Tiny Pearls in a Big World

These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen characters are unlikable. These characters are unlikable in the secret ways we don’t like ourselves, hiding those things we try to hide in a big world: “I’m sort of horrified by the things I tell myself when I’m the only one around to hear them,” one aimless narrator confesses — to herself — in the untidy closing story, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” Untidy and aimless, these are apt descriptions. Miller’s characters often resist change and the stories themselves can teeter on plotlessness, like the wheels of a pick-up truck spinning endlessly in the Tennessee mud. One narrator scrubs her addict boyfriend’s camper in reaction to his half-hearted and ultimately unfulfilled promise to bring the thing to the state park. Another narrator attempts an affair with a co-worker in the absence of her alcoholic boyfriend, but that too does not stand to last. Oftentimes, we’re left simply to wait for sunrise.

But Miller is adroit in her storytelling, and where these stories are slight in their action they are larger in scope. The characters share a hopelessness that is often found in Raymond Carver’s characters, a certain grittiness, here removed from Carver’s lush Pacific Northwest and trapped in the honky-tonk and trailer park South where the landscape is pocked with beer bottles and cigarette butts; full of cheating lovers and surrounded by Ruby Tuesdays, Taco Bells, IHOPs and Dairy Queens. The stories of Lorrie Moore, too, come to mind. Miller’s characters make the stupid decisions that have been thrust upon them by all their stupid yesterdays, all of it soaked with death, with divorce, with loss.

Yes, these stories are tiny pearls, each one propelled by Miller’s pinballing language that is lyrical in its sudden turns: “We stayed in a house on the beach and ate seafood and went to the outlet malls, but my father wouldn’t let me go in the water because once I got caught by a riptide and almost drowned and after that I got stung by a jellyfish and after that my mother died.” It is clear Miller loves these characters: for all their misgivings, the author does not condescend to them. For all their hopelessness, Miller lovingly imbues the tiniest grain of hope into each character, and only Miller herself believes in the power of that grain to be polished to pearl. She understands the pressures that weigh down on these characters, how these characters are all, self-referentially, “fucked in the head.”

And not for nothing, but the artifact itself is wondrous too. A beautiful soft cover pocket book with moody watercolor cover art that somehow serves to reinforce the heart of this collection, as if the one thing these characters can hold on to, cradled in small hands, a curious logic of holding such a small book and calling it Big World.

Growing Out of this Darkness to Find the Light: On Scott Dominic Carpenter's This Jealous Earth

Let me start out by saying this isn’t your typical review. The book I’m talking about, This Jealous Earth: Stories, by Scott Dominic Carpenter, is one I’m publishing through my own press. So rather than a review, consider this a discussion of said press (MG Press), our mission and how I ended up where I am, and, specifically, why we’ve chosen Scott’s book as our debut publication.

And it all starts with a single fact: I hated Michigan growing up. I hated the seasonal changes (damn you, allergies!), I hated the food, and, most of all, I hated how flat everything was. Oh, how I dreamt of mountains! Of adventures! But like many youths disaffected with their birthplace, sometimes a wider lens is all that is needed, and this hate grew to a begrudging respect once I moved away to Los Angeles, and eventually, upon my return home, that begrudging respect became unadulterated love for the place I had been so quick to abandon. I couldn’t, for the life of me, get over how beautiful everything was, like it was the first time I had ever seen it, and the uniqueness of the region, the very same things I had looked down on before, were now the very same reasons keeping me there. And thus, this fire for the Midwest, specifically, promoting authors and poets from here, was born.

And boy, does it blaze hot today.

I co-founded Midwestern Gothic in late 2010 with one of my best friends, Jeff Pfaller, as a way to harness our collective passion for the region — and, truly, to try to help turn around what we saw as a gross underestimation of the literary talent present here. Sure, there have been nationally renowned authors from the Midwest that have reached super-stardom (Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Chuck Klosterman, to name a few), but what we set out to do was to try to change people’s collective perspective of the region: rather than see a single Midwest author who’s “made it,” crawled out of the despair here (as is so often depicted in media) to success, we wanted to show everyone that this is a true hotbed of talent ripe for the picking. That while there are the big name people you may have heard of, there are loads of other fantastic authors and poets and journals and presses equally as worthy of admiration you may not know. And, perhaps most importantly: that our unique circumstances here have bred into us a literary fierceness unlike anywhere else in the country.

