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RABIH
ALAMEDDINE
 What's
on my desk? Clutter, more clutter, and damn clutter.
I have changed desks and continents (San Francisco
to Beirut), but the clutter follows me. I am working
on a novel, but have been stuck for a while. I have
about 100 pages. I have the story, the plot, everything
but the structure, and without structure, all I
have is clutter.
JONATHAN
AMES
I'm working on my new novel, Wake Up, Sir!
It's about two-thirds done, and is an homage — at
least in my mind — to P.G. Wodehouse. An anthology
I've put together of the memoirs of transsexuals,
tentatively titled Sexual Metamorphosis — though
The Book of Sex Changes would also be
good — still needs editing work. And a collection
of my essays is in the computer, dormant, with
such possible working titles as: Everybody
Dies in Memphis or I Love You More Than
You Know. Also on my desk is Eric Bogosian's
one-man play Notes From Underground,
which I need to learn since I'll be performing
it for the whole month of May at PS 122 in New
York City, with Eric Bogosian as my director,
so I had better not try to change any words.
ROBERT
MAILER ANDERSON
Aside from generally "trying to create a revolution
during my lifetime," on the writing front, I just
finished an article about "Guys' Night at the San
Francisco Opera" for San Francisco Magazine
that's a shameless promotional piece.
Mostly, I'm working on my second novel, Jackson
Stone, which is about personal hypocrisy,
gambling, coffee jocks, and the search for love
here at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
It's a blend between a Philip Roth unreliable
narrator's rant (God, I wish I wrote The Human
Stain) and a Charles Willeford noir. It's
supposed to be fast-paced, dark, funny, taking
place in the North Beach and Tenderloin neighborhoods
of San Francisco.
Somehow, constructing the minor characters in
this novel, I'm working through my love for Joseph
Mitchell. I'm also taking notes for another novel,
a sort of updated Great Gatsby, set in
San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I'm certain
a Larry Ellison-type guy will be a major character,
and somehow I'll make him sympathetic.
And I'm almost done with my first play, The
Death of Teddy Ballgame, which is where I
pour all my 9/11 and daily New York Times
headline angst that doesn't belong in Jackson
Stone. Unabashedly stealing from O'Neil, Mamet,
Sartre, and Beckett, I've got a group of men gathered
in a coffee shop a couple of days after the apocalypse,
wondering if it's safe to drink the coffee, discussing
how they intend to survive nuclear fallout, radiation,
small pox, anthrax, SARS II, roaming bands of
marauders, no movies or ESPN, and other horrors,
and whether or not it's even worth surviving.
It's a comedy.
And lastly, I'm working on a screenplay with my
cousin Zack called Pig Hunt that takes
place in the hills outside of a small town like
Boonville. It's a creepy cross between The
Blair Witch Project and Deliverance,
with a little Jaws thrown in. The tag line
is "Think BIG, think PIG!" You get the picture.
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Boonville
by Robert Mailer Anderson |
AIMEE
BENDER
 I
am working on an as-of-yet untitled novel from the
point of view of a teenage boy. Violence, guilt,
shame, glee? Disturbed kids on the brick wall, Nevada,
debate club, animals. Germany, vice principals,
plastic cubes and mayors.
KEVIN
BROCKMEIER
Right now I'm spending most
of my time working on a novel called The Brief
History of the Dead, but I'm also answering
last-minute queries about a novel called The
Truth About Celia, which is coming out this
summer, and cleaning up a children's novel called
Grooves; or, The True-Life Outbreak of Weirdness.
And I'm reading, of course — currently On
Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch.
MICHAEL
CHABON
 I
am working on a novel, working title Hotzeplotz.
It's set in the Alaskan panhandle, in the
present day, in the territory that was opened to
the Jewish refugees of Europe, after Congress passed
the King-Havenner Bill of 1940, for settlement during
WWII. The precarious balancing act of this Yiddish-speaking
nation-within-a-nation is imperiled by the discovery
of a mysterious skull in a construction site, and
the novel unfolds as its protagonist, a homicide
detective named Meyer Landsman, investigates. "Hotzeplotz"
is the name of a real town in the Ukraine or someplace
but it's used in the Yiddish expression "from
here to Hotzeplotz," meaning more or less
the back of nowhere, Bumfuck, Iowa, the ends of
the earth.
MEGHAN
DAUM
As for what's on my desk, seeds of both a second
novel and a sesame bagel I ate weeks ago, a yoga
class schedule I have never consulted, discarded
pages of the screenplay adaptation of my first
novel, The Quality of Life Report. Note
to screenwriters: when you get to page 163, move
the wastebasket closer.
