Literature

Hey, the sun came out!!

Goddamn it, Scotland does this to you all the time – just when you’ve made up your mind to abandon ship and go live in the Mediterranean (well, not exactly in it, obviously), the clouds part, sunlight streams down and paints all that gently shifting foliage soft velvet green, temperatures climb to respectable summer levels and you get hit with this fleeting odour of things growing – hard to describe, but for me it’s the scent of summer holidays up here when I was a kid. When we first moved to Glasgow in 2000, we had a flat overlooking a tree fringed flowing stream and I used to cycle off to work in the mornings, at the age of thirty five, convinced at some deep atavistic level that I was still on a childhood holiday. As a colleague said at the time – man, you got to bottle that and market it.

Scotland actually does do almost exactly that, if not with its scents, then with its light. You’ll have seen that light as you pass through the duty free zones in airports all over the world. It’s wrapped around ranked bottles of single malt, it’s plastered across store section poster space and sometimes it shows up in movies about Scottish heroes starring Irishmen, Frenchmen or Australian-Americans (Yeah, I know – go figure). But actually, what you’re seeing there, that light, has been stepped on, as drug dealers like to say (at least, they did when Robert Sabbag wrote Snowblind (great book, btw – get it) back in 1976 – these days, I don’t know any drug dealers so I’m not sure if the parlance is still current). To see real Scottish light, you need to come here for yourself – and a good place to see it from is heading west out of Glasgow, on the Erskine suspension bridge. Stand there towards the end of a decent summer day, and you can get a startling view that might just make you want to stay: 

Westward, the clouds are smashed in with yolky evening light and ladders of pale filtering silver-gray.  There are mountains, scoured blunt and rounded by a billion years of geology, and the sea poured into the gaps between. It looks cold and wild and heart-catching, like all that whisky advertising footage before the safely warming tones of gold and green are shaded in to take us down from cask strength to a more palatable luxury product. You’re looking at Argyll, the toe of the Scottish Highlands, and a looming hint of what’s waiting further north.

Yes, standing up there, you can forget for a while that Glasgow is the murder capital of western Europe.  Which –

Oh shit, Linda, I’m still not talking about books, am I.  My apologies.  Ahem:

Currently reading: Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Colossal seven hundred and something page epic detailing the meeting and developing friendship of those two guys who drew the famous Mason-Dixon line – though at the stage I’ve reached, they haven’t yet reached America and are busy with astronomical duties for the Royal Society. Looking up, brooding and squabbling with each other, mostly. Doesn’t sound very interesting, I know, but trust me, this is some of Pynchon’s finest work. I mean, a book set in the eighteenth century and there’s a Bill Clinton joke on page 10! There’s also a primary narrator called the Reverend Cherrycoke, a family of mad Afrikaaners called the Vrooms (the mother soberly addressed as Vrou Vroom) and an intensely knowledgable ship’s crewmember and esteemed yarn spinner called Pat O’Brien. Catch that lot, if you can. Mason and Dixon features some of best laugh out loud tricks I’ve ever seen in modern literature, along with a poignant look at the dawn of the Age of Reason and the Independence of America. However, Linda should be warned it also features more than a few “curse” words, presumably demonstrating that Pynchon, like me, is suffering from stunted vocabulary development. If you can forgive him that, though, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Just make sure you set aside a good three weeks or so to read and digest it.

Shit, that’s the bell. I’m out of words – okay, tomorrow we’re back to Glasgow and looking up some more. At a ship, among other things. See you then. Meantime, I have to go and get drunk with Steve Erickson.

No, really. --Richard Morgan

The major papers haven't taken notice yet [update: the Times did later in the day, as did Entertainment Weekly], but the web world has been noting over the past day that Thomas M. Disch, critic, poet, and major science fiction writer, died on Friday, apparently by his own hand. You can read  appreciations (with extensive comments in many cases) from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Ellen Datlow, Scott Edelman, and GalleyCat. Our own Jeff VanderMeer, before going into hibernation for a bit to focus on writing his next novel, wrote this on his own blog:

This is really sad, sad news about a very talented individual–an icon of the New Wave.

