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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/water-vanishes-alexandra-kleeman-something-new-sun/"></div>“When we rediscover that water is finite, it&#8217;s like waking from a dream and finding ourselves in a strange and rigid new place,” Alexandra Kleeman writes. It is in precisely this all-too-possible dystopia that her latest novel, Something New Under the Sun, takes place. Set in a drought-ridden Los Angeles in which climate change has forced water to be replaced by WAT-R, a synthesized liquid supposedly equivalent to its namesake, middling novelist Patrick Hamlin is assigned to work as a production assistant for former child actress Kassi Keene. As the city is quietly ravaged by wildfires and hordes of lost dementia patients, Patrick teams up with Kassi to scour the Los Angeles landscape for the secrets to her latest film’s financing, and to WAT-R itself. 
Something New is especially striking because Kleeman not only renders the threat of climate change with startling sensitivity and acuity, but forgoes centering the novel around anthropocentric melodrama in favor of a holistic view of the Los Angeles landscape. In doing so, she constructs a dystopia of today rather than an apocalypse of tomorrow. As Kleeman touches on a variety of topics below — everything from landscape architecture to optical illusions — she asks us to consider how to inhabit this dystopia as citizens: to understand our crumbling world, and to reconceive community building within it. 
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DASHIEL CARRERA: In an interview with The Creative Independent, you mentioned your ideas for writing come through a slow daily process of absorption and accumulation that, in the dead of night, culminates in paragraphs. What were you absorbing as you worked on Something New Under the Sun? How did it come into form?
ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN: In terms of what I was reading, the book probably originated in the friction I felt teaching a course on post-apocalyptic novels. I had made a varied reading list — Octavia Butler, Yoko Tawada, Antoine Volodine, Claire Vaye Watkins, even a collection of fiction and nonfiction about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, edited by Kenzaburo Oe. These books are gems: there&#8217;s so much creativity in each and a lot of differentiation in terms of affect, world-building, and how the post-world is imagined. But the emphasis on &#8220;post-&#8221; felt cumulatively crushing to me, and there was a certain machismo in, for example, Cormac McCarthy&#8217;s The Road, that felt actively hostile to the practice of dwelling in our present, pre-apocalyptic moment and thinking about the culture and causality of disaster, how we might inhabit a moment where catastrophe has a presence but not an indelible one, a moment where we still have agency and investment in the world as we know it and its constitutive systems. Early in my research process, I also did a lot of reading on the history of plastics — the title of the book comes from an advertising slogan for cellophane, the first consumer plastic and an intermediary between the natural materials that had been used before and the subsequent deluge of omnipresent synthetic consumer plastic goods. Thinking through the history and context of this material was helpful in creating my own &#8220;new&#8221; substance, one that, like plastic, was initially sold to the public as an improved substitute for other materials rather than a unique substance with properties and risks all its own.
I was particularly struck by how emotionally evocative the novel&#8217;s attention to the threat of climate change is despite the oblique manner in which it&#8217;s addressed. The novel is littered with wildfires, drought, and disease, and yet these plights rarely make it to the forefront. I&#8217;m wondering how this might reflect the &#8220;moment where catastrophe has a presence but not an indelible one&#8221; that you&#8217;re describing. 
How would you describe our relationship with the looming ails of our planet? 
I think we live in a time where disaster is omnipresent, both as a function of our information ecology but also because climate change, in all its varied and diffuse manifestations, is now visible everywhere as an extreme or as a distortion of the normal. But because of our privilege and positioning, most of us will find it possible to regard catastrophe from a distance, to intellectualize it and normalize it — and when it happens to come uncomfortably close, to use our resources to sidestep these consequences in a way that many in marginalized communities are unable to do. There&#8217;s an analogy here to the way in which we worldbuild around this catastrophic presence in literary fiction, privileging a default reality where the landscape holds still to allow greater focus on the humans moving around in the foreground. A landscape that&#8217;s only there to provide tonal notes or perform Barthes&#8217; &#8220;reality effect&#8221; is nothing like the intricate, changeable, precarious terrain that I recognize in the west, and only furthers the illusion that land is the backdrop to anthropocentric action. In the novel, I wanted to bring play with this metaphor of the old studio backdrop, bringing the flat image uncomfortably close to the human actors, populating it with smoke and fire and other urgencies, pushing the narrative eye into that flattened space to show its dimensionality and wander around in the hills and grasslands tracking nonhuman agents of all different kinds. At the same time, some of the foreground plot material reveals itself to be trompe l&#8217;oeil — Patrick&#8217;s big Hollywood break working on the set turns out to be a dead end, the green screen on set is never going to be filled in by virtual images and spaces, many of the characters&#8217; paths forward are just painted walls.
Both the novel and this response intimate a fraught relationship between the film and tech industries in Los Angeles and the landscape that surrounds them. Famously, film producers came out to Hollywood in search of consistent good weather so they could make films year-round, but ironically in the novel this once stable landscape is disintegrating. Additionally, the novel seems to skewer capitalist logic and parody the California tech industry with the immediate widespread adoption of WAT-R, a purported equivalent to the ubiquitous liquid.
What attracted you to Los Angeles as a setting for the novel? How would you describe the changing economic, artistic, or physical landscapes of Los Angeles?
