Steven Moore is the author of the new essay collection Last Time Around. His other books include The Novel: An Alternative History. He is a book critic and is the former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press.
Q: Most of the essays and reviews in your new collection were written in the past decade--do you see any changes in your writing from that period compared with previous decades?
A: Yes. My earliest critical writings were published in scholarly journals and by university presses, and thus were in standard academic mode. But beginning in the 1990s I started using a more conversational, journalistic style, so most of the recent essays and reviews are in that mode.
There are still some academic trappings here and there—scholarly footnotes, a bibliography or two—but the essays and reviews are closer to literary journalism than academic criticism.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Last Time Around is the third and final album by Buffalo Springfield (1968), which was a collection of odds and ends rather than a unified work, and their farewell as a group. My book is a similar round-up of odds and ends, and is my farewell to writing. I’ve been a critic for 50 years, and I’m pretty sure this will be my last book.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the pieces would appear in the book?
A: They are organized chronologically within each section, based on when they were first published. General essays come first, then a section of essays on my two favorite novelists (William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon), followed by book reviews, also arranged chronologically, as are the interviews that occupy the last third of the book.
Q: Of the various interviews included in the book, do you have a particular favorite?
A: I like the first one because it covers the most ground, from my family background and younger years, up to the time of the interview (2015). Taken together, that and the other interviews almost function as an autobiography, and may be more enjoyable for some readers than the essays and reviews.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Nothing. As I said, this may be my farewell to the writing profession.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: For the last two years I’ve been working with Tough Poets Press to publish new editions of the novels of J. P. McEvoy, written back in the late 1920s/early 1930s. We’ve done four of his six novels, and I hope we can do the final two over the next few years.
I have a website where I post new activities (https://www.stevenmoore.info/current.shtml), but it may be skimpy for the foreseeable future.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment