Millhauser
November 18th, 2004If you haven’t guessed by now, the picture to the right isn’t me; it’s Pulitzer Prize winning writer Steven Millhauser. Here’s a snippet from an interview by Jim Shepard (a great writer himself):
js: Don Juan in “An Adventure of Don Juan,” the second novella in The King in the Tree, longs for “a madness of desire, a journey into feeling so intense that he would ride through himself like a conqueror of unknown inner countries.” Is that what fiction should enable?
sm: I’m fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another. I do know what I want from fiction. I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way. But that said, yes, the journey into intense feeling and the conquest of unknown emotional territory is something fiction can make possible.