This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month The Rumpus Book Club hosts a discussion online with the book club members and the author and we post an edited version online as an interview. To learn how you can become a member of The Rumpus Book Club click here.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Rebecca Rubenstein.

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Noah S.: Thank you so much for doing this, George.

David B.: Did you say you were on Colbert? How did it go?

George Saunders: My pleasure. Am just so pleased the technology seems to be working—am on satellite. And yes—I did Colbert and Charlie Rose on the same day. If only I’d scheduled a rectal, I could have accomplished the coveted “stress trifecta.”

I think it went okay—was sure fun. He is an amazing, bright, and funny guy. Just fun being around him, honestly.

Noah S.: Charlie Rose has a penetrating gaze.

George Saunders: I meant Colbert in the first response but yes—Charlie Rose, too, was so kind and intelligent.

Brian S: You said something yesterday on Facebook about wearing the same shirt and jacket to both. Do they tape near each other?

George Saunders: They are both in Manhattan but a pretty good distance apart. So I sort of went from one to the next. Plus I was feeling that that shirt/jacket combo were good luck. A pretty strange and anthropologically interesting experience. Seeing how the whole thing works etc. etc.

Julie: I thought it was interesting how “scary” it must be for comedians to actually talk about the work. It almost seemed pathological to me the way Colbert kept reflexively bouncing away from discussing anything actually substantive about your great book.

George Saunders: He’s a great improv comedian, and I think that’s the game—to sort of comically skirt the substance—but then he’ll let you get in a shot or two.

David B.: Is this going to explode your readership?

George Saunders: Gotta hope. (I find myself using that smiley emoticon a lot here. Hmm. Maybe just assume one in the future.)

Kevin T.: Speaking of TV, I loved that panel on Up with Chris Hayes. You never see that many fiction writers at one time. On camera.

George Saunders: Actually that Times Magazine piece sort of shot things out of a cannon. Very generous, and after that, seems like, the crowds right away got bigger at readings and so on.

David B.: Is it stressful to have this large surge of attention?

George Saunders: It’s not that stressful, honestly. It’s more work—bigger crowds and all of that. But it’s less stressful than going somewhere and having eight people or whatever.

Brian S: Yeah, no writer wants to be the person alone at the table in the bookstore.

George Saunders: And I have been that guy. Trying to milk the last remaining person so you don’t leave too early…

Noah S.: Aside from it being a wonderful book, why do you think that this book exploded out of the gate like it did?

Natasha: I’m wondering the same thing, Noah.

George Saunders: Noah, it seemed like sort of the perfect storm deal—that NY Times profile by Joel Lovell and then, right before and after, some nice reviews in major places. And then, too, to be honest, I could feel—in the preceding five years or so—a slow building going on: bigger attendance at events and more interest from colleges.

Noah S.: Awesome.

Brian S: Which is how we wound up with this book: the packed house at Drake University.

George Saunders: Someone said that they thought part of this was just that the people who were, say, in college when CivilWarLand came out are now in positions of authority—editors and reviewers and so on.

Julie: Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that the book is really fucking great.

Brian S: I think there are a lot of really great books that don’t blow up like this.

George Saunders: In any event it’s pretty fun, and I think maybe more fun at fifty-four than at, say, thirty-five. At this age, you’re just kind of like: huh, interesting. It’s sort of like when you’re walking down the street and you smell some amazing cooking going on inside, and you enjoy it while not really feeling that it’s yours, or “real.” On the other hand, I really like Julie’s theory.

Natasha: I love that description of what it’s like to stumble across this kind of success.

Melissa S.: Are these all recently-written stories? By “recent,” I guess I mean, were you writing them for this collection specifically, or have some been around for a while and just fit in?

George Saunders: No, “Sticks” is circa 1994 (!), and ["The Semplica-Girl Diaries"] I started in ’98 and just finished. Otherwise they’re from 2006 forward.

Noah S.: “Sticks” is an absolute favorite of mine. I followed my girlfriend around the house reading it aloud, because I couldn’t help but share it.

George Saunders: Careful with that. If she is running really fast, stop reading. Actually, on a break last night, Colbert—out of character—read “Sticks” to his audience.

Bobby: That sounds intimidating. Super-famous person reading your work aloud to his audience…

George Saunders: Luckily I was in the Green Room, nearly barfing with relief.

Mira: I actually wonder if maybe your work has gotten the Colbert Bump—not from being on his show, but from his success in pop culture. Like, the success of people like Colbert has helped a wider audience embrace the absurd.

George Saunders: Mira, I think you might be right. There’s a feeling—or has been a feeling—that my weirdness is somehow less weird. Something like that—satire or irony is more mainstream? Not sure.

Ann B: Are you partial to any one of the stories?

George Saunders: At the moment I’m still feeling the “Semplica-Girl” story—because I finished it most recently.

Noah S.: What inspired “Semplica-Girl”?

George Saunders: ”Semplica-Girl” came from a dream. I dreamed that I was that guy, looking out our bedroom window, and saw those Semplica Girls—and felt proud, like: finally, I did it! I’ve arrived! 

Noah S.: And in the dream they had the microline running between their heads?

George Saunders: Yes, they did—microline and white smocks and long black hair.

Linda M.: I’m curious about the decision to go with the diary format for “Semplica-Girl.” They go so weirdly well together.

George Saunders: The diary idea came from a great book called I Will Bear Witness by Viktor Klemperer—a Holocaust diary. And he doesn’t know, of course, that it’s “the Holocaust”—his gaze is averted to these mundane, everyday things. Also, [it's] really fun stylistically—all that truncation and so on…

Hannah: I enjoyed the story “Home,” and recently thought there might be a connection with that and the Hemingway short story, “Soldier’s Home”?

George Saunders: Hemingway, yes—although not consciously. Only afterwards I was like: huh. Actually, I was sort of riffing on Euripides, Herakles, but I mangled the plot in my memory…

Hannah: Regarding “Home”: as a military prosecutor I am always shocked by the people that are upset that we court-martial soldiers who have been deployed. It seems like you captured the public’s strange and sometimes misplaced reverence for soldiers…even those who commit crimes.

George Saunders: Yes. Especially with these wars, there’s that sort of auto-patriotic response—maybe a guilt response?

Brian S: But also the rote way in which that service is honored, Hannah.

George Saunders: Right, “rote” is the word.

Brian S: Anyone else get a chill by the end line of “Exhortation”? That riff on Julian of Norwich (or T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”) just sent shivers down my spine, given what the rest of the story was hinting at. Orwellian in a really awesome way.

