Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels is published in two pocket-sized maroon volumes made to mimic the Bible, complete with red pleather covers and gilt-gold edged paper. A narrative masterpiece with a healthy dose of social commentary on politics, class systems and war, the visual imagery in The Avian Gospels is filled with elaborate death scenes, horrific violence, scores of attacking birds, underground tunnels and well, some sex. All of this action takes place in a fantastical world (where Hungary borders on Oklahoma) at the end of a long civil war, where massive flocks of birds have overtaken the city from the human ruling class. In post-apocalyptic fashion, there is an entire race of gypsies that live underground, of whom two of them, father and son team Zvoninir and Morgan have a special gift- they can control the birds actions through telepathy creating diagrams, causing or ceasing attacks and in some cases just making them go away. At 97,000 words, Novy has created an alternate reality that has been widely compared to both magical realism master Gabriel Garcia Marquez and horror genius Stephen King’s The Stand. However, Novy describes his book this way: “The Avian Gospels has a shifting, bathetic, ironic surface that’s meant to keep the reader on her heels, and if someone is reading this interview and thinks my book sounds boring, let me add that there are also chases, action, jokes, and many explosions.” We got to ask Novy a few questions about why he would write such a boring book.

Katherine: The story is kind of epic- did you sit down and plan out to write such an epic two volume book as your first novel? Did you ever stop and think you were being overly ambitious?

Adam: I knew the plot almost right away. The ambitious city-building stuff got necessary to give the book the kind of verisimilitude something this weird needs. I needed the city in the book to seem like an actual place with a history, a topography and a culture that grew measurably in time. The dictum ‘write what you know’ has always left me cold, since nothing really interesting has happened to me, so I wanted to show that ‘knowing,’ in this context—ie, making a fictional world seem credible—is really just a way of manipulating nouns. The news is always written like something known, but most of it isn’t true.

Katherine: How did you start writing? What job did you do before this?

Adam: I always thought I’d be a writer, because I like to be alone. I’ve had many unusual jobs, some great—like walking dogs—some unbelievably bad. I temped for a data entry company in Chicago one summer, and they kept all their pieces of paper, all their raw data, in the basement. That was the summer Chicago’s new sewer system, the Deep Tunnel Project, had its big debut, and it failed after a single night of rain. The basement with the data flooded out with sewage, and every piece of paper had to be wiped, dried out in the sun, and cleaned again. I sucked at entering data, so instead, I cleaned pages. It was awful.

Katherine: I take it that was the worst job you ever had. At what point did you stop your other jobs and just be a writer full-time?

Adam: Well, I’m a college professor now, and, the world being what it is, unless I write a vampire novel, I’ll probably always need a job.

Katherine: What was the first speck of an idea that led to the Avian gospels? Why did you set it in this dystopian mythical place?

Adam: Not long after 9/11, I started writing in the first-person plural—we do this, we do that—because I felt a connection to history for the first time in my life. I had this “we’re all in it together,” kind of feeling, which lasted about two weeks, but by then, I thought it might be fun to try to narrate from the perspective of the bad guys, the ones who history hates. As for the oddness of the book, I have a theory that things get mythic right away if you screw around with place-names. We get unsettled if proper nouns are twisted, which shows how tenuous our grip on things is.

Katherine: How much research did you have to do for this book?

Adam: I have about a million guidebooks on birds, but I tried to make everything up and outright lie if possible.

Katherine: Have you ever been bird-watching?

Adam: I went bird-watching once at camp and saw a family of bald eagles. The feeling was almost religious, though not for patriotic reasons; the birds just seemed so beautiful and private. I love birds and think they’re beautiful, but that’s not why I used them. I used birds because they seem so automatically poetic and symbolic. I wanted to suggest a big religious mystery without explaining it. I don’t own a bird, but I’m about to adopt some stick insects. Have you seen stick insects? They’re incredible! They’re also technically illegal.

Katherine: I googled them. They are creepy. Why do you want one?

Adam: I just think they’re beautiful, and plus, they reproduce by parthenogenesis. That is, they clone themselves.

