I keep ice cream in the freezer because I know how you prefer it not only to hemp milk, but to world peace, puppies and winning the lottery. Second, asking that question has to do with my childhood. My mother is not much of a cook but she is a professional at making people feel at home: sitting them down on the couch with a good book, tucking their feet into a wool blanket when she’s only just been introduced. My father was a more traditional in his home-making. The Iraqi Jews believed in being generous hosts: dried fruit and nuts for days when any Tom, Dick or Harry dropped in. Third, asking that question has to do with always wanting everyone to feel comfortable in my presence. If you get my name wrong, I will not correct you. I don’t want you to feel weird. It’s not a question of allowing myself to be walked all over—which I won’t allow—but with something that you and I talk about often: empathy. How some writers have it in spades (I’m not assigning judgment to that at the moment): they rely on it, are burdened and motivated by it, and it’s what allows them/compels them to write about people who are not themselves. That is the case with you and me, which means that we can imagine standing at the door awkwardly, not being offered tea. So we ask: tea, ice cream, a soft place to land?

 INTERVIEWER

You’re a nice lady. OK, let’s talk about MFA programs. We met in one. Some of our most important friends came out of one. The roots of Apricots were formed in one. What do you say to people who are considering them? What was pleasant and what was hard about the experience? Do you have deep/complex thoughts about what MFA programs are doing to contemporary writing? Go.

JESSICA SOFFER

I say/would say that it depends on who is asking. For me, two great things came out of our MFA experience: first, I met the people with whom I talk about writing, with whom I sit across a table and write, with whom I avoid writing. That is a gift that keeps on giving. Writing is a solitary act in many ways, and finding the means to make it less so, people to make it less so with, is of the utmost. Second, I learned about living a writer’s life from Colum [McCann] and Peter [Carey] and Nathan [Englander]. They are incredible teachers, and their styles so complementary to one another, but more than that, they are living, breathing, brilliant writers. And seeing how they struggle to balance writing with the rest–with family and self-doubt and teaching and bills and noise, both literal and otherwise–has been invaluable.

The drawback of the MFA for me was that at a certain point ten opinions felt crushing. Too much. There were particular pieces that I simply couldn’t bring to workshop because I was afraid of what would happen–that they might deflate and I’d never be able to resurrect them. Workshop is not a delicate place, but sometimes what the work needs more than anything is a delicate hand.

Here’s the thing: if an MFA buys you time to write, great. And if you can afford that time, great. If it lights the fire under your ass, great. But if the idea of ten opinions make your skin prickle, not great. If it sends you into the deepest, darkest regions of debt–or even if it compromises your creativity because of its financial demands–not great. And so not great if you do not trust your professors and your classmates. An MFA won’t buy you a book deal. Quite simply, it promises exactly nothing. And yet, it can mean everything.

 INTERVIEWER

Aside from meeting the people with whom you talk about writing (as we are doing now…how meta) and avoid writing (as I am doing now….how meta-squared), what do you feel you took from your time at Hunter that you were able to apply directly to the writing of Apricots? These can be writing-related or non-writing-related skills.

JESSICA SOFFER

From Peter [Carey]: everything must be in service of the story. Every line. Every word. Cut one-third (or was it two-thirds?) of everything you write. Be succinct. And eat well. From Colum [McCann]: write from the heart, from a place of fire. Language means a whole lot, but not everything. It is not enough. Write something that matters. Colum is a great bullshit detector. And bullshit has no place in good work. Something that matters is the opposite of bullshit. And drink well. From Nathan [Englander]: writing is a moral act. Write hard. Write in a vacuum. Write something that you don’t believe can be written until you write it. And caffeinate.

 INTERVIEWER

Speaking of learning about writing: can we go back earlier in your life and talk about your earliest experiences with creative writing in school?  For some reason I have been thinking a lot about my very early writing teachers recently: the kindness of certain elementary school teachers who went out of their way to say something encouraging, the awesome toughness of some of them. They gave us writing prompts so inspiring that I am still jealous of their creativity. Whether or not your memories are as positive as mine–what are some early-childhood experiences you had with writing in school?

JESSICA SOFFER

I didn’t go to a school that placed great value on creativity: on math and science and hard work, yes. But art and creativity, no. Definitely no prompts. Lucky you. All that is to say that I didn’t have much opportunity to write in school until late in the game. We did, however, read a lot. And me even more so. I always had my nose in a book. During my freshman year, I took a poetry class and we did little riffs and I remember mine being OK, and feeling validated, though I hadn’t even known it was validation I was lacking. All that reading, I realized, paid off. It had everything to do with my ability to write. From then on (and because writing electives were few and far between) I gravitated towards the teachers that encouraged more creative lines of thinking. I remember writing a story about geometry. Two angles meet a fork in the road etc.

 INTERVIEWER

What are you scared to write? What are you scared to write but can imagine writing someday nonetheless?

JESSICA SOFFER

Will answer tomorrow. On our way to pick up Scout Finch. Oh yeah. It’s happening. Ready to be Auntie Lizzie?

[Whereupon a frenzy of text messages ensued.]

[Whereupon puppy pics were sent.]

JESSICA SOFFER [cont.]

I used to be scared of writing emotion, of sounding melodramatic and false. Now what I’m scared of writing (or not writing) has more to do with craft and career and the big picture than with content. So, I’m scared of writing 300 pages of a novel that go nowhere. I’m scared of doing that again and again. I’m scared of writing something that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t mean anything. Of doing that again and again. I’m scared of writing something that I’m not proud of, and realizing that too late. I’m scared of the dark: that time between work when you have no idea if you can do it again. So many writers that I respect say that it never gets easier. I’m not scared of the challenge in that. I’m scared that one day the challenge might not even be on the table.

 INTERVIEWER

I think the challenge will always be on the table because you will always write. For me, these times are rare, but–when are you most elated while writing? What’s the best feeling you have as a writer?

JESSICA SOFFER

That’s a beautiful question. And particularly hard to answer right now as I wait for the “verdict” on my first novel. It’s a real moment of dread for me and it’s hard to remember the good stuff. But it’s probably important that I do. And when I do, I come up with two instances of elation, as you put it.  The first is when the story takes over. That might happen when I’m at my desk or maybe when I’m sleeping or maybe when I’m talking to you about a particular detail in the text and it dawns on me that I’ve built something and it’s bigger than the parameters I’ve drawn for it. The narrative, the characters, the world I’ve created becomes bigger than myself, than itself. It has a life of its own, and it exists. The other day someone told me that she missed the characters in my novel when she’d finished reading. It was among the most meaningful things anyone has ever said to me, and leads me to the other moment, which happens once the work is done. Writing, I think, is really just a way of asking the world if it likes you, if it thinks you’re good enough, if it gets you. It’s not always that, but that is a big part of it. We write for ourselves, of course, but. But but but. So, the moment in which someone does get it: finds the meaning you hoped they would, or maybe even meaning you didn’t hope for but moves you nonetheless is a really amazing thing. It’s cause for elation. We are, on good days, making something exactly like nothing else. And when it works, it can be big and it can be meaningful. That’s something I can get behind, can find great joy and pride in. Elation, for sure.

 INTERVIEWER

I’m not asking you what your next project will be, because I know what it’s like to want to keep those cards very close to my chest. But I am asking you: are you dreaming about it yet? Speculating about it? Excited about it? Worried about it?

JESSICA SOFFER

I have to say: I am beyond excited to started on another novel. (Talk to me two days in and I might have a totally different answer.) I have one percolating, though there’s nothing concrete about it yet. I’ve been working on lots of non-fiction as of late, and the other day, I started a short story and I remembered how very much I love fiction. How you can lose yourself in it in a way that non-fiction doesn’t allow. And I’ve learned so much from writing APRICOTS. I’m sure the next novel will be full of errors too, but different ones. That’s the hope. That’s all I can ask for. The opportunity to write another book with its own unique set of issues. That doesn’t feel negative to me. It feels like the best way to spend the next bunch of years.

 INTERVIEWER

I can’t wait for you to start writing your next novel, so that I can have someone else to kvetch with about novel-writing again. (Although I am much more of a kvetcher than you.)

As today is the publication day of your very first book and I’m sure you have other things to do–like swilling champagne or crying quietly in a corner–I’ll end here. Congratulations, Jessica Soffer, published novelist. Now go outside for a walk.

JESSICA SOFFER

Scout and I are going for a walk, crying and boozing every step of the way. Can’t wait to talk to you later.

