Novelist Mike McCormack speaks with Georgetown University professor Cóilín Parsons about his craft in this edition of HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life. McCormack grew up in County Mayo, Ireland, and still sets his fiction there. He began reading “cowboy books” by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour at age 9, then moved on to Thomas Pynchon and science fiction. A devoted experimentalist, McCormack resists the label of surrealist: “I’m holding this side of the surrealist’s line. I’m too structurally minded to give myself over to it, but I’ll bring it right up to the doorstep.” McCormack speaks of his earlier short stories and novels, but the writers mostly discuss Solar Bones, the 200-page novel in a single sentence that won the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction. Parsons, while praising Solar Bones as an “extraordinarily beautiful, humane book” asks McCormack: “What possessed you to put all of this in one sentence?” McCormack responds: “My own feeling is that I didn’t write it at all. I sat and took dictation for six years. I always wanted to write about an engineer. Writers and artists describe the world, but engineers make the world. There are not many books about them, they’re not the heroes. But my imagination always had a neon sign out: ‘Engineer wanted.’ ” He reads from the early part of the novel. Recorded in February 2018. For more information about or to help support HoCoPoLitSo’s live or recorded programming, visit www.hocopolitso.org.
- 6 жыл бұрын
Mike McCormack talks of his experimental fiction
- Рет қаралды 2,782
Пікірлер: 3