Boldtype: How does journalism inform your fiction, or travel writing your playwriting? Do you identify more with one style than others, or is your writing a multi-genre dialogue?

Colm Tóibín: Journalism is good as training; better, maybe, than a creative-writing course. It teaches you to be clear, to know how to open and end a piece, and to be alert to the idea that writing is for the reader. But I think this works best when you’re in your 20s — your job is not to have your style, your prose, become flattened by work in a newsroom. I approach fiction with a greater sense of reverence than I do nonfiction. I write the novels in longhand; I would never do that with a travel book. I have a sense in fiction that I’m working with the music of words, the rhythms of sentences. I have only written one play, but it seemed to me to be the same process as writing fiction.

BT: How does traveling — and, through it, the experience of being an outsider — factor into your work?

CT: The best thing about traveling is coming home, bathing in the familiar. I suppose any writer is an outsider; you’re always watching and plotting, rather than participating. I spend a lot of time alone, whether in Ireland or elsewhere. More and more, I like having stability, having the day to myself. Even if I’m traveling, I like the idea that I have two rooms to work in during the day, and maybe spend most of the day, four or five days of the week, alone. You can hardly call that traveling.

BT: It has been said that the best English writers are Irish — but, whatever one’s opinion, there’s no denying that you come from an impressive literary legacy. As you see it, what is the significance of being qualified as an “Irish writer”?

CT: I think it’s important not to put a thought into it. I maybe am Irish, but I think I come more fundamentally from a town in Ireland, or a family in that town. I have been marked by the town and the family more than I have been by the country.

BT: In addition to being categorized as an Irish writer you’re also described as a gay writer. How do you react to these inevitable labels? Do you think they’re beneficial, or can they be alienating?

CT: I am also bald. I don’t notice a section on us in bookstores. I think you’re best to look at these labels as oddly comic. A few years ago, someone wrote to me to ask for comments about publishing and gay novelists. It was strange. I had been working so hard, and thinking only about my book, that I had forgotten I was gay. I think it’s easier to be gay on holidays, or at the weekend, or late at night, when you’re not otherwise busy.

BT: You recently quoted a friend as saying, “The biggest nightmare for a parent would be to have a novelist child.” Why would that be so hellish? How do you envision the role of the novelist?

CT: I think you watch things as a novelist, and remember things that other people might remember too, but not seriously. You end up putting structure on things that were unstructured, or putting real moments beside ones you’ve invented. For those who are close to you, this is often very difficult. Would you like your partner, who witnessed those first gasping fake orgasms of yours, to write it all down in a novel? Would you like your declining years in some facility to be charted greedily by your loving child and then published in the New Yorker, down to the last and most personal detail?

BT: Your subjects have ranged from Henry James to the city of Barcelona. What compelled you to write Brooklyn? Was this a story you had been plotting for a while, or is it based on real events?

CT: Someone told me the story when I was a teenager — just the bones of the story — and it stayed in my mind. It was all about “Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn,” and I didn’t think about it as a subject for a novel for many years. And then it came to me, clear and stark and waiting to be written down.

Related post: What’s in a Name: Brooklyn is So Over Anyway…

Boldtype: As a trained illustrator, did you ever consider having someone else write the text for Britten and Brülightly?

Hannah Berry: It’s quite an irrational hatred, but I’ve always harbored a suspicion of things written by committee. Obviously, if there’s more than one creator behind a project, then it’s understandable — and it’s a necessary concession in some areas, of course — but I don’t think comics and novels come into that. Too many cooks make a compromised, homogenized, insipid broth, to be eaten by people with no taste buds whatsoever. With a big plastic spoon. But anyway, all of that was irrelevant at the time: I wrote it myself because I enjoyed the writing too much to want to share it.

BT: Have you always had that writer’s impulse?

HB: As long as I can remember (and that’s pretty far, due to my being short on years and light on recreational drug use) I’ve enjoyed drawing and telling stories, and I used to do both at every opportunity. While studying illustration at university, I still crowbared narratives into every project I could — sometimes even managing to wrangle a comic out of the brief. By the time I came to the third and final year, though, I was bitter and frustrated by the whole thing. I suspect largely because I was a crap art student. When, one day, we were given an open brief to do whatever we needed to plug any artistic gaps in our portfolios, I seized the opportunity to write and illustrate a full-length comic, even though I knew I’d only really be marked on half of my work.

