Interview with Eric Larsen
Literary Titan on The Book of Reading
The Past, Present and Future Are All One
LT: The Book of Reading follows two people 32 years apart in age, who travel through time to try and change history and wind up falling in love. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
EL: I think the inspiration for The Book of Reading may have been time itself, with its many mysteries—something very possibly true for all my novels. In the case of The Book of Reading, there was a specific real-life moment that remained with me—has remained with me—for sixty years.
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Atmosphere Press Presents: A Reading with Eric Larsen, Jeff Kirchick, and Cynthia Reevese Schiller Institute (Feb 2024)
Join Atmosphere Press for a reading and discussion with Eric Larsen (The Book of Reading), Jeff Kirchick (How Boys Learn), and Cynthia Reeves (Falling Through the New World).
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HOW DO YOU READ A NOVEL Parts 1(1967) & 2 (2006)
This piece of writing has a rather long history. I submitted its “Part I” for credit in an 18th Century English literature course at the University of Iowa in either the fall term of 1967-68 or the spring term of 1968-69. That essay was highly praised but nevertheless languished unseen until the middle 1990’s, when I brought it back into the light and brushed it off but failed nevertheless to find any place for its publication. Then came—as readers of Part 2 will find—my second novel (I Am Zoë Handke) and the remarkably divergent readers’ reactions to it, from near-adoration to near-repugnance. This bifurcation—and an explanation for its existence—became the subject of the essay’s “Part II” as the essay emerged as a kind of companion-piece to my 2006 book, A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.
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Interview with Eric Larsen
On the occasion of the Publication of A Nation Gone Blind (2006)
What I saw was that these were people who’d gone blind. They thought they were seeing actual truths about the nature of their existing inside of existence and thought they were then making meaningful observations about those truths. . . . But in actuality, they were seeing nothing beyond pre-fabricated abstractions and, about those, they were saying nothing. They had gone blind, “seeing” a false reality and taking it as a real reality.
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The Schiller Institute (June 2014) ‘Art Emotion’ versus Political Correctness
Sometime around 1991, maybe September 17th, I'm not sure, the world went dead around me, the literary world died. . . .
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Interview: People Who Know Stuff with Adam Engel (2014)
PART 1
The reason that a person does write the kind of stuff I was reading—and learning to write—is because it’s a secret. It’s a secret language, which is the way it’s telling the truth in a situation where that truth more likely than not is taboo.
Interview: People Who Know Stuff with Adam Engel (2014)
PART 2
. . .but their subversion is what makes them stay alive, is what makes them interesting, fascinating, to a thinking person who reads them six to eight, ten times during a lifetime.
Interview with Eric Larsen | BookView Review (2023)
But have I learned to know what I’m doing? No. If I knew what I was doing I’d be, say, a carpenter, roofer, or plumber, not an author. An author has to invent what he or she is doing.
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CAN THE LITERARY LIFE STILL EXIST IN A POST-1984 NATION? (2009)
High school seniors, in 2008, look at a 1971 short story by Eric Larsen.