Kristopher Jansma’s debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, is an enchanting, transfixing, and intricate codex of mirrors—an unabashedly pure, witty case study of literary fiction.  We believe both everything and nothing simultaneously, snaking through Sri Lanka, up the Mid-Atlantic Coast of the United States to Manhattan, over to the United Arab Emirates, and all anecdotes in between.  Leopards reminds us to live, and every once in a while tell our own twisted version of whatever it is we believe to be true.  Over the winter, I was afforded the opportunity to chat with Jansma about his writing history, his influences, Samuel Beckett, and a little (read: a brief mention of) Barthes.

Kristopher Jansma is a New Jersey native who received his B.A. from The Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins University) and his M.F.A. from Columbia University.  He writes monthly for Electric Literature.  At present, he works as an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase.

INTERVIEWER

How’d you begin to write?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

I wrote all the time as a kid – during recess my friends and I would have very intense imaginary battles and adventures. Afterwards we always had journal time inside, and I would write all about everything that had happened in our make-believe that day. But I didn’t think of it as anything more than that until the seventh grade. My English teacher Mrs. Inglis was really hard on me at first. I kept getting bad grades even though my work was no wiser than anyone else’s. Finally I complained and she told me that she thought I was capable of a lot more, so she graded me more harshly. She was the first person who ever pointed out to me that “writer” was a job you could have. I had never really thought about where all the books I read came from before Mrs. Inglis pointed it out.

INTERVIEWER

Who are your personal influences in literature, music, or visual art?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

With literature, I’m always looking for new sources of inspiration.  That’s one reason there wound up being so many different references throughout Leopards. Each chapter was formed partly because of what I was reading, or teaching to my students at the time I was working on it. Hunter S. Thompson one day and Beckett the next. But F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, and David Mitchell are the ones I can turn to at any day or any hour and stumble across something near holy in their inspiration.

INTERVIEWER

How exactly do you write? Meticulously and calculated, or word/idea-vomit? In silence, or blasting Slowdive?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

I usually need a good title and an opening line to start.  Sometimes that part can take days or weeks, even if I have other elements of the story floating around in my head already. But once I have the beginning, my favorite thing to do is just sit at the keyboard for six or eight hours, uninterrupted, just rolling along.  Of course, that’s not always possible. Hardly ever, really!  So most times it’s a matter of squeezing in an hour, or a half hour, between work and commuting and dinner and friends…but those minutes and hours add up at the end of the week.  Without them, I’d barely ever get anything written.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any favorite contemporaries, or any sort of friendly competition?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

I wouldn’t say I’m competitive with anyone but myself, but I’ve been very lucky to get to know some extremely talented writers, and to get their feedback both inside and outside class. One of my oldest writer friends, Ariel S. Winter, who I met in college, published a great novel last year called The Twenty-Year Death. I met Karen Russell at the M.F.A program at Columbia University, and from the minute I read her first story I was a fan. She was somehow twice as serious about her work as anyone else in the room, but also having twice as much fun with it. Reading her work has always been a reminder to me that one of the most valuable ingredients in any story is the writer’s own joy to be writing it.

INTERVIEWER

What was the major inspiration for The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

In 2009 a friend invited me to go see a Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot with her. I’d never seen it or read it before—someone had long ago told me that Godot never shows up, so I kind of felt like I got the joke. Well, when I finally saw it, I realized what an idiot I’d been. It was more moving than any other play I could remember seeing, even knowing, especially knowing the end. What struck me the most was how Vladimir and Estragon each seem, in moments, to be able to make a change and leave, yet the other one always holds them back. Somehow that got me thinking about three friends at a jazz brunch who are sort of stuck on one another and their routines and how they just can’t seem to change anything.

