“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Unknown, reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

 1. Why did you choose this book?

I did a bookswap with a friend I worked with, and my brother had recommended this one.

 2. What did you trade for it?

Her Fearful Symmetry (by Audrey Niffenegger).

3. What are your favorite books?

The Time Traveler’s Wife (also by Audrey Niffenegger), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Jodie Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper.

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

I try not to, I go off a recommendation, and sometimes I scan a bookstore.

5. What did you have for breakfast?

A pear, yogurt and cereal.

WORD on the street, Tuesday 4/27 (NYC: on the N between Broadway and Astoria/Ditmars)

Alan Sillitoe died on April 25, 2010 at Charing Cross Hospital in London. Two days later, we met Kayley reading The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

1. Why did you choose this book?

A friend and I had unearthed a battered copy at a used bookstore about 2 years ago, and were drawn to it not knowing much about Sillitoe’s work specifically, but more of the adapted film from the 1960s (with Tom Courtenay and Michael Redgrave. The title is also referenced by several bands, such as Belle & Sebastian on their Push Barman to Open Old Wounds album.)  I’ve always been intrigued by this voice of post-WW II blue-collar England, and Sillitoe was a major contributor in both books and film dealing with that subject matter, written during that time. I had been meaning to borrow it from my friend since then, but saw this Vintage edition while shopping a few weeks ago. And here we are. 

2. Do you like it?

I’ve just begun to focus on this book – I’ve only read the first two stories, but I’m really enjoying his style so far. For all of their outward irredeemable qualities, Sillitoe’s protagonists are these incredibly affected individuals searching for identity and purpose in a society that has already determined what their roles should be. He has this completely honest narrative that can be tongue-in-cheek one minute and absolutely devastating the next. I’m really looking forward to the rest of it. 

3. What are your favorite books?

Something around Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, John Updike’s Rabbit novels.

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

I try not to, but I think that a clever cover can have a real impact on why you purchase a book, especially if you aren’t familiar with the author and are initially drawn to the jacket design. If it’s done just right, I think cover art can even influence the way you perceive the story, or present a focus that you may not initially have considered. I love the cover art of this edition, by the way. 

5. What did you have for breakfast?

This book. With a coffee.

Joanna, reading A Spot of Bother

1. Why did you choose this book?

I really liked Mark Haddon’s other book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Then a friend recommended this one to me when we were discussing books with gay characters.

2. Do you like it?

I like it. In the first 40 pages or so, I wasn’t sure that it was going to catch my interest, but then it picked up and I suddenly felt invested in the story. It sometimes makes me cringe, kind of like a TV drama, when the characters aren’t understanding each other and conflicts are piling up. But the relationships are more realistic than in a TV drama, so that’s a relief!

3. What are your favorite books?

Life of Pi (Yann Martel), Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri), Zeitoun (Dave Eggers), Native Speaker (Chang-rae Lee), The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)….

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

Not usually, because I find out about them online, and can only see a little thumbnail image of the cover anyway.

5. What did you have for breakfast?

Cereal—three types mixed together. I still haven’t found one cereal that I like on its own.

WORD on the street, Monday 4/12 (NYC: on the W between Broadway and 39^th Ave.)

 Randy, reading The Age of Wonder

1. Why did you choose this book?

I read a review somewhere, maybe Salon.

2. Do you like it?

Very much.

3. What are your favorite books?

Do you want types of books or titles? That would take a long time.

Either is great.

Mostly straight literature. But lately I’ve been getting into nonfiction, like this one, historical science. But Russian lit was always my biggest thing.

Ok now a title.

Since I read it when I was 16, and I read it again all the time, Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky).

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

I try not to but I definitely do, even it’s subconsciously. Especially if I know nothing about it, then the cover can make a big difference.

5. What did you have for breakfast?

Pop-tarts. Why, are you finding a correlation between breakfast and reading habits?

Not really. What kind of pop-tarts?

Brown sugar cinnamon. Pop-tarts and coffee.