BT: With all that extra work, why the decision to hand paint, rather than draw, the panels in Britten and Brülightly?

HB: Masochism, most likely. It took so long to do, and I wondered every day if I’d made the right choice. But now that it’s finished, I’m glad I did it. The reason for even attempting it was, basically, that I wanted to copy the French. Their comics are often fully painted, and because of that, have an incredible visual depth. They look great, and are treated as a worthy art form. It was how I wanted my book to be. I hoped that the reader would see how much time I had invested in it, and maybe subconsciously lend it a level of respectability — something of the value automatically given to normal novels.

BT: Do you tend to think more visually or linguistically?

HB: I didn’t start drawing or painting the pages until everything was written. It turned out to be too complicated a plot to try and pin anything down before it was ready — a single alteration at one point in the narrative could have massive repercussions at a different point. It was like the different 1985s in Back to the Future Part II. The whole thing changed so often that there was no way I could even be happy with drawing the first page until the writing dust had settled.

Having said that, it’s much easier to write when you can see who exactly you are writing for, so the writing didn’t start in earnest until I’d designed the characters. Although I began the story proper with a written script, I found I was visualizing it as I was writing — sometimes the whole scene, other times just a detail or two. When I started drawing a page, I’d remember what I was imagining at the time of writing up to two years earlier and work from that.

BT: Did you have any help through the process?

HB: My university hired a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, Nigel Baldwin, who was tucked away in an office in case any of the art students started showing behavioral defects such as writing. He was brilliant. He was encouraging and enthusiastic, and, as a bonus, he used to be a writer on The Bill, and as such was adept at caulking crime stories. I couldn’t have brought my fledgling murder mystery to a better person.

BT: The story certainly has a lot of noir elements, but it still falls a little outside the genre.

HB: I do love noir, but I’m perhaps more of a fan of neo-noir — particularly films by Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and the like — and even more than that, of stories that have one foot in noir, and one foot elsewhere. The Coen Brothers, for instance, make films that have a lot of the tone of noir, and the furniture of noir, but are peopled by characters (fabulous, fabulous characters) that are largely rooted in the everyday, away from anything as melodramatic as noir. That’s ultimately what I was trying to achieve with mine — a story that sat in one camp but had its eyes on another. Cross-pollination is the best way forward.

BT: Was that why you made the story’s setting so ambiguous?

HB: I wanted the style and the atmosphere of the early ’40s, and the melancholy off-season tone and architectural tint of Brighton, where I live. The problem with the early ’40s is that the UK was far too busy with war to be worrying about anything else. War would have overshadowed the struggles of all the characters in the story and made them seem self-indulgent at best, comical at worst. I struggled for a while trying to choose between the weight of the story or the tone of the period, and eventually I gave up and went for both, selling my soul to a glaring historical omission.

That’s good news to anyone with an already-bulging purse (or man satchel), since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (even in paperback) can really put a physical strain on the constant and voracious reader. But for the skeptics, such as myself, all this can be a bit scary. I actually get a lot of pleasure in cracking a book’s binding for the first time. I even use a bookmark to preserve some of that pristine quality. Will the digital age of reading squeeze all the sentimentality out of the act spending time with a good book? Before I take my life totally the way of Thoreau, I thought I would give this whole curling-up-with-my-phone thing a fighting chance. On my iPhone, I downloaded the Google, Kindle, and Classics apps, found a comfy chair, and gave them a test drive.

I began with the mobile version of Google Books, designed especially for portable devices. It’s basically a stripped-down version of the regular Google Books site; the selection is entirely free, but limited to public-domain titles. Its mix of true classics and wacky obscurities is presented in a very readable format — you just navigate vertically with a sweep of your finger. The mobile site is best for those times when you’re bored and looking for a curveball — a bit like browsing through a real used bookstore, but without the dust. For instance, I searched for Where the Wild Things Are, so I could take a little nostalgia trip before the movie comes out; the mobile Google Books offered up a biography of Theodore Roosevelt and Dorset by Thomas Hardy. Searching for WTWTA on “all books,” instead of just “free books,” however, I was taken straight to the childhood classic, but just through a purchase link.