…and having thought about it some more and being both sad about this and somewhat appalled at the coverage in certain quarters dwelling on Disch’s cantankerous nature, a few additional observations.

Yes, he could be a pain in the ass. Yes, he was paranoid at times. So what? Who among us hasn’t been either of those things at various times in our lives? But he always spoke his mind, he was a true original, and I never read a novel by him that I didn’t think was deeply felt and fiercely intelligent. That includes his last, from Tachyon, out this month, which is at times by its nature self-indulgent, but has his trademark qualities: incisive wit, absurdist dark humor, stark intellectual curiosity. These are qualities you find in too few modern novels.

Disch had lost his partner of three decades, was having trouble with his apartment, and I guess it was just ultimately too much for him. Look, being a writer isn’t as tough as some jobs, but it can be lonely, it can be the equivalent of working without a safety net, and it has the ability to take a lot out of a person. On top of the blows life can deal to you.

I’m very sad at this moment, in part on a personal level and in part knowing how many of my close friends were friends of his and thus are mourning his loss right now. I never spoke to Disch–I just read his books, read his blog, and admired him for the very quality a few others didn’t like: he was himself. Sometimes I think we want writers to be sanitized, polite, get-with-the-program clones of each other in terms of their personalities. There was never any danger of that with Disch.

I didn’t actually know him in a personal sense, as I’ve said, but I already miss him very much. And I hope wherever he is now he’s at peace.

We also asked his longtime friend Michael Moorcock for a remembrance:

 

Tom and I had been friends since the mid-60s. He became a stalwart of New Worlds when we published his novels Echo Round His Bones and Camp Concentration, and many classic short stories, including The Squirrel Cage and 334. Tom's sense of humour was enormous and he was the very best company. He was witty, extremely intelligent and courteous. He was especially generous with his time to younger writers. My wife Linda says she had never laughed as much as when she was in Tom's company. His long, stable relationship with his partner ended with Charlie's painful death in 2005 which was followed by a number of misfortunes, yet he kept producing poetry, much of which he published on his own blog.  He had periods of depression but his friends remember how infectiously jolly he could be only days before the end. He gave the world a great deal and his generosity wasn't always reciprocated by the world around him.

I knew Disch almost entirely as a critic--back when I first started taking notice of bylines his sharp and often unsparing reviews in The Nation, often of books and other art far from those with which he had made his reputation, made his name stick in my mind. (That and his author photo above--I didn't know any book reviewers looked like that!) He wrote on anything that found his passion, which led to a long list of works that includes these highlights, along with countless stories and reviews:

• The Genocides (novel, 1965)
• Echo Round His Bones (novel, 1967)
  
• Camp Concentration (novel, 1968--his most-cited classic)
• Fun with Your New Head (stories, 1968)
• 334 (novel, 1972)
• On Wings of Song (novel, 1979)
• The Brave Little Toaster (children's novella, yes, later adapted by Disney, 1980)
• Neighboring Lives (novel, 1981--a historical epic about Thomas Carlyle and friends, written with his partner, Charles Naylor)
  
• The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (novel, 1984--the first in his series of horror novels)
• Yes, Let's: New and Selected Poems (poetry, 1989)
• The M.D.: A Horror Story (novel, 1991--a bestseller)
• The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (criticism, 1994)
• The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (Hugo-winning criticism, 1998)
• The Word of God (novel, 2008)
• The Wall of America (stories, coming in October 2008)

--Tom

NYT bestselling author Michelle Richmond is a bit of a chimera: her novels certainly have mainstream, commercial appeal but there's often a dark core to them, along with influences that include Italo Calvino and Paul Auster. This gives them a lot more depth than the breezy covers might suggest. Her latest, No One You Know, is as much Borgesian mystery as it is the story of a complex relationship between a woman and her sibling. Twenty years after the murder of Ellie Enderlin's sister, Lila, Ellie acquires a strange book of mathematical equations that might hold the key to finding out who killed Lila. What follows is a fascinating exploration of the past, of family secrets, and of a centuries-old mathematical puzzle.