1. Why did you choose this book? 

I chose it because I’ve heard a lot about the author, and wanted to read something he’d written. I also wanted to read a book with a setting outside of the US, and thought the UK would be a good place to start.

2. Do you like it?

I do like it. It started off a little bit slow (first 30 pages), and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue reading, but I gave it a chance and now I’m really into it. It’s definitely an interesting book with some very thought-provoking concepts. I also really like the sci-fi aspect of it, which is surprising because I generally don’t like sci-fi novels. 

3. What are your favorite books?

My favorite books are Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Book of Night Women by Marlon James, Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres, In the Name of Salome by Julia Alvarez and The Local News by Miriam Gershow.

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

Generally, I don’t. I look at the title first, and then read the blurb.

5. What did you have for breakfast?

Today I had a slice of whole wheat toast and some juice. I’m not really that hungry in the mornings.

WORD on the street, Tuesday 3/23 (NYC : on the N between 39^th Ave. and Queensboro Plaza)

Heather, also reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

1. Why did you chose this book?

My roommate gave it to me.

2. Do you like it?

Yes.

3. What are your favorite books?

Currently The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

Yes.

5. What did you have for breakfast?

I haven’t had breakfast.

We can’t be everywhere, so if you’re reading a V/A title you love, send us a photo and let us know!

Julianne, reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

1. Why did you choose this book?

The cover seemed interesting.

2. Do you like it?

Yes, (but she is only on page 6). 

3. What are your favorite books?

Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and A Confederacy of Dunces (by John Kennedy Toole).

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

Yes. (see no.1)

5. What did you have for breakfast?

Nothing yet.

WORD on the street, Saturday 3/13 (Greyhound station at White River Junction, VT)

Anna, reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008

1.Why did you choose this book?

I was looking for something random to distract me from classes. It’s from the Dartmouth College library.

2. Do you like it?

Yes. 

3. What are your favorite books?

I’ve read mostly books on neuroscience.

4. Do you judge books by their covers?

A cover should be intriguing.

5. What did you have for breakfast?

A bagel with cream cheese.

Check out the preview here.

The Green Zone, Baghdad, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their political affiliations and views on issues such as abortion, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate crises of a postwar nation. In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate and remarkably dispassionate portrait of life inside this Oz-like place, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating portrait of imperial folly, and an essential book for anyone who wants to understand those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.

CHECK OUT THE ALL-NEW FOREWORD from Paul Greengrass, director of GREEN ZONE, included in the new special movie tie-in edition of IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY, after the jump.

Sometime in early September 2004, I began to work on a film set in Iraq. I wanted it to be a thriller—urgent, contemporary, filled with intrigue: A movie that would hopefully take some of the huge audience that had enjoyed the Bourne series to a real-world setting and encourage them to consider whether the mistrust and paranoia that characterized Bourne’s world was so far-fetched after all.

My hazy idea was to follow a U.S. soldier through the convoluted and mysterious hunt for Weapons of Mass Destruction. This secret WMD quest, with all its twists and turns, claims and counterclaims, seemed to me to be the epicenter of all our unease—the toxic and unresolved issue that has haunted us ever since 2003. Was the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor the result of honest, unavoidable miscalculations? Or was it rather the result of intentional distortions by officials bent on justifying a prearranged policy?

I felt that if we could create a noble character—a military everyman—who entered Iraq at the start of the war believing WMD were there, and then followed him on his just cause as he begins by degrees to realize that the prewar intelligence claims are entirely unfounded, we would have the basis for a compelling journey. He would stand for all of us, and his hunt for the truth would be ours.

Sadly, the path toward a film is rarely straight and even. More often it is strewn with rocks, and even, on occasion, impassable. So it proved. For months I tried to find ways to develop the story, but always I hit a dead end. The story seemed to lack focus. It needed something else, but I was unable to find it.