INTERVIEWER

A large part of Leopards deals with aspects of “writing education,” or, at the very least, aspects of a liberal arts education. Was this a conscious effort on your part? Is there something you wanted to illuminate in the context of Leopards, or in the context of your personal M.F.A experience?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

Since before I began working on the book, I’d been teaching anywhere between four and seven sections of different writing courses each semester, and at two different colleges.  It can be exhausting, but I really love the job. For one thing, it really forces me to figure out how to get people interested in fiction—there’s a real audience sitting there each week, hoping to be inspired and entertained, or at least not bored to death. So when I sat down to actually write, I was always very aware of what is needed to make these lofty “writerly” ideas accessible to curious people who don’t think about writing constantly the way I might. Over and over I was told by agents, professors, and other writers,”Oh, you can’t write a book about wanting to be a writer. Nobody cares about that stuff except people who want to be writers.” But if I can walk into a room of students who want to be police officers and hockey players and public relations managers, and I can get them to care about some Cheever story written 40 years before they were born, then I figure I can get people to care about these characters too.

INTERVIEWER

Early in the novel, the narrator is forced to “lay waste” at a writing contest’s conclusive reading, shocking and hurting a select few characters.  Have you ever had to do something like that? Are you familiar with that feeling?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

It’s one of the reasons I’ve never written a lot of personal nonfiction! The narrator has rushed the job on that story, and hasn’t had time to fictionalize things before he is thrust up on the stage.  However, in real life, I always know what kernels of truth are hiding in the stories I write, and it can be very nerve-wracking to put things out there and know that friends or family members might recognize a detail here or there, or see themselves in a character.  But they rarely do. Or, if they do, sometimes they’re even flattered to see something familiar come back on a page.

INTERVIEWER

Of all the writing adages a student hears over their academic career, why use the Dickinson quote throughout Leopards? Were you always committed to that one in particular?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

At Johns Hopkins when I was an undergraduate, Introduction to Fiction & Poetry was split in two. The fall semester was “Telling it Straight” and the spring was “Telling it Slant.” It was never totally clear to me, back then, what the difference was. But like the narrator [in Leopards], I felt like it had to be very important. Years later, I finally dug up the Dickinson poem and thought I knew what she was getting at. If fiction is a way of saying something true, then do you want to drive right at that truth directly? Or do you want to circumnavigate it a little, approach it on the sly? Dickinson advises, “Success in circuit lies… the truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.” It comes back to the idea of a liberal education…do you just write things up on the board and have students memorize them? Or do you engage them in Socratic dialogue, and lead them to mull these questions over? At the end of the day, I think the second way is more likely to stick with them.

INTERVIEWER

Roland Barthes comments in ”The Death of the Author” that “writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost…it is the language that speaks, not the author.” Do you write mostly from personal experience? How did the narrator of Leopards come to be?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

I’ll have to check my pulse, but I’m pretty sure that despite Barthes, my heart’s still beating. I have to admit: I’ve never been a fan of that approach to reading literature. I took plenty of classes where we were drilled about responding only to the text itself, and please render the author irrelevant. Of course, as someone who wanted to be an author, I was constantly interested in finding any and all evidence of the author, alive and well in the language. Readers are curious—at least I was—about where stories come from and how writers do their work. Leopards is very much a book about where stories come from, and why authors matter. There’s personal experience at the heart of every chapter, even though none of these things have actually happened to me in real life.  I don’t know anyone just like Julian or Evelyn and I’ve never been to Sri Lanka or Iceland.  I did go to Ghana and Luxembourg, but both times only after I’d already written about those places.  The narrator is a lot like me, except of course that he’s a much better liar and has far fewer scruples than I do. So really, then, he’s nothing like me at all. That’s what made him so much fun to write.  He’s true and not true at the same time.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any peculiar writing habits? Do you sit or stand? Drink anything special?

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

Nothing too special is needed besides some coffee in the mornings! With my busy teaching schedule, I had to get comfortable writing pretty much anywhere, anytime: on trains, in the subway, in the library, out on a bench somewhere.  I’ve written sections of things out on my cell phone when I didn’t have a laptop or a pen handy. My ideal place to write is a little cafe called B Cup in the Lower East Side, close to where I lived when I first started writing Leopards. Everything about it is comfortable and familiar, and I’d go there every day if I could!

The Fun Parts seems an ironic title for Sam Lipsyte’s astonishing new book, his return to the short story after three acclaimed novels. In these stories, the recovering-addict daughter of a Holocaust survivor grows involved with a recovering Neo-Nazi; a listless office-drone of a dad is targeted by an anthropomorphic drone of a much more lethal variety; and a junkie tries to get rich quick. Needless to say, these characters do not experience much fun.