Richmond's other books include The Year of Fog and Dream of the Blue Room. Her stories and essays have appeared in Playboy, Kenyon Review, and the anthology Logorrhea. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son. I recently interviewed her via email. She replied from her home office, "which is a small room in a small house ten blocks from San Francisco's Ocean Beach. It's chilly and foggy today, as it is most days in June, and there's a bit of sea air coming in from one of the bedroom windows at the back of the house, which I had to open because I just burned a pan of cornbread. Really! I'm thirty-something years old and spent the first twenty years of my life in Alabama, and yet I haven't mastered the art of not burning the cornbread. Books everywhere. Papers scattered about. The closet door has come open, and various things are falling out of it: a kiddie croquet set, an exercise step, and a Trader Joe's bag filled with books I need to send out to people who have been nice to me. I've got Lloyd Cole playing on the computer speakers."

                          

Amazon.com: This is your second novel for Delacourte. Does writing a novel get easier each time?Michelle Richmond: A little, maybe. There's no formula for writing a novel, so in a way one reinvents the wheel each time. But I definitely write more efficiently now. I've become more focused over the years, less likely to write an entire chapter that is ultimately expendable. With The Year of Fog I cut upwards of a hundred pages in editing, but with No One You Know I ended up omitting only about fifty pages in the final draft. I rarely know how the novel is going to end when I begin it; I tend to figure out the plot as I go along. However, from the moment I begin, I do have a very clear idea about characters, theme, and structure, as well as a strong handle on what the emotional and intellectual centers of the book should be.

Amazon.com: Was there a particular spark or catalyst for the writing of No One You Know?
Richmond: It's difficult to pinpoint a specific catalyst. However, I knew from the start that I was interested in the fine line between fact and fiction, and the way stories shape our lives. I was interested in the idea that the stories others tell about us can have enormous repercussions. I knew that I wanted San Francisco to be the setting for the book, but not as much a character in its own right as it was in The Year of Fog. And I also decided at the outset that I was going to tackle something I've avoided my entire life--math. The narrator, Ellie, is a coffee buyer, but her sister, who was murdered 20 years before, was a math prodigy. While I didn't want the novel to hinge too much on mathematical esoterica, I did want the flavor of mathematics to be part of the book; so while the narrator is as math-phobic as I am, she is able to appreciate some of the stories behind mathematics with a layperson's eye. I have always been drawn to "found texts" in fiction, so it was great fun for me to have Ellie come across Lila's math notebook from her days at Stanford.

Amazon.com: Would it be correct to call this a lit. mainstream novel that happens to contain a mystery, or do you see it as a mystery novel?
Richmond: I see it as mainstream literary fiction that happens to contain a mystery. One of the reviewers called it a "literary thriller," which surprised and delighted me. While I never specifically set out to write a mystery, there's definitely a strong element of mystery at play in the book. I think there's room in the world of literary fiction for writers to play with all kinds of genres. Fortunately, that's something that is a lot more readily acknowledged and accepted these days--a blurring of the lines between mainstream, literary,  fantasy, mystery, science fiction, erotica, etc.

Amazon.com: There's a centuries-old mathematics puzzle involved in the plot. That strikes me as a slightly Borgesian element. Are there any ghosts of other writers lingering behind the pages of No One You Know?
Richmond: Ah, yes, I've been in awe of Borges for many years. Talk about fictional labyrinths, stories within stories! I was also reading Paul Auster at the time I was writing the book, and was fascinated by the idea of coincidences that he explores in The Red Notebook, as well as in his fiction. In the first chapter of No One You Know, Ellie runs into someone from her past--the man implicated in her sister's murder--in a small cafe in Nicaragua. On the surface it seems strange that their lives should intersect at this point, but the day I wrote that passage, my husband called from London to tell me he had just run into a friend of ours from San Francisco at Heathrow. And I've had my own strange experiences of running into old college friends in Budapest, or bumping into a couple I'd met in Iceland at my favorite movie theater on the Upper West Side. Coincidence, probability--it intrigues me.

