Literary critic and interviewer extraordinaire Larry McCaffery recently published his fourth volume of interviews, Some Other Frequency (University of Pennsylvania Press). In conversations with Kathy Acker, David Antin, Lydia Davis, Kenneth Gangemi, Marianne Hauser, Lyn Hejinian, Harold Jaffe, Robert Kelly, Richard Kostelanetz, Mark Leyner, Clarence Major, Derek Pell, Gerald Vizenor and William T. Vollmann, McCaffery discovers that the so-called "death of the novel" is really a Big Bang of rebirth, exploding what Leyner calls "traditional, mimetic, plotted narratives" into a scattered universe of innovative literary forms, which attempt to convey reality as we really live it.
As McCaffery says in the book's introduction:
My collaborators and I began interviewing these fourteen "radically innovative" American authors in 1987 and have continued our interrogations even as this manuscript is going to press. For most of this period my working title for this volume was "Interviews with Fiction Writers of the Postmodern Avant-Garde," and although I subsequently decided that this title was misleading on several accounts, it nonetheless provides a generally accurate sense of what sorts of authors I wanted to include in this volume -- namely, those working outside the usual conventions of traditional realism (usually far outside) who had produced works I judged to be of superior quality. In particular, I was interested in having these authors discuss a crucial series of concepts and tropes -- including "textuality," "defamiliarize," "narrative," the "I" narrator, "realism," "history," "reality," "originality," "collaboration," "invention," "appropriation," "authority," "representation," and others that struck me as being central to our current understanding of what the term "fiction" means at this point, what its boundary line are, how and where these lines have expanded or contracted, and for what reasons.
Larry McCaffery has published three prior volumes of interviews: Anything Can Happen (with Tom LeClair), Alive and Writing (with Sinda Gregory) and Across the Wounded Galaxies. He is the editor of the influential Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, and of After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology. McCaffery is Professor of English at San Diego State University.