Along the way it captures a big swath of what used to be called, reverently, the inner city, and of boyhood and manhood in America. And I guess I can’t blame them. I expect that of myself, that’s for sure.”, “I think you always have to have risk when you’re creating a piece of art. Lethem: This is a great example of the stuff that people think I should know that I don’t know. I warn you—no one believes what I say. And a sort of microscopic, fine-grain description of everyday life isn’t disqualified, but it’s merely one tool among so many amazing possible implements. Lethem stayed mostly in science-fiction territory in early novels like Gun, With Occasional Music, and found wider success with 1999's National Book Critic’s Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn, about a Tourette’s-afflicted private eye. You know, a novel is an enormous compilation of problems solved, and once you accept that that’s what the work consists of, you also have to accept that there are times when you haven’t solved them yet. That is writing. MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and novelist Jonathan Lethem ignores the boundary between literary fiction and “lower” pop-culture or genre work, drawing inspiration from Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and comics. This polyglot mixture was transcribed, edited, then retranslated into Spanish and rewritten by Vila-Matas before being definitively translated into English. Vila-Matas chose the location partly for its peacefulness—but really, he observed, because it was where he set the final exchanges of his most recent novel, Esta bruma insensata (This senseless haze, 2019). And then you mature at 50 and you're given your first projects.”, “You don’t have to please everybody. Los Angeles is a place that really fascinated me, but I hope the book doesn’t seem to claim to be incisive about L.A. in any important way. You didn’t do anything. And I try to expand it with every project.”, “I like the accidents, the things that happen by chance. Here I’m tempted to say Clyde Porter, but there is no Clyde Porter. Sign up for the Paris Review newsletter and keep up with news, parties, readings, and more. So I set out to write a book about that need, about that yearning to live in a dystopia. What’s exciting to me is to always locate the juxtaposition at some other level or levels in the book, and reinvent this combination that fascinates me so much, and see how I can then resolve the disruption. She pushed a shopping cart ahead of her and the shopping cart was nearly taller than she was. How do you respond to such charges, especially in light of your own experiences working in the intelligence community, and your status as a person, alive so close to the turning of a century? There aren't just a couple of genres; there's a whole garden, full of genres, once you start to think of things that way. The patience of my readers with my changes of strategy and form is something I’m very grateful for. But there’s a real value in being kind of an amateur. As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) is an academic novel, a Don DeLillo spoof, about a professor whose girlfriend falls in love with her physics experiment. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. But also—it is kind of a perverse game to play, but I was very careful about not nailing down exactly when this book takes place. She wore a tee-shirt — perhaps you’re familiar with this trend: tiny old poor people in extremely new T-shirts, often worn over long-sleeve shirts? It is indeed about the jail, and the place of jails in American life. From now on, you must be this example.’”, “I think an ambition as a performer, and maybe even in life, is to become less afraid. After our final session, before we headed off for coffee at the Europa Café on Diagonal, Vila-Matas invited me over to his apartment and showed me his small writing room, the bookshelves of which were filled with works by his beloved authors—Beckett, Kafka, Tabucchi, Duras, Joyce, Walser, and friends like Rodrigo Fresán and Roberto Bolaño. If I made money doing it, I would do it; if I didn't make any money, I would do it. It’s probably an ongoing thing for all of us — and a tricky balance. There's a lot of Ross McDonald in that book. And that teaches you strength, how to handle being put under pressure. That was a big journey for me! AVC: Does that kind of serendipity happen a lot when you’re writing? The show opens with excerpts of Toni Morrison’s 1993 Art of Fiction Interview, scored live by some of the musicians that created the score for Seasons 1 and 2. “I want to die” or “I want to kill you”? It seemed important. “Of course we all do stupid things when we're young, but that's your way to find boundaries, you know. And it doesn’t matter if somebody’s going to pay me or pat me on the back for it. I learned a lot from my wife. I want to be pushed somewhere else.”, “I used to tease the other kids because I played better than them. I tried. According to the terms of Vila-Matas’s thinking, the real can only fully acquire a luminous existence when inserted into a prior network of words— even, for instance, a conversation. It totally flows. I want to tell you a little story, as you stand there glowering at the my authorial barricades with your barracudas or bazookas or whatever they’re called full of nerve gas and inflammatory interviewing devices.