The Elegant Variation

Still Water Saints

Alex Espinoza just put out a book from Random House called Still Water Saints, published simultaneously in English and in Spanish. The LA Times, the Chronicle, the Post, and Sandra Cisneros all think you should be reading it. It's an audacious novel with a wildly diverse cast of characters, all of whom find their way into a botánica in the fictional city of Agua Mansa, in SoCal's Inland Empire.

Alex and I are friends; we went to UCI together. His book's about the Saints for a reason: you won't find a better guy. I asked him if he'd be willing to talk a little about the book, which he did via email from ... I have no idea from where. And I tried to insert a jpeg of the book jacket, which is really beautiful, but ... I'm an extremely limited blogger.

1. I hear you had quite an experience recently. What happened during your reading in [name deleted to avoid embarrassment]?

      Let’s just say it was the bad reading everyone warns you you’ll have.  It was a Sunday afternoon, not the best time, especially at a chain bookstore in a big shopping center with a WalMart and a Food4Less. The reading was held up front by the cash registers, facing the entrance. I got to watch everyone coming and going, pushing strollers with crying babies, heading toward the smoothie machine whirring away in the café, while I was reading. I felt like a greeter.

      The highlight was during the Q and A.  A man asked me if I was “Espinoza, the writer.”  He said he’d read about an Espinoza on some blogs, and that they had mentioned that this Espinoza had a tattoo.  I showed him my forearm, with the Virgen on it.  And then, having confirmed I was “Espinoza, the writer,” he wandered away.  And the really strange part is, as far as I know, this is (now) the first blog to mention my tattoos.

      But, hey, at least the bookstore had set up seats and they’d stocked my book, and I sold three copies, all to one family.  And not even MY family.

2. Your book performs acts of literary ventriloquism -- each story in Still Water Saints takes as a protagonist a wildly different type of character from the last. You have an addict, an overweight girl, a schoolteacher, a newliwed, a diabetic, a drag queen, a illegal immigrant -- and of course the botánica proprietor. What attracts you to telling stories from such a wide array of experience?

I take pleasure in stretching myself and taking risks.  I like trying out different voices, different characters, slipping into the skins of people unlike me.  I’m a big advocate of writing what you DON’T know.  Plus, this place I’m writing about, California’s Inland Empire… I’d be doing it a disservice if I presented it through anything but a range of lives.  It’s so diverse in terms of race, of religion, of politics, of class.  Even the geography – the great mantra you hear in Riverside is “It’s an hour from everything: the mountains, the deserts, the ocean, Los Angeles.”

3. Related to #2 -- to what extent, when writing, do you rely upon experience, and to what extent pure invention?

I’m sure there’s some stuff here and there that’s been borrowed from people and places I know, but only traces. Even the setting is a fiction – Agua Mansa doesn’t exist. I did do research, though.  I spent time in botanicas and talked to other people who had gone to them. And the more mundane details of the shop come from my retail background. I never worked in a botanica, but I’ve sold everything from eggs and milk to used appliances to furniture and custom framed art to capes and rock T-shirts.  You need a 16-gauge barbell for your tongue?

4. What is the scene in the book -- the paragraph, the page, the sentence -- 1) that gave you the most trouble? 2) that you continue to stress over? and 3) that fills you with the most satisfaction?

     Answer to 1): There’s a description of a mural on page 229. It had been hovering on the wall all through the rest of the book, but I didn’t know exactly how to describe it. I had trouble trying to go from the vision of it I had in my head to a written description of this non-existent thing. I worked it and reworked it. And then reworked it some more.  I think it would have been easier if I’d actually painted it.

     Answer to 2): The beginning of Juan’s story, pp 43-46. I think he’s more of a jackass on the page than I intended him to be.  And yet for some reason, I find myself doing this section a lot at readings.

     Answer to 3): I might say the mural, knowing how long it took me, but I think I’d have to say it’s Shawn’s chapter (pp 141–158), and especially this paragraph:

     “I roll the window down, watch the streetlights blur as we drive past.  The way light bends and the tress fly by makes me think about time travel, the speed of light, the ghosts of dead stars up in the sky right now looking down on us and laughing.  How we’re all just moving, just passing through and nothing’s ever meant to last.” (p.144)

     I just tapped a vein writing Shawn’s story, channeled something, and the whole of it just poured out. I haven’t managed to recapture that rush of writing yet, but I keep trying.

5. You and I went through the same MFA program together at UCI. I recently posted something here on TEV about MFAs, and it seems on the blogosphere, you want to start a fire, that’s your kindling. What do you think of your time at UCI (asked as if it were a jail sentence)? Would you recommend a program to other writers?

     Well, as you know, MFA programs are evil.  Evil, evil, evil.

     No, I know MFAs are not for everyone. I don’t think they are necessary for everyone; I think they’re often cash cows for universities who overadmit students to programs in order to make an easy buck; there are many bad ones; and plenty of great writers – and I mean contemporary ones – never stepped foot in an MFA workshop.

      That said, you’ve got to remember that until maybe a week before the program started, I was still folding T-shirts at the mall.  I’m working class, and I’d worked my way entirely through school.  The program gave me space and time, two things I knew I needed in order to hone my writing.  And it gave me access to a group of people very different from me, very well read, from very different backgrounds. The people around that table had nothing to gain by telling me good or bad things about my work.  And I was free to listen to or ignore any of the advice or criticisms.  I found my “good readers” – the people whose readings and critiques seemed to bring out the best in my work – and paid the most attention to them. 