KEN
FOSTER
I've been trying to write about Costa Rica ever
since I spent three months living there, two years
ago. I'd mapped out a collection of stories inspired
by the country, and the people I'd met there,
but nobody wants a collection of stories, they
want a novel. So I spent some time — too much
time — trying to force a big, melodramatic
arc on the thing. It didn't work, so I broke that
back down into stories and found myself staring
at the outline I had written in a notebook in
Costa Rica. There's so much life in Costa Rica
that you can't avoid death, even if you're just
going for a walk to the market. The story I'm
working on first will probably be the last in
the book. A woman in physical pain, high on pain-killers,
travels to Puerto Viejo and thinks that the wild
horses are trying to guide her. I took pictures
of the horses there, in the middle of the night,
with a Lomo. The exposures were so long that the
colors blurred into brushstrokes. That's the way
this character sees them.
PAULA
FOX
 I
am working on stories set in eastern Europe where
I spent time right after World War II, along with
some older stories. I hope to put together a collection.
LAURA
FRASER
Right now, I have a novel percolating,
which I'm not going to talk about, because it's
my first novel and so I feel like I'm falling
off a cliff, although I suppose I do have little
bitty wings. Other than that, I'm working on a
piece for Organic Style about Fair Trade
coffee, for which I traveled to Costa Rica and
Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, in particular, I was
moved by what a difference it makes to pay coffee
farmers (mostly ex-Sandinistas) a fair price for
their coffee, although I'm not sure American consumers
are going to be willing to pay a few cents more
per cup to know that they're helping leftist Central
American farmers. I'm also writing an essay for
O the Oprah magazine about a book list
I have kept since I was thirteen years old (after
a summer reading contest at the library). I'm
doing a "Hellraiser" column for Mother Jones,
and an essay for More magazine about
how women in midlife are once again vulnerable
to being duped by the pseudo-science of diets,
just when we should be grown up enough to accept
the fact that real women have asses and thighs.
I just finished a piece for Gourmet about
a funky restaurant I ate at on Taha'a in Tahiti,
and I'm doing research for a feature I'm writing
for them about one of my favorite places in Italy.
DAVID
GATES
These days it's all about short
stories. I'm completely in love with the form,
and I hope a year from now to have a collection
done. I've just yanked back a story that had been
scheduled for magazine publication in June; it
wasn't anywhere near ready. I might have tried
to rethink and rework it on short notice — god
knows how — but luckily I had a better one
to substitute. I've got half a dozen more kicking
around waiting to be born. Some are thirty-odd
pages and still unrealized, others aren't much
more than a title, a couple of lines, and a feeling.
For the past few years, I've also had a hundred
or so pages of fragments of a novel, but I want
to have made much more progress with the stories
before I begin trying to make that work — if
I ever do. Right now I'm not much in love with
the novel as a form. Meanwhile, I've got my regular
editing and writing duties at Newsweek, I'm teaching,
and I have several nonfiction projects: an introduction
and notes for Donald Barthelme's 60 Stories,
long overdue but almost done — an essay on
cutting and splitting wood for a forthcoming anthology,
an essay on Jimmy Olson comics for another forthcoming
anthology, and an anthology of my own: fiction
set in the workplace.
GLEN
DAVID GOLD
 From
left to right: stacks of 3x5 cards with cryptic
comments about the next book, some of them taped
to my printer and monitor ("All they can do now
is amuse me with their sufferings" — Wilton
Barnhardt); an empty tin of Marco Polo tea which
was full before I started working on the next book;
letterhead, postcards, bills, invitations, office
supplies, computer equipment; an eighteen-inch-tall
flamingo with feathered headdress, that's actually
a pen, given to me by my friend Leila of Operation
Smile, because she felt I needed something of proper
dignity to sign books; Meshell Ndegeocello's Bitter
and a stack of Glenn Gould CDs; some archival CD-ROM
documentaries that relate obliquely to the next
book; a shot glass from the Madonna Inn next to
a stuffed "Death" doll from The Sandman
(for ages eight and up); a peace symbol that I made
when I was age eight; a 1920s 9.5 mm Pathe Baby
film I won off of eBay that may or may not relate
to the next book, depending on whether I can find
a projector to make it work; more 3x5 cards listing
all the things I haven't done (repair our car's
back bumper, which I damaged when doing a three-point
turn into a retaining wall, apologize to many people
for many things); a framed manuscript page from
Lynda Barry's Cruddy, on which she has painted
a fierce-looking mysterious farm animal; a box of
Altoids on which rests ashes remaining from a cone
of green tea incense; a huge and unkempt file of
newspaper clippings, photocopies, auction catalogues,
photographs, xeroxes of posters and images, all
of which relate to some extent to the next book;
a 50,000 dong note sent to me by an adventure racer
in Vietnam as an informal royalty for the copy of
Carter Beats the Devil that she sold at
a bar in (I think) Denang; a hygrometer; a thirteen-year-old,
sixteen-pound tortoiseshell cat named Batgirl who
sleeps in a basket under a poem my wife wrote about
Batgirl's intense and very passionate cross-animate
love affair with the garden hose.