Then, out of the blue, Robert Bookman from CAA—a man with an almost preternatural instinct for literary material of the highest quality—sent me a new book about Iraq by the former Baghdad correspondent of The Washington Post. I had read many, many books about the war, and if anything I was beginning to feel almost despondent about the entire project. But this, he told me, was something special. It was called Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside the Green Zone.

I devoured the book in a single sitting. At a stroke Rajiv Chandrasekaran brought me into the very heart of the occupation, tracking with devastating power the intense idealism that drove a generation of young and highly politicized U.S. officials to conduct an unprecedented experiment with democracy in the heart of a war-torn and devastated Iraq, a nation on its knees after thirty years of dictatorship.

Those who led this effort from the top articulated grandiose visions of the mission in Baghdad—it was an opportunity to build a democratic “shining city on the hill” in the Arab world; the new Iraq would become an inspiration and drive political change throughout the entire Middle East. But these visions, conceived far away in Washington and London, led to wildly unrealistic policies on the ground. And Chandrasekaran’s unerring reporter’s eye and instinct for understatement, pitilessly exposes the chasm between the two.

I knew as soon as I had finished Imperial Life in the Emerald City that it would unlock our stalled film.  It gave us something to aim at. Our hero would leave the desert where the WMD were supposed to have been buried, and make his way to the Green Zone, where U.S. officials were holed up inside Saddam’s palace, engaged in a folly of ignorance and ambition. And there he would find his answers.

Green Zone—as our movie ended up being titled—is of course not an adaptation of Chandrasekaran’s book. The credit for our story lies with our screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, who labored long and hard to bring it to life. But for all of us involved, Imperial Life in the Emerald City was something of a beacon that guided us in our long journey toward the screen. And for me, it remains one of the most important and sustained pieces of reporting of the new millennium.

Read it—and consider the cost paid in blood and treasure for those dreams of democracy in the desert.

Paul Greengrass

December 2009

Excerpted from GREEN ZONE, a Special Edition of the National Bestseller IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY by Rajiv Chandrasekaran Copyright © 2009 by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Sun & Anchor asks writers and editors about what goes on behind the scenes. Next up — Award winning writer (and Veteran Vintage Publicist) Ethan Rutherford on Bad Advice

Bad Advice

Write what you know, write what you know.  I’m not sure who first came up with that little nugget of wisdom, but it’s everywhere.  It’s in the air.  It gets passed around like a cold in writing workshops and “how to” books.  And, if taken the wrong way, it’s just a terrible, destructive piece of advice, almost as misleading as “show don’t tell”.

Why?  Because if taken the wrong way—which is what you do as a young writer, you take everything the wrong way (I still take things the wrong way, I can’t help it)—it’s the sort of set-in-solid-stone advice that will shut down your imagination before it even wakes up.  This is fiction we’re talking about, the realm of boundless dramatic opportunity.  Your characters can do anything you want them to do, anywhere you want them to do it.  Your imagination is a muscle; so flex that mofo.  Don’t give your emotional experience to a character just like you—you know, we know, where that leads: to someone, sitting at a desk, writing about what it was like to become a writer.  That’s fine for non-fiction.  But for fiction?  A reader—or, I should say, this reader—wants to be flung far and transported; I want to immerse myself in the fully imagined lives of characters I’ve never—would never—encounter, in situations I would never find myself in.  I want to be surprised at the recognition something shared between myself and these characters, linking us.  And further away you are from that character’s experience, the more surprising that recognition is when it comes, and the harder it hits.

So if the goal of a story is to make the strange familiar, why not begin with the strange?  Why not write what you don’t know, but are interested in exploring?  John Gardener has written that a successful ending ought to be both surprising and inevitable.  The problem with writing what you know is that, from the outset, you know how you are going to demystify the experience, and while you often stick an ending that’s inevitable, rarely is it surprising (to you, to the reader, to everyone).  Set the stakes a little higher.  Wade into a pool that you think might be just a little too deep.  Let that story gallop ahead of you, so when you do, finally, lasso it, and bring it home to the Recognizable Corral, you’re not sure exactly how you’ve done it, and are just as amazed as everyone else.

ABOUT: Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in Esopus, New York Tyrant, VERB, Faultline, American Short Fiction, Fiction on a Stick, and the Best American Short Stories 2009.  His stories have received Special Mention in the 2009 and 2010 Pushcart Prize anthologies, and he is the recent recipient of a SASE/Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers, as well as a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. In 2009, he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota.  He’s just finished a collection of short stories, and is at work on a novel. Click here to read some of his work.

Dear Rebecca,

First, let me say that I loved 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.  It’s wide ranging and very smart in its approach to life’s questions.  While reading your book, it struck me that you and I are both writing from a similar space at the intersection of science and literature.  We both live in the corridors of academia–and even more specifically, in the world of the science of the mind–and our fiction seems to soak up that background in the form of vocabulary and concepts.

There’s probably a lot to explore about that nexus of worlds, but to get the conversation started I thought I’d pick out one particular point: I think that space provides a good launching pad for exploring big ideas while giving no truck to dogmatism.  And that seems to be the formula for both good science and good literature.

As we know, many first-class writers spend their energies assembling arguments in the God/No God debate, but perhaps there is more interesting material to talk about.  To this end, I immediately liked the deception of your book’s title: I felt that the real story was neither about arguments for nor against the existence of God, but instead about interesting ideas in the middle ground. The narrative seeks no easy solutions, but is instead willing to live with complexity.  This is epitomized in one of your characters, Azarya, who understands both the speciousness of religious edicts as well as their deep importance to community.

In the end, your book struck me as both post-religious and post-atheist.  Am I correct about that characterization, or would you disagree?  This is actually a description that a reader suggested to me about Sum during a book reading.  I loved the phrase and stole it!  After all, life is more interestingly complicated than either side of the God argument might suggest, and it often feels to me that a science-based and non-dogmatic position might be the right place to start the exploration.  After all, the scientific temperament is persuaded by evidence, but when no evidence exists, it is comfortable with uncertainty.  I think that’s an interesting place from which to write literature nowadays.  What are your thoughts?

-David

Dear David,

It is wonderful to be in dialogue with you. Although we’ve never met, I know that there is much mutual understanding and sympathy.  We’re both as deeply touched by science as by literature, and, for some reason that I’ll never understand, that makes us members of a smallish set. I have some specific questions I’d love to ask you, but before I get to them let me address your questions to me.

You’re right that I tried, from the very beginning of the book–that is, in its title–to squeeze in the ambiguity and complexity and paradox that I think lurks around these God debates.  The full title is even longer than the one you quote.  It’s “36 Arguments for the Existence of God: a Work of Fiction,” and I meant that sub-title to be an ironic comment on the proofs themselves (or, as one ardent atheist reader pointed out, on God Himself, a work of fiction).  I wanted ambiguity and complexity and paradox because that’s the sphere that humans inhabit at their deepest core, and no questions draw deeper from that core than those raised by the God debates. In the Appendix, where I simply analyze the arguments as a trained philosopher, I can be straightforwardly rigorous, knocking down one argument for God’s existence after another.  But in the body of the novel, where the human reactions toward the whole complicated business of religion is what animates the plot and characters, things gets far more complicated. Is it possible to be an atheist who feels sympathy toward at least some of the religious impulses–which, by the way, I think can be given purely secular expression?   Would that make me post-atheist and post-religious?  I’m not sure, but in any case, that describes me.

So here’s my question to you regarding your extraordinary Sum: Do you have a philosophical position regarding the possibility of the afterlife, and did it in any way play into the conception of your novel?  Do your professional views in neuroscience allow you to entertain the possibility of an afterlife?