In the past, I&#8217;ve written about places that are &#8220;everywheres&#8221; or &#8220;nowheres&#8221;: suburban neighborhoods, grocery stores, warehouses and hotel conference rooms, and dreamlike archetypal spaces that are more like the inside of my own head. So of course on some level I was interested in writing about Los Angeles, since it&#8217;s a place that embodies both extreme particularity and extreme generality, one of the most heavily mythologized places in the world and the most filmed — particularly if you count all the times when Los Angeles appears in disguise, as someplace else — but also one that is large and sprawling, full of nooks where storefronts and structure from decades past can survive undisturbed and unmodernized into the present day. It&#8217;s a place where specific ethnic communities can find space to themselves and make their neighborhoods over in something like their own image — like the pocket of the San Gabriel Valley I lived in where signage in Mandarin and Spanish eclipsed English. The overwhelming bulk of LA is not the LA of establishing shots and filming locations, but of interesting, varied, specific places that never make it to the screen and therefore never attain recognition. It&#8217;s a city with a vast and underdescribed subconscious, and strange, surreal eddies where the high scrutiny of the city&#8217;s most recognizable locations drops away sharply and it feels like you&#8217;re nowhere at all.
The ecology of LA embodies a similar paradox, an anywhere that is in actuality highly particularized. I love what you pointed out about the predictable good weather, how it&#8217;s been a draw for the film industry and civilians both, but the sameness of the weather and the apparent plasticity of the landscape — that you can grow citrus there if you have enough water, almonds if you have enough water, lush green lawns if you have enough water — masks a more stringent set of principles beneath. Water is the substance that makes everything feel infinitely possible and infinitely changeable, but when we rediscover that water is finite, it&#8217;s like waking from a dream and finding ourselves in a strange and rigid new place, one whose logic reintroduces vulnerability to the body of the observer.
I love what you said about discovering that even water is finite. I keep returning to the novel&#8217;s epigraph from Toni Morrison, &#8220;All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,&#8221; in part because it so beautifully complicates my interpretation of the famed John Keats epitaph, &#8220;Here lies one whose name was writ in water.&#8221; 
I&#8217;m curious why you chose to include this epigraph, and how it might relate to the understanding of water you developed while writing this novel. 
I love that Toni Morrison quote too, and love how it resituates our understanding of water within a vastly expanded timeframe. The quote comes from a talk Morrison did where she speaks about the human effort that went into making the Mississippi River something predictable, straightened out, offering more stable land for homes and acreage. The Mississippi as we know it was manufactured, its manageability is an illusion maintained by labor and dredging and levees and dams — and this dovetails, in fact, with an interesting argument from a book by the landscape architect Dilip da Cunha that in India the notion of a river was an imposed, colonial construct that turned long-established, naturally variable wetlands into zones of approved waterflow and dangerous &#8220;floods&#8221; that needed to be contained. The labor we put into containing our environment is often invisible, either because the infrastructure that enacts it operates out of sight or because we are too habituated to the effort to perceive it. Morrison takes the long view, that the return of water to areas of exclusion is no aberration, but a reassertion of the land&#8217;s deeper form, a way of being that can never be wholly erased — and it works as a metaphor for the individual, for writing, for the way that reality insists upon itself, inconvenient and unruly.
To me, Morrison&#8217;s insight is also one about agency and animacy: that water isn&#8217;t some inert substance we can shift at will, it&#8217;s an extended, motile thing, organismal in the way it relates to and entangles itself with the rest of the world. So the introduction of some new water substitute, manufactured and not-quite-identical, is not a simple addition to the water system but a profound disruption. From the fixed perspective of one Heraclitan individual, water is always moving, changing, structureless, but in a larger framing it has a permanent and structural relationship with our bodies and minds. It&#8217;s WAT-R, the newly made and incompatible substance, that truly has no memory, and whose specific structural differences disrupt the individual&#8217;s ability to recall who or what they are.
Toward the end of the book, Patrick says, &#8220;I need the ground, I need to feel it. It&#8217;s the only thing I have. I&#8217;m not sure of anything anymore, I can&#8217;t know that it&#8217;s there if I don&#8217;t have my hand on it.&#8221; A few pages later his wife Alison prays, &#8220;I want to live in the world, not upon it. I want to live in reciprocity, not exchange.&#8221;
Both these quotes gesture toward an underlying Cartesian anxiety and growing sense of dissociation with the Earth. What interests you about this feeling? 
I think you&#8217;re absolutely right, it&#8217;s both a Cartesian anxiety about what can be known with certainty about the world via the materiality of the body and it&#8217;s also a cultural, psychological anxiety about the distance that we encounter between our habits and impulses and the workings of a natural world that appears whole and unalienated. If you trace both anxieties far enough back, they converge in a feeling of separation and lonesome individuality that I think is worsened by the way neoliberal capitalism defines the individual as a consuming, choosing unit, self-determining within an overdetermined socioeconomic landscape. I&#8217;m interested in describing the emotional dimensions of these anxieties, cataloguing these private and difficult-to-discuss feelings of futurelessness and homesickness, and thinking about the yearning to reenter the world and all the effort, both individual and communal, that it might take to do so. Increasingly, in the framing of biologist/cyberneticist Jakob von Uexküll, it feels like the different semiotic processes within our organism that constitute our umwelt don&#8217;t add up to a whole picture, that the picture we have is continually disrupted by shifts in scale and tone and register that challenge the larger sense of being placed in the world. I wonder if stretching existing modes of representation, artistic and scientific, can help to close some of those gaps or at least point out clearly where they are. But it would probably be better to just change our lives.
