When we first started Dossier, I had a wish list of writers that I wanted to be involved in the magazine, and contacted Doerr asking him if he wanted to be involved. He mentioned he was looking to be sent to the space station so he could write a piece about it. Well, we couldn’t do that but we’re pleased to tell you that he just contributed an essay on portraiture for our next issue, with images shot by Jessica-Craig Martin. And if there are any other editors out there- he is still looking to go to space. I hope he gets there because I would love to read that essay with all its science bits. Here, Doerr was kind enough to talk a little bit with us about memories, Idaho and the best part of summer.

Katherine Krause: How did you start writing?

Anthony Doerr: I was hammering out stories about my Playmobil pirate ship on my mother’s typewriter when I was nine. I always felt amazed that the books on my shelves were written by human beings, not Gods, that anyone with enough determination and patience and guts could write one. I still feel amazed at that.

Katherine: When you were younger, was there anything else you wanted to be? From your stories it is obvious you have a comprehensive view of science, particularly biology- where does that come from? You write a column on science books for the Boston Globe, would you ever write a book on science yourself?

Anthony: An architect. And a malacologist (someone who studies mollusks). The love for science comes mostly from my mother, who has been a science teacher all her life. And it comes from being outside–I was outside all the time as a kid, climbing trees, fishing, rock climbing, capturing snails in Florida. I’m still outside as much as my life will allow me to be.

Katherine: You write both fiction and non-fiction- is there one that you prefer?

Anthony: I prefer fiction. But sometimes an essay is just waiting there, some spark of an idea for me to fumble after on the page. Often essays come from more practical urges (i.e., a magazine will pay me to write one), but fiction is my truest love, mostly because I find it so challenging and absorbing. Ultimately I just like mucking about with language and feel intensely grateful that I’ve been able to do so in my life.

Katherine: Do you have a specific writing process or ritual? How often and for how long do you write a day?

Anthony: Yep, I rent an office away from my house. I show up in the morning, strap on chainsaw-operator’s earmuffs, turn over a big old-fashioned hourglass, and try to write for two whole turns of the hourglass. Then I let myself take a break to, say, check email and answer interview questions. On good days I can do a lot more than two hours, and on bad days I don’t quite make it through two turns of the hourglass. Those days I’m usually cranky.

Katherine: You’ve said that you end up writing stories that are too long to be short stories or too short to be novels. Is this on purpose or by accident?

Anthony: I think it’s mostly by accident. Stories form slowly on the page for me, in a slow accretion of days, and mostly in one’s subconscious. One can’t always control how large their structures will be. For me, right now, they keep ending up around 50 or 60 or 70 pages.

Katherine: Do you think the novella will a renaissance?

Anthony: That sure would be nice! One likes to think that with iPad and Kindles and such, more and more readers will be willing to take on a nice juicy novella.

Katherine: Why did you choose the theme of memory for your collection of short stories? Did you purposely write these stories to be part of a bigger collection relating to memory or were you just in the memory zone? It seems like a lot of the characters in Memory Wall are isolated or abandoned and their memories are there to comfort them, but you suggest that the memories will also abandon them. What made you start thinking about that? Did someone in your family have Alzheimer’s or Dementia?

Anthony: When I was in high school, my grandmother began to act in confusing ways, and even endanger herself, so Mom and Dad brought her from Toledo to Cleveland to live with us. She quickly deteriorated; she couldn’t remember my parents’ names; she always worried about where her purse was. In the evenings she’d sit at the kitchen table and ask, over and over, to be taken home. And at night she’d stand in the hall and call names and addresses into the dark. I remember that my mom had to bathe her–my mother, bathing her mother. And yet, most days, Grandma could still crush me at gin-rummy! When the burden got to be too much for my folks, and they started looking for homes for Grandma, was the first time I’d heard of Alzheimer’s. What a strange and terrible disease. Then, though I was too young to appreciate what my parents (especially my mother) were going through, I did learn in some fundamental way that our identities are absolutely and irrevocably tied up in memory. Lose your memories, lose yourself. This new book is in many ways an attempt to being to understand my parents’ pain, and to investigate the role memory plays in the lives of all of us as we grow up, age, and cope with grief.

Katherine: The title story has a science fiction slant- is that a genre you are attracted to or would write more of?

Anthony: Mainly I’m interested in things I think are fascinating. Like parachutes and people who eat songbirds and pretty little snails that can poison big, strong adult humans and kill them. That particular story came out of an assignment from McSweeney’s to write a story set in the near-future. The conceit of the memory cartridges–that someday doctors might record our memories–is actually something neuroscientists are beginning to work on. Is is science fiction? Ultimately, I don’t mind either way–that’s for a critic to decide.