      Plus, as a Chicano writer, Irvine’s MFA program has a special meaning.  It has this incredible legacy – it produced poets like Gary Soto and Juan Delgado, and fiction writers like Helena Viramontes, Hector Tobar (technically Guatamalan, but raised in Southern California), Michael Jaime Becerra.  The university hosts a major Chicano lit prize; Alejandro Morales is there.  And there it is, not far from Santa Ana, in the heart of Orange County, which has its own love-hate relationship with Mexicans (for more on which, see Gustavo Arellano).

     And I got to work with and hang out with people like Mike Davis and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.  Oh, and I once saw Jacques Derrida buying a bagel.

6. What artistic influence, if any, hovers over Still Water Saints most heavily?

It’s impossible for me to name just one, so here are six: Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. Dagoberto Gilb’s Woodcuts of Women. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Susan Straight’s Highwire Moon. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.  Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo.

You can hear Alex read from Still Water Saints on Saturday at Skylight Books. He'll also be bad-ass Larry Mantle's guest on Airtalk (89.3 FM, KPCC) on Tuesday, March 13th from 11:30 to 12, which you can listen to here: http://www.scpr.org.

MARCUS v. EMERICK

James Marcus scores a real coup and gets to chat with former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, who recently put out a memoir of his Beatles days entitled Here, There and Everywhere.  We'd love to do a interview like this, if only we could stop stammering long enough.  (Remind us, one day, to tell the story of how we met Paul McCartney.)

Netscape: Is there one Beatles track that stands out in particular for you?

Emerick: Well, there's a couple. "Tomorrow Never Knows," of course, because it was the first track I ever engineered for them. But I'd have to say "A Day in the Life." The shivers ran down our backs the first time we heard John singing it, with that echo in his cans [headphones]. He used to like recording that way. He didn't like the sound of his voice straight. I don't know why.

If you've ever heard that vocal track, you'll know what Emerick means.  George Martin plays a short clip of it in the Anthology, and John's unadorned singing really does take one's breath away.

EXCLUSIVE - TEV GUEST INTERVIEW: DANIEL ALARCÓN

We are very pleased to host Daniel Olivas' wonderful interview with author Daniel Alarcón, about whom more presently:

INTERVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS

Daniel Alarcón’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, Eyeshot and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. A former Fulbright Scholar to Peru and the recipient of a Whiting Award for 2004, he lives in Oakland, California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College. His story collection, War by Candlelight (HarperCollins), was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award.

This February will bring the publication of Alarcón’s first novel, Lost City Radio (HarperCollins). Set in an unnamed South American country that has suffered through years of war and government abuses, Alarcón’s novel centers on Norma, the host of a popular program on which she reads the names of missing persons and, in the process, gives hope to callers who desperately want to reunite with lost loved ones. Norma has become a celebrity primarily with those outside the city who live in the mountain and jungle villages. Norma herself nurses the hope of finding her husband, Rey, who disappeared ten years earlier perhaps because of his antigovernment activities. One day, a village boy is brought to the radio station to meet Norma. The boy carries a letter that includes a list of lost people that the boy’s village would like Norma to read on her program. But he may also prove to be a link to Norma’s missing husband.

Lost City Radio is already garnering advance praise including this from Booklist: “A debut novel that is a marvel of concision and soulfulness... Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness of both the jungle and the city, Alarcón reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace.” David Ulin, book editor for the Los Angeles Times, calls Alarcón a “face to watch in 2007.”

Alarcón kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his novel, the writing process and other literary matters.

DANIEL OLIVAS: Why did you decide to set your novel in an unnamed South American country? Why not place it specifically in Peru?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: In writing this novel, I didn’t want to feel restricted in any way by the history, geography, or social landscape of Peru. It wasn’t my intention to be coy: I’m Peruvian, the general arc of the war as it unfolds in the novel is similar to that of the Peruvian conflict, and everyone will be able to recognize this. Still, the more I’ve traveled, the more places I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to, the more it has become clear to me that the forces shaping the future of a city like Lima are at work in developing countries all over the planet. When I was on tour last, for War by Candlelight, I always found myself saying, “If Peru was an invented country, and Lima an invented city, many people would still recognize it,” and I guess I sort of followed my own advice. I invented a country, a city, drew upon my experiences in Lima, upon my travels in West Africa, upon texts I read about Chechnya (the incomparable Anna Politkovskaya, RIP), or Beirut, or Mumbai. I was influenced and deeply inspired by the work of Joe Sacco as well, whose books on Palestine and Bosnia are truly masterful. The liberty to call on all kinds of sources was freeing: I came across a book called Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist, possibly apocryphal, but it rang so true when compared with the interviews I had done in Peru and Bolivia, that I felt confident referencing it in my attempt to create a composite of what that life might have been like. I am a great admirer of Ryszard Kapuscinski as well, and his death today has made me very, very sad. It is a tremendous loss for literature, and personally, I wish most of all that I’d had a chance to tell him face to face how much his work has meant to me over the years. This novel probably owes as much to his influence as to any historical or sociological text of about the Peruvian conflict. Of course, I read many of those as well: Carlos Tapia, Gustavo Gorritti, and Carlos Iván Degregori, just to name a few, have been faithful reporters and brilliant analysts of the conditions that gave rise to the war in Peru.