But for the reader there’s no irony. When I was Lipsyte’s student, he told us to cut anything we thought we needed before “getting to the good part,” because “it all has to be the good part.” This collection demonstrates the generosity of that commitment: almost every sentence is fun, and many are funny—very funny. Through tight control of each word, Lipsyte simultaneously evokes the institutionalized language that defines and tortures his characters (and us) and creates a language that is itself a kind of quarantined fun zone: “Her friends, the endorphins. She wanted to leap off a boat and swim with them.”

At Lipsyte’s office at Columbia University, we talked about how institutionalized language shapes the way we see everything from the Holocaust to drone strikes—a topic touched on in this collection’s “The Republic of Empathy,”—to what Lipsyte calls “the Z word” and what he possibly shares with Louis C.K. and Marc Maron. We also talked about short stories versus novels, the future of writing, and why he feels foxy.

—David Burr Gerrard Continue reading "A Conversation with Sam Lipsyte"…

Benjamin Stein’s second novel, The Canvas, one of the more explosive novels recently published in contemporary Germany, is now available in the U.S. (notably translated by WNYC’s Brian Zumhagen). The story of two men, a psychoanalyst and  a writer, and their troubled relationship to a writer named Minsky, the author of a fabricated Holocaust memoir, The Canvas is loosely based on the actual story of Binjamin Wilkomirski and his own fabricated Holocaust memoir. Unlike anything I have read before, The Canvas even looks like no other book. Two narrators, Amnon Zichroni and Jan Wechsler, begin their tales at either end – appropriately, there are two nearly identical covers – and meet for the inevitable showdown smack in the middle of the book, where a strange sort of violence ensues. Schticky? A gimmick? You’ll have to look elsewhere. The novel is deeply concerned with religious orthodoxy, memory, identity, and the conscious and unconscious constructions of each. There are two sides to this story, and whose testimony you first listen to counts. I met Stein at his reading at NYU’s Deutsches House, where we started our conversation. We continued our talk that next afternoon at The Housing Works Bookstore Café over macaroni and cheese, coffee, and pumpkin bread, and then via email after he returned home to Munich.    

–Scott Cheshire

INTERVIEWER

One of the things I admire about The Canvas is how particular this world is of Orthodox Judaism. I am not of this realm at all – and yet the book becomes all the more universal because of its particularity.

BENJAMIN STEIN

That is interesting, no? But this is something literature, especially poetry can achieve. It tries to express something very particular, but in a way that it becomes universal. I cannot really tell you how to do it, but I think it’s important to go out and find the right details. I was speaking just today with a group of German students from Yale. And one asked me: How do you make sure not to write platitudes? This, I thought, was very hard to answer. And yet there is one very easy way, for me. Immerse yourself in your stories and characters. Visit the places you’re writing about. This is something I like to do when I am planning a book. I always write in first person, and so I always feel the need to go on tour, to visit the places where a story takes place. The interesting thing is that when you go on tour, you find the very places where everything happens, you meet people that eventually become part of the narration or even tell you stories your characters may be involved in. For instance, before writing The Canvas I went to Israel with the strict agenda to find the right mikvah.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell me about the mikvah and its traditional ritual use, for those who don’t know?

BENJAMIN STEIN

A mikvah is a pool of natural water, for example from rain or a well. A river or the sea can serve as a mikvah, too. The idea is to transform a person or even a thing like a vessel by immersing it completely in the “living waters.” The immersion marks the transition from one spiritual state to another: the impure becomes pure, an adept convert turns into a Jew, etc. It’s a mere spiritual concept: By performing an act we change our conception of a particular part of reality. And since our conception changes the reality can change as well. As a scientist you may call this constructivism, but it’s as well a basic mystical concept, a way to bring magic into existence. Well, at least it would be nice if it worked that way.

INTERVIEWER

The mikvah is a powerful image, because it makes sense given the religious context but metaphorically it resonates on so many levels.