Before I started writing No One You Know, I had lunch in North Beach with a writer friend and teaching colleague, Juvenal Acosta. Juvenal mentioned how much he admired Graham Green's The End of the Affair. I went right out and checked the book out from the library, and six months later it was still sitting in my office, full of post-it notes. Eventually I returned it, paid the fine, and bought my own copy, which I've marked up liberally. The End of the Affair provided an opening impulse for the book, in the line "A story has no beginning and no end. Arbitrarily one chooses the moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead." This is the motto of Ellie's sophomore English professor, Andrew Thorpe, who makes the huge ethical blunder of publishing a true crime book about Lila's murder. Ellie wonders where her own story begins and ends. The End of the Affair is the story of a love affair gone wrong, with the mystery of the beloved's death front and center, but it's also a book about writing, about finding one's story and figuring out the best way to tell it. I was definitely giving a nod to Graham Greene when I had Ellie recall bits of writing advice that Thorpe had given her when she was a student in his literature class.

Amazon.com: What part of the writing life is the most enjoyable to you?
Richmond: Coffee early in the morning, and a blank page. Figuring out the puzzle--how things relate to each other, what associations will be surprising or enticing or illuminating to the reader. Even when I'm having trouble with a scene or a plot point, there's always something joyful about trying to get the story right. And I love being able to believe that there is always another book in my future. I think very few writers ever actually write the book they intended to write. There's always something more you wanted to say, or some element of the character that got left on the editing room floor. So one is always looking forward to the promise of the next book, which has not yet been written and which, therefore, still holds the possibility of perfection.

Amazon.com: When a book comes out, what's the most stressful part of the whole PR cycle for you?
Richmond: Readings! I actually enjoy giving readings, and I have a blast when I'm in front of a crowd, telling stories and connecting with the audience. Honestly, I think if I had the opportunity for an entirely different second career, I would have loved to be an actor. But there's a lot of anxiety before a reading, because I never know if anyone is going to show up. It's painful to stand in front of a room full of empty seats. Almost of my writer friends share this anxiety with me. So if you're a reader who's wondering whether you should make the effort to go to a reading and meet an author whose books you like...go! Please! They will be happy to meet you and thrilled that you made the effort. They might be so grateful they invite you over for dinner.

Michelle Richmond will be on tour this summer in support of No One You Know. Her tour schedule is posted on her website.

Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist is one of the most original American novels of the year. A quest by a father to save his son, a tale of mad scientists and dream-logic, the story of a band of "freaks" on their own strange journey, and the chronicle of an odd coma clinic, the book defies easy classification. As I wrote in my recent Washington Post Book World review, "I've read The Resurrectionist twice now, and both times it came as something of a revelation. It seems odd we should care so much about the freaks, for example, when we know they're merely characters in a boy's comic book. Nor should the dream-life of a coma patient be so resonant, and yet it is."

The Resurrectionist has been reviewed by the LA Times, BookPage, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. The New York Times Book Review wrote of the book, "“To call Jack O’Connell’s novels imaginative, or even original, doesn’t begin to say it...There’s something both exciting and unnerving about [his] kind of hallucinatory writing.” Ron Hogan at Galleycat also posted a very nice feature. A website for The Resurrectionist exists at Enter Limbo.

