Interview Roundup: Comfort Levels

Stephen Policoff speaks frankly about why his debut novel for adults, Beautiful Someplace Else, never quite took off last year despite the pedigree of the James Jones First Novel Fellowship; the editor who bought the book left his publisher before it came out and, he says, they pretty much gave up on him; "not that a quirky literary 1st novel by an unknown was likely to get a ton of attention anyway, but very very little was done to get the novel out to people who might write about it."

Meanwhile, I can't for the life of me figure out why the Engine Comics interview with Alan Moore prints the comic book master's responses in such a tiny default typeface, but if you jack it up a bit, Moore has some interesting reflections on writing, including the admission that during the writing of Watchmen, "I was going through one of my clever periods--probably emotional insecurity, I thought: 'People will laugh at me 'cos I'm doing superhero comics. I'd better make 'em really clever, then no one will laugh.'" There's also some hints about Lost Girls, which will bring Dorothy Gale, Wendy Darling, and Alice Liddell together in a Paris hotel just before World War One breaks out to tell each other more explicit versions of their stories than what the famous books have handed down to us for more than a century. And then in the back half of this lengthy chat, Moore gets all kabbalistic on the unsuspecting reader, then wanders back to comics...

Now, because The Believer has not put its dialogue between Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster on its web site, until you go out and buy that issue you'll have to make do with Auster's lunch date with Craig Offman of the Financial Times, which concludes on the observation that "along with William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, he is reportedly the most shoplifted novelist in New York." (Not Kerouac?) Auster isn't too impressed with himself, though: "We all just happen to be at the beginning of the alphabet."