While the novel&#8217;s content has an obvious facility for film, the novel&#8217;s form appears to as well. The dialogue is tense and quippy and many scenes open with strong, kinetic opening images and end with panoramic descriptions of the Californian landscape. 
How has film influenced your writing, and the composition of this book in particular? 
I think many people writing today are influenced by the rhythms and ratios of screenwriting — there&#8217;s such an understanding in today&#8217;s TV and film of the shape of the human mind, its attention span and appetite for focus and worldbuilding and surprise, and for better and for worse I think we&#8217;ve internalized a lot of these lessons. Which is a shame, because the moving image is such a profoundly inhuman medium, when you look at it apart from the way we use it, you might see more in common with machines or on the other hand with the patterns of light falling through moving branches and onto a rock. Which is why I admire works like Claire Denis&#8217; sci-fi slow burn “High Life” and Lynch&#8217;s underloved third season of “Twin Peaks” for reintroducing fragments of Real Time and Real Space into mediums that often give the impression that all the universe is made of fun-sized components. The main cord of my novel is constructed in scenes that try to be appetitive, snacky elements, but the narrative eye drifts away from them to include people in the background of the story, forgotten subdivisions, and lots of dry, elemental terrain unpopulated by human beings. By the end of the book, there&#8217;s no cord, just individual fibers. The form is driven by the question: What&#8217;s outside of satisfaction, what&#8217;s outside of interest or attention, what is the larger world we&#8217;re missing when we&#8217;re attending to any one element of it?
How can we as readers and citizens of the world see the larger world we&#8217;re missing? What thoughts has writing and releasing the book left you with, and what thoughts do you hope it leaves us with?
I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s possible to see the whole world that we&#8217;re missing, but the first step might be denaturalizing the personal sphere, taking what feels natural and immediate about it and trying always to link it to that which is extrinsic, causal, and complex. I think it takes developing a relationship with the land around you, wherever that might be, and learning to appreciate the changes and transitions of the landscape on its own temporal scale, rather than our default clock. I think a body, even a human one, is in a profound relationship to the inhuman, and that we can find a better connection to the earth by thinking of ourselves more as animals, with an animal&#8217;s grounding in bare life. That feeling, of being rooted in existence, is a type of critique in itself. I left this book feeling that I had put enough down on the page to convey how this moment in history, and the coming one, feel to me — if it is overwhelming, it should be, because we&#8217;re experience the profound destabilization of a climate that has been our home, and a good one, for thousands of years. What I want to think about now, and what I hope readers ask themselves after the book is over, is what type of world they&#8217;d rather live in, what type of world they&#8217;d want to make. When the world feels most debased, most razed and leveled, it is also an invitation to build something better, or to reimagine building entirely.
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The Water Vanishes: Alexandra Kleeman on Something New Under the Sun

The Water Vanishes: Alexandra Kleeman on Something New Under the Sun

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/review-juan-cardenass-ornamental-translated-lizzie-davis/"></div>Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental, the latest in a series of contemporary Latin American literature in translation from Coffeehouse Press, is a psychological, dystopian novel with a quiet unease.  Beginning in the form of a log by a medical doctor performing mysterious pharmaceutical trials on a group of underprivileged woman near an unnamed city, the novel follows the doctor and his visual artist wife as the drug is revealed to have addictive euphoric properties that spur civil unrest.
Despite its potentially dramatic premise, Ornamental is a work of subtlety and restraint, in which almost every conflict is heard second hand, and if then, only briefly considered. Lizzie Davis compares the novel to a work of architecture in her translator’s note. Given the novel’s high narrative distance, the comparison seems especially apt; Ornamental is born in part out of an aesthetic contrast between frenetic surrealism and clinical minimalism, not unlike the contrast between the bright splashes of color and blockish houses which they cover in Cárdenas’s home country of Colombia.
What makes Ornamental so deeply affecting, however, is not that its pages come together to form a beautiful work of exterior art — though it does — but its ability to cast unease on our interior worlds. Cárdenas is an art critic as well as a novelist, and his exploration of the nature of criticism and artistic interpretation lend Ornamental its eerie power. Early in the novel, the doctor’s wife tells an interviewer, “there is no [art]. There’s only the subtlest substance, insufflated with materiality, or rather, with movement, beginning with a primary gesture devoid of any meaning…” This statement strikes a note of ennui which hangs over the rest of the novel, apparently eating away at the doctor and his wife, but never quite reaching the point of dramatic conflict. A number of these chapters end with unaddressed tension in the distance: dogs barking outside a window, a passing description of the doctor’s wife’s tachycardia, laughter which “slips nervously through the thick disorder of branches.”
But strangely this tension is only doubled by the doctor’s lack of willingness to meditate on or address any of these conflicts — perhaps because it implies that on all of our peripheries, similar tension may be brewing. In this way Ornamental is a very unusual work of minimalist prose, gesturing toward the universality of absence rather than particular universal constructs.