OLIVAS: You note at the end of the novel that you began researching in 1999 and, in the process, interviewed many people about their experiences during Peru’s war years. Are there certain interviews that stand out as particularly moving or inspiring?

ALARCÓN: I was living in San Juan de Lurigancho, a district of Lima very similar to the place called Tamoé in the novel. I lived near the market, in a small rented room above a bodega, and taught photography in the neighborhood four days a week. Most of my students lived within a few blocks of me. There was a family down the street whose daughter was in my class, and they sort of adopted me, looked after me, and I would often go over there, to get a meal, or to talk politics with my student’s father. They were exceedingly kind to me, and they were folks who had been there from the beginning, since the night the neighborhood was founded, when it was just chalk lines on the barren earth, since the land takeover in 1984. They had come from Ayacucho, the province that gave birth to the Shining Path, and also the region of the country most affected by the relentless violence of the 1980s. I remember one night, it came out in conversation that I had studied Anthropology in college, which meant, in actuality that I had taken a set of classes concerned at least superficially with the diversity of human responses to the mystery of being alive on the planet now. I found it difficult to explain that the fact that I had studied it did not mean I was an anthropologist, that the American system of education works differently, that my four year degree qualified me for exactly nothing. The information hung there. “So you can help us,” the father said, and I didn’t know how to respond, and then quite suddenly, he was gone, away in another room, rummaging through papers. A few minutes later, he came back with lists of the people missing from his village, depositions he had taken of witnesses. He said, “What we’ve needed all these years is an anthropologist, someone to help us. We know where it is. We know what the army did to them…” I tried to explain, but he wouldn’t hear it, and I listened as he described a rather routine army action in the sierra during the 1980s, something that could be accurately labeled a massacre, and he asked me to help him take his village’s case to the Truth Commission. This was 2002. The people whose names were typed on the papers he showed me had been dead for fifteen years. “We need an anthropologist,” he said over and over. Cultural anthropology, forensic anthropology—it was all the same to him. He wanted me to help him dig up a mass grave.

OLIVAS: Was the transition from writing short stories to a full-length novel difficult? Which do you prefer?

ALARCÓN: Everything about writing is difficult, but I do prefer the novel. There is more pleasure in it, more seduction, I think, if only because you spend more time with your characters, and get to know them so well. Stories, by their very form, impose a certain discipline on the narrative impulse that is sometimes hard to accept. In any case, each story demands its own form, and one shouldn’t really resist that. I began Lost City Radio thinking it was story. Then I called it a long story, then a novella, then a short novel, and didn’t use the word novel until it was almost done.

OLIVAS: What are you working on now? Another novel? Short stories?

ALARCÓN: A little bit of everything. I spent the fall trying to push various projects past page forty, without much success. I’m onto something now, but I’d rather not talk about it just yet. In the long term, I’d like to write more novels, and also do much more journalism. It’s a dream of mine to do a sort of This American Life produced in Lima. Esta Vida Peruana or something like that. I’m beginning the process of trying make this happen. I would start in Lima, I think with people’s stories, first person accounts from the wide range of experiences that exist in the city. Nothing like that has ever been done in Peru that I’m aware of. What interests me most of all are narratives: whether they exist in the world as novels, story collections, radio documentaries, posters or websites is really beside the point. The issue is how to tell the stories that move people, the stories that get at how people live today, and have those stories make an impact. Lima is awash in stories, but for reasons of race, class, geography, etc., we learn very little about each other that isn’t alarmist, divisive, or designed to breed suspicion. I’ve envisioned a radio program, or a series of radio programs that could begin to counteract that.

OLIVAS: Has becoming a published author altered your view of literature?

ALARCÓN: No, I wouldn’t say that. Being published has made me acutely aware of my preposterous good luck. I have also learned, by necessity, something about the business of publishing, the commodification of literature, as unrelated to art as a swimming pool is to the ocean. I’m not mad at it—it’s simply something I’ve learned to deal with. Swimming pools are not in and of themselves terrible. But of course, literature is still it: the conversations writers have with the authors who first inspired them—this is the only good reason to do this work. When we write stories we’re part of a tradition that stretches back to the beginning of history. The only way I know to approach the blank page is with humility before the scale of what has been already achieved, along with a sense of hope, and above all, playfulness.

OLIVAS: Any observations about teaching creative writing?

ALARCÓN: I’ve come to enjoy teaching quite a bit, which isn’t something I could’ve said a year ago. I taught high school in New York, some undergrad at Iowa, and I taught high school age kids again in Lima, but I wasn’t really prepared to deal with graduate students. I had no idea how to do it. As with anything, the more you do it, the easier, the more enjoyable it becomes, but it was pretty touch-and-go there for a minute. When I started, I was trying to finish Lost City Radio, trying to learn on the fly, and was in way over my head. My sincere apologies go out to those who had the misfortune of being in my classes a year and a half ago. I’m much more comfortable in front of students now.

[NOTE: For Daniel Alarcón’s book tour schedule, visit http://www.danielalarcon.com/english/readings/.]

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and is a frequent reviewer for the El Paso Times and Multicultural Review. He shares blogging duties on La Bloga. Visit his Web page at http://www.danielolivas.com.

