George Salis: Your upcoming book, An Angel of Sodom, contains a short novel and seven short stories. What was the thought-process behind curating this collection? How do the stories complement each other?
Continue reading “Driving a Bug: An Interview with David Vardeman”
George Salis: How did you first discover the work of David Foster Wallace and which of his works did you first read? Please paint a picture of the beginning of this love affair.
Continue reading “Infinite Wallace: An Interview with the Co-Founder of The Great Concavity”
George Salis: Your novel, A Greater Monster, seems to focus more on language and imagery than plot. Was this a conscious choice?
Continue reading “Breaking Open the Head: An Interview with David David Katzman”
Nicole Melchionda: Anti-Heroin Chic is an inclusive journal that aims to explore the gritty depths of the human experience. When you started this project, was your primary goal to unify others, to fill some kind of emptiness, or something else entirely? Have your goals evolved over time?
Continue reading “Darklight: An Interview with James Diaz”
George Salis: You have two new novels out since 2018, The Pleasures of Queueing and Night of the Long Goodbyes. The former novel was published first so technically it is your debut, but which one is your first novel? Also, how do these novels compare and contrast? Are they in conversation with each other or totally disparate?
Continue reading “Climatic Exile: An Interview with Erik Martiny”
George Salis: What has influenced you then and what influences you now?
Continue reading “Hungrily Poetic: An Interview with Barton Smock”
Rick Harsch’s new novel, The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, is now available in a special edition run of 100 signed copies. At over 700 pages, the novel “is in part a story about what empire has wrought, and how over the recent two centuries the United States rose to global economic mastery and nuclear proliferate madhouse. But it is also an absurdist masterpiece and a metafictional epic rooted in American history (including the story of Hugh Glass, his journey along the Salmon River and the epic battle with Old Ephraim, a giant bear), and the impact of that history on our modern society (the movie by DiCaprio notwithstanding).” Order here.
Continue reading “Punnery & Nunnery: An Interview with Rick Harsch”
George Salis: I consider you something of a superhero, championing the underdogs of literature who have been wrongly neglected. And so, what is the superhero origin story of Tough Poets Press, does it involve radioactive spiders, gamma rays, mutant genes?
Continue reading “Thrill of the Hunt: An Interview with the Founder of Tough Poets Press”
Editor’s note: The Untranslated is without a doubt my favorite blog. Run by an erudite polyglot, the blog consists of English reviews of “significant literary works not yet translated into English.” Thus Andrei, the blog’s founder, makes porous the language barrier, allowing us self-loathing monoglots (or those with only a few disparate tongues) to peer into contents of foreign literary masterpieces that may or may not be translated, let alone translatable. Reading his blog is like reading a Borges story about a book that doesn’t exist, yet it does exist. I thank Andrei for all his hard work and for agreeing to this interview.
George Salis: Why do you think the audience for translated fiction is so small? Is it because the audience for fiction in general is not all that large to begin with?
Continue reading “Towers of Babel: An Interview with the Founder of The Untranslated”
Imagine a fictional world in which all your beloved (or despised) dead writers get one last swan song from beyond the grave. Do they find themselves in “heaven,” “hell,” or something far stranger? And will they ever get around to answering some of literature’s greatest mysteries for us, such as:
Continue reading “Literary Afterlife: An Interview with Ian Drew Forsyth”