DANIEL
HANDLER
 I
have a large desk. It used to be a doctor's examining
table, I'm told. On it are pages from a book I'm
finishing which is somewhere between a novel and
a collection of short stories. The book is about
love, and accordingly there are some books I'm using
as research, one on magpies and three children's
books about volcanoes, as well as two legal pads
on which the book is being written. Also, there
is a pile of notes and manuscript from the new Snicket
book I'm working on, a copy of a play by Don DeLillo
which I might adapt for film, pages from an index
I'm rewriting (long story), a fax from someone about
a new literary magazine, a small box I stole from
my college library where I keep business cards,
an iPod somebody gave me for Christmas, a coaster
from a favorite bar (Would you believe?), a toy
chimney sweep from my childhood, a bright red bowl
of thumbtacks, a photograph of my wife and me, my
computer, a Mexican folk-art triptych thing I use
for holding paperclips, three paperweights, a metal
can full of pens and pencils, four unsharpened pencils
rolling around loose, a piece of paper with "Richard
Thompson, mariachi band" written on it to remind
me about something, a glass of water with no ice
in it, a 1950s typewriting instructional tool, one
more pencil which makes five unsharpened pencils
rolling around loose, and the new double CD by The
Clean, Anthology, which I'm really loving.
Right now the song "Whatever I do is right" is playing.
ADAM
HASLETT
On my desk right now are mostly
law schoolrelated projects: a series of interviews
about how Republicans managed to convince Congress
that it should repeal the estate tax, despite
the fact that it effects only two percent of the
population, those being the very wealthy. Depressing
reading, but an insight into how the lobbying
machine works in Washington. I'm also working
on an essay about the history of the legal treatment
of suicide. No more cheery I'm afraid, but at
least the gravity is a bit closer than taxes to
questions of ultimate ignificance.
JOANNA
HERSHON
 My
desk is covered with pretty obscure and mostly falling-apart
books on the Jewish population in Santa Fe at around
the turn of the century, because I got it into my
head — after hearing about a friend's great-great-grandfather
— that I needed to write my third novel about
this. My friend's great-great-grandfather came from
Germany and found himself a young bride who agreed
on accompanying him to America but insisted on having
a grand piano, and so they traveled across the country
by covered wagon with the grand piano in tow. The
extravagance and ridiculousness of this endeavor
appeals to me greatly — even if a mute Holly
Hunter and the perennially naked Harvey Keitel do
tend to spring to mind. So I'm reading these books
(that basically cover the boring business endeavors
of a few prominent families — no juicy bits
as of yet) and I'm attempting to start the novel,
which seems to want to be an absolutely modern story
about a bad father and a series of screwed-up marriages.
I'm hoping to sort all this out over the next couple
of years.
PICO
IYER
A few years ago, when America
was basking in unprecedented prosperity, and computers
were being hailed as the unacknowledged legislators
of mankind, I decided I needed to visit the poorest
countries in each corner of the planet, much as
I had earlier visited most of the countries covered
by the Department of Treasury's "Trading with
the Enemy" act (assuming that they were the ones
I would never hear about, or never hear truths
about, at home). And so I went to Yemen, to Haiti
and Bolivia, to Camdodia and Laos and Ethiopia
and Tibet, and in the process went into strange
and unexplored places in myself, jetlagged, 12,000
feet above the sea, light-headed and unsettled.
This series of journeys into the subconscious,
or at least into the areas of our lives where
we lose all sense of orientation, and don't know
right from left (or right from wrong) — which
stops off to meditate at a Zen temple with Leonard
Cohen and to talk about suffering and hope with
the Dalai Lama — should be out next year.
The real project that is consuming me now, however,
is writing a whole novel in the voice of a woman
(and seeing the world through the eyes of someone
as different from me, I suspect, as an Inuit or
a Nepali). A traveler, I always think, is someone
who is not so much interested in exotic destinations,
as in the pull of the unknown, and the mingled
fascination of the Other. So my great adventure
currently is voyaging into the other gender and
trying to see the world I know from the other
side of the bedroom.
