All hope is lost for America. We should be clear about that. Because of a supreme court decision in June 2008 there will be no gun control. We will continue to use drugs and fight drugs and destroy Mexico. We will continue to deny that our military is making us and the world less safe. We will continue to believe guns makes us safer at home. We will continue to be bad environmental citizens. We will continue to believe big corporations are basically good as they invent new ways to fuck us and threaten economic collapse. The working class will continue to vote against themselves by voting republican, etc. It's a mess, and I've left. The problem is that we can't have a self-critical debate and so can't improve.

Palin can amaze in her ability to deny or be oblivious to the obvious.

She was just a nasty republican trick, putting a woman on the ticket and pretending she was a maverick as she actually was a right-wing automaton.

I have that same ambivalent relationship. I feel and believe I will find my goodness and innocence through immersion in nature, believing the romantic dream, but I also know it's not true, and my novels are often about the failure of that dream, with nature offering only a mirror rather than Eden.

I think this is mostly because of the obnoxious right wing talk radio stations, which bring the level of debate so low. The right wing in America denies science and fact and just shouts.

I think a life not listening to politicians is a better life.

So many, but Blood Meridian most of all. Really Canterbury Tales if I could go back farther.

My home now is New Zealand. I have a house there and love everything about New Zealand.

But my books are moral anyway. In Goat Mountain, the boy gains empathy and no longer wants to kill. Dirt is a warning of how philosophy can lead to barbarity.

Haut et Court, a great French production company, are making Legend into a film (probably titled Sukkwan Island but folding in the stories, too.

Ben Hervey is the screenwriter, from Oxford, and he's brilliant. I've spent a lot of time with him now and am so happy he's doing it.

I think that was part of the problem, and having suicide in the title, and the odd structure with the novella framed by 5 stories.

Generic hybridization (blending different kinds of stories together) and an overall debate in style and content from which the author disappears. We have no idea what he thought about anything, but we have this rich debate.

It's my best writing and the most literary or poetic in the language, so it wasn't going to be published. My former US publisher refused it, and other publishers have refused it also, but De Bezige Bij has been very supportive.

It's set 3,250 years ago and is a sympthetic and realistic portrait of her

I would like that world. I really do want the world to be ruled by women. Much safer and better for all of us.

I love the carnival that develops when a stranger comes to town in his stories.

I recommend the stories that build to and include the Erendira novella.

I am in how I see and understand the world, and I had workshops with Adrienne Rich and Grace Paley and others. And 4 out of 7 books of fiction I've written are from women's points of view. But because I'm a man and really like sex, I don't believe I can ever call myself a feminist. I think the position is impossible.

All best,
David

Yes, I have read quite a few others. It's such a rich and great literature.