LITERARY PAPRIKA

Tom Teicholz - of Tommywood fame - profiles this humble enterprise and its host for the current issue of the Jewish Journal.

Sarvas feels that "he's at the right place and at the right time," he said. He believes "there's an evolving sense of a literary community," both in Los Angeles and in cyberspace. In that regard, he was also instrumental in founding the Litblog Coop, a blog that recommends contemporary fiction.

Part of what Sarvas most enjoys about his blog is the friends he has made and the correspondences he has had with readers from all over the world. He has even engendered a literary dust-up with another blogger -- not quite Mailer vs. Vidal or a Trump vs. Rosie fracas but still evidence of the growing pains of an ever-expanding community.

How MOTEV will kvell ...

TEV INTERVIEW: JOHN FREEMAN ON THE NBCC AWARD

Tomorrow night, the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award will be announced in New York City.  We thought this was a great opportunity to talk to NBCC President John Freeman about what makes this an award worth paying attention to.  We''ll definitely be paying attention on Saturday night, and our own NBCC votes are noted here at the end.

TEV: It seems we're drowning in literary awards these days, so it can be hard to work up enthusiasm for another one but you've suggested that the NBCC award has no comparison in the literary world. How so?

JF: Well, I agree with you there – there are too many awards. The Guardian published a piece earlier this year which highlighted the danger of this – beyond mere reader/media saturation. The journalist argued we are beginning to substitute prizes for critical judgment. I don’t think we’ve got there yet, but we should be careful.

And that’s where our award, I think, stands out. All of the board members of the NBCC are working book critics. So our awards process basically ensures that books we read and consider for the prize don’t just get read, made a finalist or tossed aside. Much the time they get read and then written about and discussed in print, since many of our board members have the ability to choose what they review. So even if readers don't look up our winners, chances are our process has grazed their frontal lobe.

Here’s how it works. In March, after our previous year’s awards are over, the NBCC board of 24 critics breaks up into six book prize committees: memoir, biography, fiction, poetry, criticism, nonfiction, and autobiography. Some people sit on several committees. Each group then begins keeping a list of books that folks have read or might want to read. To put a book up onto the fiction list, for example, you have to be a member of the fiction committee. When a book is put up on the list, the committee members are then sent a copy to read. A lot of times they go ahead and review it.

So our awards process is happening in public all year long -- and we hope it’s adding to and supporting critical debate in this country. It’s about as transparent a process as you can get. You can find a list of board members online at the website – with their address, too, if you feel like Google Earthing them. There are no submission fees, so we get a lot of small press titles. And it’s open to books from any country, so as long as there's an English translation out in the U.S. during the calendar year, it’s fair game. We also have a large number of judges, so the chances of something slipping through the cracks is pretty small.

Finally, there is one more major factor which makes the NBCC different – more fluid perhaps – and more essential, I believe, as an award. Our members get to vote on the awards, and if twenty percent of them vote for a book, it automatically becomes a finalist. So not only are our board members talking about and writing about the books we are considering, our membership of 700 working critics is doing the same.* Open a book page on the weekend in almost any city in the country or click on a blog in many countries and you'll witness them there taking part in the conversation.

TEV: Why should we continue to care about book awards in general? It seems that, unlike British book awards, American ones don't seem to influence a book's fate much.

JF:  Well, I have to disagree in part here. Geraldine Brooks is well up into the several hundred thousand sale territory with March, which we passed over for “The” March, by Doctorow. Jhumpa Lahiri is, I bet, nearing if not well past the million copy mark. These are big increases over what they sold before receiving the Pulitzer Prize, similar to the effect of the Booker Prize has on sales in England.

But to get to the point of your question, we should care about awards first and foremost because they help us decide what to read. There is an obscene number of books being published every year, every month, and awards are like these giant, all-reading, all seeing friends (we hope), which can whisper in your ear and say, hey, you gotta read this.

To stay valuable, though, they have to pick good books. They have to get it right, to put it crudely. I like to think the NBCC has got it right often enough to earn readers’ and booksellers trust. We awarded Toni Morrison long before the Nobel committee got to her, and Edward P. Jones before the Pulitzer tipped him. We awarded W.G. Sebald and John Cheever and Louise Erdrich when Love Medicine was passed over by other prizes and Frederick Seidel before he began to gather the cult following he has now. Richard Powers was a finalist four (!) times. We’re the only book prize organization to highlight the brave work of Robert Fisk or William T. Vollmann for Rising Up and Rising Down. None of our judges are paid. We do this because we love it and so the lists you see are the distillation of enormous passion and respect for the work that goes into writing a biography, a collection of poems, a novel, or, say, a 3000 page “essay” on violence.

TEV: Philosophically, what's the point of a book award anyway? To acknowledge merit? To spur sales? All or none of the above?

JF: I think the primary point behind any book award has to be to acknowledge merit. It kills me to see a novel reviewed, as Vikram Chandra’s was recently in several venues, in a shameless and mind-bogglingly parochial manner, as if it were a big budget Hollywood movie. How much a writer gets paid or how a book gets promoted is really beside the point. Sure, a publisher can put ads out there, make a nice dust jacket, trim and edit a manuscript niftily. They might even do some co-op advertising and put the book at a place in the store where you can’t help but see it. But well over 98 percent of the work is the author’s – it’s them taking time out of a culture of obsessive connectivity to be alone and dream up stories that entertain and enlighten or disturb or tell us something we didn’t know before. If they’re good, they’re doing it in a way that is beautiful and essential and all their own. We live in such an instant culture that this sacrifice needs recognition.