Katherine: There is one story in Memory Wall set in Idaho, but the rest take place all over the world- did you have a connection to each of these places? Lithuania, South Africa, Germany, Ohio, Kansas, China…

Anthony: Yes. Travel fuels my work and I keep a journal everywhere I go. I find I can write better, see more clearly, and think more largely when I get out of my habits and put myself in unfamiliar situations. I was in Germany on book tour, Lithuania working with teachers, Kansas to give a reading, etc… I don’t always know that I’m going to set a story somewhere until long after I’ve returned, but for me a chief pleasure of reading and writing is feeling transported–is taking a reader to another place, and showing it to her in all its beauty and weather and heartache. So traveling and reading and writing are all very similar endeavors for me, all ways to try to live a meaningful life.

Katherine: How did you end up in Idaho?

Anthony: I fell in love with a woman who grew up in Boise.

Katherine: What are you working on next?

Anthony: A novel about the power and magic of radio, set during World War II, when radio was both helping drive the German expansion and–eventually–bringing it down.

Katherine: As far as being a writer, did you ever have an “I made it” moment and if so, what was it? (For example a friend said his was when he heard his song turned into musak in an elevator.)

Anthony: Well, I don’t really feel like I’ve “made it,” mostly because writing remains so damn hard for me, but twice I’ve seen strangers holding my book on airplanes. That’s sort of staggering to me. And not so long ago I took my kids to a swimming pool and there was a woman there reading one of my books in a chaise lounge. We swam for an hour or so and she read that whole time and then we left and she was still reading. That felt pretty great.

Katherine: What are you reading right now? What are you reading next?

Anthony: I’m reading a manuscript of Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, which will be published next year. And after that I’m going to read David Mitchell’s new novel. (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.)

Katherine: If you had to pick five books for a desert island, what would they be? What’s the one book that gives you the most inspiration?

Anthony: Moby Dick, by Melville. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy. The Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson. Dubliners, by Joyce. And for my fifth and last book, I’d cheat and bring one of those massively thick anthologies of short stories, The Story and Its Writer by Anne Charters. Sixteen hundred onionskin pages, one hundred and fifteen short stories, three pounds. The stories in that particular book are arranged alphabetically by their writers: Chinua Achebe to Richard Wright, and reading it I learned so much about how flexible stories can be, how so many different minds from so many different times and cultures have used to it stretch the form. That particular anthology is, bar none, the most inspiring book on my shelves.

Katherine: What’s the last good exhibit you saw?

Anthony: I was at MOMA a few weeks ago and found myself mesmerized by Kara Walker’s gigantic installation of paper cutouts in the atrium. It’s called: Gone: An Historical Romance of A Civil War as It Occured b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. I don’t even know all that much about Gone with the Wind and yet still Walker’s huge mural held my attention for a long time: the comic grotesquerie of it, the questions about race that it asks, and the technical skill!

Katherine: Tell us something you love about Boise, Idaho.

Anthony: I love to float the Boise River right through the center of town in a big inflatable raft with my six-year-old twin sons. We eat sunflower seeds and I listen to them tell me what they see.

Katherine: What’s your favorite thing about summer?

Anthony: Finding myself in lots of good situations to look at the stars.

The ever lovely M + E who design pretty things for people like the Magnetic Fields, Passion Pit and Phoenix have made four two-color posters for the launch of the new website Writers’ Houses: Where Stories Live. The website is a guide to writers’ homes all over the world, for both historical and inspirational reasons. The first series of prints includes Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia, Emily Dickinson’s Homestead, Edward Gorey’s house, and Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage. M + E have plans to do writers houses all over America and then branch out into the world. Personally, I would like to see Salinger’s house. Or Joan Didion and John Dunne’s house in Malibu or Brautigan’s house in Bolinas. Get cracking, guys.

Jennifer Egan’s latest book, A Visit From the Goon Squad is a collection of short stories told in many different voices that come together to look at a group of people and the passage of time. Each story could easily stand alone, as did “A to B,” which was published in Dossier and “Safari,” which was published in The New Yorker. As Egan’s fans know, her style varies from book to book and this collection is a testament to her wide-ranging mastery of voice and tone. She takes on the voices of so many different characters in this book- thirteen to be exact- that range from little girls to old men. The title comes from one of the characters, Bosco: “Time is a goon,” and Egan shows us how people grow-up, fall in love, find success, become obsolete, stage comebacks, get old and die all in the course of one life. This is not the first book to employ this tactic of the collective narrator, but I think it is done in such an organic way where you really feel something pulling you towards these characters and start thinking about how lives are lived in groups. Egan was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about writing such a multi-layered book and what she is reading now.

Katherine Krause: How did you start writing A Visit From the Goon Squad?
Jennifer Egan: A Visit From the Goon Squad began as so many projects do: as a way of avoiding something else. I was having trouble approaching a novel I’d been researching for quite a while, and I was looking for an entertaining distraction. Around this time, I found myself washing my hands in a hotel bathroom on the Upper East Side. When I looked down, I noticed a wallet resting in a bag in plain view right below the sink I was using. Its owner seemed to be in the toilet stall. Having been pickpocketed and otherwise robbed somewhere around fifteen times in my life, I felt immediate anxiety about the vulnerability of that wallet. Then I thought: but there’s no one in the bathroom except me. Which led to the fantasy of taking the wallet…or rather, a projection into the mind of a woman who might do such a thing. I found it exhilarating to imagine myself on the other side of the robbery equation. I decided to begin working on a story the next morning, beginning at the moment that a woman takes a wallet from a bathroom. Three years later, I finished Goon Squad.