BENJAMIN STEIN

I wanted to write about the idea of leaving a life behind. This way I had the chance to use the same motifs for both narrators. I wanted a mirroring effect. I also knew the book would have 22 chapters for mystical reasons, since the Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters. And so there are now eleven chapters on each side. Of course, there are always things you didn’t plan ahead or even think about and then you have to change the plan. For instance, it was never the plan to talk about the East German experience at all. Three quarters of the book were finished. Only the second half of Wechsler remained. And then I was meeting with my agent, we were driving through Berlin, and she asked me what it was like to live as a Jew in the GDR. I was immediately upset, filled with memories, and said I didn’t want to talk about it at all. But she kept asking, and I started raging. It was really ridiculous. And so she said you need to write about this! I said I need at least another twenty years before I can calm down enough. My heart was racing. I said it was impossible to write about. And she just said that’s a pity. So when I went home to Munich I thought: It’s already been fifteen years, maybe it is really time to write about it. The funny detail is the second half of Wechsler’s story had a lot of “narrative holes.” Realizing this fact I instantly knew this part of the character’s childhood experience was missing. I decided to weave two biographies into one, Wechsler’s two lives – the one he pretends to have lived and the one that he turns out to have lived, I mean, depending on which narration you trust.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking of holes in the story, the center of the book, but also technically the end, wherein Zichroni and Wechsler meet at the mikvah is sort of like the eye of a storm. Everything else seems to swirl around it, and yet we don’t actually get to witness what happens. Did you always know the moment would be so ambiguous?

BENJAMIN STEIN

Maybe this is a spoiler but I can tell you this: Zichroni is so angry with Wechsler that he wants to kill him. But he decides to do something else. This is why he takes off his gloves. He is taking away Wechsler’s memory. Like in Greek tragedy, he is put into the very situation he put Minsky in. Intellectually he cannot understand his own experience and so now he is doomed to relive it.

INTERVIEWER

And yet there is a moment in the book that equates stealing someone’s memories with murder.

BENJAMIN STEIN

Exactly. Stealing a person’s identity is much like destroying this person’s life. So it really can be read both ways.

INTERVIEWER

The book seems chiefly concerned with memory, identity, and how identity is largely formed by memory. Is this an especially German theme?

BENJAMIN STEIN

I don’t think so. I’d rather suppose it’s a very Jewish topic. The problems that came along with assimilation and persecution, the brutal destruction of families and thus the abrupt ending of family narrations just to be replaced by mostly untold stories about camps, murder and murderers – these problems are like the perfect soil to grow substantial identity problems for the next generations. Here you have it: confusion about identity may be a dominant Jewish problem, but of course it can and does happen to all of us. You can tell the Jewish story in order to portray a general human problem.

INTERVIEWER

I think American readers have a very difficult relationship to this question. We are as a people largely attracted to the memoir and its very simplistic notion of identifiable truth and memory. How do you feel about the memoir as a form?

BENJAMIN STEIN

Memoirs are piles of lies. Well, let me phrase it less drastically: Every written memoir is carefully shaped. It presents the retouched version of events in a way that best illustrates the point the writer is trying to make. No more, no less. Just ask your family members for their accounts of an event they all witnessed some years ago. You get as many story versions as you have narrators. This is absolutely no problem. Just don’t think that anybody would recall something like an objective truth from memory.

INTERVIEWER

The physical book is unique, and appropriately so, given its theme. But it also happens to make an indirect argument for the physical book. Were you thinking of the digital book at all when writing, and how this book demands physicality?

BENJAMIN STEIN

I just wanted to write one last book that works in its entire structure only as a printed book. I like printed books. They may disappear. But I wanted to show that the medium of the printed book can be more than just a different container type for text. With The Canvas the book as a book is part of the artistic idea.

Matthew Vollmer is the author of two short story collections: the critically lauded Future Missionaries of America, a beautifully crafted sampling of spiritual longing and religious legacies amidst the lives of contemporary Americans, and, still fresh from the presses, Inscriptions for Headstones, an ambitious, poetic, and really quite singular work. There’s nothing else like it in the world. Close on the heels of his latest, Vollmer has co-edited with David Shields FAKES: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. Given that Inscriptions is actually comprised of thirty “epitaphs,” Vollmer seems especially interested in notions of authenticity, and, dare I say, Truth. I saw him read at powerHouse Books recently where, among other things, we talked (and then talked more over email) about Truth, Fakes, and fraudulence in fiction, plus his time spent at the Iowa Writers Workshop. And I must say Vollmer strikes me one of the most dynamic and sincere conversationalists I’ve met in some time. He means every last word.