It is not until the narrator states that he and his wife are both “designers of artificial emotional states,” however, that the full extent of the novel’s implosion is laid plain: if artists are creators of an artificial world, than their creation is merely ornament, a projection which we as readers can pass our hands through but never touch. The exercise of reading the novel, then, becomes an act of futility, much like taking the drug in the book — a warping of perception which generates interest but which is ultimately empty. “Meaning is an accident,” the doctor’s wife tells us. “A surplus.”
As the psychotropic drug hits the market and grows in popularity, women from around the city band together and perform raids to get access to more. One of the women from the drug trials disappears entirely. The doctor begins giving the drug to his wife in order to ease tension in the relationship. As the ennui of the novel slowly burns on, doubt subsumes the doctor to the point that we are left with the chilling final line:  “I can’t tell if [my wife’s] asleep. I place my hand on her head, but her head is no longer her head, nor her hair her hair, nor my hand my hand.”
Brilliantly executed and cleverly translated, Ornamental leaves us with a fresh understanding of the creation of art and the nature of meaning-making. Davis’s translator’s note leaves us with the question, “How do we look and listen from now on?” and I can honestly say, I haven’t the slightest idea — this novel has knocked me off my feet.
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Art and Futility: A Review of Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental, Translated by Lizzie Davis

Art and Futility: A Review of Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental, Translated by Lizzie Davis

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/grain-john-obrien-possible-dalkey-archive-open-letter-merger/"></div>Since its founding in 1984, John O’Brien has led Dalkey Archive Press as a stronghold of groundbreaking contemporary fiction. Publisher of three Nobel Prize winners and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, O’Brien continues to champion innovative fiction in resistance to the pressures of the American marketplace: publishing non-traditional narrative forms, keeping all books in print regardless of sales, and translating countless works of world literature despite the isolationism of the American critical establishment. 
Recently, as O’Brien envisions his inevitable departure from the press, he has considered merging with Open Letter Press, a literary translation press housed at the University of Rochester. Catching wind of this, I reached out to O’Brien via email. As dark, witty, and audacious as the press which he helms, below O’Brien discusses American indifference to literary translation, the tendency for presses to inflate sales figures, the need for coalitions among independent presses, and the future of Dalkey Archive. 
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DASHIEL CARRERA: What do you see as Dalkey Archive&#8217;s role in contemporary literature and how has this role changed over the past decade?
JOHN O’BRIEN: The origin of Dalkey Archive was with my starting the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1980. I wanted it to be a forum for the discussion of contemporary fiction from around the world, and I wanted it to bring attention to writers who were being dismissed by the critical and academic establishments. The writers I was reading and was passionate about were ignored — such people as Gilbert Sorrentino, Nicholas Mosley, Douglas Woolf, Paul Metcalf, Jean Rhys, Luisa Valenzuela, Wallace Markfield, and many others. Though creating criticism around their work might develop a wider readership and open up different ways of looking at literature, many of their works weren&#8217;t in print because they didn&#8217;t sell well enough. So, I began Dalkey to get back into print what I thought were very important works of fiction and far more engaging than the books that were selling better and (how shall I say this?) easier to read. Again, I was working against the grain.
This soon led to my doing translations because you could see that the trend in commercial publishing was not only to put works out of print because of the marketplace (the American form of censorship) but it was showing signs of moving away from translations. In college, I cut my teeth on books from New Directions and Grove Press, especially their translations. And of course one had to learn about these books on one&#8217;s own since in America we have &#8220;English&#8221; departments that stay strictly within the boundaries of English. My view is that if literature is going to be taught, it should be taught as world literature. And this of course means using works in translation.
There are now many small presses that have taken up the cause of translations, very good presses such as Open Letter and Archipelago. But the media tends to avoid reviewing translations, especially from the smaller presses that are now the primary sources for publishing translations. And at the same time, the larger houses publish virtually nothing. Every once in a while a foreign writer will break through, and this then is held up as evidence of some kind or other. But we are talking about the great exception here, and of course we live in an age in which literature in general is marginalized.
But to try to answer your question much more briefly. Dalkey&#8217;s role is much the same as ever. Having emphasized translations for so long, it may be time to look to more American and British writers, as well as English writers from other English-speaking countries. I have gotten older, too much older along the way, and these days I&#8217;m focused on how to hand over Dalkey to the next generation and keep in print the 850 or so books we have. The United States is not great at preserving literature or at preserving publishing houses. I am hoping to help create a new model for how a publishing house can go on beyond its founder with its mission and values preserved. Copper Canyon and Graywolf are great models of presses that have survived intact but Dalkey is quite different from both of these in terms of its history.
Is the impending merger or collaboration with Open Letter part of this new model for the next generation?
What might be possible between the two presses is a work-in-progress. Both I and Chad Post, the publisher of Open Letter Press, have always been very interested in doing things in publishing that haven&#8217;t been done before. There are two issues here: 1) should small presses collaborate on a regular basis, share information, share office space, and perhaps even share staff? To their detriment, I believe, these presses do not think of ways to collaborate. A number of years ago, I tried to get a group of presses together to act as a group for the sake of publicity and fundraising. As a group we could do things and gain attention that weren&#8217;t possible on our own. But nothing came of this, largely because each press wanted to be fiercely independent; 2) the second issue is whether a literary press inevitably has to disappear when its founder does. These presses contribute so much to the literary culture and life in this country and beyond — shouldn&#8217;t they go on existing into the future?