But then there is the larger sort of cathedral in the sky that prizes erect for the forms they honor. I think there’s a large schism between academia and the literate world, and the big danger of this disconnect is a creeping fuzziness about what we’re talking about. What is a memoir? What is a novel? What is a lyric poem? James Wood wrote in his first book about the broken estate of tradition – I think in some ways awards can be the sign posts along this collapsed footbridge between our current time and the illustrious past of literary forms. I have never had a happier reading time in my life than when I first moved to New York after college and read through the first four decades of NBA winners. It was astonishing -- like watching post-war American literature develop. Salinger’s early stories, Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Singer’s stories, Stone's Dog Soldiers, Pynchon’s towering inferno of a novel, Ellen Gilchrist’s short fiction, Delillo’s White Noise, all those Updike novels, the big early realistic novels of Joyce Carol Oates, and lesser known writers like William Wharton’s Birdy or big bloated beasts that were hard not to love, like From Here to Eternity, by James Jones. I don’t know if I would have gotten to all these books had it not been for the NBA.

TEV: Can you tell us something about the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing?

JF: It is a prize set up in honor of one of our founding members, Nona Balakian -- a critic and longtime editor at the New York Times Book Review -- to award the work of a critic who had done an exceptional job writing about books during the previous year. Again, there’s no entry fee, but you have to be a member in order to apply. Although it doesn’t get as much press attention as the book awards, it’s pretty hotly debated and near and dear to a lot of board members' hearts – because this is what we do. So the reviewing which is inventive and has a strong voice and masters the material really stands out – it’s often the submission you wish you had written yourself. Our former winners are a diverse group. The novelist Laurie Stone won one year, but has since moved on to do more performance work. Albert Mobilio won during a period when he was doing a lot of reviewing. Now you can see his handiwork all over the pages of Bookforum, which he edits. Some other recent winners include Ma ureen McLane, Elizabeth Ward, Wyatt Mason, George Scialabba, David Orr, Thomas Mallon, Daniel Mendelsohn, Brigitte Frase, who reviews quite frequently now over at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Scott McLemee, who you can read at Insiderhighered.com, and who will be coming up to New York to announce the winner of this year’s prize.

TEV: Can we ask you which titles you're particularly pulling for, or will that reveal too much?

JF: I wish I could be like one of those Booker judges and start blabbing – while I complain about the chore of opening all those packages -- but I can’t. I’ve got to save my argumentative jujitsu for the Saturday meeting, when I’m going to try and put some vibrato in my voice and pull for my favorites.

TEV: What can TEV readers who want to follow the Saturday announcement of the finalists do?

JF: Well, the NBCC”s blog, Critical Mass, is going to post the finalists as we announce them live at a party in New York at 6:45 PM (EST) on Saturday. We hope to have video up of the announcement pretty shortly thereafter. We’re also going to send the list out to editors and writers and bloggers so chances are you’ll see it linked to – or we hope – here at TEV and elsewhere in the blog world, like at Frank Wilson’s Books Inq. or at the Complete Review. You’ll probably see an AP story move about the awards pretty quickly and we’re hoping that will get picked up in the print world. Finally, once the list is up I hope people sound off on it, discuss it, and, most importantly, if they haven’t done so already, get a chance to read the books. We’re finally down to long-lists now, and knowing what’s in the running, I can say this is going to be one of our most interesting years yet.

* TEV NOTE: For those who are wondering my five fiction votes were for The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (as noted yesterday), Ticknor, Dead Fish Museum, Theft and Black Swan Green.  In other categories, I included Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map as well as Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost.  I gave E.L. Doctorow and Lawrence Weschler votes for criticism and Frederick Seidel got my lone poetry nod.  Let the carping and second guessing begin!

THE LAZARUS PROJECT

At Eight Diagrams, Wayne Yang interviews photographer Velibor Bozovic, who is collaborating with Aleksandar Hemon on The Lazarus Project.

Wayne: You have been working on a collaboration called Lazarus with the writer Aleksandar Hemon. Can you talk about how you both came to work on the project? What was its genesis, and where are you taking the project? How much does it relate to the collaborative work that appeared in The Paris Review?

Velibor: The writer Aleksandar Hemon, who happens to [have been] my best friend for more than 20 years, asked me to accompany him on a research trip to Eastern Europe and document it with my camera. Hemon’s book will be partially based on the life of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant who at the age of 19 was killed by the Chicago chief of police, only months after his arrival to America in 1908. We were going back to where Lazarus came from, trying to understand the places he left behind.

The Lazarus story is very interesting and eerily familiar almost 100 years later. After the incident when he was killed under mysterious circumstances. Based on the story version by [the Chicago chief of police] the man who killed him, the press started the hype labelling dead Lazarus as an “anarchist,” emphasizing his body features (his curly hair, low forehead… his brain was taken out and examined by scientists to ‘understand’ the mind of an anarchist) and triggering hysteria among ‘decent’ citizens towards the immigrants. (Everyone who looked different, if not an anarchist/terrorist already, is a potential anarchist/terrorist and has to be closely monitored… This was in 1908. All of this is well documented in Chicago historical archives and in a book by Walter Roth and Joe Kraus “An Accidental Anarchist: How the Killing of a Humble Jewish Immigrant by Chicago’s Chief of Police Exposed the Conflict Between Law and Order and Civil Rights in Early Twentieth America.”