My best,

Rebecca

Dear Rebecca,

Great – that gives me a richer understanding of your work, thanks.  By the way, speaking of your full title, I wondered whether you sometimes have a hard time explaining the subtle meaning to fresh readers?  I ask because I’ve had that problem with my subtitle (Forty Tales from the Afterlives).  At books readings, some fraction of the crowd shows up because they’ve heard I’m a neuroscientist, and they assume I’ll be describing clinical near-death experiences and making a proclamation about the afterlife.   I’d be interested to know how many people are buying our material online, sight-unseen, judging the books only by their covers.

As for my position regarding the afterlife, I don’t hold one.  From a literary standpoint, I chose the idea of mutually exclusive afterlives because they provide such a good foil for highlighting what matters to us in the here-and-now.  From a scientific standpoint, most neuroscientists would probably subscribe to the likely scenario that we simply shut off when our brain ceases to function. But we don’t actually know that with certainty.  Like every previous generation of scientists, we operate under the belief that we have all the main pieces of the puzzle, and now we’re just trying to fit them all together.  Presumably, like every previous generation, we’re wrong. (There is always the argument from parsimony, but of course historically that approach has been wrong at least as many times as it’s been right.)  A few years ago I wrote an article in Discover Magazine called “10 Unsolved Questions of the Brain”, and I think it surprised some readers to find that we don’t really know answers to even the most basic questions: how to read the neural code, how memories work, what intelligence is, why we spend one third of our lives asleep, and how to build consciousness from physical pieces and parts, and so on.  Even in this golden era, our knowledge is vastly outstripped by our ignorance.

To my mind, this situation encourages a celebration of the enormous size of the possibility space, and that’s what Sum is about.  It goes without saying that all the stories in Sum are meant to be totally improbable and humorous.  But what is serious is the exercise in loosening up our thinking. The main thing science teaches is an appreciation of how much we don’t know, and I used mutually exclusive stories to structure to illustrate this.

Are these issues of possibility and creativity what attract you to both science and literature, or do you have other reasons?  And what’s your take on why more scientists aren’t writing fiction?

Dear David,

We’re in even deeper sympathy with one another than I had suspected (though now that I reflect back on Sum, I should have guessed).   My Ph.D. dissertation was on the limits of scientific explanation, especially as regards the phenomena of consciousness–all the abundance of inner life that is our primary focus of description as novelists.   Back when I was doing my graduate work, this was a very unpopular position, especially in the ranks of analytic philosophy, which is my province.  Strict reductionism was pretty much the dogma of the day, and the very word ‘consciousness’ was tainted. To insist that a strictly physical description of a person, either in terms of her hardware or software, would leave out what it’s like to be that person, what it feels like for that person to be the person that she is, was to meet, quite often, with lectures about latent religiosity hiding itself in the philosophy of mind.  All that has changed a great deal now, of course, but back then anti-reductionism was a lonely place to be.  I was lucky because Tom Nagel–who wrote a wonderful article I’m sure you’re acquainted with, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”–was at Princeton when I was a student there, and so I was able to work with him on my dissertation.

Speaking of Nagel, I have my protagonist in “36 Arguments for The Existence of God,”  Cass Seltzer, falling into gleeful amazement, as a student, when he reads Nagel’s book, “The View from Nowhere.” Cass connects what he’s reading with one of his earliest childhood memories, lying in his bunk bed and thinking himself into bafflement about his own personal identity.  “Here was the bedtime metaphysics that used to exercise him to the point of hyperventilation being described with precision by a prominent philosopher. (Thomas Nagel sounded prominent from the book jacket.)”

That sort of moment–when I have a character discovering that some problem that is very personal to him and that he assumes nobody else has ever considered, is really a standard philosophical problem–is very important to me.  It’s part of the reason I turned away from writing the kind of works that would only be read by other academics.  I’m convinced that all people ponder these questions, that these existential dilemmas and ontological bafflements belong to the deepest core of us. We all–not just scientists and philosophers–have what I call the ontological urge, trying to figure out the nature of the world and of ourselves within it.  This urge leads us into many false beliefs, of course–sometimes because we just can’t tolerate the overwhelming uncertainty of having so many of our questions go unanswered and so we grasp onto answers prematurely–but it also leads us to whatever knowledge we’ve been able, personally and collectively, to acquire.