Chad and I have been talking about what happens with Dalkey when I&#8217;m gone, and right now we are focused on how we can be of help to each other. Dalkey has this very substantial backlist of over 850 books, and Open Letter has who I think is the smartest person there is in terms of marketing. Right now we are speculating on everything from a close alliance to an eventual merging of the two presses.
Speaking only for myself, I am not quite ready to step away from Dalkey but I am certainly ready to turn over a number of our operations. One does reach the point when time takes a toll, one gets worn down. At the same time, I am very interested in creating a new model for small presses, especially in the area of long-term financial stability.
Stay tuned, as they say.
What would working with Open Letter enable Dalkey to do that it can&#8217;t do now? What would you tell an independent press who was skeptical of collaboration?  
In this collaboration, Chad and I are primarily talking about marketing, publicity, and sales. He is a genius in this area of publishing. I know this is a vastly general statement without specific details to give you but we don&#8217;t have the specifics entirely developed. He would have a Dalkey backlist of about 850 titles to work with, as well as our frontlist. This would fill an enormous gap for Dalkey Archive.
What would I tell another independent press? Try to find another press to work with to address weaknesses, and start a partnership that benefits both. That could mean sharing staff, space, distribution. The hoped-for result would be lowering expenses while increasing revenue. The partnership could be with a press that editorially is doing something very similar, but could also be with an unlikely partner. For instance, could there be a partnership between a press doing highly literary books and one devoted to social causes? I think that there could be. Might they even merge? Sure.
In a 2004 interview for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, you stated that you though the ideal funding model for Dalkey would be some kind of endowment. Do you still believe that today?
Some presses only have a few years in them; they do some good books but then it&#8217;s time to get back to a reasonable life. The founders of some have no desire for their presses to continue, and fear what they will become in the hands of others. One of Dalkey&#8217;s principles was that our books — or literary books in general — should stay in print permanently, and do so regardless of sales. But this meant that something or someone had to protect the protector. Thirty years I began on how Dalkey could stay alive and flourish even if I couldn’t. Ultimately, it seemed to me, it had to be endowed, so that it could withstand any threat — a key person leaving, a distributor going bankrupt, an unexpected turndown in donated money.
So, I began generating ideas and testing various models. And continue to do so. I am rather convinced that I know how to do it but still need a few other pieces in place before starting to. The guru of nonprofit presses, Jim Sitter, started calling me Moses a number of years ago — that I would lead the Press to the Promised Land but would not myself see it. This was fine with me. I hope that this is what will happen.
Is it a model for other presses? Maybe. But I have built a backlist of books that should not be allowed to disappear, and I built it in a very conscious way — very well-known names next to very little known. I wanted it to be obvious why this press should not disappear. I built it to last.
What excites you about contemporary American fiction and fiction abroad?
One of the liabilities of being in publishing is that one tends to get isolated with one&#8217;s own books or books to be considered for publication, and this limitation for me is especially true of contemporary American fiction because I have been so focused on literature from other countries.
Having said that: my view is that the best writing these days is coming from Latin America and Eastern Europe. I&#8217;ll give you a short (I hope it&#8217;s short) list of the writers (and one book per writer) that Dalkey has been publishing who I think are phenomenal, each breaking new ground in one way or another and each struggling to find their audience in America: Dumitru Tsepeneag (Vain Art of the Fugue, Romania), David Albahari (Gotz and Meir, Serbia), Svetislav Basara (Chinese Letter, Serbia), Drago Janćar (I Saw Her That Night, Slovenia), Mario Levi (Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale, Turkey), Ignacy Karpowicz (Sonka, Poland), Joao Almino (The Book of Emotions, Brazil), Luis Chiterroni (The No Variations, Argentina), Pablo Katchadjian (What to Do, Argentina), Eloy Urroz (The Obstacles, Mexico). I could go on and on, of course.
These writers are not necessarily &#8220;experimental&#8221; (that awful word with which reviewers often label Dalkey writers), but they approach fiction writing as though, at one and the same time, they are very aware of the tradition of the novel but are writing the very first novel. There is freshness to their works, and never a sense that one has already read so many books like them. The reader is pulled into the making of the book, and amazed at how it is being done. And most of them have a very dark side coupled with an outrageous comic sense. They belong to that tradition established centuries ago by Cervantes and Laurence Sterne.
Are the titles you mention above able to find audiences abroad more easily? Why do you think these titles might be struggling to find an audience in America?
This is where I say things that lead to trouble. Publishers have a distinct tendency to exaggerate numbers. There was a meeting years ago among small presses at the Mellon Foundation and each of the presses was asked what its single greatest problem was. The first one said that he prints 1,000 copies of a book of poetry, it immediately sells out, and he doesn&#8217;t have the money to reprint. Next publisher: same problem, he&#8217;d print 3,000 copies, it would sell out overnight, and didn&#8217;t have the money to reprint. I sat there thinking, What the hell? I publish fiction, and in the first year I typically sell 400-500 copies. I thought about it. If their books of poetry sell like this, then why don&#8217;t they have money?  Well, they didn&#8217;t want to say how they really sold — too embarrassing. The next time when I was together with the same presses, the first one said that, yes, poetry, they just sold 25,000 copies. Foreign publishers play the same game in trying to sell rights: &#8220;50,000 copies sold already!&#8221; This week, I received an email from a foreign publisher who didn&#8217;t know the game: his email said &#8220;1,200 copies already sold.&#8221; A moment of truth.