Lazarus Averbuch was born in Kishinev, today Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. There, as a child he survived the pogrom and escaped with his family to Chernivtsi, today in Ukraine, and then continued his journey to Chicago where he got killed. We went in the opposite direction. We were not going to solve the mystery of Lazarus’s life and death and that was not the intent behind the trip. Aleksandar needed to see, hear, sense the remaining fragments of the times and locations Lazarus went through on his journey from Chisinau to Chicago. We were not in search of the history (as historians would) but rather in search of the story. The resulting photo essay is not pretending to be an objective photo journalistic portrait of the region, it is more a personal reflection on places we visited and people we met during the trip. In retrospect, while Aleksandar was looking for his story I was looking for myself.

BIRNBAUM v. PLOTUS

Robert Birnbaum interviews our Poet Laureate, the great Donald Hall.

Robert Birnbaum: How does one address the Poet Laureate?

Donald Hall: PLOTUS. Poet Laureate of the United States.

RB: As in the acronym for the President of the United States, POTUS?

DH: Yeah.

RB: The position is described as "a lightning rod for the poetic impulse" in the country—what's your take?

DH: You are a figure for poetry for a while; while you are at the Library of Congress, you get asked to speak, and actually I think you have something to do with the readings that will take place at the Library of Congress.

RB: You haven't been told what you do?

DH: Not very much. There are a couple of fellowships that I can award, I believe small ones. And I have to choose judges for a prize—and I am going to find out.

AMITAVA KUMAR INTERVIEWED

Amitava Kumar - whose fine blog we read regularly and plan to add in our next scheduled blogroll update - is interviewed by the Business Standard.

You specialise in essays and personal-experience pieces. What creative leap did you have to make to write a full work of fiction?

Actually, I began this book as non-fiction but then found I wanted to add more layers. For a long time, while rewriting the book, I thought fiction meant that one needed to add dramatic details to what had already been collected through travel and research. What I learnt, however, is that writing fiction is more about taking things away and letting the silence stand.

GUEST INTERVIEW: SALVADOR PLASCENCIA

GUEST INTERVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS

Last year, The Elegant Variation published my review of Salvador Plascencia’s debut novel, The People of Paper (McSweeney’s). I called it “a wonderfully strange, hallucinogenic and hypertextual blending of fiction and autobiography.” But I was not alone in singing the novel’s praises. The El Paso Times proclaimed that Plascencia’s “fantastic world…is like inhabiting a poem that tantalizes with its brilliant imagery and imaginative leaps.” “New and unexpected” said the Los Angeles Times. Plascencia’s novel landed on several “best books” lists for 2005.

If you haven’t read it yet, Harvest Books has just released the paperback edition of The People of Paper at a very reasonable price of $14. So now there’s no excuse.

Most reviewers encountered difficulty trying to explain exactly what this novel is about. Plascencia’s characters include Merced, a woman made of paper. There’s also a mechanic who makes robot tortoises, flower pickers, gang members, monks, Napoleon Bonaparte, a curandero, among others. Plascencia himself makes an appearance and plays a pivotal role in the narrative. As for the plot, Plascencia’s world lives by different rules. And the book’s layout is unusual with columns of text vying for attention as but one visual motif. No doubt, it will change your view of what a novel can look like.

Plascencia kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his novel in conjunction with the paperback release.

DANIEL OLIVAS: The layout and visuals of your novel are so different from more traditional novels. How did you develop the "look" and were there any examples of unusual novels that influenced you?

SALVADOR PLASCENCIA: I don't really see The People of Paper as a deviation from tradition. If anything, I see it as a throwback to the spirit of early books and to the playfulness that existed before industrialized printing presses. If you look at early books they are very varied in their typography and design. It's a shame that technology has actually limited and uniformed our conception of the book instead of expanding the possibilities. But if I have to claim direct literary influences, like Paul Collins once noted, "All odd books can be blamed on Tristram Shandy." And of course there was Vonnegut and Kathy Acker.

OLIVAS: Your book readings are also very different from the typical readings. You employ others to read portions of your book and you also start the reading with what can be called a hilarious monologue that employs a mixture of fact and fiction. How did you develop such presentations?

PLASCENCIA: I'm actually a horrible reader. Even if I practice I mumble and mispronounce every other word and I get really nervous. I didn't want to torture the nice people that showed up to the readings with my incoherence, so I had to develop some sort of misdirection to get away from the fact that I can't really read in public.

OLIVAS: When your novel came out, you made a comment that caused a bit of controversy within the Chicano writing world. In a Los Angeles Times interview, you responded to a question regarding your decision to publish with McSweeney’s and not a Latino imprint. You answered: "The Latino imprints never called when it was going around. McSweeney's called. But I'm very happy because now the book doesn't get reviewed as a 'Latino imprint' book, but as a book. As a writer, I align myself with aesthetics, not ethnicity. Why is Jonathan Safran Foer not published by a Jewish American press? Should John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison be published only by black presses? There is something comforting in the fact that these ethnic collectives exist, but they can also have a ghettoizing effect."