Janeen: Brian, I got chills so many times throughout the book. I had to read it slowly, because I found it so dark and frightening.

Natasha: What do you think “Exhortation” was hinting at? Maybe I didn’t think too deeply about it because it was starting to get so creepy.

Brian S: I felt like Room 6 in “Exhortation” was, in effect, a torture chamber of some kind. Bad things were happening in there.

Natasha: I can see that. There was certainly something sinister going on in there.

Julie: Can I ask how you get into the head of your characters? Their mentalese is so idiosyncratic and unusual and real. Do they just “come to you”? Do you do a lot of people-watching and are a natural mimic? How do you get in there? When I write, all my characters sound too much like me.

George Saunders: Julie, that is an exquisite and writerly question. They sort of do just come to me; I think of it as improv—with heavy revision.

Julie: It seems then that you must work on multiple pieces of writing at the same time. If this is accurate, how do you do that as well as teach? Do you work on something for a bit then go on to something else and then come back?

George Saunders: Yes, always. I try to have four or five things going so I can gravitate to whatever seems most interesting on that day—keeps it lively and productive, versus working out of a place of unhappiness or boredom. I work on something until it goes cold. Teaching doesn’t seem to bother me much, I just work in [and] around the cracks, so to speak—actually nice to get away from a piece sometimes, you know? So you can see it fresh.

Mira: A lot of your stories are written with multiple narrators. Do you start out writing a story from one character’s P.O.V. first, and then start to wonder how the other players would experience the situation? Or do you see it from multiple viewpoints from the beginning?

George Saunders: I think the idea is usually to limit it to one character, but then the story will start to tell you otherwise—for the story to unfold naturally, it seems to want someone else to get in there and start thinking. Sometimes, it’s just that the first character’s voice can’t accommodate the action, i.e. can’t make it happen convincingly. All very intutive and iterative in the actual doing.

Mira: Yeah, I guess I was kind of rooting around process with that question… Do you edit relentlessly? When I write, I edit over and over and over, and sometimes I worry I’m editing the life out of things. Do you edit a lot? Or do you leave that to others?

George Saunders: I edit a lot. Yes. Over and over. Hundreds of times. My theory is that it’s like decorating an apartment: say I give you a furnished apartment—it wouldn’t feel “like you.” But if I let you take out one item a day and replace it with something you chose, after a year or so, that place would be more “you” than you ever could have conceptualized at the outset. This is what editing is, for me. Trying to move the thing to be more like me than I could have imagined at the outset.

Jack W.: I re-read most of your other books along with Tenth; one serendipitous moment was reading your essay “Thought Experiment” and then reading “Escape From Spiderhead” afterwards. They went together beautifully. A question: do your own works somehow inspire you, i.e. something you’ve already written sparks a new idea?

George Saunders: Yes, and since we’re in such an intimate setting here, I’ll confess that sometimes a story will “fall out” of another. A riff will occur, but not be right for that piece. So I treat it as a gift from the subconscious, like it was in there trying to get out, but blundered into the wrong story, i.e. “Chivalric Fiasco” fell out of “Spiderhead,” etc. etc.

Brian S: My partner is using the book in her senior writing seminar this semester, and I’ll be subbing for her for a couple of classes, so I get to work with “My Chivalric Fiasco.” I’m very excited about it.

Michael: I also had my wife read the book. It’s funny, but I felt like the book expressed a lot of things I’d hidden from her. Unintentionally. I don’t know how to say it another way.

George Saunders: Like what sort of things? Not to pry…

Michael: Nothing particular, but a kind of continuous dilemma—work situations mostly, which I don’t bring home. I’d have to think it through, how to say it, but a sense of working in the wrong moral direction (“Semplica-Girl”) by way of making things what they are for your family. And the sense that death frees you to be moral: really painful.

George Saunders: I get that, Michael, yes—and have felt it.

Natasha: I’m really interested in the theme of parenting and other forms of control (“Escape From Spiderhead,” for instance). Is parenting something that you’ve always explored in your writing?

Noah S.: I was curious about that as well, Natasha. It feels like there’s lots of children in the book, and most of them are in either extremely restrictive or lacking situations.

George Saunders: Lots of parenting yes, and honestly it’s just because that was one hundred percent what our minds were on at the time…so it leached into the stories, for sure.

Noah S.: On the cover of the book, Jennifer Egan calls it “Hilarious…” Do you set out to have these stories make people laugh?

Brian S: It’s the twelve-year-old in me, but I found myself laughing every time I saw a new euphemism for penis.

Noah S.: Totally. There was a reference to “boners” in “Semplica-Girl Diaries” that made me laugh out loud.

Brian S: “Pre-bone” made me snort out loud in public.

Natasha: I agree. Lots of wonderful humor in these stories. Definitely laughed a lot.

George Saunders: I love to make my reader laugh. Love it.

Melissa S.: Speaking of images, some of the stories have some pretty eerie ones (drowning the kittens, boy chained to tree, etc). Do you ever think, Whoa, too far? Has anything been edited out of the book?

George Saunders: I would never say too much—unless the “too much” was also just wrong, i.e. was working against the larger artistic goal of the story. If you go too far, then the job is to justify it: make it worth the shock or disgust.

Melissa S.: How long does it take you to write a story? Have you ever stolen a story idea from one of your students?

George Saunders: Have never knowingly stolen a story from a student, no. And they take, honestly, from three weeks (“Home”) to twelve years (“Semplica-Girl Diaries”).

Melissa S.: Wow, twelve years. And you never put it away. That’s amazing.

Natasha: I wish I’d read the book earlier so I’d have had time to process and really understand the themes. I’m still digesting “Semplica-Girl,” which I adored. And even though you’re lucky enough to have these images come to you in a dream, you must have been amazingly dedicated to keep coming back to it for so many years. Thanks, because it’s so worth it! Did “Semplica-Girl” threaten to turn itself into a novel? It does seem to be the perfect length, but I can imagine getting sidetracked and following more of what’s going on with the other characters.

George Saunders: ”Semplica-Girl” tried to be a novel, Natasha, yes, boy did it. I have—embarrassing—but I have at least eight boxes of drafts. Ugh.

Natasha: Wow. Hopefully those boxes won’t string themselves up in your yard.

Hannah: It seemed like you used animals (dogs and a pony, I think) to emphasize poverty. Is this accurate?

Bobby: Has teaching had any positive influence on your writing?