Here’s what I mean, and I’ll be frank: The Midwest is dirty (in parts), dingy, full of hardworking folks — blue-collared, if you will — and I think the history here, the historical devotion to farms and factories, the nitty gritty, our mostly-congenial attitude (with a slight bit of snark), has produced very distinct literature . . . literature that, I believe more than any other region, holds a mirror up to us. Shows us the darker sides of life, of ourselves, the parts we may want to gloss over and not think about. But it’s not just about being dark, it’s about growing out of this darkness to find the light. And you can’t very well do that if you don’t embrace it.

And that was why we were so thrilled when we received Scott Dominic Carpenter’s manuscript for This Jealous Earth, a collection of shorts that take the reader on various journeys, all intimate in their own way, filled with characters that might, at first glance, be labeled as irritating or unwelcome, but eventually grow on you, sneak up in your subconscious until you can’t stop thinking about them. These are people faced with decisions that may not seem tremendously big, but will alter their lives one way or the other. And these are the sorts of things we experience every day, right? What is life if not for a series of decisions, of various tensions affecting us, day in and day out. And it’s through these collective experiences — wrought with humor, I might add, another great facet of the Midwest psyche — that you fully grasp what he’s done: held that mirror up to us. Shown us the good, bad and ugly of ourselves. Shown us what we like to pretend may not be a part of us, but is buried somewhere. And this makes the stories that much more enjoyable, even easier to glob onto, because what’s in these pages is you. And maybe the collection doesn’t ask and answer big questions about life, solve any major dilemmas or, even, get any national dialogs going. But it doesn’t need to. It’s an intimate experience Scott’s created here — no matter where the story is set, no matter who these people are, you are there with them.

This Jealous Earth is the first publication of Midwestern Gothic’s newest endeavor, the micro-press MG Press. Our goal runs parallel to that of the journal — highlight Midwestern authors — but differs only in the focus: in this case, book-length fiction with a singular point of view that really worms and worries around the foundation of all things Midwestern. Sure, it may seem nepotistic for me to recommend a book I’m publishing, that I have a stake in, but truly, it is one of the best short story collections I have ever read, one that made me appreciate my home even further and come to terms with the grimy side of my being in one fell swoop — recognizing in that darkness something a bit familiar.

And then, a surprise: a speck of light. Hope.

I Don’t Know How to Describe the Book: Tim Kinsella's The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense

“‘I hate The DaVinci Code and its stupid exclamatory big-string swells every thousand words.’

He nodded.

She repeated herself, ‘Yeah.'”

I have had an on and off again fascination with Tim Kinsella for years. I think of him as a sort of indie-rock Werner Herzog, and that might be totally off base, but that is sort of what I think of him as. First as the singer of Cap’n Jazz and then in Joan of Arc he delighted and annoyed me with a great songs that held in them the potential to be be unsatisfying and annoying. They (I’m talking more about Joan of Arc than Cap’n Jazz) also had something literary about them and like the other notable Cap’n Jazz spin-off, Promise Ring, the lyrics had something ee cummings-esque about them. Here are two of my favorite Joan of Arc songs, feel free to listen to either of them as a soundtrack to the rest of this review.

“I Love a Woman (Who Loves Me)”

“Post-Coitus Rock”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this might just be one of the best novels of the year. I probably haven’t read the other novels that could be up for this honor, and this is a pretty flawed best novel of the year, but I think it’s still that good and, even with the problems I’ll mention later, it manages to transcend those flaws to be a very satisfying novel.

First, the book looks amazing. Aesthetically, featherproof has put out another fine looking book. Possibly their best yet. It’s mass-market size (but comfortable mass market size (were there people out there really complaining about mass markets being too uncomfortable? (this little aside has nothing to do with this book but with a way big publishers tried to market the new size books a few years ago))), but with trade paper-back quality, and even a kind of pretentious detail of the price of the novel written on the upper-right hand corner of the first page in a way that makes it look like it had been written with a pencil. You know like an used or independent bookstore might do. It was a little detail I loved when I first saw it and showed to Karen multiple times, each time thinking it was something new I was sharing with her. Oops.