PLASCENCIA: Maybe I'm insensitive to the old school Chicanismo, but I don't see anything particularly inciting about what I said. I just don't have the desire to forefront my ethnicity over my writing. Identity politics bore me, especially when its infighting within the group. A lot of it becomes about people sitting around a table arguing about who is more Chicano and who is a sellout. But who are these arbitrators that get to set the standards of what is Latino or not? It's fair game to critique my book on a aesthetic level, or to call it unreadable, but when it gets knocked for not being Chicano enough or for not fulfilling my ethnic obligation to my group and roots it's a retrograde argument that, to be honest, I'm not really interested in. And it's only minority writers that have to put up with this, and that was my whole point.

OLIVAS: Who are your literary influences?

PLASCENCIA: Obviously Márquez. And then there is: Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, David Markson, Angela Carter, I remember some and forget others depending on the day. Borges, Morrison, George Saunders, Jiri Grusa, Kafka, Winterson...

OLIVAS: I listen to jazz when I write (Miles, Monk, Puente, etc.). Did you listen to music when you wrote your novel? If so, did the music influence your fiction?

PLASCENCIA: I didn't have a particular sound track. Whatever was on the radio. A lot of KCRW that I piped in all the way from Santa Monica to Syracuse, New York. I would also listen to what my roommate played on his stereo. He has much better taste in music than I will ever have.

OLIVAS: What are you working on now? Another novel? Short stories?

PLASCENCIA: I think I'm stuck writing novels for better or worse. I'm too scattered to be able to make one of those tight little machines they call short stories. I'm putting words and sentences together that will hopefully be book number two someday, but I don't have a concrete concept or hook for the second novel. But I had no firm conception about The People of Paper either until the final months of working on it.

OLIVAS: Why did you write a novel instead of memoir?

PLASCENCIA: Why would I write a memoir? When I was writing The People of Paper I was a twenty-something kid who came from kind and generous parents, I never fought in a war, and I had nothing but the support and love from my friends and family. What business would I have with the memoir? I'm much more interested in the works of the imagination than in my mundane reality.

OLIVAS: What has been the reaction of your family members, friends, ex-girlfriends to your writing?

PLASCENCIA: They all do a really good job of not telling me and I try my best to keep all the copies of my book underneath my bed.

OLIVAS: Do you teach writing? If so, any observations about teaching?

PLASCENCIA: Right now I'm still a student but I'm looking around some classrooms that I might like.

Daniel Olivas is the author of four books including Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press). He is the editor of Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, forthcoming from Bilingual Press in 2007, and which includes a chapter from The People of Paper. His first full-length novel, The Book of Want: A Novel in Commandments, is currently making the rounds. Olivas shares duties at La Bloga, a blog dedicated to Chicano/Latino literature.

THREE-MINUTE INTERVIEW (3MI): JONATHAN LETHEM ON DANIEL FUCHS

We first became aware of Daniel Fuchs via last year's collection The Golden West from Black Sparrow Books, which was urged on us by none other than Sam Tanenhaus himself, who felt we'd respond to the Los Angeles subject matter of this fine collection.  He was right, and thus we were excited to receive a copy of Black Sparrow's Brobdingnagian one-volume paperback reissue of Fuch's three novels - The Brooklyn Novels, as they're now known, written before he decamped for the sunnier climes of La-La land.  The book sports a fine introduction by the talented Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude), so we thought we'd drop him a line and see if he wanted to chat about Fuchs for this latest installment of 3MI.  Remember the rules - three questions custom-designed, the last two the same for all comers.  And we're off.

TEV: The shelves of Yaddo seem to be a spawning ground for rediscovering authors, especially the practitioners of realism. (Fuchs for you, Fox for Franzen.) Given that Fuchs' work is so steeped in a tradition of 1930s realism, what do you think his relevance and value to contemporary audiences is (especially for those Beyond Brooklyn), and what case would you make for giving his work a second look? (And this is from someone who is more generously disposed to the realist tradition than a lot of readers and writers seem to be these days.)

JL:  Well, not to begin grousing at your questions right out of the gate, but I feel obliged to try to undermine the categorical imperative infesting your question about my stumbling across Fuchs in the Yaddo library all those years ago. I'd never describe my response as being: "Hey, wow, this example of 1930's realism is a promising one, possibly of interest despite/because of its relation to that tradition..." (Nor was I thinking "Franzen found Fox in here... gotta get something of my own... maybe it's in the "F's" too..." -- though I mention it because this self-generated image made me laugh...I'd forgotten until you reminded me that J-Franz located P-Fox on those same shelves.) What happened instead is I fell, swooningly, in love with Fuchs voice. A simple thing, that, though it needless to say can't and doesn't happen enough. His screwy, intimate, fresh and utterly persuasive evocation of a Williamsburg tenement sang to me, beckoned across the dusty years. The Yaddo library is a good test of such things, since they've removed all the dust jackets from the books, so you're not triangulating your reader's response to an unknown name like Fuchs against flap copy, blurbs and the like. No claim of importance or relevance to any tradition, either from Fuchs' peers and contemporary reviewers or any retrospective critical authority, was there to nudge me and my encounter into this or that intellectual continuum -- I was merely reading. And if, say, his sweet and seamy New York characters had begun donning alligator suits and descending into the sewers, or been harangued by a prophetic talking bird, or (ahem) found a magic ring and begun attempting to use it to fly, I'd have gone to those places with them, however surprising those turns might have been. And his glorious language, and the way he uses it to express the dreaminess in his ghetto-bound characters, contains its own element of fantasy, hinting everywhere at life's possibilities of rapturous strangeness and escape. I wasn't, then -- or, actually, now -- so clearly aware of what the '30's realist tradition' was, so I couldn't be holding him against it. Hemingway? Not close. I don't mean I wasn't, inevitably, making comparisons, but they were my own eccentric and anachronistic ones. He seemed like a precursor to Jerome Charyn, a non-graphic Will Eisner, a less-neurotic Henry Roth. His portrayal of inner-city childhood reminded me of certain of my favorite Lenny Bruce routines (do you know the one about the kid who goes into the toy store for airplane glue to sniff?).