The novel comes nine years after O'Connell's last, in part for reasons revealed in the interview below and in part because his previous novel, Word Made Flesh, "was an extremely dark book. By the time it was published, I had two young kids. And I didn’t want to go back in the darkness for a while. So I spent a couple of years writing a satirical road novel. It’s a book I still like but my agent convinced me that it was not what readers expected or wanted from me. And that it might diminish whatever small readership I’d built up over these last 15 years. So I put it in a drawer and launched Sweeney’s story. Which was soon invaded by a troupe of wandering circus freaks." Other novels by O'Connell include the cult classic Box Nine, The Skin Palace, and Wireless, all set in his iconic, uniquely American creation, the rustbelt city of Quinsigamond.

As a long-time fan of O'Connell's unique surreal noir approach to fiction, I was thrilled to have a chance to interview him. When I asked where he was while answering my emailed questions, he replied, "I’m in the lab. The sepulcher. The dreaming vault at the top of the house. Hermetically sealed and insulated with 40 years worth of collected pulp. It’s about 5 a.m. and I’m stupid with jet-lag..."

Amazon.com: Where did your city of Quinsigamond come from? How has it changed over the years?
Jack O'Connell: Quinsigamond is my home-city as refracted through a quarter century of fever dream. I’ve lived my whole life within about three square miles of central Massachusetts. That was not the intention. No kid ever fell so hard for the standard clichés of an imagined writing life. I haunted the corner Rexall store and memorized the bio-blurbs on the rear covers of the paperbacks. Was long convinced that I needed to travel the globe, drive dynamite trucks, pan for gold in the Yukon, and fight fascists in Spain in order to become a writer. Things didn’t work out that way. And so, to paraphrase Thoreau, I have traveled much in my old, rustbelt, native city.

Basically, and over time, Quinsigamond became my supreme noir machine, the eternally dark and unknowable American metropolis. A nefarious, urban, capitalist hive where cycles of mystery, violence, manipulation, degradation, fear, loathing and meaninglessness play out repeatedly. Quinsigamond is the enormous, shadowy, chaotic, violent city that you have seen in so many films: It is Alphaville. It is Chinatown. It is Gotham City, Sin City, the Naked City. It is the Asphalt Jungle, the Nightmare Alley, the Shock Corridor and the Street of No Return.

But it’s also the archetypal real-world urban industrial city of the northeastern United States. So, Quinsigamond is Detroit, Michigan, of 1976. It is Akron, Ohio. It is Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Bangkok Park section of my city is Watts of 1965 or the most ravaged section of the Bronx in New York in 1972 (crossed with the Harlem of a dozen b-budget crime movies). The Canal Zone section of Quinsigamond is Manhattan’s East Village, on a Halloween night when someone slipped a particularly potent brand of acid into your punch. In one sense, Quinsigamond is this stew of my perceptions of what happened to all these once-teaming, once-vibrant metropolises of the American empire; these large urban municipalities that were emblematic of the industrial age. And as we moved into a post-industrial era, these cities were sort of abandoned and left to decay.

From the beginning, I was writing stories set in some version of my hometown. By the time I hit my 20s, it had morphed into Quinsigamond. And to this day, I continue to watch it evolve...or, maybe, devolve. It has grown in ways that amuse and repel and surprise. These days, I’m most interested in the totality of its history, which I’ve been mapping in the notebooks with ever-increasing detail over the last decade or so. I know how Quinsigamond began and how it ends. And I’m discovering with a good bit of excitement what happened in between.

Amazon.com: Your writing often mixes noir, horror, and the grotesque with your own brand of what I'd call American Surrealism. What influences on your work might surprise readers?
Jack O'Connell: Not sure how surprising any of the influences might be. I came of age in the late 60s/early 70s and, like a lot of my peers, I confess to a crazy amount of joy derived from wallowing in the pop of that era. What I get a kick out of is discovering, via the Web, that though we often thought we were the only Secret Martians on the planet grooving on the weird stuff at 1 a.m. in our parents’ paneled rec rooms, we were actually part of a teeming, semi-hidden nation of pulp-devouring geeks. I really dig that shock of recognition when somebody references that ancient ABC Movie of the Week that played with his head for two weeks in 1971. Or that German horror flick that triggered a month of dissociation when it was screened at the downtown grindhouse one weekend in ’72.