Noah S.: What was your response to Adrian Chen’s “Write A Goddamn Novel Already” piece about you?

George Saunders: This is hard! Sorry I’m not keeping up…

Brian S: You’re doing great! We can be a little overwhelming.

Deborah M: Yes, we are bombarding, and you are doing great.

Janeen: So glad there’s a large and lively bunch tonight.

Ann B: Brian, how many of us are there?

Brian S: Pushing thirty.

George Saunders: Yes! No! Boxers! Briefs! Sometimes, but rarely in that exact manner!

Hannah—not intentionally, but seems like it. I don’t do a lot of symbol placement, but my guess is, my subconscious does.

Teaching is all positive, Bobby—we get 600 apps a year and the students we get are so amazing. Fires me up with love for the youngsters, and gives me hope for the future of literature. No downside, honestly, and it just gets sweeter as I get older—a great gift, to get to interact with talented young people who are not necessarily grossed out by you.

Noah, I actually found that Chen piece sort of sweet. I didn’t mind it a bit and it started a shitstorm, which is always good. The real answer, of course, is (as it so often is) provided by Flannery O’Connor: “A writer can choose what he writes but he can’t choose what he makes live.” Amen.

Noah S.: Do you consider yourself a “dark” writer?

George Saunders: That “darkness” question is interesting. I think what I’m doing is something like that Portuguese Fado music—where every song is ostensibly a dirge, but within each there is overflow that equals joy. So there is like a “negative offset” to each story, but hopefully the reader feels a sort of scale model of the world, where good is there, and bad is, but the whole frame is bent. Something like that.

Brian S: I get that. “Victory Lap” is an undeniable dark story, but it ends with the damage to everyone being mainly scars that they’ll carry with them. But nobody’s dead, so it’s a happy ending in a way.

Deborah M: The “good” definitely flows through the stories, and that’s what remains (rather than the dark details…).

Noah S.: I love that you ended with “Tenth of December”—it felt like the story that best captured that people, amongst all the badness, really do some good things.

Hannah: Why these particular stories in this book?

George Saunders: Those are just basically the stories I wrote during this period. And then the ordering was really the thing…

Linda M.: I am wondering about ordering decisions, as well. I first read “Semplica-Girl” in The New Yorker, on its own. But then, within a collection, the stories bounce off of each other.

George Saunders: The ordering thing…I got a little help from my daughter, who reminded me of how an album is ordered: something to get the person in easily, strong ending, and then pace the middle, so that one story propels the reader to the next. Or, another way to say it, stagger the stronger/weaker stories so the reader can never quite go “meh,” and walk off.

Janeen: Do you feel like the success of this book will help or hinder you when you sit down to write the next one?

George Saunders: As I get the real, physical sense of how many more readers there are now, it’s a little scary. Like if your party got really crowded, and everyone was waiting for the food. But I’ll take it. The more positive way to think about it is to say, Well, they liked that last one, so let me do more of that, be bolder, trust the new readers, and just go for it. I really find that once the shit dies down and I get back in my little writing shed, everything feels pretty okay and normal.

Jack W.: Donald Barthelme is someone you’ve written about (and whose baton I’d declare from rooftops that you’ve been passed) as propelling his readers via a “series of pleasure-bursts,” followed by continual escalation. This seems to apply to your writing, as well. Do you have a method in capturing this feeling in your writing? I, too, find your courage thrilling.

George Saunders: Thanks, Jack. I think the only way is to re-engage with what you’re working on every day as you think a first-time reader might—to read it line by line, monitoring your own pleasure. When the pleasure goes down, something is off. Or—”pleasure” might not be the exact word. But you are sort of scanning the prose to see what it is causing to happen. And adjusting accordingly, in the only way possible, i.e. micro-adjustments of the sentences and phrases…

Ana: I have a rather focused question I wanted to make a point to ask. I was at a book reading recently with Junot Díaz, where people were asking about developing an ability to write about race. He lamented the fact more writers weren’t asked about race in their writing like, for example, George Saunders. So I thought I would ask: people talked about “write about race” as a sort of muscle you have to engage, train, and strengthen. Do you feel like that is a muscle you have developed, or worked on?

George Saunders: I’m not sure. I tend not to think, you know, that a story is “about” race, or gender, but it’s about people struggling against something or other. So those other things sort of get subsumed in that. Or, you know, “race” is part of a larger narrative about trying to be human. Hmm. Great question, but I am sort of going too fast here. Let me think about that one…

Mira: You write a lot about class and capitalism. Can you say something about how you see the role of writer—and, I guess, artist—in our culture? I’m thinking of the book The Gift here, and the idea of art as being beyond commerce. Curious about your thoughts on that.

Ana: Mira, I’m really interested in that question. Going off that, I was thinking back on the two stories, “Victory Lap” and “My Chivalric Fiasco,” and the characters’ interventions at different stages—both to varying degrees of success—driven by some sort of imperative. And I guess I’m wondering if you feel any similar imperative in the role as a writer to intervene in “injustice”? I love how both stories show the complex motivations and complicated success of such an endeavor.

George Saunders: Mira, I think that, when I’m writing, I try not to think about the role of the writer at all—when I do, I fuck things up; everything gets too literal. I mean, I kind of do that anyway. But I just trust that if I am trying to get the story to stand up and walk, and my heart is basically in the right place, then I’ll be fulfilling the correct role, if that makes sense…like a musician might have ideas about social justice and all of that, but the main and first job is to kick ass.

Ana, I think the main struggle, in the actual writing, is to come up with something important and then, once that’s in place, try to complicate it in a way that somehow escalates matters. Like, in that “Fiasco” story, the rape is major. I think the reader feels the horror and injustice of that, even with that comic/minimal prose style. So then you have that to work with: the feeling of wanting justice. And then you go: okay, so how can I now complicate that beat called “the feeling of wanting justice”? Well, she doesn’t want justice. She wants silence. So he complies. Now—how can we make him not comply? Etc. etc. So the thinking, such as it is, is coming from inside the situation, as opposed to being imposed from the outside.

Natasha: Escalating matters—that’s what I’m working on in my writing (I’m a playwright). I’m finding it takes much more planning and thought than I wish it did!

George Saunders: Yes, escalation is the golden ticket, isn’t it? I did an exercise in one of my classes—I played this crazy-ass song called “The Arizona Yodeler” by The Dezurik Sisters (circa 1938), that is nothing but escalation. They yodel, they whistle, they do these crazy mouth-sounds—and it’s a great way to isolate escalation as a very exciting thing, separate from content—the song is completely silly, has no content—but everyone in the room is grinning like crazy by the end. I recommend it highly.

