“It’s harder to build a body of work slowly, over time…without a million little snap judgments all along the way. While in the past those snap judgments would evaporate, now they’re preserved in digital amber,” notes Greenman. He says we should stop fretting over “print/electronic opposition” and focus on the more crucial issues of authority, frequency and identity, which persist in every medium.

Greenman approached the writing of his novel with a journalist’s M.O., researching the bejesus out of the book’s subject, funk music. But regardless of genre, his intention is the same: “If I’m writing a ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ for the New Yorker, a current-events musical for its website, a literary short story or a book, I’m always thinking about the same themes: creative parentage, emotional fidelity, how people connect and disconnect, the uses of delusion, and the importance of making the world superficially comic to hold off the things about it that are profoundly tragic.”

Do you share Eli’s fascination with extinct languages? Is there one where the disappearance strikes you as particularly poignant?

I do share Eli’s fascination with extinct languages. What strikes me as particularly poignant isn’t so much the loss of any one specific language, but the way in which so many of them die: in the end, after decades of gradual attrition, it often comes down to one last speaker. When that last speaker dies, the language dies with them.

There was a particularly heartbreaking quote in The New York Times that I read a few years back—the reporter had gone to the Amazon to interview Natalia Sangama, the last woman who spoke a language called Chamicuro. She told the reporter, “I dream in Chamicuro, but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone. Some things cannot be said in Spanish. It’s lonely being the last one.”

You lived in Montreal briefly before coming to New York. Was your experience there as disheartening as Eli’s or Michaela’s? (And while we’re on the subject, how’s your French?)

My French, regrettably, is virtually non-existent, although I’m very good at saying “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French” and “A bowl of cafe au lait, please” en francais. I consider this both a personal failing and a gap in my education; French is a required subject in Canadian schools, but I was homeschooled as a child and never picked up the language, and I grew up in a region (the west coast) where almost no one speaks French. When I arrived in Montreal, I’d only heard French spoken in passing maybe five or six times.

As the casual reader of my novel might guess, my experience in Montreal wasn’t overwhelmingly pleasant. I’d been under the impression that Montreal was a bilingual city and that therefore I could get by in English for a few months while I learned French. This turned out not to be the case.

What are you working on these days?

I actually just sold my second novel to Unbridled Books, which is tremendously exciting; I’ve loved working with them on Last Night in Montreal, and it’s a joy to have the opportunity to work with them on a second project. I’ve been working on revising the second novel; it’s called The Singer’s Gun, and it’ll come out in spring 2010. I’ve started writing my third novel, but only barely.