“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things


Monday, February 21, 2011

My Interview with Verity La

Over the weekend, Alec Patric at Verity La posted an interview with me, which you can read here. Alec, much to his credit (and as his really interesting Verity La interviews always do), eschewed the normal writer-interview questions, and we got to talk about a lot of different topics, including being an expatriate seppo, the persistence of Modernism, Joyce vs. Hemmingway and the relationship between literary criticism and 'average' readers. Anyway, I enjoyed it--but whether or not you do is a separate question . . .
Posted by Emmett Stinson at 10:02 AM

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great interview, I like Alec's deviation from the ordinary line of questioning, it can be quite unnerving but you fielded well. I enjoyed your theories on the continuation of modernism.

February 21, 2011 at 2:11 PM
Emmett Stinson said...

Thanks, Mark. For my part, I really enjoyed Alec's questions--I'm much happier to talk about ideas or other book than I am to discuss my own work; really, there's nothing more boring than discussing your own book--if I wanted to say something, I would've put it in the book already!

February 24, 2011 at 10:11 AM
Jeff said...

Good interview, with many things about literary fiction nicely said.

March 2, 2011 at 5:04 AM

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