Ann Nash: I appreciate getting into your head with writing with escalating complications. Perfect goal. Thank you.

We read your puppy story in our nonfiction class two years ago. Lots of heated discussion followed. It brings out a lot in those with and without children. Experience with [parenting] tempers judgment towards both mothers. How did you come to write “Puppy”?

Janeen: Ann, that story just slays me.

Natasha: I can see “Puppy” being read as part of the standard curriculum in high school classrooms in twenty years. I’d have loved to have it in mine.

Michael: The puppy story was the first one I read. How being a parent changed my perspective on that one! I don’t think I’d have got it the same way in high school.

George Saunders: ”Puppy” was…we drove by a house in upstate New York, and there was a kid in the yard, on some sort of harness. And he seemed pretty happy. And we (my wife and then-baby daughters) were feeling, at least in my mind, sort of, you know, yuppie. In our new Nissan and all. So I had that in my mind for about five years, that basic setup. And then Zadie Smith asked if I had something for this Other People anthology, and that came out.

My dog is really pissed off that I am typing so late. And I just, twice, typed “my god is really pissed off.”

Melissa S.: “My god is really pissed off.” Best short short since “Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Hannah: Glad to see you have a dog. Hopefully bettered cared for than the ones in your stories.

Natasha: George, do you have any advice about writing process and other things that help you write successfully? If you wrote a book for aspiring writers, what would it boil down to?

George Saunders: I think it’s simpler than we’re taught, and I think it has to do with trying—or being willing to—entertain, in your own unique way. Or “compel.” I had a long period where I was trying to write with my head—to be smart or thematic or whatever, and not only was I not smart, I was boring. And my big breakthrough, if you want to call it that, came when I realized that, in life, I liked to be funny and strange and fast—and maybe those were literary virtues, after all. So with my students, I often find it’s a matter of somehow leading them to a place where they feel comfortable with their own real and natural strengths, and thereby free to walk away from approaches that confine them or feel false…

Natasha: Yes! That’s probably why your writing is, as I described to my boyfriend earlier today, “not highbrow,” even though you’re a renowned literary star these days. Willingness to write from your own reality is probably a big part of that.

Melissa S.: What you said about not wanting your students to feel confined—boy, is that ever true. I am friends with one of your former students and his entire (amazing) novel is so out-of-the box and free. So refreshing.

My husband saw you read at BookPeople in Austin the other night (I drew the short straw and had to stay home with the kiddo). He told me you read from “Spiderhead.” What made you decide to read that particular section, and how do you choose what you will read, generally?

Brian S: As an addendum to Melissa’s question: are there times on the book tour that you change up what you’re reading to keep from getting bored with your work?

George Saunders: I used to read whole stories at readings—thirty or thirty-five minutes. But now that the crowds are bigger and the signings take longer, the stores seem to be suggesting ten to fifteen minutes. And really, whoever left a reading going: damn, he read too short? I sort of just experiment and see what might make an entertaining ten-minute reading. Still am. At colleges, I read “Victory Lap” and I love doing that. I try to do all the voices and so on, which keeps it fresh. For me anyway.

Brian S: It was a killer performance in Des Moines. I’ve never seen that many people at a college reading, and that many people just rapt with attention.

Ana: I saw you read from “Home” earlier this month. It was very interesting hearing your voices, which is not how the story sounded in my head! I also loved watching you engage with [Deborah] Eisenberg, whose book I bought that night. Do you have a preference or not when it comes to doing joint readings?

George Saunders: I love joint readings if the person reading with me is as wonderful as Deborah. She is the bomb. Such a sweetheartand a genius, for real.

Ana: I’m really loving her stories, which I hadn’t read before. And thought it was so interesting how she was almost forced to take up writing as a result of quitting smoking.

George Saunders: The other amazing thing about Deborah that night was she was very, very sick. I mean high fever. And still killed it, right?

Brian S: Five minutes, everyone—any lurkers want to get in a last-minute question?

Kevin T.: With the obvious exception of “My Chivalric Fiasco,” it looks like you’re about done with theme parks. Have you mined everything out of them that you can? Has child-rearing replaced them as a preoccupation? Are there more theme parks in the pipeline?

George Saunders: I might be done with theme parks, but you never know. I really just am looking for a few good sentences to start me off, and I honestly don’t care where it’s set or what it’s about—just so it confuses and intrigues me and sort of obscures the trail, i.e. keeps me from repeating myself (too much).

Melissa S.: What are you reading right now?

Natasha: Ooh, I’d love to hear what your reading list is, too. Favorite books? Movies? What makes your short list?

George Saunders: Read Europeana (Ourednik) and Senselessness (Moya), and a really funny galley by Jack Handey called The Stench of Honolulu—he’s the Deep Thoughts guy. I just saw an incredibly sweet documentary called Buck, about a guy who breaks horses in a new and gentler way, because he was abused as a kid. Also read, for the first time, Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which I thought was about as dark a book as I’ve ever read, and totally convincing regarding the savagery of the rich-poor divide. That one killed me. He has this bit about how a human being should never act, at all, unless he/she is “feeling love.” Radical.

Noah S.: Buck is so incredible. The part with the crazy horse still appears in my dreams sometimes.

George Saunders: Yes. That poor crazy horse. Ruined by its owner, mostly.

Janeen: Are you working on new stuff now, or just taking a break (or, well, traveling and appearing everywhere)?

George Saunders: I have a new thing started, but I’m taking a big break with the new book. I think I’ll be able to get back to work in a month—although I have to also read for Syracuse admissions. We got 566 apps for six spots.

Brian S: Okay, that’s the hour, so we’re going to cut off questions.

David B.: Thanks, George, for staying up late.

Ann Nash: Thanks, George, for out-of-the-box writing. Inspirational to us all.

Ana: Thank you! Best of luck with all your work this year.

Julie: Yes, thanks so much for doing this. I sort of feel like there was the world-before-reading-George-Saunders and now the world-after-reading-George-Saunders. Mind-blowing and amazing. Please keep writing for a very long time.

Brian S: Any chance you’ll be in Boston for the AWP convention?

George Saunders: Brian—I will be in Boston. Syracuse is doing a 50th anniversary event.

Bobby: I will come and give you a high-five at AWP then, if that’s cool?

George Saunders: Bobby—definitely. Or just bring me a drink. Thank you all so much for your generosity—really enjoyed this.