But the writers who really knocked me over and shaped me were people like Bradbury and Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison. I always loved stories that seemed rooted in the mundane here and now until about three pages in. Then someone turns down an alley and everything becomes bathed in a growing aura of weirdness. I had the good fortune to spend a day in Phoenix a couple weeks ago with Jim Sallis, and, as always, I couldn’t help but hound him for anecdotes about the New Wave cabal – about Ellison and Delany and Spinrad and Dangerous Visions and New Worlds and such. Those guys hit me at a crucial time. From someone like Ellison, I took this lasting notion that you could mix things up, that you could retain the coolness, the flash, of SF, and merge it with mainstream literary devices and concerns. That you could cross-breed genres. That you could experiment, you could have fun. You could play with new effects, styles, approaches. That you were allowed to use whatever you felt best illuminated the story at hand.

A lot of noir writers that I know acknowledge an adolescent love of mystery stories. But during those crucial years when I was driving around my hometown with my father and soaking up my particular landscape, I was also feasting on different kinds of stories, which, though often housed inside a variety of different mediums, shared tone--a kind of weird, noirish, dystopian-but-still-romantic, individualistic, visionary vibe. Whether in stories and novels, or films, or even in TV shows or record albums, I was hungry for fables about the tensions between rebellion and conformity, the individual and the faceless state, control and freedom, illusion and reality, comfort and liberty. I was always a sucker for neo-Orwellian weirdness. I guess I’m thinking of stuff like The Prisoner, this blatant, strident, anti-totalitarian serial--Mod Kafka for the late night tube. And that trickle of early ’70s SF films about near-future dystopias--movies like A Boy and His Dog, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and Rollerball--which all seemed, even to my hormone-engorged, pubertous brain, incendiary critiques of contemporary culture. You know, I’d even include Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” which was a corner drugstore JD paperback novel set to music, exploded into a Wall of Sound, electrified, supercharged, made epic and operatic, a teenage Iliad staged inside the noir daydreams of my own city.

Amazon.com: What was the hardest part of writing The Resurrectionist?
Jack O'Connell: Everything was difficult throughout the course of this composition. I started out imagining that I was writing one book and ended up realizing, at one point, that I was writing another. I’ve never had a writing experience like this one. Originally, my intention was to write a sleek noir story that could have been sold in a 1959 Detroit bus station. In four or five months, I had completed most of a first draft of that book. In that draft, I had my protagonist repeatedly reading a comic book to his comatose son. Then one day, I asked myself, “What’s the deal with this comic book? What’s the story?” And thus was born the sub-plot about the Goldfaden Circus Freaks and their travails, as detailed in the comic book, Limbo. In short order, the freaks’ story began to expand and grow. And before I knew it, the freaks’ tale was rivaling my little bus station noir. Then it was mirroring the original story. And then it was making moves to merge with the noir thriller. 

Amazon.com: Did you write the "comic book" sections all at one time and then layer them into the novel, or...?
Jack O'Connell: Yes. Once I realized the comic book story was going to be a running secondary narrative throughout the book, I wrote the freaks’ tale beginning to end. In fact, there is a larger, longer version than the one that appears in the book. I sliced and reshaped and rewrote in order to layer it into the primary narrative.

Amazon.com: There's a remarkable scene between the (mad) doctor and his prized newt. What did you want that scene to accomplish? Was it as fun to write as it is to read?
Jack O'Connell: Ha! Glad you liked René! Mostly, I guess, it’s an expository scene, of a sort. And I was hoping to shine some light on Dr. Peck’s character, I suppose. But the fact is, I’m not done with René. René will return. He and his kind have played a significant role in the history of Quinsigamond and will continue to do so. You know, a couple weeks back, I was walking around Portland, Oregon, late at night and I debated getting a tattoo of René the newt on the bottom of my left foot…

