The Terms Of The Experiment: An Interview With Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates, five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and recipient of a National Book Award and a National Humanities Medal, among many other honors, is one of the United States’ most prolific living writers, having published nearly eight dozen novels and short story collections in five decades, in addition to essays, novellas, and poetry collections. And that’s just the books she’s written under her own name.

Oates’s latest is a novel called The Man Without a Shadow (Ecco, 2016), which follows the lives of neuroscientist Margot Sharpe and her prize patient, amnesiac Elihu Hoopes (or “E.H.”), who can only remember events for 70 seconds at a time. It’s a fascinating novel that explores the meaning of memory, loss, and the possibility of loving and building a history with someone who can never remember you.

I had the pleasure of a lengthy conversation by phone with Joyce Carol Oates, who is currently teaching in Berkeley, the week before her new novel was released. We talked about the development of her writing over many decades, the role of obsessions and social engagement in a writer’s life, and the many mysteries of the human brain.

CL: How did The Man Without a Shadow start for you?

JCO: The Man Without a Shadow began as a short story, a long short story. It was about thirty pages long, that became thirty-five pages, and then forty pages, and I kept building on it. I perceived it as a work that a woman is recollecting in her own memory. She is now somewhat of an elderly woman perhaps. Or she’s retired and she’s much older. She’s outlived the love affairs, and she has outlived most of her career. She’s a very famous neuroscientist. She’s now in the phase of her career where she’s winning awards. She’s receiving lifetime achievement awards, and she’s giving lectures and talks and so forth in different parts of the country. She’s sort of remembering — that’s what the novel is, she’s remembering these things.

We move through the novel in a chronological way, and we’re with her as she is accumulating these memories. But in the very beginning, like the first page, basically, of the novel, the romance is over, because at that point her lover has died. So all this has to be put into a form, and the form is very challenging and intriguing to the writer.

CL: I was wondering about your decision to write The Man Without a Shadow in the present tense. It’s such a great choice for your character Elihu Hoopes, who can only recall new experiences for 70 seconds at a time and really just lives in the present tense.

We all suffer short-term memory loss all the time.

JCO: Yes, when people who have normal brains get older, their short-term memory starts to deteriorate. We all suffer short-term memory loss all the time. We write down numbers, we write down telephone numbers, we don’t trust our memory, even though, supposedly, most of us have normal brains. The man in The Man Without A Shadow is someone who has suffered very definite brain damage, but it’s not ultimately that different from, say, an Alzheimer’s sufferer — if you know anyone in your family, and I did know someone in my family, who suffered from this deterioration of memory– Eli, he’s not that different. One could fall in love with this man because he seems to exude normality. It’s only after a while they start to realize that he’s not remembering anything. I have been with people — always older people, even friends — where you tell them something and then a few moments later they’ll actually have forgotten. They weren’t listening, or they were distracted or something. They ask you the question again, and it almost doesn’t matter how old they are, because students forget things, too — they can forget things within a matter of minutes. So in writing about this particular person, I wasn’t really writing about experiences so different from what many of us have had.

CL: As I was reading the book it seemed to me that, in many ways, Margot and Eli aren’t that different — there is selective memory happening as well on the part of Margot. This idea of creating your own past, and how much control you have over that…

JCO: Yes, we all have selective memory. I see it in myself. I know it’s there, so maybe that’s why I recognize it. Many people don’t recognize it, the selective memory — literally just completely forgetting something that is unpleasant or that you don’t really want to do, and then realizing that you haven’t done it. And sometimes people have actually forgotten– there’s a purpose to that. I can see that — and I don’t feel I’m quite like Margot — Margot is trying to deny certain things. She’s not considering them at all, and of course she starts drinking, which definitely causes a deterioration of memory.

CL: Yeah, there’s definitely some dishonesty with self that happens in your novel, and it brings up a couple of questions, like, what is reality, and who is defining what reality is, ever?

JCO: That’s so true.

CL: Well, who does define what reality is?

JCO: When Margot’s professor is being accused of moral turpitude and scientific misconduct, it’s a subject I know quite a bit about because my husband wrote an article about it for The Nation magazine, and he was reading all these books and so forth. But scientific misconduct is so uncommon. It’s very scandalous and usually kept quiet when it involves famous people — they maybe just retire precipitously from Harvard or something, which happened not so long ago. But Margot either doesn’t want to acknowledge that, or she actually doesn’t think he did it. He was exploiting her and he did exploit some of his other assistants. But he also rewarded them, and he was also a wonderful and brilliant man. These are the kinds of people you meet in real life, especially in science, they’re charismatic, they’re brilliant, and they have a whole cadre of graduate students, younger people, who they are training and sending out in the world. But then at some point they may just be exploiting these students, and they’re not really in the lab as much as they used to be, because they’re in Washington doing something. So Margot just defends him absolutely. She says no, he never did anything like that, she really denies that. But the reader knows that really she does know that he’s done that. But it’s not clear that she’s lying. It’s more that she stubbornly is not going to say anything negative about him.

When all of us talk about some friend or parent or something, we usually use superlative adjectives — she’s this wonderful this and that– and we’re deliberately not acknowledging that maybe once or twice this person was not so perfect, because we are selecting the details we’re giving to other people. Reporters and police officers never believe anything that people tell them because they know that it’s not going to be perfectly true. Anyway, it’s very normal to do this, and I’m not suggesting that people who do this are immoral in any way. It’s just very natural.

The famous scientist in The Man Without a Shadow is based on a composite of several great neuroscientists. Since my husband is a neuroscientist, I know all of these people. I know them by name, from his stories about them. It was really lots of fun to write about these people, because everything in the novel is basically true in some way.

CL: Your initial interest in the subject matter when you started this novel is clear, but then what kind of research went into writing the novel? There’s so much detail in The Man Without a Shadow.

JCO: I had several books. I acknowledge them in the acknowledgement page. Mostly Suzanne Corkin’s book about the most famous amnesiac in the history of neuroscience: Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesiac Patient H.M. She just retired recently from M.I.T.; she’s a friend of my husband. And then there is this younger professor, a neuroscientist at Princeton — his name is Nicholas Turk-Browne. I acknowledge him also. There was a long article about Nick in the New Yorker about eight months ago. He’s working with a severe amnesiac who got amnesia from brain damage caused by encephalitis. That’s maybe a little more like my character, who has brain damage from encephalitis, probably caused by a mosquito bite up in the Adirondacks. He didn’t get the proper treatment. It’s terrible to think that this could happen from a little mosquito bite, but it can. So I did that research, and I did some general reading. Then my husband read the manuscript and he pointed things out that I should explain or I needed to put more in. And then he read it again when it was all finished and offered some suggestions. His library is just filled with all these books, many, many books, including books by Darwin — Charlie is interested in the history of neuroscience also. So I had access to a lot of books — I basically was just reading a lot.

