Featured Interview With Steven Fraccaro
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in New York City and have lived there most of my life. I lived downtown for many years, first in Tribeca, when it was mainly warehouses, egg wholesalers, and artists. Now it’s all investment bankers. Then I lived in the East Village when it still had the last of its bohemian edge and we used to stay up all night. Now I’m back uptown in this madhouse of a city, still trying to survive.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I became fascinated with books around the age of seven, if not before. The first book with full text that I remember reading was “The Gods of Mount Olympus.” This was written by Robert Penn Warren, the poet and literary critic, and was part of a series of mythology books for children. These were originally published by Random House in the late 1950s and have since become collectors items.
Later, what really got me interested in writing was reading Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Joyce, Eliot and Yeats when I was fifteen to eighteen years old. After that, there was no turning back. Later on, it was Proust and Henry James.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
To be honest, I’m more interested in British and European novelists than in Americans at this point. This causes a certain problem when approaching agents and publishers, but I can’t say that bothers me enormously. The greatest lasting influence is probably Borges, who I always come back to. I first read him in a college Spanish class, but now I read him in English. “Funes el Memorioso” was the first of his stories we read. I love “The Aleph” and “A New Refutation of Time,” among others. And I much prefer the old Grove Press translations by Anthony Kerrigan and Alastair Reid to the newer Penguin translations, which aren’t bad, but seem to lack something. For anyone who’s interested, the best place to start is probably “A Personal Anthology,” from Grove Press.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
“The Recalcitrant Scrivener” is currently being offered for free download for a couple of days each month. This is a short collection of essays about writing literary fiction in the age of the web. And about the publishing industry, which currently appears to be in a state of crisis, a crisis I pretty much predicted five years ago when the first of the essays appeared. There are also pieces on vampires, on poets, and on trying to earn a living as a writer. All important topics.
My major work to date is the novel “Dark Angels: A Novel of the Future Past.” This was written a number of years ago, but only published recently. It’s a strange sort of book, subtly dystopian, not really science fiction, even though it’s set in a near future. It involves various sorts of mind control, surveillance, and an agent who is forced against his will to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. One might say these are clichés, ideas that might be found in a Philip K. Dick novel, which is true, but I’ve twisted them, made them internal, and taken them somewhere else. It’s a book to read late at night.
Remember, writing is a way of defining the world.
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