Amazon.com: How much revision do you do? And how much of what you wrote in rough draft made it into the published version of The Resurrectionist?
Jack O'Connell: I’m a compulsive reviser. And I wish I were not. And the compulsion seems only to get worse. I go through multiple drafts of a book and the changes from draft to draft are considerable. Then I work with my agent on additional, successive drafts. And then with the book’s editor once it’s sold. I’ll put it this way: I always begin with an outline. Once a book is about 100 pages along, I put the outline in a drawer and give myself the freedom to take some detours and see where they lead. When the book is finished and I’m packing up drafts and notes and the ephemera that surround composition, I’ll often take another look at that original outline. It rarely bears much resemblance to the published novel.

Amazon.com: Who is the biggest "freak" in The Resurrectionist, in your opinion?
Jack O'Connell: My gut says that the biggest freak of all is the guy who dreamed up the story. And I’m more than a little ambivalent regarding that confession…

Amazon.com: Would you ever consider writing an actual Limbo comic book?
Jack O'Connell: Yup. After the book sold, word got around, apparently, about the comic book subplot. There were some casual discussions between my agent and some comics people. One day, I received an envelope in the mail that contained some pencil sketches of some of my Goldfaden freaks. The artist really nailed some of those characters, I thought.

It’s funny--because of the Limbo story, people think I have some background in comics. I wish that were the case. Growing up, comics were a seasonal, passing fancy. I never read the terrific superhero stuff my friends were reading. Late ’60s, I was feasting on the stories of “Chuck White” in Treasure Chest and things like Archie and Sad Sack. It wasn’t until the 1980s that I became aware of some of the amazing work people were doing in comics. My brother turned me on to Dean Motter’s Mr. X. Right now, I’m smitten with Warren Ellis’s Dr. Sleepless. And while I’ve been out on the road, lots of people have raved over and pointed me to Criminal by Brubaker.

Amazon.com: Buzz the motorcycle gang leader is pretty complex, but basically a sociopath, I thought. Would you agree with that assessment? And if so, what does it say about Sweeney that he in a sense weds his fate to Buzz's by novel's end?
Jack O'Connell: I do agree. And I think it says that Sweeney has come down a pretty harrowing road and emerged at its end a fairly altered individual. One who can no longer accept the consensus reality that, in the past, had defined his existence.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Jack O'Connell: About ten years ago I started writing a novel about a group of surfistas--the kids who try to “surf” atop speeding commuter trains. Back in the early ’90s, someone gave me a photo of these streets kids in Rio who weren’t allowed onto the tourist beaches. And, so, they found their own way to surf--they’d climb up on the roofs of trains and try to surf them as they sped down tracks and around curves. Until recently, I couldn’t find the correct voice for the book. Now I think I’ve got it. Hopefully, I’ll have a draft done in the next year.

Daniel Grandbois' writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction, Boulevard, Sentence, Del Sol Review, and the anthologies Freak Lightning and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years. An accomplished musician, he has played in several Denver-based bands. This month his first book, Unlucky Lucky Days hits bookstores. It's an intriguing, nicely-packaged fiction collection divided into a week's worth of 73 short-shorts. Some of these stories are funny, others unsettling. One of my favorite writers, Brian Evenson, has said of Unlucky Lucky Days, "Grandbois is the master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits." I recently interviewed Grandbois about fiction, music, and Buckwaldo Mudthumper. Included after the interview is an exclusive excerpt from the book.

Amazon.com: Please describe your surroundings as you answer these questions.
Grandbois: I’m in my car, parked outside the house where my son is having an extra piano lesson in preparation for a recital this weekend. The car is facing into a field at the back of the cul-de-sac, and it’s raining cottonwood seeds. The little puffs, almost deliberately it seems, come in through the windows and get in my hair. I have a thermos of green tea. I’ll need to pee before his lesson is over. The driver’s seat is scooted back, and I’m sunk down into it.

