- - - - Copyright 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
- - - - Book 'Em: Five first-time authors to bookmark. (Writer Forecast) Interview, April, 2002, by Diane Baroni In these strange, unsettling times, the world needs fresh literary voices--writers who can illuminate and inspire as well as entertain. That's why we've chosen the five debut novelists and short-story writers featured here. Their visions are unique, often disorienting. They force us to see ourselves and others in startling new ways. An overwhelming emotional jolt is what they're after, which means they often break the rules. "I wanted the experience of reading it to be more like listening to music than what we normally think of as being the experience of reading a book," says Jonathan Safran Foer of his novel, Everything is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin). The book is based on a trip to the Ukraine Foer took the summer after his sophomore year at Princeton. He was searching for a woman who might be a link to the grandfather he never knew. "Originally, I'd planned to do something non-fictional, but that didn't work at all," the 25-year-old remembers. "But once I allowed myself to do what felt right, which was to fictionalize the story, I wrote 300 pages in a month." Short-story writer Marc Nesbitt, 30, author of Gigantic (Grove Press), often fictionalizes personal experiences, too. "Like my first day of temping for the state highway, I had to dispose of a big, dead deer. Or my first day of work at a bar, I had to clean puke out of a urinal. You get that stuff out of the way on the first day, the rest of it's cake." Sheila Heti, 25, author of The Middle Stories (McSweeney's Books) says her stories "come from a feeling that I want to write, not of wanting to write a particular thing." Maybe that's why Heti's work is so original. In one story, a young man falls in love with a beautiful monkey. The stories in 29-year-old Kevin Brockmeier's collection, Things That Fall From the Sky (Pantheon), make adult use of the fairy tales and other forms of storytelling--Bible stories, allegories, Mad Libs--he loved as a child growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas. "Very little of the material I actually use in my fiction is autobiographical," he says. "Maybe you could call it speculative autobiography. I imagine what my life might be like if I were in a certain circumstance or if I were able to return at a certain point and do everything right." Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints (Pantheon), about three generations of Dominican women, isn't autobiographical, either, although Rosario read a lot of history about her birthplace. "There was a point where I stopped and said, I need to get life into it, not get caught up in stuff like what was the brand name of a particular cigarette," she recalls. Song took her six years to write. "I don't like to write short. I like the messiness of novels," says the 30-year-old writer. These five writers approach their craft in different ways. Brockmeier writes every day for eight hours straight; Heti writes only when she feels like it. Most prefer solitude while working; Foer writes in the big reading room at the New York Public Library at 42nd and Fifth. But no matter where they do it, how they do it or what form their writing takes, these first-time authors share a crucial skill: The ability to take you to places you've never been before. Diane Baroni is a frequent Interview contributor. - - - -
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