It’s this picture I have of human nature that makes me so eager to bring science and philosophy and literature together.  Fiction is a way of showing how deeply these questions are felt. I’ve always thought that the distinction between cognition, on the one hand, and emotion, on the other, is too sharply drawn, and now you neuroscientists are validating the deep interconnections between thinking and feeling, the subject of some of Antonio Demasio’s fascinating books.

The meshing of cognition and emotion is a vindication, I think, of the sort of fiction that you, too, produce in Sum, merging fanciful thought experiments with one of the most emotionally fraught of all ontological questions: the nature of our real being and how this bears on the possibility of our surviving the body’s death. Certainly when it comes to this question, everybody feels the ontological urge.

Sorry to go on so long, but I feel we’re really getting into it now. Does any of this resonate?

My best,

Rebecca

Hi Rebecca,

Yes, that all resonates!  You and I both seek to marry the cognitive to the emotional, usually by taking an idea and extrapolating it to the point where it matters to people.  And both science and philosophy offer infinite, rich material for this approach.  That is why most of the stories in Sum launch from scientific foundations; similarly, I immediately appreciated how your writing takes advantage of scientific ideas to re-cast questions in lush new vocabularies of game theory, prime numbers, private subjective experience, and so on.

And I think I see another connection between our work.  It seems that we’re both interested in the awe at the edge of science, but that doesn’t mean we’re willing to spill out our wonderment for any old story.  We’re interested in first clearing away the detritus to get a clear view on the most interesting bits of the problem.  So, for example, in the appendix to your book you take compelling arguments for the existence of God and disassemble them. Many of the stories in Sum do the same thing but with a different approach.  Instead of hitting the arguments head on, I use a reductio ad absurdum, taking basic assumptions to their logical extremes.  For example, how old should each person be in the afterlife?  In the story “Prism,” God becomes confused about what age to make people: if he keeps people the age they were when they died, their bodies are broken and they look terrible. Perhaps he should make them young—but how young, exactly?  And is it a problem that granddaughters will no longer recognize their grandmothers?  In other stories, I examine the idea that people can be reasonably categorized into good and bad, or the assumption that one would even want to live forever.  I started chewing on these problems after asking strangers on airplanes how they conceive of the afterlife — and it became clear to me that the most basic assumptions were often not thought out to completion. Instead of directly refuting any assumptions, I simply let the consequences play out.  Like your appendix, this has the result of clearing unexamined intuitions out of the way.

And that allows us to reach the more interesting, teeth-sinking material deep in the forests of our ignorance.  That’s where I can write the other type of story in Sum, the kind that is not resting on old assumptions but making up entirely new ones, often launching from scientific or philosophical ideas.  It has always seemed reasonable that any sort of spirituality should be predicated on what we already know, and we know so much now about the size of the cosmos, microbial infection, computation, quantum mechanics, natural selection, and so on.  Some religious scholars try to use science to justify their stories; a better approach, perhaps, is to use science as the bedrock off of which to springboard into more interesting, innovative narratives.

After all, as I said last time, the main thing science teaches is the size of the possibility space.  When smart kids first start in science, they believe that science will be able answer everything; more seasoned scientists appreciate the extent to which the cosmos outstrips our imagination.  It sometimes feels strange that when we walk into the bookstore we mostly find books taking theological positions with absolute certainty.  Why isn’t there a broader dialogue?  As Voltaire put it “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”  Sum was a way for me to write a piece of literature that shone a flashlight around the interesting bits of the possibility space, and, as far as I can see, that’s what 36 Arguments allowed you too.

Thinking about things in this way has led me down the path of my next book, entitled Why I am a Possibilian.  Possibilianism is a movement that I accidentally started when giving talks about Sum, and it has grown from 0 to 5,000 hits on Google in the past year.  I think that’s good news for authors like us: there seems to be an appetite for transcending traditional claims while simultaneously retaining deep humility about our knowledge.