Katherine: It only took three years to write Goon Squad?
Jennifer: Well, about three years, but four of the chapters in it I’d written and published some years ago as stand-alone stories. They were in a kind of limbo in my mind; I wanted to revisit them, but wasn’t sure how to. Then, to my surprise and excitement, I found the new material sending out tentacles and attaching to that earlier stuff. Characters from those older stories began to reappear at earlier and later moments of their lives. So if you include the time I spent writing that older material, it ends up having been a longer process. But difficult to measure.

Katherine: So, the stories didn’t start out being connected to each other?
Jennifer: Each one would make me curious about a peripheral character, and then I’d begin a piece about that person. For example, in the first chapter, “Found Objects,” the wallet thief mentions in passing her former boss, a record producer who sprays pesticide in his armpits and sprinkles gold flakes in his coffee. When I wrote that, I meant it as a laugh line–a thumbnail sketch of a decadent music industry type. But after finishing that chapter, I found myself curious about the music producer and why he has those odd habits. So I began a story about Bennie Salazar, who turned out to be one of the main characters, and I began with no more information than the fact that he did those odd things. The chapter was an exploration of why he did them. And in the course of writing that chapter, several other peripheral characters caught my eye…and so on.

Katherine: Do you have a favorite character in Goon Squad?
Jennifer: It would probably be Bennie Salazer, whom I mentioned above. I loved him for his wild, neurotic eccentricities. He’s also plagued by shame memories, which is something that was happening to me at about the time I began his chapter. So we have that in common.

Katherine: Who was the first character you wrote about?
Jennifer: First Sasha, then Bennie. Then Bennie’s former wife, Stephanie, whose older brother turned out to be someone from one of the earlier stories. That one took the form of a celebrity profile, told from the point of view of a troubled, exhausted, harassed and ultimately violent man who attacks the starlet he’s interviewing. When I wrote about Stephanie, that character, Jules Jones, reappeared after his jail sentence.

Katherine: Which was the last story?
Jennifer: The last one was the second-to-last chapter, which is written in PowerPoint. I wrote that under a lot of pressure last summer, after I’d already sold the book. I was absolutely consumed by a desire to write fiction successfully in PowerPoint. But let me tell you, it’s not easy.

Katherine: Was that the hardest to write?
Jennifer: The PowerPoint chapter was the hardest technically. Second hardest would be “Out of Body,” which is written in second person. Also very hard to pull off.

Katherine: Was it difficult to switch back and forth between so many voices?
Jennifer: I found it refreshing to move from one to the next, in much the same way that I like to completely change the ground rules from one book to another. But it was extremely hard to find a unique voice, and world, and mood, for each chapter. It was hard to start fresh thirteen times and still have them all add up to one big story.

Katherine: Why did you choose to write Alison’s chapter in PowerPoint and footnote Jules’ chapter?
Jennifer: I knew I wanted to write in PowerPoint before I knew what that chapter would be about. I tried first to tell it from the point of view of a different character working in the corporate world–hence the PowerPoint. But found that a corporate frame was pretty deadening for fiction. I’d also toyed with the idea of writing about Sasha (the wallet thief) many years later, but I didn’t want to write another chapter from her point of view. Then it came to me that one of her kids could be the author of the PowerPoint, which gets around the corporate feeling. And I began to hear a kid of “voice” she would use in her PowerPoint, which was when I knew the gambit might work. As for the footnotes, I was trying to capture the desperate way in which writers of celebrity profiles try to elevate their pieces above the very low level at which celebrity profiles tend to operate. I felt so sympathetic to that attempt, but I also wanted to poke some fun at the result. I wrote that piece in the 1990s, when the David Foster Wallace/Nicholson Baker influence was pretty intense. There were a lot of footnotes around at that time.

Katherine: Is the book about the group of people or is it really about Sasha?
Jennifer: I think that’s really up to the reader. For me, it’s about different people at different times, and about all of them together, and about time itself.

Katherine: On your website, you have some notes about the genesis of your stories- do you have one you would like to share with us?
Jennifer: Sure, I’ll share some notes about the last chapter, “Pure Language,” which is one of my favorites:

Original Title: “Reach”
Where: In Prospect Park, after dropping off my son at Hebrew School, in a shrinking patch of sunlight on the grass, listening to bicyclists whipping past on the road behind me and wishing it were slightly warmer.
Music: The Frames, FOR THE BIRDS
History: My husband and I moved out of our apartment on West 28th Street in January 2001, three weeks after our first child was born. We made the jump to Brooklyn, a place I hardly knew except from trips to BAM. Before we sold our co-op, we learned that the two squat buildings east of us had been bought by a hotel company, which planned to build a skyscraper there. For years after we moved, nothing happened. And then, maybe three years ago, getting off the 1/9 train at my old stop on West 28th Street, I noticed construction beside our old building. The skyscraper was beginning to go up. Our apartment had four windows, all facing east; through one of them, where I’d placed my desk, I could look almost straight up at the Empire State Building. I remember that building so many different colors — a beautiful prong of New York, reminding me of why I’d come here in the first place, without family or job — with nothing more than a desire to be here. By now, that window must be covered up.
Last bit of history: It was only as I wrote about Alex not having seen the original World Trade Center that it struck me in a deep way that a whole generation of young New Yorkers has never seen those buildings — their experience of the city is purely post 9/11. Which of course is a strange idea for those of us who were here before. One of my first jobs in New York involved catering for the Port Authority; taking the 2 train from the West 69th Street apartment with the foam couch, getting off inside the World Trade Center and vaulting by elevator into a vast internal kitchen, thick with foody humidity, where (in my memory, anyway) there were mixing bowls the size of bathtubs. I wore a black skirt, dark tights and a white blouse, and my job was to arrange cookies on white paper doilies for luncheon meetings in the Port Authority offices. Naturally, I hated it. But I do find myself remembering that job, now and then.

Katherine: What are you listening to right now?
Jennifer: Well, my husband brought home a Madeline Peyroux CD last night and I was wild about it. He’s in the theater, and is actually the source of a lot of the new music I end up liking.

Katherine: How many hours a day do you write?
Jennifer: When I’m generating new material, I try to write 5-7 pages on a legal pad a day. I write by hand. Sometimes I can complete that job in an hour or two; sometimes it takes all day. Editing I can do for much longer periods. But honestly, I feel terribly far from all of it right now. I’m dying to reconnect with that part of my life.

Katherine: Do you have any rituals for writing?
Jennifer: Not really. The fact that I write by hand makes it easy to write anywhere. If I’m looking for a big new idea or direction, I’ll often go to a coffee shop. If I know what I want to do and just need to get to it efficiently, I’ll stay home. I try not to stop for very long once I start, because I’m trying to enter a sort of unconscious state outside of rational thought or planning. That’s where the good stuff comes from, for me.

Katherine: Could you provide a list for our readers of some favorite books of yours for summer reading?
Jennifer: Well, I don’t really think in terms of “summer reading,” because I tend to like the same kinds of books all year long. But here are some ideas:

-The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: fantastic gothic thriller. Impossible to put down.
-The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: one of my favorites of all time. No one has more piercingly examined the relationship between beauty and commerce.
-Middlemarch by George Eliot: Such a glorious novel, and so strange. Better every time.
-Anything by Harold Q. Masur. His 1940s mysteries are unbelievably stylish (his “detective” is Scott Jordan, an irresistible–to women–lawyer). I believe his books are all out of print, but they’re worth tracking down for the sheer fun of it.

Katherine: What are you reading now?
Jennifer: David Copperfield. Can’t believe I’ve never read it before. It’s fantastically inventive; Dickens’ sense of how to put a scene together is thrilling.

Katherine: What do you want to read next?
Jennifer: Bleak House. I read this years ago but I don’t remember it well. I’ve gotten really interested in 19th Century fiction, and plan to focus mostly on that for the rest of this year.

Katherine: Who are some of your favorite authors working today?
Jennifer: Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Susan Choi.

Katherine: What is one book you always refer to or read again?
Jennifer: Traditionally it’s been The Image by Daniel Boorstin, which was published in 1961 but essentially predicts, in accurate detail, the mass-media saturation of American culture and its bizarre consequences. That book should be required reading for every person living in America. But now I have a new one to add to the list: You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier. Lanier invented the term “virtual reality,” and was one of the early true believers in the positive power of the internet. Now he feels that things have gone badly awry, most of all because the Internet has ended up stifling creativity (and draining income from those who create) rather than spurring it. It’s a fascinating, necessary read.

Katherine: Who are some of your favorite artists working in a different discipline? Photography, painting, mixed-media, etc…
Jennifer: Well, I love Bill Viola, and his work has had a real influence on me over the years. I’ve been following the painter Vincent Desiderio for a long time. I’ve enjoyed the video installations of Toni Dove. My friend Eva Mantell stunned me recently with some strange and exquisite leaf rubbings that are so complex you have no idea how they were made. And another friend, Magaret Boyer, is doing fantastic large-scale color prints that remind me of a Cindy Sherman sensibility unleashed in the domestic realm.

Katherine: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?
Jennifer: Good question. I could see myself as a doctor or an archeologist–both things I wanted badly to be at earlier points in my life. If I were a doctor and didn’t have a family, I would like to work with warring or refugee populations. I’d love to know that what I’m doing is directly helping people. That’s not a feeling you have often as a fiction writer.

Katherine: What are you working on now?
Jennifer: Blabbing about this book, mostly, but I’m fantasizing (hopefully the first step toward action) about writing another piece involving some characters from Goon Squad. Most of all, I want to tackle that big project I wrote Goon squad to avoid. I feel ready to approach it, finally–I hope it’s still out there, waiting for me.

