Pamela Paul

Collects 65 top-selected interviews as published in The New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" feature to share literary reflections by such personalities as David Sedaris, Michael Chabon and James Patterson.

Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review

By the Book

High Fidelity

We all want to know what other people are reading. We peer at strangers’ book covers on an airplane and lean over their e-books on the subway. We squint at the iPhone of the person standing in front of us in the elevator. We scan bestseller lists and customer reviews and online social reading sites. Asking someone what she’s read lately is an easy conversational gambit—and the answer is almost bound to be more interesting than the weather. It also serves an actual purpose: we may find out about something we want to read ourselves.

Notewise, whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.

I read “book” books—the ones between covers. And I mark ’em all up. They’re mine, after all. Though I’m not opposed to e-books. It’s not a moral issue for me.

I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t have a question, but dude just seems like he could use a hug.

Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust. You get the cold flesh of the story in that chilling first line: “In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death.”

Who are the best short story writers? People who like to suffer or perhaps people tempted by perfectibility. For that is the short story’s great lure— that you can write a perfect one. With novels it’s quite the opposite—the lure of the novel is that you can never write a perfect one.

If the reader wants information primarily, of course nonfiction is preferred. But what is executed by way of “information” makes literature, whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. A typical biography relying upon individuals’ notorious memories and the anecdotes they’ve invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered “nonfiction.” My favorite literary genre is, in fact, the “literary novel” (unfortunate term roughly translated as the Kiss of Death). I also enjoy anything noir (often, though not inevitably, set in Los Angeles).

I was trained to consider “disappointment” of this sort a character flaw of my own, a failure to comprehend, to appreciate what others have clearly appreciated.

Do you have a least favorite? Or one you regret having written? The novel of mine that everyone has hated, or had hated (since it has been out of print virtually since its publication), is The Assassins (1975), which I have not looked at since perhaps 1976. I would never dare reread it—I could accept that it is not a good novel, but I would be very upset to discover that it wasn’t, or anyway, wasn’t “nearly so bad” as everyone said. That would hurt.

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