There are always the very rare exceptions, but so rare as not to be worth mentioning. I was on a panel recently with one of my fellow-publishers, and before the panel started we were swapping figures on how typical translations sell for her, and she is the head of a very distinguished press. She said the typical number is 700. Another moment of truth. When the panel began, there was a surge in that number to several thousand.
Alright. So don&#8217;t believe publishers.
Does literature sell better in foreign countries? Per capita, yes, it seems to. These are countries where books and literature matter in a way they don&#8217;t matter in the United States (I can hear the uproar already).
Many years ago, I became letter-writing friends with James Laughlin, the founder of that great press, New Directions. In a letter to him, I said that, given the kinds of books that he and Dalkey publish, the potential size of the audience is 50,000, but they won&#8217;t like everything we publish and it&#8217;s difficult getting the word out to them. He wrote back and said that 50,000 was the size in the 1930s or 40s; now it&#8217;s 30,000! We were disagreeing over 20,000 in a country with a population over 300 million. Strangely, I don&#8217;t think either of us found this dismaying — just a statement of fact.
One publishes these books because one loves them. If you want to make money, sell insurance. Or even worse, go get a job at an Arts Council. The positions pay well and you don&#8217;t have to know how to read.
Or go be an editor in New York and do books about how to lose 35 pounds in a week.
One of my great regrets was that I never met James Laughlin in person. He invited me to come to visit him in Connecticut, but I didn&#8217;t travel in those days. Without New Directions, there never would have been a Dalkey Archive. New Directions and the old Grove Press when Barney Rosset was running it: they were the forerunners.
To try to answer your question: the media doesn&#8217;t help in that effort. Space for book reviews has shrunk, but even so, the media avoids reviewing literary translations, especially if they are from small presses. If Knopf&#8217;s name is on the binding, they pay attention, but that doesn&#8217;t greatly affect sales.
What is your hope for the future of American literature?
Even though I am not as current as I should be with American literature right now, here is my firm belief about both writers and readers: writers write; they more or less have no choice about this despite how marginalized literature generally is in the public eye. We continue to get very interesting submissions from both young and veteran fiction writers. The greater challenge is readership. It&#8217;s not a matter of whether the readers are out there but how to reach them effectively. This view proceeds from my view of both readers and the act of reading. No matter the distractions in our time, there is a deep need for many people to be reading. Reading is an experience, I think, unlike any other. I don&#8217;t quite know how to put this. Younger people — those in their teens and early twenties — turn to literature as a means of finding themselves. It&#8217;s in those years that reading habits are developed, but those habits remain even if the reasons for reading may change over the years. Reading is usually a solitary act in which you have to cut yourself off from everything around you and to be engaged with the book: it&#8217;s you and the book talking to each other. You come away from that seeing the world around you differently, with a new way of interpreting that world. I will not claim that the experience makes for a kinder and more humane human being — that kind of nonsense is reserved for the National Endowment for the Arts to say and its ongoing effort to appeal to local communities in order to keep Congress off its back; as far as I am concerned, the NEA has now become a social service program that has little to do with supporting excellent art. Reading proceeds from a need, a deep psychological need to find oneself and to try to make some sense of the world and the people in it.
But how to reach these readers? Electronic media are picking up some of the slack as print media for literature disappears. Dalkey is part of an initiative to create an international book show, and we will have an hour per week to interview writers, both our writers and those of other publishers. Trafica Europe Radio is spearheaded by Andrew Singer. It launches May 10 in New York and should be of interest to a wide audience. You can read about it <a href="https://trafikaeurope.org/trafika-europe-radio">here</a>. It&#8217;s a huge undertaking and has been in development for the past three years.
In brief, I think the future of American literature is bright if the publishers are ready for it. I hate to end on such a promising note, but this is what I think.
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Against the Grain: John O’Brien on the Possible Dalkey Archive/Open Letter Merger

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/vipers-robots-cheese-casseroles-matthew-vollmer-permanent-exhibit/"></div>Cheeseburger-eating horses, life-sized sex robots, serpentine casseroles, and singing ex-Satanists litter Matthew Vollmer’s sprawling new essay collection, Permanent Exhibit. Started inadvertently as a series of hastily written Facebook status updates, the project quickly spun out into a book-length collection of single-paragraph musings on everyday life in the Age of Information. Each essay follows Vollmer’s wandering mind from topic to topic, rarely pondering his obsessions — animals, video games, cycling, violence, film, his family — for more than a sentence at a time. Instead, these winding streams-of-consciousness read more like collages, meditations on a scattered world.
While this brand of meditation might seem disastrously unfocused to the yogis among us, the disaster for readers is a delicious one — Vollmer leaps from thought to thought in an associative mode which is at once intimate and goofy, juxtaposing the warm and familiar against the inconceivably catastrophic. The result is a poignant, rapturous collection that speaks to a new generation of internet addicts — a group for whom attention is wandering and complex, as frustrating as it is beautiful.
Vollmer deactivated his Facebook shortly after publishing Permanent Exhibit (I suspect to avoid an onslaught of inflammatory status updates about the midterm elections), but in an effort to return to the medium which birthed the project, I convinced him to reactivate for one last interview. Perhaps unsurprising, our conversation was as manifold and kinetic as the collection, laden with likes and comments from appreciative but confused Facebook friends who had no idea we were conducting an interview.