CL: I’m amazed how mysterious the brain really is, still.

JCO: I know, it’s so fascinating, just the dreams that we have. Almost every night, our dreams are so astonishing. Sometimes they don’t seem to make any sense, and sometimes they do make some sense. But nobody really understands them.

CL: I remember a scene in the book, among the various experiments that take place, where the amnesiac patient is woken up in the middle of sleep and asked to recall his dreams. This idea of recollection in dreams…

…when you’re alone, or when you’re married to someone who doesn’t really know your background, you just start drifting into all these memories that are sort of half confabulated, and half real…

JCO: Confabulation is something that we all do, and those are experiments that are done with normal people. Say, you’re wearing something, like right now you have a wristwatch on or something, and somebody says, “Oh where did you get that?” You don’t really remember where you got it. So you make up a plausible answer. You say, “Well, my mother gave it to me.” Or something like that. That’s confabulation. It’s not really lying. It’s supplying a plausible answer because you’ve forgotten where you got something. So then, the next time you’re asked the same question, you just give that answer. So within families there are all these stories, and then it turns out that someone remembers, “Oh, that’s not from your mother, that’s my watch!” Or something. That happens all the time in families because people are confabulating constantly. But in a family you have somebody who can check you. If I said something that was just wrong, my husband might not know about it, but my brother would. So when you’re alone, or when you’re married to someone who doesn’t really know your background, you just start drifting into all these memories that are sort of half confabulated, and half real. And there’s nobody to check you, especially people who live all alone.

CL: Hearing you talk about that makes me think of Margot, who has this attraction to this man, her amnesiac patient, who knows nothing or will remember nothing about her.

JCO: I was thinking how wonderful it would be to talk to some person who maybe could give you good advice in the moment, but then wouldn’t remember. I know a number of people who would never go to a psychiatrist or a therapist, because they don’t want their problems to get out. You don’t really want to talk about your problems to anybody because they may write a memoir, they may go online. You can’t trust anyone. But if the therapist had…

CL: A memory problem?

JCO: …then they could give good advice and then just forget it. They wouldn’t remember; it would be such a solace.

CL: I think you’ve discovered a new profession for amnesiacs.

JCO: Yeah. I do know people who would never go to a therapist even though maybe they would benefit from it, because they’re really terrified that it would get out. I remember years ago I was reviewing a book for the New York Times, a biography of Anne Sexton, and there it was: her psychoanalyst had actually revealed her fantasies, and notes from their sessions. I thought that was extremely unprofessional. Because she was dead, but her children were still alive. It’s very hurtful. So most people are afraid of therapists revealing and behaving unprofessionally.

CL: That’s interesting. The Sexton book is different of course because it’s a biography, but do you think that writers have a responsibility to be engaged politically or socially? Do you have any opinions on that?

JCO: It all depends on who the person is, obviously. There are very activist people who go out in the world, like Walt Whitman, who was working with wounded soldiers in the Civil War, and his contemporary, Emily Dickinson, basically was a recluse who stayed in the house. They’re both great poets. I wouldn’t say that one was more ethical than the other; they’re just very different. Some people are extremely involved in the world, but those are people who may not be comfortable staying at home, they may be restless at home. And then there are people who can only work in a quiet way, they have to schedule their lives very carefully because they need all their energy to focus on something. So, we’re all extremely different people.

I do have friends who are quite active — animal activists and women’s rights activists. Ecologically and environmentally involved people. But then I have friends who are poets and who are really quiet, who just like to lead quiet lives.

CL: You’ve taught at Princeton and elsewhere since 1978. How does the experience of teaching affect your own reading and perhaps your own writing?

JCO: I teach a large variety of works of fiction. I teach a story by Hemingway, by Faulkner, by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, many, many different styles. It’s the attentiveness to sentences and to the construction of a short story. Usually I teach short stories. So it’s a sort of attentiveness that we pay in a workshop to the way that a story is structured. What does the title mean, what is the first sentence, and what is the last sentence? How is it paragraphed? There are formal things that we look at in a writing workshop that most people, when they’re reading, are hardly aware of, except perhaps subliminally. Most people could never tell you, or they wouldn’t be interested in, what the paragraphing is in a story by Hemingway.

But when you’re writing a story you have to make all these decisions that seem, to other people, trivial. But they’re part of the building of the world.

But when you’re writing a story you have to make all these decisions that seem, to other people, trivial. But they’re part of the building of the world. It’s put together like a wall or a mosaic, it has to be put together. And as soon as people start to write they realize that you don’t just write in one long paragraph. You are breaking up into different sections, doing things of a spatial nature. We spend a good deal of time on those things in my workshops.

CL: You mention constructing a wall or a mosaic. What is the impetus for you for a story or a novel, and how do you build on that? For yourself, in your writing practice, is there a spark that says, this is an idea I want to explore?

JCO: Well, certainly one does get an idea. You have to have some emotional connection with a story, with characters, with a scene, with a setting. I really like to place my fiction in very definite settings. Usually I do spend a good deal of time describing places visually. I may not leave all of that in the prose, but I do that for my own purposes. Setting a scene is very exciting, and part of writing. It’s partly like a person making a movie. Let’s say it’s set in a natural setting, and the nature and the background are part of the emotional tone of the movie — and if it were set somewhere else, or interior, it would be quite a different experience. So I spend a good deal of time setting these things up. As I said, maybe not all of it gets into the final version. I may take some material out, or I may develop it or enhance some material.

CL: You’ve written so much over several decades. Has your own practice of writing or your own approach to writing changed in this time?

JCO: Oh, yes I think very much. When I first began writing, my first several books, I narrated by a literary voice. I basically narrated. But my more recent novels, maybe recent like the past ten or even twenty years, are more mediated voices. The characters are speaking more. The characters’ vocabularies and idiomatic ways of speech are the style of the novel, whereas when I started writing it was more like a literary style that was narrated. Now I have more people talking, more characters. The Man Without a Shadow is very much in the voice of Margot, and, to some extent, Eli’s voice. There’s no place in the novel where Joyce Carol Oates starts talking about these people. Basically they are presenting themselves through their memories and dialogue.

I had a very interesting time with the experiments in the book because they are all based on real experiments. Some of them are famous experiments.

CL: I can see that it would be really interesting to play with experiments like you did in the novel. To have these characters you are exploring in your writing, and to be able to put experiments on them…

A con man is someone who is trying to sway us. But other people, particularly normal people, are trying to impress one another.