Katherine: Why did you decide to make The Avian Gospels look like a bible?

Adam: Making the book look like a bible was the idea of my editor at Hobart, Aaron Burch. He’s been an excellent editor in every way.

Katherine: Do you think that will help or hurt sales?

Adam: More than sales, I hope the book begins its own religion.

Katherine: Really? Like L.Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith?

Adam: Oh no, they were entrepreneurs. I want my religion to be mystical and ancient, like Gnosticism.

Katherine: Have you seen anyone reading the bible and thought it was your book?

Adam: I haven’t seen anyone reading it anywhere, alas. I saw someone reading Nicole Krauss’s book at the airport and pretended it was mine. That was a lovely feeling. Once, I read the bible, end-to-end, on public transportation. People kept on interrupting me to ask what section I was reading. I made all kinds of friends, got asked to dinner, etc. The subtext was always: See you in heaven.

Katherine: How much does the bible play into your influences for the Avian Gospels?

Adam: The Bible is often very fast and violent, like great pop fiction. It’s filled with indelible stories that everyone loves and fears, and it’s supposed to tell us who we are and what to do, but we don’t even know what it is, or, by extension, who we are in relation to it. I absolutely tried to mimic that. I want to unsettle the reader’s relationship with the text. The world is just so confusing, you know? I wanted my book to capture that dislocation and make it worse, so we can know it better.

Katherine: How is your work influenced by science fiction or magical realism?

Adam: My favorite science fiction is Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler, and it definitely affected how I write, because of how it probes the way we change in relation to our circumstances. Everyone should run out and read this book immediately. It’s indelible. It seems to me we live in a kind of sci-fi dystopia, and science fiction is changing from the genre no one respects to the one that everyone has to write to be a realist. I like the way Italo Calvino uses details, especially in Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities. He describes with crisp, precise language, but one can hardly visualize his world, which teeters on the edge of the imaginable. I don’t mean to be precious, but I experience our world this way.

I really admire the way James Ellroy uses plot. I want the energies released in the story to be attributed to characters, and I like accountability and consequences. This makes me sound like a Republican, as though my characters aren’t victims, which they are, but they discover that too late to really separate themselves from that which victimized them. I think it’s interesting when decisions made under pressure end up being more consequential than they seem to be at first, or than they should be. That’s probably where the book departs from magic realists like Marquez: the characters don’t lope along through life and make adorable mistakes, with all of human folly keening like a wind in their ears. My characters are trapped in a kind of death spiral of their own making. By the way, I know that that’s the dumbest description of Marquez, ever.

Katherine: I was drawn to the love story aspect and found the Jane/Katherine triangle to resemble American Tragedy. Did you mean to put class struggles in with all of the other themes at work here?

Adam: Love triangles are great! Kids get stuck in them all the time. I think there’s a difference between what Morgan, Jane and Katherine represent as public figures in the world of the book, and who they are as individuals. Morgan is a terrible leader, but the more screwed up he gets personally the stronger he becomes as a myth. Jane and Katherine love him, and he loves them for very different reasons, which connect, at least in part, to how much money they have. Love can’t give these characters what they want from it.

A great way to complicate class and ethnic distinctions to make individuals fall in love with those outside their caste. Music is good for this, too. Katherine’s brother Mike hates Gypsies but loves their music, so he ends up liking Gypsies. On the other hand, it was important to me to preserve the book as one where the rich show no compunctions about fucking over the poor. I needed to find the truth of the world I was making, and it was a place where people were desperate, and therefore meaner than they are in other books.

There’s this anonymous guy on Twitter who calls himself PourMeCoffee, and he joked last month that the rich may do away with weekends as a budget-cutting measure. He was kidding, but he wasn’t.

Katherine: Who else do you follow on Twitter? Which websites do you look at?

