Interviews

Kevin Brockmeier is the bestselling author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia. He is also the author of the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Best American Short Stories anthologies, to name a few. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

BP: Your novel The Brief History of the Dead is fairly compact (something like 252 pages). Leo Tolstoy's War & Peace, by contrast, is 1,465 pages in the 2006 paperback. Lately I noticed novels are trending shorter. So I wondered: Are there any benefits to writing a compressed story or novel? What -- if anything -- would those advantages be?

KB: I suppose that the shorter forms permit a clarity of line and allow for a more singular emotional effect than the longer ones do. As a reader, I find that there's a big difference between the books I'm capable of finishing in a single sitting, or at least a single day (although I actually did read Anna Karenina in one single marathon session when I was in grad school), and the books I have to absorb piece by piece over many days or weeks. And I have to say that many of the great big books that everyone celebrates as the crowning achievements of modern literature strike me as tedious and bloated and ultimately exhaust my patience.

Dennis Lehane is the bestselling author of Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. Mr. Lehane graciously agreed to take some time and answer a few questions for "Ask the Writer," including his thoughts on the movie business, his upcoming novel The Given Day (Sept. 2009), and whether there is in fact any hope for the aspiring novelist.

Just what does it take to make it as a writer? What are the perks and pitfalls of a writing life? And, perhaps most importantly, does Dennis Lehane hate ballpoint pens? Read on to find out.

Benjamin Percy is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf in 2009), and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007), and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction appears in Esquire, Men's Journal, the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. His honors include the Plimpton Prize and a Pushcart Prize. In 2008, he won received a Whiting Award. He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State.