Sloane Crosley is a super-hero of sorts; book publicist by day and best-selling author by night. For her day job, Sloane works at Vintage Books as the publicist for big dogs like Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Jay McInerney, and Dave Eggers. In her free time, she wrote her own book I Was Told There’d Be Cake, the best-selling collection of essays that HBO bought the rights to and is currently being turned into a pilot. Her much anticipated second book How Did You Get This Number? comes out this week. Although some of these essays take place as far away as Alaska and Portugal, they are all very rooted in that wonderful melancholy New York humor she’s become famous for. Highlights include an essay that reads like an ode to smelly taxis and how difficult finding a decent apartment in New York is, weighing the pros and cons of a kleptomaniac roommate. Also, whenever you can quote “I believe you are in league with the butcher,” you win my vote.

Katherine Krause: How many hours a day do you write?
Sloane Crosley: Depends. Sometimes five. Sometimes none. Though I don’t think you can write well after three hours. Or at least I can’t. I hit hour four and it’s like I write one sentence, get exhausted, and need a cookie.

Katherine: Do you have any rituals for writing?
Sloane: I need a full glass of water and a clean apartment. And I usually start sitting on the floor.

Katherine: Do you try to write humor or does it just come out that way?
Sloane: Mostly it comes out that way. That said, I have a general sense of when it needs to either be drawn upon or cut back.

Katherine: Do you read a lot of humor writing?
Sloane: Actually no. I appreciate it. I love David Rakoff and Nora Ephron and humor novelists like Sam Lipstye. But I don’t seek it out. It’s how I feel about potato chips. I’ll eat them if they’re there and I’ll like them but I’ve never pulled off the road for them.

Katherine: You’ve said you are a short story fanatic- what are some of your favorites?
Sloane: Oh my God. Well, okay. Collections are too many so I’ll go with individual short stories:
People Like That Are The Only People Here by Lorrie Moore
In The Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark
Pie Dance by Molly Giles
Things You Should Know by A.M. Holmes
Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor by John Cheever
White Angel by Michael Cunningham
The Dead by James Joyce
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
How To Give The Wrong Impression by Katherine Heiny
A City of Churches by Donald Barthelme
Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard
Mortals by Tobais Wolff
Send Me To The Electric Chair by Clyde Edgarton
Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story by Russell Banks
Down Through the Valley by Wells Tower
and maybe Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. I think of the last line of that story all the time.

Katherine: Do you write fiction or poetry?
Sloane: Fiction. My poetry sucks. I know because I’ve never really tried. I think you have to have a special calling to write good poetry.

Katherine: Did you always want to be a writer?
Sloane: Yes. Mixed with other things like archeology and art but pretty much, yes.

Katherine: Did you always want to be a publicist?
Sloane: Fuck no. I had no idea what a publicist was growing up. But it turns out to be a pretty excellent job when you believe in what you’re promoting.

Katherine: What is one book or story you always try to push on people?
Sloane: When people come into my office and just say they need something to read I’ll give them Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro or anything by Lorrie Moore or Dave Eggers. Also The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon is a crowd pleaser. If I could push any book on anyone? Maybe The Moon and Sixpence.

Katherine: Is there one book you re-read again and again?
Sloane: Dubliners by James Joyce.

Katherine: What’s your opinion on the iPad and digital technology in the publishing industry?
Sloane: Call me when it makes waffles. No, really: I think we’re so simultaneously scandalized and fascinated by it but generally I think the iPad is great. Though the glare in the sunlight sucks if you intend on taking it to the beach. But it’s not blanketly bad for books. But it’s hard for me to have a definitive opinion on e-readers yet. I think both their advantages and damages have yet to be realized.

Katherine: How many actual books do you think you own?
Sloane: 600? 1,000? I can’t do math so good. It’s why I work in publishing.

Katherine: Who are some of your favorite artists? Photography, painting, mixed-media, etc…
Sloane: Gregory Crewdson, Tracy Emin, Amy Cutler, Tokihiro Sato, Sally Mann. I like Robert Montgomery. In general I end up liking one piece by an artist, which doesn’t bode well for art collecting.

Katherine: What’s your best NYC survival skill?
Sloane: Ignoring my instinct to turn when called. That and walking over sidewalk grates in heels without really having to see when one is coming up.

Katherine: When people come from out of town to visit you- where do you take them?
Sloane: The Russian Samovar, Raoul’s, Death & Co., Egg, Frankie’s, Barney Greengrass or Russ & Daughters. I like Omen too. I like to ply people with food and drink, clearly.

Katherine: What is a book or a piece of art that sums up NYC to you?
Sloane: The giant Chagalls in Lincoln Center. I remember standing beneath them with my grandmother when I was about 4 and her explaining what everything in them meant. It’s one of my earliest memories of the city.

Katherine: Any plans to leave NYC or are you here for good?
Sloane: I would leave if I had a good reason or a strong desire. Put it this way: if I felt I absolutely couldn’t live anywhere else, I’d force myself pack my bags tomorrow. I’m here by choice.