Adam: Oh dear. I follow Dave Weigel, Brian Beutler, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Ann Lowery, Choire Sicha, Alex Pareene, Liz Penn, Zonal Marking, Maria Bustillos, Sid Lowe, Daniel Taylor, Adrian Chen, Blake Hounshell, Bill Simmons, Evgeny Morozov, Andy Mitten, The Cockney Red, R_o_M, Peter Daou, Tom Scocca, Melissa Broder, The Girl At The Pub, and my cousins Charlie, Molly and Katie. Those are just the ones I can remember. I read The Awl and The Hairpin, Gawker, Bookslut, Pitchfork, io9, The Guardian, Red News, The Republik of Mancunia. I’m an addict! Help!

Katherine: Which author has made the most impact on you in your life?

Adam: James Ellroy, Jose Saramago, William Faulkner, Italo Calvino, Ovid. I like Henry James and Proust and Virginia Woolf and the plays of Chekhov but I don’t sound like them at all. Octavia Butler and William Shakespeare. Thucydides and Herodotus and Lawrence Wright. Richard Slotkin, Klaus Theweleit, Michael Hart and Antonio Negri. Samuel Beckett.

Katherine: What’s the last good book you read?

Adam: The Instructions, by Adam Levin. It’s incredibly tender and cruel, and the quality of the rhetoric is just frightening. It’s a masterpiece.

Katherine: What are you planning on reading next?

Adam: Eugenie Grandet, by Balzac. My fifth Balzac novel of 2010.

Katherine: Can you share with our readers a list of your top ten books, short stories, etc..

Adam: Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler. My favorite science fiction.
American Tabloid, by James Ellroy. I dare you to find a better plot.
Lost Illusions, Balzac. Beneath the cranky verisimilitude is a deeply jaded ache, and under that, a profound love of money.
The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, Henry James. These book sees Europe as a kind of exquisite trap for damaged people who can’t quite live their lives. These are the novels I wish I could emulate and can’t.
Antony and Cleopatra, by Shakespeare. The play treats the Roman Empire as a gorgeous illusion. As Auden says of this play, “You can’t suggest that the world is destructive without showing it in all its seductiveness.”
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler and Red Harvest, by Dashielle Hammet. These books go together because they have nothing common, which is how they set the boundaries for detective fiction. Chandler’s world is gorgeous, his prose is to die for, loss and moral outrage suffuses everything. Hammet’s world is endless midnight and everyone is evil, drunk and doomed.
Regeneration Through Violence, by Richard Slotkin. I found this book because the title is mentioned in a blurb on the cover of my copy of Blood Meridian. The book is non-fiction, so it doesn’t create a world so much as convince you that the one you’re living in is different than you thought. Regeneration Through Violence describes the myths our country told itself as it was born. It’s a terrifying, invigorating joy to see through this lens.
Operation Shylock, by Phillip Roth. Roth’s explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes as follows: everyone is crazy and more-or-less well-meaning and can’t stop yelling, and, beyond their madness, there is nothing. It’s a very rhetorical book, and my book has almost no rhetoric at all. I went for no ideas but in things, while he tried no ideas or things, just spazzing people. Roth for the win!
The Cherry Orchard, by Chekhov. Once I’d finished writing The Avian Gospels, I spent two years failing to write a book that captures time and loss and melancholy like The Cherry Orchard does. Chekhov treats the world like a kind of time machine that keeps you from inhabiting the moment, and life goes by, unlived. My novel, which I never named, failed. I am writing another one.
Love and Rockets, by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. These comics deal with time and plot and character in a really sophisticated way, and there’s a lot of awesome sex in them. The storytelling is great. I like how comics use text and image. It’s a different kind of narrative, and I’m just starting to understand it.
Time Regained, by Proust. The best book I ever read. Having four thousand pages or whatever it is to flesh out themes and characters really helps. I had this thought while reading The Instructions, too: how am I supposed to write a novel in just three hundred pages?
The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek, who haters like to label as an undeserving Nobel laureate, but her prose is so many things at once: ironic, flexible, angry, hilarious, nasty, intelligent, generous. Her rigor is absolutely merciless.
Naked, by David Sedaris. Because he sells so many books and everyone loves him, he doesn’t get the credit he deserves as an artist. His work is brave and sensitive and dark.
The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Either she was right about Catholicism, or else she’s just the cruelest American writer. Could somebody this mean get into the canon in 2010?
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf. For me, the perfect fusion of text and life.