DANIEL
MASON
 On
my desk (actually the dining room table — I
just moved), I have The African Religions of
Brazil and Epitaph of a Small Winner
by Machado de Assis (my next book takes place in
Brazil), a Portguese-English dictionary, and a lot
of opened CD cases. I should be reading more of
the former, but mostly end up listening to the latter.
Alas, Brazil...
HARRY
MATHEWS
I'm revising a memoir of the
early seventies: how I got stuck with a CIA rep
and what I eventually did about it.
RICK
MOODY
At the moment, I'm banging the
big rounded part of my forehead against a brick
wall repeatedly over a new novel having something
to do with television, independent film production,
and dowsing. The bloodshed part is going well,
if not the novel writing part.
ROBERT
OLMSTEAD
I'm working on a relentlessly
bleak and terminally sad novel set in late 19th-century
northern Quebec. Some days it goes okay and some
days it doesn't.
STEWART
O'NAN
 I'm
about two-thirds through a first draft of a novel
about a woman who's waiting for her husband to get
out of prison. He's doing twenty-five-to-life for
second-degree murder, and the book follows her from
his arrest to the moment she feels he's really back
home with her and the two of them are truly together
again. So in a way it's a romance that also follows
her necessary and difficult movement from innocence
to experience. Unlike prison life itself, which
attracts tons of media coverage, being a family
member on the outside is a hidden world, and because
of that, I think the book has a large non-fiction
component, realistically laying out for the reader
what it's like. So I'm doing a lot of research,
talking with women in that situation and figuring
out the arcane and frustrating ways of the New York
State Courts and Department of Corrections. Another
six or seven months and I hope to have a draft together.
At that point I'll show the manuscript to the women
I've been talking with to see if what I've written
mirrors their experiences.
ANN
PACKER
On my desk are bank statements, refinancing documents,
birthday party invitations, a summer camp application
for my son, a folder full of EOBs (Explanation
of Benefits, that is) from our health insurance
company, a list of phone numbers from a place
where I got an amazing massage so that I can try
to find the artist who painted this exquisite
scene of Venice that was hanging in the bathroom,
the latest schedule of classes from the place
where I do yoga, some return address labels with
my name that I got from the American Diabetes
Association, a booklet of coupons to make monthly
payments to my daughter's orthodontist, and my
laptop. On my laptop, where I seek refuge from
the other items on my desk, is the beginning of
my new novel. It's set in the Bay Area, where
I live, and as I have in the past tended to write
about places where I used to live, I'm
adapting to the pleasures and pressures of having
the world in my mind reflect and be reflected
by the world outside.
SUSAN
SHREVE
I have a stack of books on one
side of my desk for a novel I hope to finish this
summer called A Student of Living Things
— about a student of evolutionary biology who
until this narrative begins has collected only dead
things. There's Darwin and Lewis Thomas and a basic
biology text which I'm not quite equal to understanding
and my personal favorite, Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice
to All Creation by Olivia Judson, which is a
funny, informative book about the outlandish sexual
behavior of the animal kingdom — an indulgence
since the humor in my book is dark, not raucous.
On the other side of the desk is a novel called
Geography of a Marriage which was due last
June and I keep beside me as a reminder to be vigilant
since sometime in the course of the three years
it took me to write that book, I fell out of love
— and like the end of most love affairs didn't
realize it until too late and so withdrew the book.
And I'm doing the final edits on a children's novel
out in January called Under the Watsons' Porch
— a first love story.
ZADIE
SMITH
 My
desk is covered with school work. I'm taking a class
on Jane Austen and Henry James, and a class on literary
theory. In between I'm writing a book of essays
on the novel. The subtitle of the book is "Essays
on Fiction and Failure"; the essays are concerned
with the ethical impulse in fiction as I find it
expressed in the 20th century novel. At the moment
I'm working on the introduction and the first chapter.
That's about E.M. Forster. Basically, the book is
a very gentle exploration of a suggestion of Iris
Murdoch's: That the literary impulse and the impulse
towards the Good fail and succeed along similar
lines. It's an old fashioned book in that way; it
suggests that elements of a novel that we would
describe as aesthetic failures are actually ethical
failures also. Some of the other writers in the
collection are Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Updike,
Vonnegut, Salinger, Kingsley Amis, David Foster
Wallace. And there's one poet in there as sort of
epilogue — Philip Larkin. I made a decision
to only work on the writers I love. There comes
a point where it becomes exhausting to continue
pretending that A Room With a View is not
your favorite novel.
LYNNE
TILLMAN
I'm working on a novel called American Skin
— on sensitivity and insensitivity, Americans,
history, animals, friends, enemies, food, etc. etc.
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