JCO: Yeah, people are conditioning one another all the time. Politicians, when they give speeches, are trying to condition the people, they are trying to sway them. A con man is someone who is trying to sway us. But other people, particularly normal people, are trying to impress one another. When a man and a woman are in a romantic situation, it goes into high gear, because they are both trying to impress one another. The woman puts makeup on, or she has a nice dress on, or the man has shaved. And all these things are so much like an experiment. They are basically setting the terms of the experiment. The real people may not even be like that. I sort of joke about my husband, that when I first met him he was a certain person, and I never saw that person again. You start seeing the older clothes and the worn out shoes. A person hasn’t shaved or something. Real life starts to come forward when you get to know someone, which can be really wonderful. But it’s not really like the original meetings, which are more like these formal experiments.

CL: That is something that I wanted to ask you about, this exploration of the male-female dynamic in the book. Margot makes this comment: “To be female is to be weak, and to squander time. To be female is a second choice.” And yet she seems to yearn for a romantic relationship with a man and all the possibilities there.

The laboratory situations are just fraught with these kinds of emotions, because everybody is looking to the principal investigator — he’s the boss, he’s the patriarch.

JCO: Well, especially with that man. There may be other men around she’s not so interested in. But she falls in love with her professor, her mentor, her dissertation advisor. He is a very charismatic and handsome man. She falls in love with him in a kind of adulatory way. She’s not his equal; she doesn’t imagine that she’s his equal. And he looks around the laboratory and sees who the women are and how they are gazing at him. The laboratory situations are just fraught with these kinds of emotions, because everybody is looking to the principal investigator — he’s the boss, he’s the patriarch. Usually, they are men. And so there’s sibling rivalry and the desire to please him. And if he likes you, he helps you get promoted, he helps you get your book published. There’s so much he does for you that it is just fraught with all these emotional stretches and strains.

Also, when Margot first meets Eli, she’s really surprised at how attractive and well dressed he is, because, with many people with brain damage, you can tell that they’re brain damaged, there’s something wrong with them. Eli seems to even recognize her, he does remember someone like her, whom he knew before his brain damage, and so he’s just kind of looking at her and smiling, being very charming. And because he has that attraction to her, she has an attraction to him. That’s how romances are. If you know that somebody is attracted to you, you like that person a little better, and you’re flattered and happy because somebody values you. Somebody that you might not have even looked at, if you know that person really likes you, you start liking him, and as time goes on, you might end up liking him more than he likes you. It’s a conditioning, a psychological mechanism that happens all the time. Anyway, these things are very interesting.

CL: There seems to be so much material here that you could dive into, with psychological experiments and whatnot. Do you think this is something you’ll continue exploring?

JCO: Oh no, I’m actually working on other things. I think this is probably it. But I’m interested in it, just intellectually.

CL: Do you think that humans can live without a shadow?

JCO: Well, what I mean by shadow is just a sense of one’s identity and of the past. I think we all live in different ways. Some people don’t look back; some people dwell on the past. They are surrounded by mementos and pictures of the past. Other people don’t want to do that. It really depends on who you are. I think the whole literature of the Holocaust, and films and so forth, is testament to the great gravitational pull of the past to give people their identity. If you’re descended from Holocaust victims, for instance, part of the gravity of your existence is to look back. But somebody else who doesn’t have that might have virtually no interest in his grandparents, or there might not be a particularly good reason to have any special interest, so that person’s more looking towards their future. As I said, we are all different. I’ve had a number of Jewish students at Princeton, and they have written profoundly about their grandparents’ experiences, because there was nothing else like that in their lives: the profound experience of having survived the Holocaust. A boy who is twenty years old is writing about something that happened in 1939 or 1940, because he’s mesmerized by it, because it involves his own family. But another boy who is twenty years old maybe doesn’t have that at all, he’s maybe writing science fiction or something different.

CL: There are things that are embedded inside us or not. Are there certain obsessions of your own that you think you continue to come back to again and again?

JCO: I do come back to a rural background and childhood. The family unit. I often write about families. This time was a little different — it’s mostly just about two people. Yeah, I often write about families, family life, and the countryside. Not always, but sometimes. I don’t know how obsessional it is. Most writers write about their own background.

CL: Right, obsession is kind of a loaded word.

Well, the great writers of all time tend to be obsessive.

JCO: Well, the great writers of all time tend to be obsessive. Proust wrote about his own life, obsessively, James Joyce wrote about his own life, D.H. Lawrence. Hemingway often wrote about his own life. But then Shakespeare didn’t. Shakespeare’s a great anomaly, because he never wrote about himself — not in any way that one can discern. Again, it just depends on who you are. Most novels, I think, people begin writing about their own backgrounds. That’s conventional. Some writers like Erica Jong and John Updike and Phillip Roth, through their whole careers they’ve written about themselves. And Saul Bellow. But then Norman Mailer didn’t write about himself at all. I’m just saying in a kind of haphazard way that we are all different.

CL: Is there anything that you’ve read recently that you particularly enjoyed or would recommend to people?

JCO: Well, I’m reviewing a novel now for the New York Times Book Review, which I like very much, but I can’t actually say what that is, I’m not supposed to talk about that yet. I liked the Joan Didion biography that I reviewed for the New York Review of Books by Tracy Daugherty. It was quite a wonderful biography. There’s a biography of Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate, that’s excellent.

CL: A couple of biographies there.

JCO: Yes.

CL: Can I ask what you are working on now?

JCO: Oh, sure. This is really a family novel, it’s about two families. I want to present a sort of portrait of America, very divided, on the abortion issue, for instance. There’s one family in which the father is an abortion doctor. And another family that’s very evangelical Christian, and they are very opposed to abortion. And then how these two families interact. The father in one family basically assassinates the abortion doctor. The two families are compared; the novel spends time with both families. I did a fair amount of research into abortion providers, especially in the Midwest. And then the anti-abortion movement, which is very interesting. So it’s sort of volatile, I feel that probably somebody’s going to be angry with me. Or both sides will be angry at me, because I present the characters sympathetically. People get very angry about these issues.

CL: Well, that’s what writers do.

JCO: That novel will come out in 2017. It’s called A Book of American Martyrs.

CL: A Book of American Martyrs?

JCO: Yeah, it’s the same as a book called A Book of Martyrs, a Protestant book, I don’t remember when it was published — let’s just say the fifteenth century or whatever, could be sixteenth century, I’m forgetting. Anyway, my novel takes that title and makes it the book of American martyrs.

CL: You mention that you’ll probably get people angry from both sides there. Do you care about that reaction?

JCO: No, I can’t really think about it. It’s possible nobody will even read the novel. I think anti-abortion people will probably not read it. Pro-choice people might read the novel. Basically it is a pro-choice novel — I mean, I’m a pro-choice person — so it sort of comes down on the side of pro-choice. But I don’t make the other side into villains or idiots, you know. It’s not a satire; I’m not making fun of the other side. I try to show both sides sympathetically. Why are the anti-abortion people so impassioned? Who are these Christians, and where do they come from? Not all Christians are anti-abortion at all, by any means. It’s just sort of looking at their background, and trying to let them talk. I said before that my characters do a lot of talking, rather than my talking. Having them talk is one of the things I do in my writing.