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DASHIEL CARRERA: I like the way you phrased that, a “bubble of peaceful introspection.” It sounds almost monastic. Do you see Permanent Exhibit as spiritual, in a way? Or connecting to your Fundamentalist Christian upbringing?
MATTHEW VOLLMER: I was just having this conversation with a good friend of mine yesterday about how I look back on the period during which I wrote the book as a deeply spiritual time. By spiritual, I suppose I mean that I felt tuned into the universe, dialed into a channel that allowed me to observe more carefully than usual. Because I was so often working on one of these essays, and because the work of writing them caused me to be present in the world, I felt more awake, more alert. Everything around me seemed to vibrate with potentiality and meaning and significance. To acknowledge one&#8217;s place in the world, however small, can be extremely validating. I think that&#8217;s what the writing of these essays, each one of which represents a kind of journey, an excursion, into a state of mind — or perhaps it&#8217;s merely a disposition — that looks around in wonder noting the strangeness of a world in which a horse named Patches rides in a convertible and eats cheeseburgers, or that the daughter of the founder of the Church of Satan cuts an album and titles it Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera, or that there&#8217;s a chipmunk living in the base of my basketball goal, or that the sound designer of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy falls into the snake pit slid his hands into a cheese casserole to evoke the sounds of slithering vipers. Each time I sat down to begin one of these essays, I felt like I was reaching into the universe, into the day itself, and asking what it had to bring me. I often referred to it as &#8220;letting the day in.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know how much it has to do with my religious background, but I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s something there. I certainly prayed a lot as a child, and I agree with Simone Weil when she says, &#8220;Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.&#8221; So with that in mind, Permanent Exhibit does — in many ways, at least to me — feel something like a prayer book.
The first piece in the collection, “Status Update,” which you wrote off the cuff to launch the project, seems entirely collage and free-associative. This spirit carries into the other pieces, but there’s a clear change — they become more methodical, providing evidence and elaboration when needed.
How did this book evolve from the form of status updates to the form of a book?
I wrote the first piece by accident. No, wait. I guess I should say that I wrote it mindlessly. It was a knee-jerk reaction to whatever was happening on July 6, 2016 and what the people on my feed were saying about it. I had outrage fatigue. So I wrote a status update about riding my bike, seeing a fawn nursing from a deer in the middle of the road, running the dishwasher, eating a slice of pizza big enough to wrap around my face. People responded. The post got a lot of likes. I thought, huh. So I wrote another one. And another. And another. The more comfortable I became with the associative mode, the more I began to let myself linger on certain subjects, or the more focused the string of associations became. After a month of writing, I felt as if I could string them all into a manuscript, assuming I kept writing, which I did. Looking back at it now, it feels like the book sort of wrote itself.
You mentioned before that in 2016, everything you saw on Facebook was some form of aggression. It took me a few essays to realize, but for a book that’s so funny and playful, there’s a real violent undertone. You’ve got the algae that smell like dead animals in &#8220;Can’t Feel My Face,&#8221; your fear of crashing on your bike and bleeding out on the side of the road in &#8220;33rd Balloon,&#8221; your father cutting off the head of a snake in &#8220;Well of Souls,&#8221; mass vehicular homicide while playing Grand Theft Auto V in &#8220;Out of Lives,&#8221; and so on…
Yet this violence passes by with little meditation. In the essay &#8220;Robocall,&#8221; you go straight from five police officers being killed by a sniper to an article on sex robots.
How do you think about violence? How have social media and video games shaped your understanding of violence?
Good question. I think like everyone else, I think I&#8217;m kind of numb to violence — that is, until it&#8217;s close enough that it causes pain. Simulated violence — participating in games or pretending to kill or be killed — has always had an allure, and maybe it&#8217;s because in these games the person who dies always ends up cheating death. If I&#8217;m shot in a video game, or I leap from a skyscraper, or throw myself in front of a bus, or fail to deploy my parachute when jumping out of an airplane, or walking into someone&#8217;s beach campfire and self-immolate, I always come back to life. I think that&#8217;s the thing about these games I love — the fact that we never really die.
As for social media — we&#8217;re inundated with news about violence. How many mornings since the shootings here at Virginia Tech have I woken up to read news about a mass shooting? I lost count years ago. I always think about that Onion headline: &#8220;&#8216;No Way To Prevent This,&#8217; Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.&#8221; But now, even the word &#8220;regularly&#8221; seems outdated. It feels like it&#8217;s happening all the time. Maybe that&#8217;s why I simply mention the deaths of shooting victims. I want to acknowledge them, but also I have to go on with my day. And I can&#8217;t think about sad things all the time, which is now what social media wants me to do.
One of the most poignant moments in this book is the description at the end of &#8220;33rd Balloon&#8221; in which one final balloon is released to honor the death of the Virginia Tech shooter, because &#8220;he had once been a baby, a boy, a son, a brother&#8230;&#8221;
Has the shooting shaped how you write or think about the world?
