One advantage of living in a pleasant and inexpensive European capital is that people want to visit you. Another, that there is access to the Internet. Neither paves the road of novel-finishing, and so the American writer Helen DeWitt decided to leave Berlin two years ago, taking with her a toothbrush and laptop. A series of stays in the small towns and writers’ colonies of the American eastern seaboard ended this September in New York, where she now spends afternoons at Artists Space gallery in SoHo, writing at a long white table. The light is plentiful and clean, and she can ride the elevator down to smoke, every so often, on the bubbly cobblestones of Greene Street. There’s even room for her library. Under the banner of The Library Vaccine, Artists Space presents discrete collections of various writers’ books. DeWitt’s just arrived from Germany accompanied by an impressive catalogue: Having your library indexed from Albersmeier to Zweig is what you get when you sublet to Berlin artists “for a couple months,” then vanish for two years. DeWitt says she could go back if she could sell another novel. I ask if that’s what she’s working on. “No,” she says.
The rest here.