'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.
The last book I read was the book I've been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
I've tried to show in my most recent book, the 'Irresistible Fairytale', that in order to talk about any genre, particularly what we call simple genre - a myth, a legend, an anecdote, a tall tale, and so on - we really have to understand something about the origin of stories all together.
I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.