If it’s the latest releases you’re after, Amazon’s free Kindle app is very easy to use. A friend of mine who works in publishing owns an actual Kindle, which he uses to take multiple books and manuscripts home with him. He let me play around with his full-sized Kindle, and I must say that the Kindle iPhone app is the better-looking kid sister. Instead of using keys to scroll, you flip pages by just moving your finger across the screen. You can even dog-ear pages just by pushing a button — like the real deal, sans paper cuts. Amazon has a fairly big selection of popular books available for sale, and before you pay for any of them (it’s $9.99 for most books) it will send a pretty large sample to your iPhone. Not a bad deal in these economic times.

The Classics app, meanwhile, is less of a practical reading device than a clever way to get around to reading a certain type of book; you know, the ones you may have skimmed in high school, but keep telling people at parties you’ve been meaning to actually read. The app is currently on sale for 99 cents, and it’s worth it just for the kitsch factor. The interface looks like a shelf of hardbound tomes — from Dracula to Alice in Wonderland — which open as you touch them. The pages look similar to those in the Kindle app, but instead of dog-earing, Classics places an animated satin red ribbon to mark your place. While Classics doesn’t feel like a must-have for reading, it’s certainly a fun way to pass the time on a subway ride or during a boring meeting (hint: reading on your phone is very inconspicuous).

While I’m not a total convert to reading on my iPhone, I now see the perks. If you already own one, why not? It’s worth it to carry a few books on it for when you get restless at a bar and literature is a better companion than that girl or guy passed out next to you. You can even read Ulysses at 1am on a Saturday night, and everyone will think you’re just texting a hot date.

David Grann — who writes about the adventurer in his new book, The Lost City of Z — records that Fawcett was convinced “that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon, and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated, it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas.”

Fawcett’s mission captured the popular imagination, generating international headlines. For weeks, the world tracked his journey, certain that a great discovery was about to be made. Then, after a final dispatch from somewhere near the Upper Xingu, he and his team disappeared, never to be heard from again. One after another, would-be rescuers tried to find Fawcett, or some sign of his fate. None succeeded, but dozens lost their lives in the attempt. Over time, his story became as much a thing of legend as it was fact, before slipping into fiction altogether.

Eighty years later, Grann — a writer for the New Yorker — finds himself obsessed with learning the truth. Eventually, he heads to the Amazon himself, following Fawcett’s trail. The historians and anthropologists of Fawcett’s day were convinced that his mission was a fool’s errand. They believed that the Amazon was too harsh a place to support anything but the most primitive of peoples. They were wrong.

As Grann searches for Fawcett’s remains, he meets an archaeologist with evidence that something approaching the Lost City of Z might well have existed (even if its streets were not paved of gold). For the reader, that discovery (along with the thrill of the story itself) will have to suffice, however, as Fawcett’s true fate still remains a mystery.

With a little help from Facebook and Twitter, authors and publishers hope that these trailers will connect them with web-addicted demographics. To make them, some authors and publicists scout for talent among their friends, while others seek the paid assistance of production companies. But however they’re made, good book trailers are more than just a marketing tool — they’re art. “The web is providing so many exciting opportunities for video to live, and I think book trailers is one of those,” says filmmaker Scott Thrift of the Brooklyn-based video label m ss ng p eces.

This wasn’t always the case. When Thrift and his partner, Ari Kuschnir, first sat down with Random House to discuss making a book trailer for Robert Masello’s thriller Blood and Ice, they were taken aback by the shoddy production values of other trailers they saw. Says Kuschnir, “It would be something like a still photograph, and then the book would come flying in. Basically a glorified PowerPoint.” Still, they were excited by the opportunity to do something new with the medium, and were rewarded for their efforts in the end. In addition to being distributed widely online, their trailer was licensed abroad, and may even have a theatrical release in Portugal.

Because of their artistic bent, many book trailers are identified as short films “inspired” by a work of fiction or nonfiction. Sometimes they use voiceovers of an author reading from his or her book, with accompanying action. Actors in these films are usually friends, family, or people around the office at Random House or Penguin. Novelist Jami Attenberg appeared in her own conceptual book trailer for The Kept Man, created by a friend’s production company. The same company, Milk Products Media!, created a trailer for Sloane Crosley’s book of essays I Was Told There’d Be Cake, employing more non-narrative measures: stop-motion animation, finger puppets, and a catchy jingle. The video went viral, partly thanks to a nod on the New York Times Paper Cuts blog.

That’s the goal, says HarperCollins senior publicist Audrey Harris. She first oversaw a trailer in 2006, for Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest. Book trailers were unusual then, but now they’ve become almost de rigueur, says Harris. She estimates that between 25 and 50 percent of Harper Perennial titles have trailers.

