FictionDaily likes to interview our favorite writers and editors.
SAM LIPSYTE
1) Where are you from? Why?
Born in New York City. Raised in New Jersey. Why? The migration patterns of Jewish immigrants in the 19th Century and of their Jewish-American offspring in the 20th century. Now I live in New York City again. Why? I like it here.
2) Generate a relevant formula.
My field is prose fiction. There are no relevant formulas.
3) You’ve been awarded many things for your writing. What is legitimate fiction, and what’s the best way to assign legitimacy in literature generally?
Awards are nice, but I’ve also been not awarded many things for my writing, so I don’t think it’s connected to legitimacy. Also, we’d have to define legitimacy. Books win much bigger prizes than I ever have and nobody I know would consider them literature. The best way to assign legitimacy in literature is to read it and take note of the work that truly seizes you. Then spread the word.
4) What’s the funniest thing ever?
Human consciousness.
5) What is there, and what should we do about it?
There is the world and how you perceive it. Try not to let either one destroy you more quickly than it must.
6) Is anything absolutely true? If yes, what? If no, do you believe that absolutely? Why?
Many things are true. It’s just that often their opposites are also true. Does that prevent them from being “absolutely” true? I’m not so sure.
7) For this question, please write three sentences that make us feel something. Anything.
What a world it would be where I could conjure real feeling in people with language at someone’s simple request. You could ask me to make you a sandwich and I think I would be able to do that in a jiff, would be thrilled to, in fact. But the sentences that make us feel, truly feel life in all its wonder and terror, these take me years, years that just vapor away, all those hours I might have spent with my children, who are so beautiful and every moment growing into a world I understand less and less, or with my wife, with whom I grow old and away from the bright now, and all those years that leave their marks on me, their weals and burns, they disappear too, although they never really existed except as some phony calendar of decay, and there I am trying to make those sentences, and failing, just failing, and for what, really, I don’t know, given how tiny and fleeting it all is, how inconsequential in the end, and again not being enough with the people I love but living with the sentences that taunt me, that task me, me the dying one, that slither away before I can find what must be found in them.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collection Venus Drive and the novels The Subject Steve and Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award. His most recent novel is The Ask. He lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