Amazon.com: Are you a writer first or a musician first?
Grandbois: Though I wanted to be a musician as far back as kindergarten and didn’t think about writing seriously until college, I’ve found myself consistently working harder at and having more success with writing. I’ve certainly spent more hours in my life listening to music than reading books, but I never really put in the time to understand an instrument more than intuitively or develop any great songwriting skill. I’ve pulled my weight in some great bands over the years, but those were, essentially, other people’s bands--Slim’s band (Slim Cessna’s Auto Club), Kal and Rumley’s band (Tarantella), and now Munly’s band (Munly and the Lupercalians). The writing is all my own and, for whatever reason, easier for me to be disciplined about.

Amazon.com: Why short-shorts? And why now?
Grandbois: When I was in my realist/traditional phase of writing, which coincided interestingly with my formal education phase, I got frustrated after a workshop with Frank Conroy in Iowa and wandered off the campus and into Prairie Lights bookstore, grumbling to myself, “Can’t I even like what I like?” I asked the clerk what he recommended that was anywhere close to the style and voice of Richard Brautigan, my first real love as a reader (Brautigan’s whimsical, poetic, voice-driven little pieces were what made me both a reader and a writer), and was handed a copy of Russell Edson’s “The Tunnel.” I still struggled through many years of trying to write more traditional narratives but discovering Edson’s somewhat obscure (then) and twisted little prose poems was probably the second major step in getting me to write whatever absurdities naturally poured out of me when I allowed myself to forgot everything I’d learned and everything I thought I was supposed to write. I had no real knowledge of the history of the short short forms. I just knew what I liked and began to write what pleased me. I guess it all comes, then, from having this peculiar lump of gray matter.

Amazon.com: In closing, let’s talk about influences. I’ll give you two writers’ names. You tell me which one wins in your literary pantheon and why...Jorges Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
Grandbois: Borges for writing short fictions and prose poems before their time and for imagining he wouldn’t bring his umbrella if he could do it all over again.

Amazon.com: Thomas Pynchon or Joan Didion?
Grandbois: I’ll always remember a review of “Jitterbug Perfume” that said Tom Robbins was “funny as Vonnegut, winsome as Brautigan, and knowing as Pynchon” because it got me to read all three of those authors, and this was at the beginning of my reading career when it was such a thrill to discover new voices. So Pynchon wins for that reason alone!

Amazon.com: Jack London or Jack Kerouac?
Grandbois: Kerouac in my twenties, London in my forties. I wrote a Kerouac-inspired novel, “Pointing Nowhere,” in my mid-twenties, begun while living in a two-room cabin by a creek in an almost-ghost town at the edge of the Indian Peaks Wilderness. On moonless nights, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. It was my second book. Unlike my first, “The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir,” which was recovered from a box in the garage and will be published by Green Integer this September, “Pointing Nowhere” won’t be dug up. Maybe that’s why the nod here goes to London.

Amazon.com: Buckwaldo Mudthumper or Juan Mandible Sick-Eyes?
Grandbois: The last time I heard anything remotely flattering about Buckwaldo Mudthumper I was three feet deep in viscous sewage that had found its way into my garden apartment at the behest of one Mr. Juan Mandible Sick-Eyes and his uncompromising hoses. “That ol’ Mudthumper,” said Sick-Eyes then, I his more than captive audience, “he sure knew how to plug a drain.” Tie.

STILL LIFE WITH PAINTER
Excerpted from Unlucky Lucky Days
Copyright 2008 Daniel Grandbois

The painter did not move. His assistants moved things around him. Now, he was in the kitchen. Now, in his bed. The fruit bowl was brought to his face so he could eat avocados and pomegranates by using only his jaw. The carafe was drunk from similarly, as well as the porcelain teacup and the indelicate glass of wine. Once a day, a bouquet of flowers was put beneath his nose for sniffing, which he did without a sound.

They touched canvases to his brush. This was the most demanding task, not for the obvious reasons but because his curling fingernails had never been cut.

In the master’s m