Brian S: Thanks again, George. Hope to run into you in Boston.

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Author photo © Basso Cannarsa/Opale

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We’re pleased to announce that our February selection for the Rumpus Book Club is Emily Rapp’s The Still Point of the Turning World. Publishers Weekly had this to say about it.

Her elegant, restrained work flows with reflections and excerpts from writers and poets like Mary Shelley, Pablo Neruda, and Sylvia Plath, as well as supporters who helped her during the difficult unraveling of her son’s condition. Writing about Ronan allowed her to claim the sorrow and truly look at her son the way he was. Her narrative does not follow Ronan as far as his death, but gleans lessons from Buddhism and elsewhere in order that Rapp could “walk through this fire without being consumed by it.”

The Poetry Book Club will be reading Kate Greenstreet’s Young Tambling, which Greenstreet describes as “an experimental memoir.” The Ahsahta Press website says this about Young Tambling:

Greenstreet does not dabble in teleological platitudes: the lives crosscutting these poems are not singular but plural and sublime, full of sacrifice and empathy for the lost. In Young Tambling, a life’s meaning is born of its poet’s song, and a memory cannot reveal its truth until it finds its ballad.

We’re also excited to announce that our March selection for the Book Club will be Matthew Spektor’s American Dream Machine, out from Tin House on April 9 (that’s right–members get the book a month before anyone else does). And our Poetry Book Club selection will be Lynn Xu’s Debts and Lessons, out from Omnidawn Books April 1.

In other book club news, T Cooper, author of November selection Real Man Adventures is on tour right now. He’s in Nashville tomorrow and Asheville on Saturday with special guests Peg Hambright (at both shows) and Clay Aiken in Asheville. Check the website for future dates in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Coldfront Mag is currently listing their 40 best books of poetry from 2013. They’ve only released numbers 21-40 so far, but it’s nice to see Rumpus Poetry Book Club selectee The Ground by Rowan Ricardo Phillips come in at number 33. We expect to see other books we’ve read appear in the top 20.

Why wouldn’t you want to be a member of one or both of these book clubs? Click here to join.

Related Posts:

• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Camille Guthrie
• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with Emily Rapp
• Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Well, we might start giving away a free copy of one of those past selections to anyone who signs up for the Rumpus Book Club or Poetry Book Club. (If you sign up for both, I’ll send you two free books!) This is only while supplies last.

This month, the fiction club is reading Manuel Gonzales’s The Miniature Wife, and new subscribers will start with that book. We’ll be chatting with Manuel about his book on January 2, so there’s still plenty of time to get the book, get in on the discussion, and talk with the author. (Plus, free book!)

And in January, we’ll be reading the latest George Saunders collection, Tenth of December. As with every Rumpus Book Club selection, you’ll get your copy before anyone else does.

On the poetry side, we’re reading Dana Goodyear’s The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard right now, and we’ll be chatting with her on January 3. New subscribers also have time to get the book and get in on the chat. (Plus, free book!)

And in January, we’ll be reading Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair, out from Subpress. As with the Rumpus Book Club, you’ll get new collections of poetry before anyone else does, and have a chance to chat with the author about her work.

And you can also give these subscriptions as a gift. So send some literature your friends’ way, and get a bonus book while you’re at it.

Related Posts:

• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Camille Guthrie
• Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• The Rumpus Book Club Conversation with Manuel Gonzales

Highlights include the distinction between “pity whoop” (noun) and “pity-whoop” (verb), the hyphenation of “pre-boner,” and how to put “Darkenfloxx” in the past tense.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with George Saunders
• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• “Fakes,” by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer
• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion 33 – George Saunders

To be clear, the book doesn’t deal in actual hoaxes; you won’t have to read anything else about J.T. Leroy or James Frey, praise the Lord. Nor are they typical short stories – because, really, all fiction falls under the broad umbrella of “fake”– but specifically texts that masquerade as another kind of text: the document, the email chain, the textbook. Fiction in the guise of nonfiction. Again, it’s not a new technique (early English novelists like Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe employed the “No, really, these are just some letters I found” method of distancing themselves from the novel’s bad reputation), but the approach has changed. These pieces are self-evidently false; they play a game of pretend with the reader, who is not asked to believe anything. One of the more well-known selections, George Saunders’s “I CAN SPEAK! tm”, for example, would not be mistaken for a real letter about talking baby-masks. Yet the joy of the piece is trying to imagine the man who purportedly wrote such a letter and the world he inhabits, in the same way that Found magazine presents us with the pleasurable combination of random chance and voyeurism inherent in the discarded objects its contributors send in. Fakes takes it one step further: what if you found a crumpled piece of paper on the ground and it turned out to actually be heart-wrenching or funny or well-written?

David Shields

The anthology has an endearing order, starting with a “Disclaimer” (by David Means) and ending with a “Contributor’s Note” (Michael Martone) and an “Index” (J.G. Ballard). Humor with a dash of pathos seems to be the desired effect of most of the pieces. The inherent tension between what the text purports to be (real) and what the reader knows it to be (not real) lends itself to irony, if not outright satire. The stories are also generally on the brief side, making it a fun collection to dip into here and there.

But it’s not the lit snob’s version of a joke book to be marooned on top of a toilet tank. Pieces such as Kevin Wilson’s macabre and grief-torn “The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys (Laconic Method to Near Misses)”, Don Bartheleme’s abstracted “The Explanation”, and Amy Hempel’s “ Reference #388475848-5” – a parking ticket appeal that becomes a meditation on urban anonymity– bring far more than cleverness to the table.

There are more examples that could be included – the recommended reading list in the back brims with fine suggestions. Even then it’s possible to brainstorm more potential inclusions – what about A. Van Jordan’s dictionary definition poems from M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A or an excerpt from Jenny Boully’s footnotes-only The Body? What about that PowerPoint chapter from A Visit From the Good Squad?

The one area where the book is lacking is, strangely, the introduction. When I first got my hands on a copy, I was eager to read what Shields and Vollmer had to say about the current vogue for fraudulent artifacts. I liked Shields’s Reality Hunger, full of ideas that generate discussion whether you agree or passionately disagree with them, and many of which would seem to apply to the appetite for fakes. But the editors have mostly dispensed with the theorizing here, which for many readers may be a plus, opting instead for their own play on another form, that of the creative writing handbook. It’s hard to tell what the ratio of straightforwardness to tongue-in-cheekness is in this “Guide to the Manufacture and Distribution of Fraudulent Artifacts.” It reads as both genuinely encouraging and so obvious as to be a parody: “A diary will be written in first person, a contributor’s note in third;” “Your artifact will need a voice.”