Fill in the blanks:

If I could follow in anyone’s footsteps it would be: George Plimpton

The last thing I think about before I go to bed is: what I’m doing with my life

The last thing that pissed me off was being ridiculously nice to someone I can’t stand because I was nervous

What I hate about NYC is crowds

What I hate about suburbia is a lack of crowds

My favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip or that cereal milk thing at Momofuku

If I could be re-incarnated I would come back as a panther

Best cultural institution in NYC is The New York Public Library

House on fire- what do you rescue? Mabel (my cat), my passport, my computer, photographs, first edition of Franny & Zooey, a box of sentimental things, a Givenchy bag

The last thing that scared me was getting caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing

How Did You Get This Number is out on June 15th followed by a nationwide book tour. Visit Sloane’s website to find out when she is reading near you.

Barnes & Noble Tribeca
7PM • Wednesday, June 16th
97 Warren Street

McNally Jackson
7PM • Monday, June 28th
52 Prince Street

Get a load of William T. Vollmann’s new title:  Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater With Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. In other words, welcome to the work of William T. Vollmann.  I admit to being drawn to his new book, not because I have a particular interest in Japanese Noh Theater (I don’t), or because I believe Vollmann is the Noh expert of his day (he’s not) – but rather, I’m interested in experiencing the latest Vollmann experience.  I mean this as a compliment.

If you’ve never read any of his books you’ve probably heard of him second or third hand, heard that’s he’s crazy, heard that he smokes crack, heard that he frequents prostitutes and you’ve inevitably heard that he writes long books.  Impossibly long books.  But what you might not know is that William T. Vollmann is one of the most daring, breathtaking, morally serious authors writing in English today.

While Kissing the Mask is, on the surface, about Japanese Noh Theater (and about a dozen other, tangentially related topics) it’s really just an excuse for him to write a book about capital B Beauty and Beauty’s infinitely unfolding (and folding) mysteries.  He says as much in the clever opening chapter (Chapter Zero) Understatements About This String-Ball of Idle Thoughts where, in two short pages, he preps the reader for the semi-academic, but-mostly-personal-research, journey they’re about to embark on:  “Deaf, dumb and illiterate in Japanese, innocent of formal study in any discipline of art, a graceless dancer afflicted with bad eyesight, I may not be the perfect author for any essay on Noh drama.  Fortunately, this is no essay, but a string-ball of idle thoughts.”

Vollmann goes on to say in an extended footnote that whatever factual errors he made in the book, few people will catch them because so few people are educated in the nuance of Noh.  Nothing like appropriately lowered expectations!  How humble, how…Japanese!  But, also, how deft!  Those two little pages buy the remaining 498 pages a great deal of legitimacy, if not compassion or, at the very least, pity.  (John D’agata’s About A Mountain would have benefited greatly from such a simple yet commandeering escape clause).

And in case you still weren’t sure what to expect from Vollmann’s latest non-fiction escapade, he spells it out in the conclusion of his opening remarks:  “How I love my life in this floating world!…I’m a glutton, a plump middle-aged man now beginning to understand the old lechers who clutch at beauty, not that I’ll do that; I’m proud, so I’ll watch grace in theaters, bars, teahouses; I’ll invent a book about representations of feminine beauty and write off every geisha dance on my taxes….”

Got it?  This is not a book about Noh.  This is an imagined book (a fake book, really) designed to allow the author to experience things that he was going to experience anyway.  Why not?

Actually, this is Vollmann’s nonfiction M.O..  Poor People, his 2007 response to James Agee’s 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is a hybrid research/travelogue/meditation on the relative nature of wealth (and lack thereof).  While 2008’s Riding Toward Everywhere might, on the surface, be about two fifty-something men hopping trains, hobo-style, across the western United States, it’s really a meditation on America, American values and the particular kind of paradise that we Americans seem to fetishize.  And 2009’s 1000 page-plus monster Imperial? (Disclosure: I only made it through the first third.)  It’s “about” the history of the region between California and Mexico called Imperial but it’s about so much more – it too is about America, American values, the politics of water, land use, the way human beings treat one another when survival’s at stake.  Think of Vollmann’s non-fiction as a kind of personal documentary cinema.  Extremely well-researched (yet inevitably imperfect, messy and sometimes downright confusing) personal documentary cinema.

Kissing the Mask is Vollmann’s latest foray into the unknowable mysteries of the human experience and so it may come as no surprise that one of the most oft repeated words in the book is evanescence, meaning “soon passing out of sight, memory or existence; quickly fading or disappearing.”  This one word could be used to describe his entire project – beauty, mystery, life itself….  It’s also useful to know that the most oft repeated question in Kissing the Mask is “What is a woman?” for this is, no doubt, a central concern of the book.  “The unanswerable question,” he calls it, in chapter one.