A few questions for you: this is your ninth book, and I’m curious how you’ve changed through the process of writing them.  Do you feel there are things you understand now that you didn’t when you began?  Either about the material or about yourself?  And (while I know that you’ve just published 36 Arguments less than a month ago) do you have any ideas about what your next book will be on?

Dear David,

You ended your last message to me asking me what I’ve learned in the process of writing nine books. Each book has brought, of course, its specific discoveries.  So, for example in my first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, my main protagonist struggles to understand why her life feels so wrong to her, the nature of the sickness in her soul.  She comes up with the concept of the mattering map to help articulate what ails her.  Since then—just as with your concept of a possibilian—the concept has taken on an independent life.  I just checked now, and there are tens of thousands of hits on Google. Sometimes I’m credited with the concept, more often it seems I’m not, but there it is, out there in the world, being used (as I just learned from my brief Google search) in an article in Harvard Business Review, called “How Mattering Maps Affect Behavior” and in books and articles on fans and geeks and online communities, and in works of economics and psychology. I would never have come up with this concept if I hadn’t been inhabiting the foreign point of view of my fictional character, Renee Feuer.  It was really her concept, the kind of thing she would think up but not me. Do I find such a statement mysterious?  Yes, I do.  Nonetheless, I know it to be true.  Inhabiting another point of view—which is exactly what literature asks us to do, whether we’re reading it or writing it—puts us in the way of assaults from truths we might never have otherwise encountered.

Two of my books were non-fiction.  Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel is on a revolutionary mathematical discovery and the strange man behind it.  Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity is about the philosophy of the seventeenth-century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who is a man who made every claim for the life of pure reason that’s ever been made.  These two book dealt with weighty themes which are hard to understand and even harder to make accessible and engaging to the layman.  Yet writing them had felt to me like a walk in the park compared to writing a novel.

Novels are often regarded as frivolous, escapist make-believe, whereas a work on mathematical logic or on the philosophy of the über-rationalist Spinoza is clearly serious.  Books like those obviously teach the reader something and so, for disciplined and serious people, who want even their leisure to contribute to their projects of self- improvement, they’re the reading matter of choice.  In fact, quite often fans of my non-fiction will assure me that “Of course, I’ve never read your fiction.”  They seem to think that this will impress me with what serious people they are. I understand why they dismiss fiction; I understand why made-up stories can seem childish compared to books on history or popular economics or psychology or physics. Still, I think the dismissal of fiction as a way of discovering important truths is itself missing out on important truths, and it makes me sad.  Sometimes it’s made me so sad that I promise myself I’ll stop writing fiction. What’s the point, I sometimes ask, when people who take ideas seriously don’t even bother with fiction?  But in the end, I can’t forsake this form of writing, not only because of its ways of mixing cognition and emotion that we’ve discussed, or for the assaults from large truths that it encourages, but for a deeper reason than all of these.  The novel, imaginatively plunging into people’s lives, struggles to do justice to us, showing us how irreducibly individual and quirky and irreplaceable each human life is.  It’s the form that labors to encompass the sheer tremendousness of just being this thing, a human being, and in the end validates what we all know about ourselves, our own uniqueness and importance, but have to be constantly reminded about others. We each of us carry around a world within us.  So yes, there is that vast and mystifying world out there, the province of our sciences.  But there, too, just as vast and mysterious, is the world as it is for each of us.  “What a piece of work is a man.” That’s what I learn from every good novel and short story I read, each of them teaching it to me all over again, making the lesson so new that it hits me each time with the shock of a revelation.

What a pleasure, David, it’s been to exchange thoughts with you.   I think—to use the concept of my fictional character—we occupy the same zone on the mattering map.  I certainly know that everything you write will greatly matter to me.

My best,

Rebecca

First up, Vintage Editor Zack Wagman.