CL: Right. I feel like it’s the role of the writer to have an empathy or sympathy of some kind with your characters, whether or not they’re like yourself. If you are judging your characters or presenting them with a certain bias, that’s a difficult thing.

JCO: I think that’s true. And when I started writing, I probably didn’t have as many subjects. It was so long ago, I was just in my early twenties. Now that I’m older, and as years have gone by, I’ve become interested in more subjects, and I’m not just writing about my own background. I’m wanting other people to be represented.

Originally published at electricliterature.com.

Out of the Rain: A Book Tour Tribute

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by Keith Lee Morris

When I was 23 years old, in 1986, I decided that I was going to become a fiction writer. There was no reason to believe that I would be successful at it. I had taken up reading fiction only recently, after I had flunked out of the University of Idaho and spent a year or two wandering around the country imagining that I might become an actor, a vocation for which I had no apparent skills or prospects, either. I was living in the French Quarter in New Orleans and working as a bellman.

It was part of my morning routine then to read The Times-Picayune in Jackson Square. One day, I found in the calendar a literary event that seemed interesting. The author in question was a guy I’d barely heard of — at that time I was familiar with only one or two contemporary authors. But someone at some point had shoved a copy of the most recent Best American Short Stories in my hands, and there was one story in it that I really liked, called “Communist,” which was about the kind of people I’d grown up around in Idaho. The author of “Communist” was doing something called a “book signing” at Maple Street Books, which was Uptown off the streetcar line. I’d never heard of a book signing and didn’t really know what it might entail, but, since I planned on becoming a writer myself, I thought it might be a good idea to meet one. Might as well begin with this guy, whose name was Richard Ford.

…since I planned on becoming a writer myself, I thought it might be a good idea to meet one. Might as well begin with this guy, whose name was Richard Ford.

It started pouring rain while I was on the streetcar — a New Orleans rain, the kind that floods the gutters and jumps the curb in a heartbeat — and I was soaked through by the time I reached the bookstore a block or two from the streetcar stop. I had expected — I don’t know — lines spilling out the door, a bank of photographers, angry cops trying to quell a riot by restless lovers of literature. What I found was the author and his wife settled behind a foldout table with a few stacks of paperback books on it. Other than the clerk behind the counter, there was no one else in the store.

I wasn’t sure if I should just walk on in and introduce myself, but, meeting no resistance, that’s what I did. I’m sure other people must have wandered in and spoken to Mr. Ford and bought books and had them signed, but I don’t remember it. I remember the rain outside the windows and how quiet it was in the store, how it seemed like a place of refuge.

I think I talked to Richard Ford and his wife for about 15 or 20 minutes. She was kind enough to find me a towel so that I could dry my hands and face. It turned out that Richard Ford and I had a lot in common, or at least I imagined we did. We were both born in Mississippi. We both had an interest in sports — my father was a football coach and Mr. Ford had been a sportswriter. I’d spent most of my life in Idaho, he’d lived in Montana and written a book set in Wyoming. I was living in the French Quarter, and he and his wife were thinking of buying or renting a place there. He was the author of the short story “Communist,” and I wanted to be the author of a story just like that.

I must have figured out by that point that the purpose of a book signing was for the author to sell and sign books, so I used what little money I had to buy two — a recently published novel called The Sportswriter, featuring a character named Frank Bascombe, and an earlier novel that Mr. Ford recommended called The Ultimate Good Luck (maybe the title reflected what he thought I’d need to fulfill my authorial dreams), which he signed for me. He and his wife were gracious and warm, and I don’t remember, even once, either of them stifling a laugh or rolling their eyes at me. I got the impression that writers were decent, caring people who did important work. At times, now, when I start to wonder if that’s true, I try to remember that day. I left the store with the feeling that, concerning my future, I wanted to do exactly what Mr. Ford did.

I got the impression that writers were decent, caring people who did important work. At times, now, when I start to wonder if that’s true, I try to remember that day.

Thirty years later, with my fifth book of fiction, I’m fortunate to have a publisher who has agreed to send me on a book tour of the type that’s steadily disappearing — the type that brought me into contact with Richard Ford at that out-of-the-way shop in New Orleans. All authors have their own horror stories to tell about the old-fashioned bookstore appearance — in San Francisco, I once read to an audience that consisted of my wife, the bookstore manager, and an undergraduate who had to do a report on a reading and chose me because mine was the last available author event of the semester — and I suspect the signing in New Orleans that day might have been one of those for Richard Ford (remember the time with the torrential downpour when no one showed up except that crazy, half-drowned kid?). But I also know that no blog, no website, no online interview, no podcast, no Amazon author page, no Goodreads giveaway — none of the more cost-effective marketing methods that publishers are steering toward — can take the place of the kind of interaction I was fortunate to share with Mr. Ford that day.

When my first short story collection was published, a reviewer for The Believer called me “the heir to Richard Ford.” I was prouder than the reviewer could have known. A few years later, when I had become a professor at Clemson University, I was honored to host Mr. Ford as a guest of our literary festival. He didn’t remember me, of course, but I was able to tell him how much that brief encounter 25 years earlier had meant to me, and we hit it off just as well as we had the first time. Before he left, he re-signed that same copy of The Ultimate Good Luck.

There are still plenty of festivals, still plenty of colleges hosting visiting authors, still some indie bookstores doing their damnedest to bring writers into contact with readers, but the days of the book tour are numbered, it seems. If this is my last time out, I’ll try my best to be grateful, no matter what size the crowd, and I’ll remember to stay on the lookout for someone walking sheepishly through the door on a rainy afternoon, someone a lot like me.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: A CALCULATOR

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★☆☆☆☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing a calculator.

Walgreens is having a sale on calculators. I didn’t need one because I see math problems as an opportunity to engage nearby pedestrians or call up a friend. Math is a social activity, not something to be done in isolation. However, I’m never one to pass up a good sale!

It was the last calculator left on the shelf so I snatched it up quickly. I could tell other customers were envious of me as I passed by. This was sure to be an awesome calculator.

When the clerk said I owed $7.46 I was confused. The original price was $9.99 before the 12% discount. Sales tax is 6.25%. I asked to double check the clerk’s math on my new calculator and suggested we could do it together, but he told me I couldn’t open the package until I paid for it. And also that he didn’t want to do any math with me. I agreed to pay the $7.46 and took the calculator home.

The sticker on the package explained the calculator was powered by the sun. I liked the idea that the sun could power my calculator but it is an admittedly inconvenient gimmick. I had to stay up all night waiting for the sun to rise.

Once the calculator was up and running I was excited to try it out. I couldn’t think of any math problems I didn’t already know the answer to, so I asked around the neighborhood to see if anyone needed any solved.