Forgive my curmudgeonliness. This morning I also feel like an enemy of the word *relevance*. (In fact, it may have been at least partly the fear that he was insufficiently 'relevant' -- a value "proletarian" writers were supposed to exhibit, back in Fuchs' day -- that drove him from continuing to write fiction.) Save us from relevance. Read Fuchs for Fuchs, he's like no one else, that being the only relevance literature requires.

TEV: Fuchs headed to Hollywood but unlike Fitzgerald and Faulkner (with whom he collaborated), he neither imploded nor became embittered.  Rather, he seemed to thrive in the vanilla sunshine and wrote without disdain about being a writer for the studios. (I love his "A Hollywood Diary" from last year's collection The Golden West; it's a wonderful bit of freeze-frame of a bygone era when screenwriters were contract workers.) Do you think his unwillingness to at least bite the hand that fed him contributed in any way to his marginalization by East Coast Literary Types?

JL:  Yes, he's refreshingly clear-eyed and good-humored about the advantages and disadvantages of writing for the movies in the great era of the studio system, and provides a much less hysterical window into the fate of a studio writer than the pervasive Barton Fink images suggests. And I don't doubt (as a writer who's flitted from West Coast to East in my own subject matter, and is now about to flit back again) that there can be a self-reinforcing fascination in New York intellectual circles with local topics -- a leaning that may sometimes overrate certain dullish books that happen to be P.C.

"Read Fuchs for Fuchs, he's like no one else, that being the only relevance literature requires."

(provincially consonant) and either overlooks or patronizes books from elsewhere -- and which, even more specifically, might fail to disguise disappointment when one of its 'own' violates Eastcentricity (I remember some memoirist of NY in the '50's, though I can't remember whom, saying that a certain segment of the New York scene had never forgiven Bellow for fleeing to Chicago). But then again, how can we blame the marginalization of Fuchs-as-novelist on anyone but himself? I mean, given that he A: basically quit, and B: persistently, for decades, whenever anyone asked, downgraded his own accomplishment, claimed he'd used up what little he had to say and hence was no particular loss to the reader?

TEV: One of the attractions of the Fuchs story seems to be speculating about what might have been, the novels he might have written had he not "gone Hollywood." In his review of The Golden West, Sam Tanenhaus suggested that Fuchs had "run out of things to say," working on yet more variations of the Brooklyn novels. What's your take on all this?

JL: Well, as I mentioned above (before I'd read this next question), Tanenhaus was only quoting Fuchs. My guess is that selling in the three figures could blunt anyone's sense that they had more to say. I don't know that my wish is for more Brooklyn novels, per se -- but it would have been lovely to see where Fuchs could have grown next, if something or someone had really insisted to him that his voice was remarkable and that he ought to exercise it on any subject that came to hand. Since he ended up in Hollywood, it's hard not to fantasize about a really encompassing and ambitious Hollywood novel from him -- but who knows what else was possible? Many writers are greatest *after* they use up the first thing they have to say, and take a second draught of inspiration.

TEV: Who's the best author we've never heard of?

JL: This is a perfect time to mention my favorite dark horse -- in my mind, the best postwar U.S. novelist still untouched by the present revival boom (is it because he's Left Coastish?): Don Carpenter. Berkeley born and raised, lived most of his life in Mill Valley -- except, yes, for stints in Hollywood, where he wrote in the fading days of the studio system, squeezed out one great proto-indie movie (PAYDAY, with Rip Torn), and stuck better than Fuchs to writing fiction. Hence produced, after first two great novels HARD RAIN FALLING (a terrific prison novel which helped inspire THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE) and BLADE OF LIGHT (which, incidentally, looks to have been an uncredited source for the movie SLINGBLADE), a string of lean and effective novels of '70's show business: THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF JODY McKEEGAN, A COUPLE OF COMEDIANS, and TURNAROUND. Carpenter was among other things, a great writer on the subject of gambling -- pool and poker, specifically -- and that made him particularly apt in his depiction of the fate of art, including his own, in a money town.

TEV: And, finally, ask yourself any question you like - but be sure to answer it.

JL: Any other introductions or afterwards coming out? Well, I've just written a new introduction for Penguin to a book that so far as I know has never been out of print, but doesn't have the stature I think it rates: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, by Shirley Jackson. In the new edition I compare the book to Charles Portis, Henry James, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and Beckett, which suggests pretty well what I think of it. I also just wrote an introduction for a small-press limited edition of a great surrealist noir novel called THE DEADLY PERCHERON, by John Franklin Bardin. Finally, I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I'm writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select. After that, I'm out of the scholarship game, for a while: time to start a new novel (unless someone rescues Don Carpenter...)