Very much so. I imagine getting shot a lot more than I used to. It&#8217;s just part of the way I go about the world. But I also often think  about the aftermath of the shooting: the news media tents, the students wandering aimlessly about campus, taking naps on the floor of the Blockbuster, reading all the signatures on the giant cardboard placards where people wrote messages to the fallen, the ribbons tied randomly to trees, the groups of evangelists walking around campus, asking people if they died today would they see the face of Jesus. It was so bizarre; we had department meetings where grief counselors told us that we should find things to do with our hands. My wife walked around campus soon after the shootings had happened and ended up in a room at the University Inn where it was apparent that family members of the slain were being addressed for some reason. The person speaking said that if they were being interviewed on TV, they could prevent themselves from crying if they wiggled their fingers and toes. The weeks and months following the shootings were filled with deep sadness and utter absurdity. I couldn&#8217;t walk on campus for years afterwards without thinking about them. And, of course, I still do.
That seems a perfect example of the kind of absurd associative leap the book thrives on: one day, mass murder; the next, toe wiggling. It’s funny to think that these juxtapositions aren’t just constructed — they are a part of our daily lives.
You wrote recently that you see your life as a collage, and a striking feature of the book is the way in which moments of poignancy — I’m thinking of your fear of your son’s death, or of your desire to tell your wife she looks more beautiful everyday — are absorbed by the quotidian or the Internet tidbit.
Do you see the quotidian, the distressing news stories, the fun fact, as equal parts of your new writerly conscience? How do you negotiate their correspondence?
I don&#8217;t know that it&#8217;s &#8220;new,&#8221; necessarily. And I don&#8217;t think that we need the internet or social media in order to see &#8220;life&#8221; as a kind of collage. I imagine that experience for humans has always been a kind of montage; we&#8217;re constantly experiencing, selecting and discarding information, and using that information to make up stories about ourselves. As for how it all balances out, or whether the quotidian or distressing or &#8220;fun&#8221; become equals — I have no idea. Then again, maybe they do. At the very least, they live side by side, don&#8217;t they? Those parents who traveled to Virginia Tech after their babies were slaughtered had to live for a time in one of our local hotels. They woke up and fed themselves from a carb-laden breakfast trough, checked their emails to find condolences sitting alongside bill payment confirmations and party invites, and failed to comprehend a world where the loves of their lives could no longer be found. The knowable and unknowable are eternally entwined in every moment; sometimes we are awake enough to acknowledge this and sometimes we aren&#8217;t.
Do you think this project could have come into being offline? At the end of the essay &#8220;Out of Lives&#8221; you talk about playing Ms. Pacman in a &#8220;delightfully panicked state,&#8221; which often describes how I feel using technology. In what ways do you find the internet, tech, and games invigorating?
I really don&#8217;t think I would&#8217;ve written the book without the internet. It&#8217;s funny you ask what I find invigorating about playing video games. I&#8217;ve spent a lot of my free time recently playing Red Dead Redemption 2, luxuriating in its resplendent facsimiles: shadows of trees shifting, the way light glistens on mud patterns, deer and squirrels and bighorn sheep bounding away in front of the horse I&#8217;m riding, the way my character&#8217;s hat gets blown off my head during a shootout. It&#8217;s an exquisitely beautiful game, and part of the joy — for me, anyway — is that I walk away from it and enter the &#8220;real&#8221; world and am suddenly awake to its particular features. Like so many forms of successful storytelling, it invites the player into an immersive world, one that is richly complicated and emotionally compelling.
I read that this book was born in part out of frustration with writing your memoir. Ironically, the collection contains quite a few memories from your childhood, and operates in an associative mode often linked with memory. 
Has this project changed how you think about memory? Has it affected the process of writing your memoir? What can we expect from the next Matthew Vollmer project?
Yes, that’s true. I was working on a longer book that will attempt to tell the story of what it was like to grow up in the mountains of western North Carolina, in a Christian denomination that preached a lot about the end of the world. It’s about memory — how it serves and fails us. It’s about growing up and growing older and what it means to say goodbye to a set of beliefs and rituals that so many of your loved ones continue to embrace. It’s about mountains, wilderness, serpents, demons, and angels. I don’t want to say much more than that, except it sort of operates in that associative mode you just mentioned, only on a much grander scale. I hope I can make it work.
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Vipers, Robots, and Cheese Casseroles: Matthew Vollmer on Permanent Exhibit

Vipers, Robots, and Cheese Casseroles: Matthew Vollmer on Permanent Exhibit

Jeff Jackson is the author of the novels Mira Corpora (2013), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Destroy All Monsters (2018). Six of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award–winning Collapsible Giraffe theater company in New York City, and he writes songs and performs with the band Julian Calendar.

Jeff Jackson

Dashiel Carrera is the author of the novel The Deer (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022). His writing appears or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, FENCE, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. Also a musician, he has released five albums on the label 75orLess Records. He is currently a PhD student in human-computer interaction at the University of Toronto. You can find more of his work at <a href="http://www.dashielcarrera.com/">www.dashielcarrera.com</a>.

Dashiel Carrera

Anchor Points and Improvisations: A Conversation Between Jeff Jackson and Dashiel Carrera

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

Dashiel Carrera is the author of the novel The Deer (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022). His writing appears or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, FENCE, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. Also a musician, he has released five albums on the label 75orLess Records. He is currently a PhD student in human-computer interaction at the University of Toronto. You can find more of his work at <a href="http://www.dashielcarrera.com/">www.dashielcarrera.com</a>.