Marty, a guy standing around outside the library asked me how many miles it was to Walmart. I knew where the Walmart was but there was no way to enter this query into my calculator. Marty, who says he has several calculators at home also couldn’t figure it out. My calculator was useless and it was a bright, sunny day.

I figured perhaps I could try a simple arithmetic to test the calculator’s capabilities. When I tried the calculate pi, the calculator stopped at only eight places after the decimal point. I know for a fact that’s wrong. There are humans who can do way more than eight. And they can do it at nighttime! What a piece of crap this calculator turned out to be.

I brought the calculator back to Walgreens for a refund but was told clearance items are not available for a refund. So I took the calculator outside, placed it into the street, and waited for a car to drive over it. When a car finally came, the driver stopped the car, got out, picked up the calculator and left with it. That driver is going to be really disappointed.

BEST FEATURE: 58008 typed out spells “boobs” when turned upside down.
WORST FEATURE: Literally everything else about it.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Bob Marley.

Midweek Links: Literary Links from Around the Web (January 21st)

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Looking for some interesting reading to get you through the week? Here are some literary links from around the web to check out:

Famous fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast might be thousands of years older than we thought

Ann DeWitt interviews the great writer and editor Diane Williams

It was Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday this week

Are the literary 1%ers eating up all the money in fiction?

The Story Prize spotlight award goes to a graphic novel this year

Daniel Older and Victor LaValle talk race and Lovecraft

The greatest crime novel of the 20th century that you’ve never heard of before

Justin Taylor on revision

What you can learn from reading 1 star reviews of your own book

Lastly, Electric Literature is seeking interns for the Spring semester!

Truth is Shockingly Hard to Pin Down: An Interview with Amy Gustine

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by Melissa Ragsdale

“When We’re Innocent” is featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading with an introduction from Kristen Miller. Amy Gustine’s new collection, You Should Pity Us Instead will be available from Sarabande Books on February 9.

Melissa Ragsdale: In this collection, we see everything from a mother searching for her son in the Gaza Strip to a woman who has fifty-five cats. Yet, even in the most remarkable of situations, the piece seems to hinge on the relationships between characters. When you’re crafting a story, how do you make these connections? What comes first — the situation or the characters?

Amy Gustine: What motivates and fascinates me is the spontaneous and unique meaning that arises out of the complex interaction between character and situation. The same person is capable of leading entirely different lives. Which life we lead is wholly luck — to whom we are born or adopted, whom we meet when, whether we get hit by a truck or win the election, and on ad infinitum. Equally, people in very similar situations will lead very different lives because of their personalities. So any story is equal parts situation and character — it’s THIS person in THIS situation that makes the story what it is. Character + situation = meaning. That said, I almost always start with situation, which is odd, because I have always considered myself a primarily character-driven writer; it’s the people who arouse our emotions in a story and I find all people fundamentally interesting. However, I love to do research, learn things about different jobs, time periods, academic disciplines, cultural forces, etc. My favorite type of story is both compelling on an emotional and psychological (i.e. character) level and set in a time and place that teaches me something new. One way to think about it is that the situation is the intellectual side of my writing and character is the emotional side. Characters show up in my work in some strange, instinctive way. It’s kind of like this: you decide where to go (the local post office, a ski resort, a dive bar, nineteenth century Warsaw) but you don’t determine whom you meet there.

MR: Right now our culture seems obsessed with ambiguous stories about violence/crime — I’m thinking specifically about the success of Serial, The Jinx: The Life and Death of Robert Durst, and Making a Murderer — and while this story has many of the same elements, it has a very different focus. This is not a story of “what happened?” (though, at points, it teases at the edge of it), but rather a story of “What now?” When you wrote this, did you have answers in mind about the reason and circumstance behind Jocelyn’s death? Or Brian’s alleged crime? Do you think those answers are important?

AG: No, I never tried to answer, even in my own mind, what precisely led to Jolly’s death or whether Brian had in fact raped the woman he invited to his apartment. Those questions are as unanswerable to me as they are to Obi and Brian. For me the story is about the longing for understanding and how often we are denied it — even about those things we ourselves do. Yet it is the ability to trust others, and to anticipate their behavior, that makes all social bonds possible, and social bonds are what make life possible among all the world’s animals. I feel like every culture is interested in stories about violence and crime because it’s part of our survival strategy to understand what others are capable of, what motivates them, what we need to be on guard against and how we can leverage other people to our own benefit. I think ambiguous stories about crime are a mark of an increasingly sophisticated society. High literacy rates, advances in science and a distribution of power across society (among people with different ethnic, religious, knowledge, and sexuality backgrounds) leads to opposing voices being heard, which leads to the idea that people in established positions of authority are not always correct and the appearance of things is not always a reflection of truth, and this quickly leads to the realization that truth is shockingly hard to pin down. That sometimes truth and being “correct” don’t even have meaning. It’s similar to the journey we make as individuals, from childhood, in which there is always a yes/no answer and the adults are always correct and powerful, to adulthood, in which there doesn’t seem to be a clear yes or no answer to anything.

MR: This story addresses two types of guilt: the outward guilt of whether or not an act was committed (e.g. guilty versus not guilty) and the inner feeling of guilt that both Brian and Obi are experiencing. For you, how do these inform each other?

AG: Mysteries novels have to end with a definitive and factually correct answer about outward guilt: who did what. You’ll notice, however, that a motive is always presented, because motive is the essential inner complement to the outer act that makes someone guilty. We are interested in knowing who did what, but in order to feel truly satisfied by a story we also need to know WHY they did what they did. This allows us to assign a DEGREE of guilt to people and that is a fundamental need of the human confronting another human. If you murder your husband because he was sexually abusing your daughter, you are less guilty than if you murder your husband because you want his life insurance — and I want to know HOW guilty you are. This will determine my level of fear of you — or my affection for you.

The law deemed Obi at fault (he ran the light) but didn’t feel it useful to punish him (because it was an accident not caused by obvious recklessness or misbehavior). From society’s point of view there was no deterrent or protective value to punishing Obi. But Obi himself wants to be punished. Without punishment, there is no expiation. Thus, decades later, his impulse is to interpret Jolly’s death as a kind of retribution. Outside an explicitly religious framework, we might call this magical thinking, and in some sense it is both a relief and a crushing blow to Obi, one more thing to feel guilty about. It reminds me of the ceremonies that some cultures have for making amends or being cleansed of one’s sins (Catholic confession or the cleansing ceremonies many communities have). The thing is that you have to truly believe in the power of those rituals or those authority figures to absolve you. For people who either don’t believe or don’t live in a culture that offers such rituals, the legal system is the route to absolution. For Obi the legal system failed even though it felt it was doing “the right thing.” For Brian, too, the legal system is not sufficient or useful. There is an irresolvable duality that hinges on the inner feelings he and the woman had: if at the time of their interaction he thought she was consenting, but she did not feel she had indicated consent, then he simultaneously did not rape her and he did rape her. Brian is simultaneously not guilty and guilty, and the law has no way of resolving that duality.