Second, there is no description anywhere on the book about what to expect. Just the kind of catchy title and a blurb from Dennis Cooper. This scared me a little bit. I generally find that books Dennis Cooper blurbs turn out to be ‘shocking’ in a way that bores me the same way that looking at teenage goth kids in their scary get-ups bore me. Fortunately this book isn’t shocking and doesn’t try to be.

Third? I don’t know how to describe the book. I want to thrust it in to peoples’ hands and tell them to read it, but I’m afraid that if I gush over it the book won’t live up to expectations. I was expecting a fairly pretentious book that would humor me in the balls-out way it danced around pretensions. This is a novel for gosh-sakes by a guy who for one of his albums filled the CD booklet with a photo montage of him(?) and his hip looking friends dressed up from scenes of Godard’s Weekend. I was expecting the literary equivalent of that. Nope. It didn’t turn out to be that either.

I’ve been putting off writing this review for a while now. I don’t know how to gush appropriately. Things I think of saying could come off wrong.

I’ll put off gushing for another paragraph and say what is bad about the book. The book is over-written at times. It can be wordy in the way a good editor might have been able to control a bit. It also gets a little, um, well-wordy in an intellectual sense at times to, for example a seventeen year-old (I think that is her age, she’s in high school still) can have this scene:

“Still, it had been a while since it first occurred to Sarah Ann that her MySpace profile no longer reflected the her she thought herself to be. Social networking was obviously little more than the sunny cultural inversion of terror cells, the final clinging to some sense of community or belonging that the last stages of consumer Capitalism would allow. and the habit had been knocked to the back of her mind, so only occasionally did she cringe, recalling the state of her identity as she left if projected to the world. But, she did cringe.”

and later in a scene between her and an older character:

“. . . ‘he put on some Fleetwood Mac, but I told him I wouldn’t dance to that Clinton music.’

Gus nodded.

‘The stupid neoliberal conception of freedom, the self-absorbed, unchecked ego, that’s what opened the door for this corporate fascism. It allowed everyone to assume it’s their right to have opinions about everything, when there are, in fact, facts in the world,’ she went on. ‘Facts are not disputable.’

Gus rubbed the back of his neck, ‘I kind of like Fleetwood Mac,’ he said quietly.”

When Kinsella has an intelligent angry teenager making this Adbusters like critiques there is something charming about them. They might be overwrought arguments that make you roll your eyes but an angry alienated kid in the Midwest making those comments seems almost nostalgic to me, and it fits into the very anti-intellectual atmosphere of this book. This book isn’t about people who equate social networking to late capitalism terror cells, and they aren’t the type of people who would watch one of the Twin Towers burning from across the street and think, “This is a spectacle of late capitalism’s own demise” (what kind of fucking twat would think that, right?). This is a book about some unremarkable people and their pretty shitty lives… which I’ll use to segue into the next paragraph where I’m going to make the comparison I’ve been dreading making. . . .

This is a shitty lower middle class version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, or The Corrections about people who we might actually know from our own shitty little towns. I’m not saying this is a Franzen knock-off, but it’s the same basic premise. Three siblings return home and see each other for the first time in years at their grandmother’s funeral. The eldest was a cool guy, the kind of guy who drove a Firebird and listened to The Who and probably had a comb in his back pocket who know works a menial factory job to support his family. The middle child is a woman in her mid-thirties who has just hung up her stripper boots and now slings drinks at the club she used to dance at, and the youngest son is a recovering addict who lives caught up in perpetual twelve steps (his addiction happens to be getting the shit beaten out of him in fights, his character being a weird mixture of Fight Club and Infinite Jest). Intersplicing the present and back stories of the three siblings are the stories of a few other characters who help flush out the novel and give it some offbeat color. I was going to say something about these characters but it would give away a bit too much of how the novel unfolds. And I believe novels should be let to unfold in the way the writers mean for them to unfold and not be ruined by (in)competent reviewers.

I compared this to The Corrections, but this is the family that lives on the other side of the tracks to Franzen’s dysfunctional family and who would have beaten the shit out of The Corrections kids when they were in school.

I’m hoping this review will be good enough to get someone to try to read this novel and hopefully get some enjoyment out of it. Or hate it and then blame me for steering them wrong.

