was an aberrant blip rather than a cavernous opening of new possibilities. It's as if the great work of the 1960s by heroes like William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, etc. Maybe there's just something conservative at the bedrock of American fiction. author as experimental seems to be shorthand for "difficult," "pretentious," and "no fun." Most people suddenly feel like they're being asked to eat their vegetables – and these vegetables also happen to be covered in shit. Because, certainly, describing a book by a U.S. and therefore aren't bound by the same rules. Or maybe it's a case of believing that writers construct books differently outside the U.S. When these books get strange, the reader is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe readers are willing to embrace this because translated titles seem like they've already been vetted: another publisher thought enough to translate them and they're often accompanied by glowing reviews from around the globe.
They're a key ingredient in what makes their fiction so enjoyable. There's a long tradition of fiction from writers like Calvino, Borges, Murakami, Cortazar, and Kobo Abe where the formal experiments are part of the attraction. Often I think readers pick up literature in translation expecting it to be adventurous and experimental. People don't seem aware of the double standard. Why is it okay for literature in translation to be tagged 'experimental,' but when the label is applied domestically, to books by U.S. Following is an interview conducted over email, inspired by many of the conversations that Jeff and I have had, where we discuss the possibility of making reading hip again, the films of Terrance Malick and Harmony Korine, and the conservatism of popular authors. It is a long process from acceptance of a manuscript to the point where it becomes known popularly, commercially, as a "book," which affords me the opportunity to get to know the author, oftentimes quite well. It was jolting, in a very positive way, to see how he managed to introduce some of these sensual flourishes to prose. While Mira Corpora is his first novel, Jeff is well-known as a playwright, where much of his work for the stage concerns the sensual experience of viewing art. That is something, as an editor, you don't see very often.īut, that aside, what initially attracted me to the work was the manner in which Jeff took something well-trodden – the coming-of-age story – and made it feel fresh and new again: his prose is so refined, so cautiously constructed, that it sears the page. When Jeff Jackson's agent submitted the manuscript for Mira Corpora to me at Two Dollar Radio, it immediately stuck out: it arrived accompanied by an endorsement from Don DeLillo.
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