MR: Still thinking about guilt, this story centers around a lot of accidents and situations (e.g. Obi’s car wreck) that aren’t concretely the result of malice or intention. How does intention factor into innocence? Do you see any of these characters as being innocent?

AG: I don’t know if they are innocent. Maybe the woman is a liar who was hoping to get some money out of Brian by making a false accusation and she did in fact expect and want him to touch her as he did. Or maybe Brian knew or suspected his touches were not wanted or expected and now he’s rationalizing to make himself feel better. Maybe the traffic light had a momentary failure and Obi didn’t run a red. Or maybe his brain had a “short out.” Can we be blamed for a chemical or physiological process we can’t control? Looked at one way, his running the red light might be like a person who has a seizure and in the course of it knocks into another person who falls down a flight of stairs. The person having the seizure isn’t culpable, but they might feel guilty. However, parents who keep a loaded gun in their nightstand could be said to be culpable if their six-year-old kills herself even though they never intended the child’s death.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of guilt and how it relates to intention. It started in grade school. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools run by nuns. I remember having a strong reaction to the notion of original sin even then. Taken literally, the Bible makes the claim that sin is inherited (original sin stains each of us because we are descended from Adam and Eve) while at the same time making the claim that we have completely free choice. I couldn’t resolve these two ideas into a coherent system of thought about guilt, responsibility, or punishment. Later I learned that some people think of the story of the apple in Eden as an allegory representing how humans are inherently capable of both good and bad, but this didn’t help. What if you do something that turns out bad but you had good intentions? We still feel guilty, and somehow being punished makes us feel better. But punishment doesn’t undo the damage. What if you’re faced with a Sophie’s choice? What if you did something without thinking or planning at all, a kind of “instinctive” badness? What about people’s urges? Serial killers feel very unhappy and restless until they kill someone. Does this in any way speak to their guilt? That their actions weren’t driven by greed, say, but by an urge that is linked to their ability to feel content? Maybe the rest of us shouldn’t feel so smug in our innocence, because we don’t have the urge to kill in the first place? Some people take great pleasure from helping others. Does this diminish the credit they should get for doing good? How does a belief in a reward (e.g. in the afterlife) impact how we should feel about a person’s good deeds? I’ve also thought a lot about what it means to believe that Jesus’ death absolved or saved us. His crucifixion is a kind of proxy cleansing ceremony: he suffered on our behalf. That doesn’t make sense to me. It seems to me like we would have to suffer ourselves in order to be cleansed. My work often struggles with all of these things: guilt, intention, responsibility, free choice. I never seem to get any closer to a coherent system of thought than I did in fifth grade. Which is probably why Brian and Obi never find out why (or if) Jolly killed herself intentionally.

MR: We have three incidents at play in this story: Jocelyn’s alleged suicide, Brian’s alleged rape, and Obi’s car wreck, none of which happen in real time. For you as the writer, how do these relate to each other? Particularly, how is Jocelyn’s suicide informed by the other two events?

AG: All three incidents are connected by the question of why. Why did Obi not see the red light? Why did Jocelyn commit suicide (IF she in fact did; intent is everything here). Why did Brian arrange for the woman to come to his apartment? Obi doesn’t know why he didn’t see the red light. Brian has a sense of why he invited the girl and he feels the urge to explain his motives to Obi — again we’re back to guilt being connected to motive, and to receiving absolution from another person who assesses our motive and, based on it, assigns us a degree of guilt. We can’t know Jolly’s motive, and neither can Obi or Brian, though they try because they believe if they can answer why, they will know whether or not they are to blame for her death. In the end, however, they must live without knowing. This is how it turns out most of the time in life: we must accept not knowing. But Brian gives Obi a gift: tell his wife that it is Brian’s fault Jolly died. This is a symbolic act, in which Brian takes on guilt he doesn’t truly bear which frees Karen (who presumably also feels guilty) and Obi and may expiate Brian’s actual guilt about the woman he (may have) violated. It also speaks to the way we are responsible for everyone. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says, “Rarely is suicide committed through reflection. If a friend addressed him indifferently that day, he is the guilty one.”

MR: Your characters throughout the collection are characterized by a unique three-dimensionality. Even seemingly minor characters (such as Adoo in “You Should Pity Us Instead”) come to us with full, intricate lives and backgrounds. What is your process for creating character?

AG: It’s organic to the story. In other words, I don’t decide ahead of time what type of person each character will be. I work off a kind of instinct that brings a person to me whole, the same way you might “get a vibe” off someone you meet at a party. Then as I lay down dialogue, facts about their past, actions, etc. I emotionally check each one against my instinct about this character. It either fits or it doesn’t. I think, as I said earlier, characters sort of come along with the situation and the concerns that that situation represents to me; they almost seem to pre-exist in the story. It’s odd, I grant. It’s like that old saying about sculpture — that the figure exists in the marble and the sculptor is unearthing it. It’s a mystery to me.

***

Amy Gustine’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, North American Review, and others. Her story “Goldene Medene” received Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXII. She lives in Ohio

Person as Persona: Loquela by Carlos Labbé

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by Alexandra Talty

Carlos Labbé takes readers on a surrealistic rollercoaster in his latest work, Loquela. Setting up his novel–if this can be called that–as a discourse between lovers, it begins as a meditation by one of the main character’s, Carlos. And just in case one thinks this is a simple premise for one of Latin America’s most avant-garde writers, the reader quickly learns that Carlos–which is also the name of the author–is a character in a book who is writing a book about someone writing book. Talk about inception.

As a reader, if you are willing to let things like changing character names slide, it proves to be a beautiful story about modern-day Chile and South America, focusing on themes of consumption, the role of humans in nature, and rampant capitalism.

A few key events and objects ground the narrative: an albino girl, a murder, a student literary magazine, a rape, a novel, an untoward professor, a letter. By reverberating around these central issues, Labbé gives the reader the feeling that although they might not know what exactly is happening, as names and times and places are changed between chapters, they are delving into the importance behind these occurrences.

Flipping between “the Novel” Carlos who is a struggling writer in Santiago, Chile and two other characters who at first are only referred to as “The Recipient” and “The Sender,” the story slowly unfolds. “The Recipient” is quickly deduced to be the “real Carlos,” who, through diary entries, speaks about his wish to write a real novel that would take the text of his life and then delete all personal references. “The Sender’s” identity takes longer to deduce, but once it is clear that she is the albino girl of both Carlos’ daydreams, the reader is able to draw a muddy line between fiction and reality.

However, decoding what is fiction and reality is not at all essential to the experience; in fact, part of the text’s magic is the enigma of it. To fully enjoy Labbé’s world, the reader must let go of ideas like characters, events or even plot. While there is a purpose to everything, one will probably never deduce the exact meaning or truth unless they were Labbé himself.