An Interview with Gabriel Brownstein

Gabriel Brownstein and I conducted this interview by e-mail, using the addresses provided us by St. John’s University, where he is a professor and I was once a student. During my years as an English major and a grad student, I took a handful of fiction writing workshops with Professor Brownstein. His classes were immensely popular — four or five of my peers and I comprised a cohort who registered for any class with Professor Brownstein’s name attached to it. During workshop, we’d write down the names of authors and books he gushed about; we’d jot down writing adage after writing adage, some of them his own (“What happens next in your story? The worst thing possible.”), some of them borrowed from others (Flannery O’Connor: “Dramatize, don’t report.”).

But class was not enough for me. I would visit his office hours regularly. We talked about my work, we talked about what we were reading, the steam from his Lipton tea drifting between us. And I would leave his office trying to decide which I would do first when I got home: read or write.

After conducting this interview with Gabe — which felt a lot like a written version of the sort of conversation we used to have in his office — it was easy to see what I’ve always found so inspiring about him, which is that while he is professorial in his depth and breadth of knowledge, he is also amateurish in his giddy enthusiasm. When he talks about anything literary, the subtext is always: I just love this stuff, don’t you?

*

STEVE WILLIAMS: Maybe you could start by talking a little bit about the new book.

GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN: There’s not really a new book. There are new stories, and they’re coming out here and there in quarterlies. I’m not sure where they’re going, collectively, but they’re going somewhere. I think.

SW: Your first novel, The Man from Beyond, tells the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini’s Spiritualism debate from the perspective of reporter Molly Goodman. In one of your more recent stories, “Occupations, Settlements, Territories” — which was published in the Spring 2010 issue of the Harvard Review — the young, male narrator works at a socialist Zionist summer camp and converses with the spirit of his father. What about the subject matter of spirits interests you?

GB: I once read an interview with Robert Stone, where the interviewer asked why his characters drank so much and did so many drugs and he said something like, “I don’t know, but they keep doing it.”

I think that everything I’ve published has something to do with ghosts, something to do with haunting. And I like books with ghosts in them. I think ghosts work in stories when they make the ineffable into something dramatic and ironic and maybe even comical. But there’s a limit to this: as soon as you make the ineffable a ghost it becomes, in terms of the story, pretty effable. So it’s a ham-handed move in a way. But it’s my move.

SW: What, for you, are the differences between novel writing and story writing? What different challenges and pleasures does each form offer, and is it always a conscious decision to write one and not the other?

GB: I’m finding that right now stories suit me temperamentally, and I’m not sure why. I feel a little looser in the short form, a little more at ease. I don’t think I can imagine myself ever going 500 pages for a novel, I’m not that kind of guy. At the same time, there’s pressure in story writing — stories demand a kind of perfection. As they say, a novel with a flaw can be a great novel, but a flawed short story is a dud.

SW: It seems fair to say, though, that our literary culture favors and even has more respect for the novel form. Just to give one example of this, a quick Google search reveals that since 2000, only two story collections have won the Pulitzer, and none have won the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Which brings us back to the old question: is the short story dying?

GB: My favorite book of 2010, the one where I discovered a writer who blew me away, was Memory Wall, by Anthony Doerr, a knock-out of a short story collection. There were two collections this year by favorite writers of short stories, Jim Shepard and Steven Millhauser, plus the National Book Award-nominated collected stories of Edith Pearlman, a short story writer who, I’m embarrassed to say, I had never heard of until this year. None of these books, I believe, were listed in the NY Times Best Books of the year.

So is the story dying? No. Is it undervalued? Oh, yeah.

It’s tough to argue that contemporary novelists are more serious artists than story writers, or more successful artistically. What is true is that the markets for short stories are vanishing, fast. The Atlantic has (I think) moved its story publishing on-line. Even the Paris Review has, over the last decade, geared itself a little more towards non-fiction. It’s just about impossible for a writer to get a collection of stories published by a mainstream press, without promising said press a novel. There are lots of good new story quarterlies, but these don’t get much attention.

Funny thing: The last three stories I published, all in very high class quarterlies, did not have on-line presence (the magazines did, but not the stories), which means in certain ways that for most readers the stories did not exist. I have a feeling e-reading may change the relationship of short stories and readers. A short story seems a very natural thing, to me, to download on an e-reader. More so than a big fat novel. But maybe I’m dreaming.