–Interviewed by Scott Cheshire

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Domestic lassitude, Siberia, stray cats, curb-stomps, that new car smell—they all flirt together in Steven Barthelme’s new collection of short stories, Hush Hush. Characters fall up, in, and out of love, finding solace and grandeur in the darkest pockets of modern America. Barthelme conducts a masterful ensemble of has-been’s, never-was’s and coulda-and-shoulda-been’s in the lonely neon maelstrom of our current world. You may connect with these people in ways you do not want to.  Even then, how mystically gratifying and affirming it is. Mr. Barthelme and I discussed craft, DeWalt power drills, influences, box turtles, and his family, among other things.

Continue reading "Somebody Did Say That Once, It’s Not Like I Made That Up: An Interview with Steven Barthelme"…

I was granted a twenty-minute phone interview with Martin Amis, enough time—I’m told—for phone sex, but perhaps not enough for an in-depth literary conversation. Amis, though, was impeccably gracious and obliging, not the intimidating figure sometimes depicted in the press. Conversation centered inevitably on his latest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England. Amis always fires up the critics, and one sometimes wants to ask: Now that you’ve reviewed the book’s publicity and the author’s life, would you care to comment on the new novel? Continue reading "Twenty Minutes with Martin Amis"…

Shane Jones’ latest novel Daniel Fights a Hurricane magnetizes the eye to its watercolor collision course. It’s a lighthearted, good-natured tragedy powdered with bubbles, feathers, shaggy-haired rock gardens and folded kangaroos. It’s playful enough to hold court in the camp of anti-pretentiousness, yet so sad and demented that even the anthropomorphic “bears throwing acorns like grenades at squirrels” add an air of menace.

Daniel, the hero, must build a pipeline to save his town’s water supply from the titular hurricane. Helping him along are a hyper-empathic mind-reading child poet prodigy named Iamso, The World’s Most Beautiful Man with the World’s Worst Teeth, and The Two-Second Dreamer. The result is a blend of Terry Gilliam “psilocybinesque” and original Grimm; it’s no surprise Jones is being lauded by the likes of Sam Lipsyte. Daniel Fights a Hurricane serves as a cautionary tale to those who have tendencies to succumb to their obsessions: for some it’s TV, video games, or fantasy baseball; for Daniel it’s the impending weather disaster.

 Shane Jones, an Albany local, is the author of the novel Light Boxes, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year in 2010. His other work includes the novella The Failure Six and poetry collection A Cake Appeared. I recently had the pleasure of asking him a few questions via email.                

-Sabra Embury

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“YOUR FATE IS SEALED WITH GLUE I HAVE BOILED IN A VAT. I SLOPPED IT ON AN ENVELOPE AND MAILED IT TO YOUR MOTHER’S WOMB.”

Threats such as this pose perplexing evidence to the fact that something is amiss in Amelia Gray’s mind. Gray grew up in Tucson, AZ; following the publication of two collections of dark tales, AM/PM and Museum of the Weird (winner of the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize), she has released her ominous debut novel Threats.

Centered on disgraced dentist named David, Threats opens as a package of mysterious ashes arrives at his house. We learn that they belong to his wife Franny, who loved him right up until the day she came in from the woods with blood-soaked feet and died at his side. Now, threats are arriving on everything from David’s bags of sugar to his dead wife’s makeup (which he can’t bear to get rid of):

“CURL UP ON MY LAP. LET ME BRUSH YOUR HAIR WITH MY FINGERS. I AM SINGING YOU A LULLABY. I AM TESTING FOR STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS IN YOUR SKULL.”

Whether it’s the plunge of a wasp’s stinger into a boot, or the flicking away of its corpse by a disdainful finger, the imagery in Threats keeps its tone bleak and progressively more hell-on-earth hallucinogenic. How does Franny keep showing up in people’s lives despite the fact that her ashes are on David’s coffee table? Who is in the garage? Gray is a virtuoso of subtle mood building, a concocter of caricatures led astray by their own unreliable notions of a comfortable reality. She will simmer a murder in a shaky spat between a bus-stop doppelganger, a laundromat apparition, and a self-proclaimed therapist who lives among the wasps in David’s shed… all while describing what makes a perfect set of teeth gleam. I recently had the pleasure of asking her a few questions via email. —Sabra Embury Continue reading "Amelia Gray"…