“You decide, you’ve already received these pages, if I am not in eternity or simply the lines of a novel, as a person, as a persona, as a model; you decide if I die with you in the moment you stop reading me.”

Deeply sensual, the novel hits its stride when focusing on the themes of love and writing, often presenting these two as foils of sorts, as both can never be fully realized and can only be worked on tirelessly. Labbé is insightful regarding human experience, deftly capturing the reader with descriptions of Santiago or the fictional land of Neutria. The reader retains slivers of the main characters throughout, illuminated by concrete scenes that, while not in chronological order, serve to explain something of the narrative.

This cleverly constructed, fantastical world is edged with a violence–a murder, a rape under a bridge, an investigation. While the characters’ roles in the acts are always shifting, on an abstract level, they offer comment on the heartlessness of our modern, mundane world.

A great book for an adventurous reader, the beautiful prose, sensual descriptions and poignant commentary in Loquela prove to be captivating journey from beginning to end.

Electric Literature Is Seeking Editorial Interns for Spring 2016

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Do you love literature and writing? Are you looking for an entry into the New York literary world? Consider joining the Electric Literature team! Electric Literature’s volunteer internships introduce undergraduate and graduate students and emerging writers to digital publishing and the New York literary scene. Because we are a small, not-for-profit publisher, we provide unique opportunities for professional development and resume-building.

As an Electric Literature volunteer, you are encouraged to become involved in any aspect of our work that interests you. Sure, you’ll go to the post-office, but you’ll also do things like contribute to editorial decisions, interview authors, write articles, and attend literary events.

Responsibilities:

  • Read submissions and participate in editorial discussions
  • Comb the web and social media for breaking literary news
  • Copy edit and proof read
  • Contribute content to electricliterature.com
  • Interview Recommended Reading authors
  • Staff events
  • Select images to pair with articles
  • Transcribe interviews
  • Maintain book reviews database and other databases as needed
  • Manage order fulfillment from online store
  • Other administrative duties as needed

Skills:

  • Knowledge of WordPress, Tumblr, and social media platforms
  • Basic understanding of Photoshop
  • Firm grasp of grammar and spelling, with a sharp attention to detail

The ideal candidate:

  • Has an educational background in literature or creative writing
  • Writes clearly and with personality
  • Participates in the contemporary literary scene
  • Regularly reads literary magazines and literary websites (including but not limited to Recommended Reading, Okey-Panky, and electricliterature.com)
  • Believes strongly in the Electric Literature mission: To amplify the power of storytelling through digital innovation
  • Is hard working, pays great attention to detail, and can work independently

This is a volunteer position (10–20 hours/week) located in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. Candidates must be able to come to the offices at least 2 days a week. Although this is an unpaid volunteer internship, interns will be paid for writing content for electricliterature.com. We are happy to work with universities and MFA programs to provide course credit, though you do not need to be a student to apply. This 3 month position runs from late February to May (exact dates are flexible).

Since writing for the website is an integral part of the internship, please include a sample “scuttlebutt” post (150 to 300 words) about a recent literary topic with your application. Feel free to put your personality into the post. You can see examples of recent scuttlebutts here.

To apply, please send the sample post, cover letter, and resume to editors@electricliterature.com by February 5th.

Fairy Tales Might Be Thousands of Years Older Than You Think

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A new study shows that famous fairy tales like Beauty and The Beast and Rumpeltiltskin might be thousands of years older previously assumed. Dr. Jaime Tehrani from Durham University worked with folklorist Sara Graça da Silva from The New University of Lisbon to study 275 Indo-European fairy tales, using a technique commonly employed by biologists called phylogenetic analysis. By looking at common links between tales, the researchers found that some of them originate from before even English, French, and Italian existed. Dr Tehrani remarked: “We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written.”

This is not the first time the idea of fairy tales dating far back has been brought up. Wilhelm Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm, believed many of the stories he popularized had originated with the birth of the Indo-European languages. Later scholars disagreed with him, saying certain stories were younger and only became part of the oral tradition after being written down in the 16th and 17th centuries. Da Silva confirmed Grimm’s assumptions, saying:

We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm. Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology — some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts — but our findings suggest they are much older than that.

Beauty and The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back 4000 years. Jack and the Beanstalk was traced back to the split of the eastern and western Indo-European languages, over 5000 years ago. A lesser known tale called The Smith and the Devil is estimated to have originated in the bronze age, 6000 years back. All though the name of the fairytale is unfamiliar, it shows a blacksmith selling his soul to the devil for supernatural powers, a trope familiar from Goethe’s Faust. Da Silva believes the stories endure thanks to the power of storytelling, and the timeless and universal nature of fairytales, with themes of morality, right and wrong and good versus evil. She continued to say: “Ultimately, despite being often disregarded as fictitious, and even as a lesser form of narrative, folk tales are excellent case studies for cross-cultural comparisons and studies on human behavior.”

Is Your Favorite Novelist Writing For TV In 2016?

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Is there any difference these days between curling up with a good book and tuning into HBO? Or FX, or Amazon? More and more each year, novelists are taking their talents to the small screen, joining staffs helmed by literary showrunners like David Simon and Jill Soloway, or striking out on their own. The TV scene is so lousy with novelists it’s sometimes hard to keep track. So, to kick off your year of reading and watching, we made a list of authors who are bringing their fictions onto the screen and into your homes in 2016.

1. Noah Hawley, Fargo (FX)

Fargo

The showrunner behind FX’s critical hit Fargo is also a novelist. Since the release of his debut in 1998, A Conspiracy of Tall Men, Hawley has penned three more books, most recently a psychological thriller, The Good Father (Doubleday 2012). Fargo was picked up for a third season (airing in 2017), which means we’ll likely be waiting a long while for Hawley’s return to hardcover.

2. Ali Liebegott, Transparent (Amazon)

Transparent

Thanks to the success of her three novels (most recently, 2013’s Cha-Ching, from City Lights), Liebegott was already a prominent voice in the Queer lit community. Now she’s writing for Amazon’s hit show, Transparent. She shared writing credit with Jill Soloway (another accomplished author) on one of the first season’s great episodes: “Wedge.” If you want to know more about Liebegott’s thoughts on gender identity and writing for TV, check out her 2014 essay from The Atlantic: “Can a TV Show Save Lives?”

3. Joe Weisberg, The Americans (FX)

The Americans

Besides creating The Americans for FX and serving as a CIA officer, Joe Weisberg also has a couple novels to his name, including a coming-of-age tale and, naturally, a spy thriller titled Ordinary Spy (Bloomsbury, 2007).

4. Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers (HBO)

The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta is no stranger to screen adaptations. His novels Election and Little Children went on to movie fame. (Co-writing the script for the latter with Todd Field, Perrotta earned an Oscar nomination.) He later turned to TV, adapting The Leftovers (St. Martin’s Press, 2011) for HBO, along with showrunner Damon Lindelof. In the show’s excellent second season, the action moved beyond the book, but Perrotta has stayed on with Lindelof as a writer and executive producer.

5. George Pelecanos, The Deuce (HBO)

Pelecanos

After publishing a string of acclaimed DC-based crime novels, Pelecanos joined the writing staff of The Wire and, later, Treme. (He’s credited with writing some of The Wire’s greatest hits, including “Hamsterdam” and “Middle Ground.”) In 2016, his work will be back on HBO. Along with Simon, he authored the pilot for The Deuce, set in the 1970’s and 80’s Times Square porn industry (starring, obviously, James Franco).

6. Richard Price, The Deuce (HBO)

Richard Price

Another esteemed novelist in the Simon orbit. (If you love crime writing and good TV, read Simon and Price’s conversation at the 92nd Street Y, published last year by Guernica as “The Cousins Karamazov.”) In addition to authoring classics like Clockers, Price has been writing for the screen for decades. He adapted Clockers with Spike Lee and went on to work with Martin Scorsese on The Color of Money, then later joined the writing staff of The Wire. Like Pelecanos, Price is now reportedly writing scripts for The Deuce.

7. DB Weiss & David Benioff, Game of Thrones (HBO)

Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones

As showrunners, they need no introduction. But both creators also have novelist bona fides. Benioff is, of course, the author of The 25th Hour (Plume, 2002), which later became a Spike Lee Joint (with Benioff penning the screenplay), as well as the 2008 historical novel, City of Thieves (Viking, 2008). Weiss’ debut novel, Lucky Wander Boy came out (also from Plume) back in 2003; supposedly there’s a second novel on a shelf somewhere. Both men are now busy deciding the fate of Jon Snow, with season 6 scheduled for an April 2016 premiere.

8. George Mastras, Vinyl (HBO)

Vinyl

At this point, what kind of HBO show would it be if there weren’t a novelist or two on the writing staff? Vinyl, the new HBO prestige program from Scorsese & Jagger, is no exception, counting Mastras, author of the 2009 international thriller, Fidali’s Way (Scribner, 2009), as one of its executive producers. Mastras has an impressive script pedigree: before Vinyl, which stars Bobby Cannavale and Olivia Wilde, he wrote for Breaking Bad and won a PEN Center USA West award for the episode, “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”.

9. Jonathan Ames, Blunt Talk (Starz)

Blunt Talk

Ames, author of I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir!, is now a TV veteran. After Bored To Death’s three season run on HBO, Ames is back — this time on Starz — with Blunt Talk, starring Patrick Stewart as a British newscaster in LA.

10. Gillian Flynn, ???

Gillian Flynn

After the success of Gone Girl, Flynn again partnered up with David Fincher, signing on to write every episode of a straight-to-series order for an HBO adaptation of the UK hit, “Utopia.” The series, set to star Rooney Mara, was well into production this summer when Deadline reported that Fincher and HBO couldn’t agree on a budget and that HBO was releasing the actors. Deadline also reported, however, that HBO remained “high on the project” and speculated that “Utopia” might eventually proceed with another director and cast. So, however unlikely it seems at the moment, we may yet see Flynn’s scripts brought to HBO soon.

Honorable Mention. Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective (HBO)

Nobody outside the hallowed HBO halls seems to know what, exactly, is going on with True Detective. Pizzolatto has signed an overall deal with HBO and is expected to develop several projects for the network. Will one of those projects will be a third season of True Detective? If so, when will it premiere? Probably not in 2016. Last week, in an interview with The Frame, HBO President of Programming Michael Lombardo suggested that season 2 had been rushed. In the meantime, you can check out Pizzolatto’s Gulf Coast thriller, Galveston (Scribner, 2010).

To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing

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by Diane Williams

Recommended by Deb Olin Unferth

People often wait a long time and then, like me, suddenly, they’re back in the news with a changed appearance.

Now I have fuzzy gray hair. I am pointing at it. It’s like baby
hair I am told.

Two people once said I had pretty feet.

I ripped off some leaves and clipped stem ends, with my new spouse, from a spray of fluorescent daisies he’d bought for me, and I asserted something unpleasant just then.

Yes, the flowers were cheerful with aggressive petals, but in a few days I’d hate them when they were spent.

The wrapping paper and a weedy mess had to be discarded, but first off thrust together. My job.

Who knows why the dog thought to follow me up the stairs.

Tufts of the dog’s fur, all around his head, serve to distinguish him. It’s as if he wears a military cap. He is dour sometimes and I have been deeply moved by what I take to be the dog’s deep concerns.

Often I pick him up — stop him mid-swagger. He didn’t like it today and he pitched himself out of my arms.

Drawers were open in the bedroom.

Many times I feel the prickle of a nearby, unseen force I ought to pay attention to.

I turned and saw my husband standing naked, with his clothes folded in his hands.

Unbudgeable — but finally springing into massive brightness — is how I prefer to think of him.

Actually, he said in these exact words: “I don’t like you very much and I don’t think you’re fascinating.” He put his clothes on, stepped out of the room.

I walked out, too, out onto the rim of our neighborhood — into the park where I saw a lifeless rabbit — ears askew. As if prompted, it became a small waste bag with its tied-up loose ends in the air.

A girl made a spectacle of herself, also, by stabbing at her front teeth with the tines of a plastic fork. Perhaps she was prodding dental wires and brackets, while an emaciated man at her side fed rice into his mouth from a white-foam square container, at top speed, crouched — swallowing at infrequent intervals.

In came my husband to say, “Diane?” when I went home.

“I am trying,” I said, “to think of you in a new way. I’m not sure what — how that is.”

A fire had been lighted, drinks had been set out. Raw fish had been dipped into egg and bread crumbs and then sautéed. A small can of shoe polish was still out on the kitchen counter. We both like to keep our shoes shiny.

How unlikely it was that our home was alight and that the dinner meal was served. I served it — our desideratum. The bread was dehydrated.

I planned my future — that is, what to eat first — but not yet next and last — tap, tapping.

My fork struck again lightly at several mounds of yellow vegetables.

The dog was upright, slowly turning in place, and then he settled down into the shape of a wreath — something, of course, he’d thought of himself, but the decision was never extraordinary.

And there is never any telling how long it will take my husband, if he will not hurry, to complete his dinner fare or to smooth out left-behind layers of it on the plate.

“Are you all right?” he asked me — “Finished?”

He loves spicy food, not this. My legs were stiff and my knees ached.

I gave him a nod, made no apologies. Where were his?

I didn’t cry some.

I must say that our behavior is continually under review and any one error alters our prestige, but there’ll be none of that lifting up mine eyes unto the hills.