SW: I’d like to open up my last question about the state of the story to the state of American fiction in general. Alexander Nazaryan recently wrote a piece for Salon in which he suggested that the reason an American hasn’t won the Nobel Prize since Morrison in 1993 is that America’s great writers exist in “self-enforced isolation” from the rest of the world — their work is too insular.

The writers many Americans see as deserving of the nod — Roth, Oates, DeLillo, McCarthy — are all, according to Nazaryan, what David Foster Wallace once called Great Male Narcissists (even Oates). And things are not getting better: many of the great writers of this generation, he says — naming Franzen, Foer, Tan, and Lahiri — are guilty of the same insularity.

In what direction do you see American fiction going, and is this a direction you’re pleased with?

GB: I haven’t read the article, so I can’t respond to its particulars. But there are real problems with translations coming into America. Go into any good bookstore and ask for new books of European stories in translation — books from anywhere but the US — and outside of the classics, you’ll be lucky to get three. It’s true that other nations read American books, and US readers don’t read much in translation. It isn’t a good thing.

I have a hard time, though, with the suggestion that American writers are more insular than they were sixty or seventy years ago. It seems just basically true that more US writers come from more places and backgrounds than they used to. You mention Lahiri and Morrison, I’d add Junot Diaz, Edward P. Jones, and without even going further note that these are all writers with huge historical and political concerns. And the force of multiculturalism has been a good thing for writers who are as you say, Great Male Narcissists.

Operation Shylock, my favorite book by my favorite living writer, is supersonically engaged with the issues of Zionism, history, identity, imperialism, racism, antisemitism, and (yes) narcissism. I mean, it’s not like men’s tennis: American writers are not getting beaten by European writers.

The Nobel is a lousy measure. If the Swedes had gotten to vote on the number one player of my youth, they would have always picked Borg over McEnroe. On the other hand, when you get to the most celebrated youngish novelists right now, there is this strange phenomenon of the massive novel about a few friends from college — Freedom, The Emperor’s Children, The Marriage Plot — and without dissing any of those writers or books — I am a big, big Jeffrey Eugenides fan — it’s just notable that the characters are quite likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools as the reviewers and editors and publicists hyping the books.

I’m not saying there’s no insularity going on in the world of US marketing and publishing. But the Nobel — or any prize — seems a lousy way to gauge the work of writers. I’d give the same answer about US novelists as I did a while back about US story writers. Every year, there are more good writers writing more good books than I can find time to read.

SW: That leads nicely into my next question, which is about an article you wrote for The Millions called “The Big Show: Franzen, Goodman, and the Great American Novel.” In the article, you explore why Franzen’s Freedom gets dubbed The Great American Novel and Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector does not. You examine — among other things — how this difference in reception is related to the formal differences between these works, and one of the comments you make about Freedom is that it “sometimes feels like a guy at a dinner party who’s talking very, very loudly.”

How and to what extent does a novel “talking very, very loudly” relate to that novel being narcissistic and/or insular? Because in your answer to the last question, you sort of set up a dichotomy: writers with political and historical ambitions, and writers who write about old friends from school. I’m not saying these are rigid or mutually exclusive categories, but I am wondering to what extent you think Freedom being insular (although it does have political ambitions) relates to it being so loud.

GB: Look, Franzen is a great writer. Freedom is (to my mind) his second best book so far. But it’s really, really good. And sweeping, and large. And though sometimes his sympathies can seem pinched, in the end he reveals himself as a big-hearted writer. Reading it side by side with The Cookbook Collector — another really good book that is really similar in form and theme — I began to wonder, why all the attention for one book and not the other?

The disparity seemed extreme given the quality of the books. So I stumbled to my answer to that question as best I could. One thing I noticed is that Goodman is, as she said in a response to my article on the excellently named website Bookslut, interested in invisibilty. (I’m not quoting her exactly.) Franzen, to put it mildly, does not seem so interested in invisibility. He’s interested in showing off — not a bad thing in a novelist. (It’s a thing you could say too about James Joyce. Big show off.)

I don’t think Franzen is at all an insular novelist. People love to take swipes at “American fiction” and usually when they do they take a swipe at Jonathan Franzen — I saw a panel where a British novelist of Pakistani extraction kept talking about the failure of the American 9/11 novel—she had written a 9/11 novel too. And privately, I thought: really? You’re going to say that all the writers in the US are all writing badly about 9/11 and that poor writing is because they’re American?