But besides a few offhand comments about being enslaved by our information, there is little consideration given to the why of fakes. Why the sudden interest in reading and writing these ostensibly impersonal or anonymous texts that become unique narrative, imbued with pathos (or, sometimes, a parody of same) – like Joe Wenderoth’s comment cards at Wendy’s: “July 16, 1996 – Today I bought a salad just to look at it, smell it, rub it on my face. Again I’m feeling like a doctor, but now the feeling is clearer – I feel like an ancient doctor, with ancient ideas about what needs to be done. I asked the register-girl if it would be possible to have small holes drilled into my skull so that good strong coffee could be poured down onto my brain.”

Matthew Vollmer

One answer, I suspect, is that the Internet has made these sorts of pieces more publishable. A quick calculation of the permissions reveals three of the 34 selections first appeared on Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, which has given rise to a sort of house style of lists and recipes and formulas. There are also new and exciting web forms to parody, like Kari Anne Roy’s “Chaucer Tweets the South by Southwest Festival” (one of the McSweeney’s-born pieces – one which I might have traded for an older example from the suggested reading, maybe an excerpt of Twain or Borges). Or maybe it’s that in our age of anti-privacy, the double masking of the author is more appealing. Yes, Mark Halliday is the author of “One Thousand Words on Why You Should Not Talk During a Fire Drill,” but the fictional pen is in the fictional hand of the kid being punished. For once we are free to speculate about the writer’s personal relationship to the text, because the writer is part of the text, too.

I realize that my desire for the editors to conjure up an entire field of scholarship where none currently exists constitutes a pretty tall order, and Vollmer and Sheilds freely admit the incompleteness of the anthology. It’s to their credit, then, that I’m hoping for a Volume II.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with David Shields
• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with George Saunders
• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion 33 – George Saunders

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A blurb on the back of Seth Fried’s debut collection The Great Frustration compares the young writer to George Saunders, and after reading these eleven stories it’s not hard to see why. Fried uses the same wacky concepts and possesses a similar sense of empathy, but to declare him derivative would do a great disservice to his work. While some stories are less successful than others, the best employ a first-person plural viewpoint that stands in for a town, a group of scientists, henchmen who have to squeeze a monkey into a capsule. The effect is fresh and unique even as it borrows from Faulkner and Eugenides, among others.

The chief strength of The Great Frustration is that these stories all feel thematically different from one another while remaining united by voice. So many times when I read story collections—especially debuts—it feels like I’m going through variations of the same arc over and over again. Fried never falls victim to this trap. The first story in the collection, “Loeka Discovered”, is arguably the strongest. Centered on the discovery of the frozen body of an ancient man, “Loeka” covers the rise and fall of a group of scientists tasked with analyzing the specimen.

We wondered if we were parasites. Had our relationships with our colleagues changed so quickly because of something latently flawed that they had recognized in us? We began to think that maybe there was nothing wrong with them at all but that we were just oblivious, emotionally handicapped monsters, doomed for the rest of our lives to commit the same sins against all the well-meaning people who would ever be fortunate enough to find themselves in our path.

Like the aforementioned George Saunders and even Etgar Keret, Seth Fried uses bizarre settings and kooky hijinx to get readers to lower their guards. Don’t be fooled. These are not light stories. Fried often goes in for the kill when you least expect it, mining an emotional depth from his intensely flawed characters that is rare in debut fiction. Stories like “Loeka Discovered” are as heartbreaking as they are funny.

Similarly successful is “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre”, a story told in the same first-person plural as above about an annual small-town picnic that racks up casualties year after year.

Another year, all the children who played in the picnic’s bouncy castle died of radiation poisoning. Yet another year, it was discovered halfway through the picnic that a third of the port-a-potties contained poisonous snakes. The year that the picnic offered free hot air balloon rides, none of the balloons that left—containing people laughing and waving from the baskets, snapping pictures as they ascended—ever returned.

Seth Fried

Like the great cultural satirists, Fried makes a great point about how frightened people are of change without losing the humanity and humor that makes this piece shine. “Those of Us in Plaid” works equally well, lampooning the drudgery and sheer pointlessness of so many office jobs. A group of workers—designated as inferior stock by their plaid uniforms—are tasked with jamming a monkey into a capsule which will then be picked up by a helicopter and dropped into a volcano rigged with explosives. Read that sentence again. Fried’s at his best when he tosses convention to the wind and allows himself to go all out crazy with his subject matter and settings. In stories like these, Fried reads less like a George Saunders disciple and more like a very original, talented voice at the beginning of what looks to be a promising career. Stories like “The Frenchman”, about a racist play unknowingly performed by children, allow Fried to play up the jokes before bringing the emotional hammer down, a potent one-two punch.

Not every story fares as well as the above four. Fried falters when he abandons his innate sense of humor. “The Misery of the Conquistador” makes a turgid statement about greed in a manner similar to Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” but without the heart and wit Fried’s best stories convey. The same can be said for “Life in the Harem”, a strange, Kafka-esque tale of a heterosexual man dropped into an all female harem in service to a sexually frustrated king. Fried sometimes appears less confident in his ability to nail emotional beats. He occasionally over-explains emotional states—the reluctance of the people in “Picnic Massacre”, the self-doubt of the scientists in “Loeka”—that are already successfully implied. But these problems are mostly minor and indicative of debut collections in general, and the number of successful, hysterical stories vastly outnumber the few pieces that aren’t firing on all cylinders.

Seth Fried’s The Great Frustration is the type of debut story collection I love reading. Some of the stories don’t hit as hard as they could, but the ones that do work—in Fried’s case, pieces that mix and match his gonzo hijinx with a deft emotional darkness—signal the arrival of a new talent.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with George Saunders
• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• “Fakes,” by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer
• “Upgrade”

Week 1

I showed Edwin Porter’s 1903 short “The Gay Shoe Clerk.” It’s basically a quick gag–a young woman and her mother appear in a shoe store. As the clerk is sizing the young lass, he takes the opportunity to fondle her foot. Oh dear! The mother hits the clerk with her handbag. The end.

What makes this film foundational is the editing. We see a medium shot of the clerk and shoppers in the store. The perspective then shifts to a close-up of the man fondling the woman’s foot. It’s the sort of edit we take for granted, and we don’t question the continuity–we know the foot belongs to the woman we were just looking at. What I hoped to demonstrate was that the early experiments with film editing resulted in a cinematic grammar that we have internalized without paying it too much notice.