How long have you been an editor? What made you want to become an editor?
I’ve been an editor for 6 years now, though some of that was as an assistant.  Actually, I originally wanted to work in the film business (I’m a huge movie nerd), in “development,” though I don’t think I really understood what that meant.  All I knew was that I was an avid reader and preferred working behind the scenes.  The summer I graduated from college, I was working as a freelancer for a professor of mine who was publishing a book with Random House.  As I got to know more about the editorial process and the publishing world, I realized that in publishing, I’d be able to work in pop culture and help develop projects that I believed in.  Eventually, I got hired at Knopf and I’ve been here ever since.

What are the most important qualities in an editor as you see it?
Patience is a virtue!  You’ll need patience to read through the countless bad manuscripts to find that hidden gem; to problem-solve with an author to get the manuscript to where it needs to be; and to be an enthusiastic cheerleader for the book at the company.    I would also say an open mind, courage to take a risk, and a sense of fun.

What was the best advice you got at the beginning of your career?
My first boss in publishing, Vicky Wilson, told me to always trust my instincts.  I would have put that in my answer above, but I didn’t want to steal her line.  But it’s true!  I’ve read manuscripts that aren’t necessarily a natural fit for the Knopf Group, but I made a stink about anyway because either I couldn’t stop turning pages or it stuck with me well after I finished reading.

What’s the biggest cringe-worthy moment you’ve had in your career so far?
A few years ago, after corresponding with an LA-based author for months, I finally met her in person.  She made a strange comment when she first saw me: “Huh.  I always pictured you as a blonde.”  I was sort of caught off-guard and tried to recover with a joke: “Oh, because of Zack Morris?”  She just stared at me in total confusion for what felt like five full minutes and then walked away.  It was a meaningless moment and didn’t affect our working relationship at all, but it was damn awkward.

What advice would you give the Future Publishers of America?
Read what’s on the New York Times bestseller lists!  I’ve interviewed job applicants before—many of them right out of college.  And here’s a piece of advice: as much as we all love and respect Tolstoy, Dickens, and James Joyce, citing them as what you’ve read recently doesn’t do much for me.  I’d much rather hear your opinions on Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson, or Malcolm Gladwell.

Who are your greatest influences?
Pixar, comic books, my parents, Michael Chabon, Billy Wilder.  Not necessarily in that order.

Complete this sentence: if it weren’t for _____ I never would have gotten my foot in the door.
If it weren’t for persistence, I never would have gotten my foot in the door.  I sent my resume to Random House for about 6 months before anyone called me back!

How much do you read?
I typically read about 2-3 books a week.  Sometimes more, sometimes less.  I’m always reading on the train—usually work stuff in the morning and something lighter in the evening.  I read at my desk when I can, but I’m usually dealing with emails, factsheets, catalog and cover copy, reader reports, etc. so it’s not that often.  I read a lot of newsy/politics/pop culture blogs in the morning and at night.  And I try and read for pleasure so I can remember why I got into this business in the first place!

What surprised you most about the getting published process?
How hard it is!  Even if you know tons of people in the industry and have written a great book, there’s no guarantee.  It’s so subjective that you really need to get the book into the hands of the right reader, otherwise you’ll be told “It’s not right for me.”  That’s why I always tell aspiring writers to get an agent!  They know the landscape and will get the book into the right hands.

What is paperback editorial like? How does it differ from hard cover editorial?
The cool thing about paperbacks is that we have a precedent to work from.  At Vintage, when we prepare to publish a paperback, we look at how the hardcover did.  Sometimes it was such a success that we just keep the cover, plaster the back with tons of great quotes, and publish as is.  But a lot of times, something didn’t quite click in hardcover – timing, package, etc. and we need to rethink it.  And that’s the fun part.  We get a new cover, find some positive quotes, get a new afterword if appropriate, put it out in the summer instead of the fall, and try something new.  It doesn’t always work, but the new energy and creativity is invigorating.