Activity

ozick: [Resumes typing] The Modernist Dream. I recently did a review of William Gaddis and talked about his ambition—his coming on the scene whenit was alreadytoo late to be ambitious in that huge way with a vast modernist novel. But I was ambitious that way too. I no longer believe in Literature, …

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the feeling of first publication?

ozick: I was thirty-seven years old. I had the baby and the galleys together, and I sat at my desk—the same desk I use now, the same desk I inherited from my brother when I was eight years old—correcting the galleys with my right ha…

INTERVIEWER: Whatsustained you without publication during that period?

OZICK: Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature. I had a youthful arrogance about my“powers,” and at the same time a …

[...] That, in fact, was one reason Ezra became interested in Mussolini. He knew that Mussolini was an intelligent, rather cultivated man. He’d been a Socialist journalist. Ezra hoped that Mussolini would throttle the banks and could be converted into a patron of arts and letters. You remember the …

[...] I’ve thought quite a lot about the issue of fiction and journalism as two possible ways of presenting realities of life, particularly such harsh ones as we’ve encountered in my lifetime. Fiction is the more attractive to me, because if a novelist succeeds, he can enable the reader to identify…