Katherine: What are you working on now?

Adam: I’m writing a book about the youth of Perseus and Medusa, before they get discovered. It’s called The Gore and the Splatter, and, the title notwithstanding, it’s a sweeter book than The Avian Gospels.

Fire At the End of the Rainbow, the first book by Shawn Vandor, is a poised and unusual performance, an autobiography made of very brief chapters which eschew the typical surreality of short prose forms in favor of a less experimental, more vernacular directness. It begins with jokey pieces about men confronting men, but steadily gets grave, until the violence—and the critique of masculinity—becomes extreme. In the story Man of the House, Vandor bickers with the father of a friend about where to take a shower: the bathroom, or outside on the new back deck, where the weather is uncomfortably cold, and the fight, although trivial at first, grows unbearably intense. Later, in Man of the House II, Vandor endures a dinner at the home of actor Michael Madsen, a threatening and unpredictable man who almost hits the narrator and just quickly offers him a movie deal. In Subway Ride, Vandor sees a man beat the crap out of his girlfriend; in You Look Nice Tonight, a female friend describes how she was humped on public transportation by a stranger, an anecdote that ends ambiguously when Vandor discovers his own manhood poking from his shorts. In the title story, his mother’s boyfriend chokes her after a miscarriage, “…like a million men before him throughout all time.”

Vandor seems the prisoner of a useless, almost dangerous vulnerability, and undergoes humiliations worse than those endured by other people, as when, for example, he shits his pants in the company of his dream girl and her father in a motorboat, or when a middle-school classmate named Jill seduces him and then kicks him in the balls. Nearly every passage comes down to a gendered battle for dignity, and he emerges from this youth both ambivalent—often juggling several girlfriends at once—and impulsive to the point of liability—moving back and forth across the country to be with women who don’t seem interested in him. The Shawn Vandor of Fire At the End of the Rainbow is an extremely complicated literary creation, and while the book provokes a long and fierce analysis of him, it does not leave him reduced by diagnosis, a considerable achievement for an autobiographical work.

Vandor’s technique is clear, concise, often funny, but never desperate for laughs, and exhibits the same perplexed, defensive reticence as his character. He would like to leave the reader troubled, and doesn’t nervously over-entertain or end on strange, obliquely evasive notes. He is forthrightly ambivalent. He lets a girlfriend cry in his arms without knowing how to comfort her, because “…I was too far away from myself and I didn’t know how to get back,” and he feels nonplussed toward the advances from a gorgeous woman named MaDora, asking “Where’s the mystery? Where’s the suspense?” as though he prefers the uncertainty of courtship to actual fucking, and loneliness to intimacy. As the title suggests, the book ends, not with a solution, but a permanent state of mind.

Fair or not, first books are not often noted for their control. Fire At the End of the Rainbow is uncommonly accomplished and harrowing.

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

Photograph by Stephen Rose

At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions can only be suppressed by Sebastian’s storytelling, which makes him a Scheherazade figure, whose subject is almost exclusively his own family. When Sebastian was a boy, the Skeleton family performed—embodied? experienced?—a particularly gruesome and hilarious array of dirty jokes, as when, for example, Sebastian’s father falls in love with a duck, and then grows jealous of this duck’s duck boyfriend, whose barn he sets on fire, and then parades his mistress duck before his wife, announcing, “This is the pig I’ve been fucking.” (33) And when his wife protests, he says, “I wasn’t speaking to you.”

As Sebastian escapes prison with the Murderer and the Molester, the stories he tells grow complex, self-referential and oblique, and while each one takes the shape of a joke, chapters do not necessarily end there, they press on in unexpected, melancholy forms. Sebastian’s mother, Joan, leaves his father and dates another woman named Joan, while his father subjects him and his sister to escalating abuses I had better not describe, and entertains a priest who tries to exorcise his demons, and who also tells the one about the butcher and the human-eating cat. The Molester and the Murderer confess that they are innocent of their crimes, and later turn out to be lying. Everyone goes chasing their desires and never quite achieves them, and they never really understand themselves, which Momus echoes formally by having the Murderer and the Molester argue throughout the book over whether a man can really be his uncle’s uncle. The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes, it’s a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials.

Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical. An example: Sebastian’s mother’s lawyer wears “…a fibule-fastened chiton surmounted by a himation, itself topped off by a jaunty chlamys…” (124) He also has a sensitive instinct for ethics: of Sebastian’s father, he says, “He was consummate hypocrite. Or, as he preferred to put it, a dialectician.” (150) And he finds a way to blend the funny and the horrid into the banal: “My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it to himself, turning to his feathered friend instead.” (49) This passage wouldn’t be out of place in Thomas Bernhard; substitute the internet for the duck and you have almost every father in the world.

The Book of Jokes contains scenes of sexual violence that are genuinely shocking, which is Momus’s goal, of course: to transcend every barrier of taste, good and bad. On the other hand, the book offers chances to debate all sorts of questions we don’t usually get to ask, such as, is it worse to describe your father’s coitus with a duck, or your son’s? The Book of Jokes is an absolute gem.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Camera defies so many sacrosanct laws of fiction that the critic hardly knows where to start, but among its most disturbing propositions is the notion that narrative itself is a kind of overstatement, that turning points in life don’t actually exist, that life is nothing more than one bloody thing after another.

Toussaint is hailed in France as a comic genius, and there’s a lot to laugh about in Camera, which at first seems like a fresco of triviality. A man, let’s call him the narrator, goes to renew his driver’s license, and soon returns to the driver’s ed office to seduce the woman who works there, whose life he seems to quickly, if obliquely, commandeer, somewhat in the manner of Harpo Marx, “… slightly moving objects on her desk, opening random drawers,” and sending her to buy him coffee. At this point in the book, all is lightness and irreverence; she yawns, he also yawns, and he travels to Milan for no reason, where he soon develops corns. Later, he is thrilled when she spills a box of parking cones. We don’t learn her name—Pascale Polougaievsky—until page forty-eight. In its immunity to plot, the book is practically autistic, but it—and, by extension, the narrator—stays in happy ignorance as long as its routine is unspoiled.

But the book’s banal idyll is disturbed when the couple is joined by Pascale’s father, a bossy man of overwhelming teleological nullity. Mr. Polougaievsky insists on being busy, and his man-of-action attitude turns a trip to buy some propane into a doomed and circuitous search for purpose. The trio fail on their mundane quest, lose their way, and seem to drift around for days, in awful weather. The narrator bristles at Mr. Polougaievsky’s need to act, and is massive on the virtues of his own passivity—he’s a kind of monk of indolence—but it’s part of Camera’s critique that assertiveness and meekness add up, in the end, to same damn nothing. As long as no one battles this futility, no one fails, but the moment that the world is engaged, paradise is lost. As Mr. Polougaievsky carries groceries, the narrator sulks behind, “…indifferent and aloof, with my collar raised, and Pascale still further off, nonchalantly dragging a dead branch that she had picked up along the way.”

Not everything is bleak to Toussaint. He has an ear for the preposterousness of names, as when the characters change trains in towns like Reuilly-Diderot, Daumensil, and La Motte-Piquet. And yet, London can never have seemed as gloomy as it does when the narrator and Pascale go there for vacation, and lay in bed watching unexciting sports on TV, while an announcer “…whispered with an obsolete seriousness.” When the narrator initiates sex, Pascale says she has a headache; later, he plays a slot machine, where “…two eternal mauve prunes, ambivalent and testicle-shaped, recurrently appeared before me as an image of my personal fate.”

Because this book is overstuffed with meaningless vacations—from what, you may ask, since the narrator doesn’t work—the end of Camera finds the narrator on a boat that’s going nowhere. As invisible as death, Camera does more than ventilate the novel, it subjects it to a sheepish, languid sandblast.

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