The Believer has just published what is likely writer Peter Matthiessen’s last interview, conducted only a month before his death. Included: Jaws, the sticker that Kurt Vonnegut left on Matthiessen’s car, and why Matthiessen didn’t like to write about New York:
I also very rarely write about cities or urban people—especially urban people of our own region. ’Cause it’s too well covered, my god! I mean, the New Yorker has saturated the world with this stuff for years, and I never wrote fiction for them; I didn’t want to. I wrote nonfiction for them. I like my own beat—I like to be out there on the edge with people who, as I say somewhere, haven’t got time to be neurotic.