What makes a woman woman? Vollmann’s not in the least bit interested in a biological answer (of which, he merely says, towards the very end: “…I sometimes regret that in this book about feminine stateliness I have forgotten the vibrant vulgarity of biology, the “real” world of the floating world we float through…”), and he’s not interested in a moral treatment of femininity; his aim in this book is to understand the aesthetic nature of womanhood, that is, the performance of feminine beauty.  Regarding this, he says, “The withholding of a thing invests it with desirability; to the extent that it grows (or remains) opaque to the gaze, resistant to the will, it draws us towards itself.”  This is femininity.  Regarding the Noh performance of feminine beauty, he says: “The point is to make the audience experience skilled unexpectedness.  If they anticipated novelty, they would undervalue it.”  This too is femininity.  And in another possible answer to the unanswerable question What is a woman? Vollmann writes:  “The model’s expression in today’s magazines is neutral, not unlike a Noh actor’s, the eyes wide open, but in concentration, lips parted or not, but rarely smiling.”  And in regard to a Katie Holmes fashion spread in an American magazine, he wonders, “How much of the allure is her makeup and dress, how much is diet and discipline, how much the young, lovely female body she was given?”  All of these things are also femininity, a question to which he clearly seems more comfortable providing a bevy of possible answers than one pat conclusion.

Formally, Kissing the Mask, like the rest of Vollmann’s non-fiction oeuvre, is constructed of essays, interviews, (more-or-less casual) first-person narrative, photographs, drawings and oftentimes all five at once.  This stylistic hodge-podge, narrated by a larger-than-life character, is what makes his books so much fun to read.  One gets the impression that one is snooping over the shoulder of a semi-deranged, super bright world traveler as in this somewhat typical excerpt from an interview with Noh actor Mr. Mikata Shizuka:

“‘Where does your consciousness go when you perform?’

‘It depends.  The state where you think absolutely nothing, I think it’s hard to grasp.  But the intention is to show….  If you want to show something, it comes to you internally, then somehow shrinks.’

I told him about feeling in my hands and fingers when I am caught up in my writing; it is an exhilarating feeling during which my fingers do not belong to me, but to something else which is writing.  What is it?  I do not know.  At its best, it is not an assertion of myself.”

It’s a typical passage in that we meet a character from Vollmann’s journeys, through Vollmann, and the experience is immediately translated back into what Vollmann knows best: himself, writing.  This is the kind of non-fiction that drives some people crazy, in which the narrator often intrudes upon and supercedes the subject matter at hand – a practice that, in Vollmann’s case, is often and too easily passed off as narcissism.  But I see Vollmann’s intrusions less as a narcissistic tendency than as an ontological strategy.  Which is to say, he begins his investigation (whether it’s into violence, poverty, America, whatever…) with the assumption that things in themselves can never truly be known, an inevitability that should not in any way preclude from asking the big questions.  And what better tool to refer to when wading through Life’s opaque mysteries than oneself, one’s experiences, one’s beliefs, one’s feelings?  This is in part what makes William Vollmann’s brilliance – he is an investigative reporter in the truest sense, cable news networks and glossy magazines be damned.

So when, in the sixteenth chapter, Vollmann journeys to a Japanese beauty salon to be made-over as a woman (wig, make-up, pretty black dress and all) it should come as no surprise (thanks to the irrefutable testimony of actual photographs) that William Vollmann does not even come close to looking like a human woman.  And so to answer his echoed question: “What is a woman?” Our one clear-cut answer might be:  Not William Vollmann.  Which I think, technically, disqualifies his whole argument that femininity is a performance and perhaps not an innate quality at all specially reserved for one gender and not the other.  Oh, well.  But then again, don’t forget:  Vollmann set the book up not to create a new hierarchy of truths in regards to beauty but merely to unspool “this string-ball of idle thoughts.”  And no one unspools the given world quite like William T. Vollmann.

It goes without saying that this style of writing, this kind of investigation is not for everyone.  If you like your non-fiction neat and tidy, with more-or-less pat conclusions (think Newsweek articles or, say, a nonfiction book along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love) Kissing the Mask is probably not for you.  But if you like a little challenge, a little adventure, a little unbridled audaciousness in your authors and if you too sometimes find yourself in awe at the inexplicable mystery and seemingly endless beauty of existence then have I got an author for you!

Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press

Springtime, 1916.  Irish expatriate and soldier-turned-outlaw Trooper O’Hara is adrift in the baring woods of Southern Ohio.  Thirty-some years away from home, Trooper’s leather face is furrowed, the fire of his hair all but extinguished by the darkness he has seen; he is a man changed by America.  Having crossed the mark of middle age, Trooper is ready to end his odyssey, to bid goodbye to his fellow fugitives and ride the Eastertide back to County Sligo, Ireland.  There is just one thing he must do before he leaves: visit White Woman Street, where he will implore the mercy of a certain ghost.  For only then, he believes, can he reconcile with his conscience, “wipe the slate clean and go back to being what he was.”

