Early in September, Christopher Glazek and I spent a long, pleasant afternoon interviewing Helen DeWitt. Helen had arrived in New York a few days earlier, about a month before her latest novel, Lightning Rods, was to be released by New Directions. There were miles of book tour events to be traveled before she slept,…

JENNY DAVIDSON: Here’s one sentence that caught my eye early on, as your protagonist Joe’s first trial of his sexual-release program for high-performing employees leads him to tweak the product he’s offering: “It meant another head-to-head with Beginning Programming for Dummies, but the thing that separates the sheep from the goats is the willingness to…

David K. Israel: As I understand it, you actually finished this manuscript for Lightning Rods before completing and publishing The Last Samurai. Sounds like an interesting story for aspiring novelists. What happened there? The whole saga here.  

One of the most exciting literary events this fall is the publication of Helen DeWitt’s long-anticipated second novel, Lightning Rods. DeWitt, a Maryland-born polymath, is best known as the author of The Last Samurai, the story of a boy genius who sets off in search of his missing father. Sam Anderson called that book “the…

Even beyond incorporation of the film, you use a lot of Japanese language—among many others—in your book. Have you studied? Many years ago, in London, I came across a book by Murakami Haruki whose English title is “A Wild Sheep Chase” (Hitsuji o meguru boken). I loved this book. I read somewhere that Murakami had…

“Your Name Here is a book that feels profoundly of-the-moment: it documents how we read online in the early years of the twenty-first century. Bertrand Russell praised Stefan Themerson’s novel Bayamus as being “nearly as mad as the world,” which feels entirely apropos to Your Name Here, nearly as mad as the Internet.” Dan Visel…

“A Softer World is a comic that was created by Emily Horne and Joey Comeau so that people would recognize them as important artistic geniuses.”  It is in the tradition of Simenon, not Schultz. EH takes photographs for which JC writes captions with a sting in the tail. Joey: Suicide is often associated with mental…