We then moved on to the Porter film that caused audiences to literally leap out of their seats, the first blockbuster, The Great Train Robbery. The bad guy at the end points his pistol at the camera and pops off a shot. Is the bullet going to come out of the screen and strike you dead? Better duck!

After Porter I screened George Melies’s “Le Voyage dans la Lune” from 1902. This is the classic rocket-hits-the-moon-in-the-eye movie. Take a look.

So sorry, I meant this:

From this film class staple we jumped ahead a couple decades to Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Junior. I love watching silent slapsticks because I love thinking about the ways humor can be timeless. As much as I admire Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Keaton remains my favorite of the silent comedians partly because what he did was so counterintuitive. Where Chaplin’s face conveyed everything you needed to know about what his tramp was thinking and feeling, Keaton–famously nicknamed Old Stone Face–was about as facially expressive as a light socket. Which meant that he drew his audience into the screen, rather than delivering from it, providing a blank canvas onto which we might project ourselves. Watching Sherlock Junior right after the Porter shorts revealed how sophisticated audiences became. There’s this wonderful sequence in which Keaton, playing a projectionist, climbs onto a movie theater stage and literally enters the movie that’s playing. All this happens within a dream. Add to this a crazy funny motorcycle chase and boy howdy do you have a movie!

After a great discussion we took a break and reconvened to discuss Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” What does this story of pillaging Vikings have to do with the films we watched? Nothing, nothing at all. I just love that story and will teach it any chance I get. The “blood eagle.” Damn.

Week 2

All right so we sort of laid the foundation in the first class. Now I wanted to push the envelope a bit. First up was a film I’ve blogged about here before, “Un Chien Andlou” by Luis Buñuel. After that I screened the Spanish director’s L’Age Dor. While Buñuel’s short exhibits no agenda besides letting irrationality take the reigns, L’Age Dor feels very much like a political film, a sneering, shaming assault on the conventions that keep society humming along at the cost of those being ground under the heels of wealth and privilege.

I’d argue that’s most shocking about the film–and what had it banned and out of circulation from 1933 to 1979–isn’t the toe-sucking scene, but the final few minutes of the film. In a direct reference to Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, we see four libertines departing a castle where, we’re informed, an orgy has just taken place. And holy crap if one of the libertines isn’t the spitting image of Jesus Christ. Watching this film again in a room full of students I was struck anew by the audacity of the filmmaker. To draw a parallel between Christ and de Sade, and further, to end with a shot of scalps nailed to a crucifix… wow. Just wow.

And it’s interesting to think about how Buñuel reached for that catalogue of evils for inspiration in 1930, and 45 years later Pier Paolo Pasolini went to the same well for his unfathomably brutal Salò: 120 Days of Sodom. The two films bookend the 20th century, the first a premonition, the second an autopsy. Luckily for my class, I spared them the Pasolini.

As if to lighten the mood (but not by much), we discussed George Saunders’s “Sea Oak” in the final hour of the class. Good old Aunt Bernie.

Week 3

We backtracked a bit this week, into German Expressionism, specifically Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. There’d be no Shutter Island or Careful without Caligari. Watch out for Cesare!

After this masterpiece of psychological horror, we discussed Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” for an hour. I’ve taught this story before, and like to begin by drawing little stick figures of the characters on the board, then drawing the hideous machine with its harrow and designer and bed of cotton. Great fun. And moreso than the two weeks previous, the film and the story fit together nicely this round. Each about control in some way, each perhaps a warning from the early years of the 20th century that the world was about to become an even more frightening place.

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• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update

I know I should be grateful to the NYTBR for trashing my new book. I’m not.

So the New York Times Book Review just reviewed my new one, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. The most awesomest passage of the review likens the book to Going Rogue by Sarah Palin. Hey, it’s not every day a guy gets compared to his spiritual mentor.

The overall tenor of the critique isn’t exactly a shocker. Having written a book that vilifies self-serious cultural critics, I figured at some point it would be reviewed by a self-serious cultural critic, who would use phrases such as “an aesthetic of quasi-handmade approachability” and quote the Velvet Underground adoringly and decree that anyone who might enjoy my book is a cretin.

It’s a sore bit of luck to have this critic deployed by the NYTBR. But it more or less lines up with my expectations of the venue.

This no doubt sounds like sour grapes, given the context. Probably it is. I’m long past denying that most of what I do in life amounts to sour grapes. Still, here’s what I had to say on the subject a few months ago:

I am so ungodly tired of reading all this crap-ass literary punditry that passes for criticism. I mostly avoid reading the NYTBR for this reason. Rather than documenting the pleasures and disappointments a reader might encounter in a given book – offering a serious consideration of aesthetic and moral intent – they just do this stupid trend-mongering.

***

I’ll resist the urge to revisit Katie Roiphe’s lazily reasoned publicity stunt, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.

Instead, let’s check out the Jay McInerney review of Joshua Ferris’ second novel, The Unnamed. You could just see the editors sitting around with this one going, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll get the old It Guy writer to take on the new It Guy writer!’ McInerney’s eventual verdict: Ferris should stick to writing droll comedies of manner.

He has a right to that opinion, of course. But it’s a facile opinion, the sort that refuses to engage honestly with the book in question.

The Unnamed is far from a perfect novel. My own take on the book found fault with its ponderous prose. But any responsible critic would also have to recognize that Ferris did indeed have a moral and aesthetic intent.

His hero is afflicted by a mysterious condition that causes him to walk compulsively, through “the scuffed aisles of candies and chips … the dismal fluorescent brutality that chain restaurants wore like trademarks … the national color of insomnia and transience.”

Ferris isn’t just dragging the reader on a forced march into America’s bleak capitalist hinterlands to torture poor Jay McInerney. He’s asking an essential question: will the base compulsions of our bodies defeat the contents of our souls? Will our lust for distraction and empty calories overrun our duties toward those we love?

Whether or not McInerney thinks Ferris is successful, he should at least recognize the dude’s deeper intent.

***

Compared to George Saunders, Ferris should maybe consider himself lucky. A couple of years back, Will Blythe wrote a review of the essay collection The Braindead Megaphone that was astonishing for its intellectual stinginess.

Blythe mocked Saunders for his excessive use of capital letters, which he diagnosed as part of the author’s larger effort to buff his persona:

Maybe, as a Chicago-raised guy, [Saunders] goofs on himself to show he’s not some East Coast Intellectual Twit. One suspects that the irony of this maneuver is there to protect the very Midwestern Sweetness of the Author’s Soul.

For George Saunders has a Very Sweet Soul indeed.

Blythe has every right, even an obligation, to observe that he feels manipulated by Saunders. He can even be snide about it, and try to score laughs. But he also has an obligation to give Saunders credit for his insights.

That doesn’t happen. He writes off the title essay as a “solipsistic analysis” of the modern media. I can’t express how disappointing I found this judgment. Saunders’ piece is a strenuously reasoned argument against the Fourth Estate’s impulse to wring profit from neck of stimulation.

But the end of Blythe’s review, I felt this creeping suspicion that he simply had it in for Saunders, that he resented the author’s ostentatious decency and/or his optimism and/or the fact that he became a MacArthur Genius despite his Inexcusable Use of Capital Letters. He did what the lit crit crowd back in college used to call “reading against the text.” He thereby flattened the entire experience of reading Saunders.

Again: I’m not suggesting that critics can’t dislike the books they review, and say so. I do it myself. But I’m really tired of reading reviews – in the NYTBR and elsewhere – in which I feel essentially stuck inside some critic’s cant, with no clear view of the author’s world, let alone the broader ideas that ostensibly made the book worth reviewing. Or in which the subject of the review isn’t really the author’s book at all, but the imaginary book the critic not-so-secretly wishes he or she had written instead.

One of the most glaring recent instances was Jodi Kantor’s dismissal of Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

Kantor’s agenda is plain from the start. She had a great wedding. So did her friends. So why is Mead being such a party pooper?

What never seems to have occurred to Kantor – or the editors who published her review – is that Mead’s book wasn’t written as a rebuke to Kantor or her fun-loving pals. It’s an exploration of something larger. Namely, the insidious reach of the bridal industry.

I suppose a topic like that wasn’t compelling enough to capture the fickle post-millennial reader on its own merits. So the editors turned to the tried-and-true gimmick review, the one guaranteed to generate debate – not about the book’s subject, but about the review itself.

***

Look: the NYTBR is supposed to be the gold standard of mainstream literary thought in this country. The disappearance or contraction of other outlets makes it, at the very least, the dominant arbiter. They’ve got scads of editors, and can get basically anyone on earth to write for them.

Given all this, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in asking them to stop doing business in such a shallow, small-hearted manner. As for the perpetual moaning about space constraints: I’d be more sympathetic if the editors took a knife to the gratuitous plot summaries and indulgent, trend-mongering leads that eat up so much of their word count.

On that note, let me reiterate an uncontested point: I’m reacting to the sting of a particular review. (Full disclosure: this is actually the second time my work has been torched by the NYTBR.) Our loyal literary pundits will inevitably seize on this fact to dismiss my larger point. It’s kind of their job to do so.

But for the rest of us – the writers and critics – let me offer some parting words, before I put the finishing touches on my upcoming masterpiece, Chasing Sarah: A Life in Hunting and Pornography.

First, you have the right to react to the critical reception your work receives, or doesn’t receive. There are zillions of writers out there who are, this very minute, cursing the NYTBR for ignoring their work altogether.

Books – especially literary books – should be filled with smart, provocative ideas that deserve a response. They are intended to initiate a conversation about what it means to be human. A good review enlarges that conversation.

But it’s a loser move – an imitative fallacy, actually – to dismiss a bad review. As unpleasant as it’s been to read the assessments of my work in the NYTBR, both of the reviews in question had something to teach me – about dumb decisions I made at the keyboard, about the limited appeal of my sensibility, about certain habits of excess borne of my own doubt.

So, yeah, it’s okay to get pissed, maybe even inevitable. But we must not stop learning as writers. Even our least sympathetic reader has something to offer.

Second, as writers (of whatever sort) we should discuss books as seriously as we want ours to be discussed. I truly believe this. And not just in print, but in our daily lives, in how we talk about books with friends and colleagues, on our blogs, or even within some aggrieved comment thread. To degrade another writer without a respectful consideration of his or her intent and labor is to degrade our own vocation.

It would be wonderful if the NYTBR had a bunch of editors who held themselves to this standard. But that’s not really their job – as much as they might think it is. Their job is to drum up interest in a cultural artifact (the book) that keeps sliding further out onto the margins of our frenzied visual culture.

Our job, as writers and critics – as plain old advocates of literature – is to keep this larger discussion alive, about what it means to be living in this perilous historical moment, about our good intentions and our bad conduct, about those ecstatic confusions that made us fall in love with books in the first place.

***

Now then. In the interest of giving credit where it’s due, as well as promoting good works over sour grapes, here’s a brief list of critical dispatches I consider excellent role models:

*“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” by David Foster Wallace (from his fantastic collection Consider the Lobster). Note how precisely Foster Wallace articulates his disappointment in Austin’s memoir, then goes on to enlarge the conversation about our worship of athletes.

*James Wood’s review of Paul Auster’s Invisible demonstrates why Wood is such a badass. He goes out of his way to understand and articulate the author’s intentions. He cops to his biases. He puts the book into a comprehensive aesthetic context, by which I mean that he compares Invisible not only to other Auster books, but to Flaubert, DeLillo, and the post-modern tradition. (I’m pretty sure Wood would chew me up and spit me out if he ever read one of my books. But I’m also sure I’d know a lot more about what I’m up to as a writer after he was done.)

*David Ulin’s review of John D’Agata’s About A Mountain. Ulin discusses D’Agata’s controversial narrative decisions in a way that actually helps us make sense of this unorthodox book. He takes in the forest without getting lost in the leaves.

*Justin Taylor’s remarkable inquiry into Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad. Without passing easy judgment – the perpetual temptation for a critic – Taylor provides a detailed and thoughtful meditation on a book that most reviewers (myself included) would either write off as vacant hipsterism, or glorify for its affectations.

*Laura Miller on Eric Kraft’s Flying. I have a feeling I’d be less amused by Kraft than Miller, given my impatience with meta-fiction, but she does a terrific job of locating the writer, both among his contemporaries and a longer tradition of satirists. (Bonus points: This actually ran in the NYTBR!)

*Anthony Lane reviewing the film Lilya 4Ever. Lane can be savagely smart about dumb movies. Here, he’s unflinchingly honest about a heartbreaking film.

***

Right. Enough of my blather. What critical pieces have you read of late that enlarge the conversation about literature, about art, about us? Even if you’re gonna rake me over the coals, that’d be swell to know.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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