So begins Sebastian Barry’s White Woman Street, now showing at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Chelsea.  At its heart, it is a classic tale of atonement, overlaid with themes of exile, loss of innocence and the deception of memory.  While the audience can see the impossibility of Trooper’s dream, realizing that there is truth to that old saying “you can never go home,” Trooper, for all of his experience, is blinded by a self-preserving naïveté.  It is not that he is unprepared for the journey ahead, but that “home” no longer exists. Tucked away in the American wilderness and oblivious to worldly events, Trooper is unaware of the recent insurrection in Dublin, a bloody rebellion led by Irish republicans against British rule. Old Ireland persists in his mind alone; and even if Trooper sees home again, he is unlikely to recognize it.

Still, in at least one way, Barry seems to suggest that Trooper has never left home.  Upon his arrival in the States, Trooper enlisted in the American military and was sent to fight in the Indian Wars.  The morbid similarities between the Irish and the Native Americans is lost to no one, including Trooper, who coldly remarks, “Ever see an Indian town—the tent towns? Put me in mind of certain Sligo hills, and certain men in certain Sligo hills.  The English had done for us, I was thinking, and now we’re doing for the Indians.  You asking Trooper why he never killed?  I seen plenty killed.  I don’t say I didn’t.” It’s not that America is so different from Ireland; it’s that here, Trooper finds himself on the other side of the gun.  Although he never murdered with his own hands, as the play unfolds we learn of one death in particular—that of a beautiful Indian girl, from a brothel on White Woman Street—for which Trooper blames himself.  Guilt is the reason why he left the army.  And he is not so much hiding from the law as he is from his past.

In all honesty, this is not Mr. Barry’s best work.  But, the man is one of the most accomplished wordsmiths of our century—a poet, novelist, and of course, playwright—and, thus, one can overlook this fumble.  After all, White Woman Street made its debut back in 1992, and it was one of Barry’s earliest attempts at the style known as “interlocking monologues.” At times, the pieces of this play don’t exactly “click,” but if the theatergoer is willing to jam them together, the resulting picture is well worth the extra exertion of imagination.  For anyone who had the privilege of watching The Pride of Parnell Street (which made it’s way to 59E59 Theaters last September), or has read his novel The Secret Scripture (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008), it’s obvious that Barry has since mastered this artform.  Just think of White Woman Street as “A Portrait of Sebastian Barry As a Young Man.”

White Woman Street will be at the Irish Repertory Theater until June 27th.

Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press

Photograph by Skye Parrott

O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus) is the first novel by Kate Zambreno, and, if she continues in this vein throughout her career, she’s going to start a lot of fights.

The novel describes a older suburban woman named Mommy, her suicidal daughter Maggie, and a homeless and insane man named Malachi. The characters don’t have conversations, and there is no conventional dialogue at all, but Zambreno uses what amounts to different languages for each of them. Mommy gets the longest, most complex and satisfying sentences, such as “Mommy wept tears and tears for Laci more tears than she has ever wept for her own daughter but Mommy doesn’t want to think about that no Mommy doesn’t even want to talk about that Maggie has dug herself into her own hole and she will have to dig herself out of it it’s called Tough Love! It’s a parenting technique. Like guilt and manipulation.” (7-8) The long, rhythmic and unpunctuated switchbacks of these lines will be compared to Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek—and their frequent, joyous obscenity reminds of Kathy Acker—but the sheer inflammatory shallowness belongs exclusively to Zambreno, as does the comic timing of lines like, “There are angel soaps and little angels on the guest towels (which you are not supposed to use)…” (27) One expects a novel’s major character to be sympathetic, especially one named “Mommy,” but the biggest impression of O Fallen Angel’s Mommy is how utterly loathsome she is. In other words, Zambreno quite deliberately slays one of our era’s most sacred cows.

Maggie’s section is perhaps a bit schematic in comparison, but it better represents the book’s agenda to obliterate received wisdom about everything: character, gender, the so-called traditions of the novel, etc. Instead, for example, of writing scenes with Maggie’s therapist and developing them both over time, she opts for “Maggie is broken because Maggie cannot articulate why she feels sad or why she feels angry and that’s why therapy does not go too well.” (32) This scorn for narrative convention stumbles when Zambreno wanders into cliché—“Because the first cut is the deepest”—or tautology—“Maggie is Ophelia”—but succeeds when it remembers to be ironic, as with the line “Maggie fucks boys and pretends it doesn’t matter because Maggie is empowered!” (34) At such times, O Fallen Angel lays waste to swathes of phony consolation, and feels  genuinely troubling. It doesn’t give us tools to build a better world so much as show us how the tools we do have suck.

The third section reads like a mix of holy rage and paranoia, and seems like an unexpected middle ground of the other two. One’s enjoyment of O Fallen Angel depends on how much provocation a reader can take, but it’s a virtue that Zambreno spends exactly zero time making her book seductive. Her idea is to make a work free of empty solace, and this, as we know, is exceptionally unusual, especially for rookies. The book does not make one feel better, it shows how feeling better is a deception, and it asks, why this need to make one’s self a fool? Not everything we read will act like this—and if this book came up in a workshop, the instructor would spontaneously combust—but those that do perform the essential social task of undermining piety. O Fallen Angel is absolutely fearless, and, in its way, it is devilishly fun.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.

Above Image: Lighthouse, Beheaded, by Adam Frelin