There’s such a diversity of writers in this country, such a diversity of outlooks among them. I think writers do what they can. And I think sometimes writers who seem “insular” are, on close inspection, working at very intricate complicated powerful stuff. It’s an easy way to dismiss writers, and it’s a charge that gets leveled mostly at domestic, female novelists. Who’s more insular than Jane Austen? Who’s a better novelist?

I do not think that the Big Subject results in a Good Novel, and a lot of my favorite readings can seem small and domestic at first blush. What I was saying about the bunch-of-friends-from-school novel wasn’t intended as a dig at the novelists — I think theirs is a real way of describing current middle class existence in this country. The insularity might be more in the marketing and the publishing world.

But I’ll make a stab at a big idea here: writers are insular. They sit at the island of their desks, alone. Many of my favorite books are about that kind of insularity. Borges? Bernhard? Are they “insular”?  They write a lot about being stuck in their own heads.

SW: You teach in a department that features M.A. and D.A. degree programs, but no M.F.A. program. Yet your fiction writing courses are consistently filled with students used to writing critically who are eager to try their hand at — for lack of a better term — creative writing. What’s your understanding of the relationship between creative writing and literary criticism? Does the study of one enhance the study of the other?

GB: I like to quote the poet William Matthews, “Poetry is not criticism backwards.” But literary criticism and creative writing classes intersect around an easy point, which is reading. I think in both kinds of classes, if they’re taught well at the undergraduate level, the teacher’s not trying to turn to room into a bunch of critics or a bunch of poets — but getting people to put their attention on language, and on literary language.

I do wonder, at the doctoral level, what a student gets out of my class — I can’t imagine that writing a short story in any way helps them pragmatically with their dissertations or their contemplations of Derrida. But maybe it allows them in the face of literature to be completely amateurish, which, if you ask me, is the best way to approach a good book, out of love and not professionalism.

In that way, I particularly like my students. I like that it’s not my job, as it would be in an MFA program, to kind of move them toward getting an agent, toward thinking about publication. I don’t have to pretend that my class is much more than an intellectual play pen.

SW: Could you talk a little bit about your process and your habits as a writer?

GB: Two or three good hours every day without interruption is the idea in weeks when I have lots of time. When I don’t have time, I try to fill all the time I can get. Which can mean a six hour writing day and then a half-hour writing day. I write the same thing over and over and over again for a really long time. I go back and forth from draft to draft between computer and long hand. I usually have more than one project cooking at once. I wish all the time that I were better.

SW: You mention that you write longhand. What about writing longhand appeals to you?

GB: It’s just my habit, I guess. I mean, I can give justifications: mostly that I go more slowly writing than I do typing, and so my brain is always a little ahead of my hand when I write long-hand, and so the length of my attention is stretched a bit.

Also, I don’t have the distractions of the computer when I write in a notebook — I don’t go back and polish my sentences as I write them. But I think what helps me most is going back and forth from the notebook to computer to the printed page, to the notebook, and so on. I see the work a little bit differently each time.

I used to suggest that students write longhand, but my guess is that it’s very foreign to lots of people these days. I do find, for me at least, that writing only at the computer tends to make me focus on tiny perfectionist details of words and sentences in a way that’s not always good.

SW: What have you been reading lately? Are there certain works or authors that you find yourself rereading, works you return to for some type of guidance in your own writing?

GB: My reading of fiction the last few months has been all over the place. The stand-out recent literary work has got to have been Denis Johnson’s novella, Train Dreams, just a beautiful book by one of the great living US writers. I reviewed it, which gave me the opportunity to reread a lot of Johnson. Fiskadoro and Jesus’ Son are both astounding works.

I also recently read the Fire and Ice books, George R.R. Martin, which I just could not stop reading. I went through all five books in a row. And — since I can — I’ll just put in my two cents about those: Everyone is comparing him to Tolkein, but I think the more appropriate, immediate influences on him are probably Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock — favorite writers of my teen years.

Who do I go back to most often? I’m a big re-reader. Over the summer, I reread a lot of stuff from my childhood — Salinger and Le Guin and Hammett. And, yes, I recently reread Anna Karenina, but every writer says that, right?