In terms of stylistic trajectories, Harris says animated trailers are the newest wrinkle. She oversaw one recently for Toby Barlow’s novel Sharp Teeth, created by a filmmaker friend, Eun Ha Paek. Neil Gaiman turned Blueberry Girl‘s illustrations into animation, adding a voiceover and an ethereal score of cricket chirps and wind chimes to make his trailer. Wells Tower read while an animated Viking ship bobbed in the ocean, illustrating the excerpt from his collection’s title story, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” And pencil drawings reminiscent of childhood are sketched before our eyes as Stefan Merrill Block reads from his debut, The Story of Forgetting.

Another class of book trailer works off of the public’s reaction to a book. The action in John Wray’s Lowboy takes place on the subway (Wraith also wrote large portions of his book in transit), so for his trailer, he had commuters on a Brooklyn L train read excerpts aloud. In a trailer for Much to Your Chagrin: A Memoir of Embarrassment, meanwhile, author Suzanne Guillette prompted strangers to reveal their own mortifying moments on camera.

Whether or not book trailers succeed as selling devices, it’s forming a meaningful connection with the public that’s important. As novelist Jami Attenberg puts it, “If somebody sees my trailer, they’ll know more about the book, and get an impression of me as an author.” Thrift and Kuschnir hope that soon, book trailers will be integrated into Kindle, to help convince online window shoppers to make a purchase.

When questioned about whether a trailer might corrupt how books engage the imagination, however — like seeing a movie adaptation before reading the original — Attenberg laughs aloud. “My trailer wasn’t taken from anything except a feeling, a moment, a little inspiration that grew. I would never let anyone use a promotional device that I didn’t feel reflected the spirit of what I’m doing. So, I’m not worried. I’m thrilled that it’s out there.”

Image: Still from “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” trailer

Boldtype: Where did the idea for I Saw You, as a basic concept and as a comics project, come from?

Julia Wertz: From procrastination. I was searching for a job on Craigslist, and I was wasting time by looking at apartments and houses in cities I don’t live in, as well as the Missed Connection ads. As a cartoonist, it was just natural to want to put the two together, but I didn’t want to do a whole book of them myself, so I gathered other cartoonists, and hence, an anthology was born.

BT: How did you go about selling the book?

JW: At first it was just a zine. I never meant for it to be anything more than that, but it’s “high concept” — which means the initial blog calling for other submissions got a lot of links, and someone in the publishing industry saw it and contacted me. I sent them some zines, and from there it got turned into a book.

BT: Had you been a voyeuristic reader of Craigslist’s Missed Connections section beforehand?

JW: No, and I’m not today either. It was just a fun side project from my own autobiographical comic The Fart Party, which is collected and published by Atomic Books and runs online twice a week. I think Missed Connection ads are actually pretty lame.

BT: There’s a huge audience of people who read the section for fun or vicarious amusement — what do you think is the allure then?

JW: It’s kind of like peeking in someone’s pathetic diary. And everyone not-so-secretly hopes they’ll see one posted for them, I guess.

Click on the images above to view at full size.

BT: How do you think message boards have changed the way we interact with strangers, especially romantically?

JW: People feel less inhibited, so they’re more likely to be honest — or they’re more likely to lie. It’s easy to embellish or to censor yourself online, creating an online persona that’s different from real life, so it’s probably more deceptive than honest. I’m not sure about the romantic aspect though; it’s not an outlet I’ve forayed into.

BT: What was it like to edit a collection of other peoples’ comics, rather than just your own?

JW: It’s frustrating and time consuming, and I will never do it again.

BT: How did you solicit submissions? Did you reach out to specific artists that you like?

JW: I handpicked about half of the artists, and the rest were open call. I wanted the book to have a lot of variety, and not just be my specific choices.

BT: The last panel of the book reads: “It’s a fine line between ‘hopeless romantic’ and ‘creepy’” — what do you think differentiates one from the other?

JW: Most advances made by strangers in public situations like that are unwanted. Most people know this; however, there are some people who are completely oblivious to it, and think that just because they made eye contact with someone or thought a stranger was attractive justifies an advance, whether in person or online. The vast majority of those are just creepy.

Boldtype: Your memoir is arranged as a series of chronological essays, each one focusing on a different male influence in your life. How did you come up with the concept?

Diana Joseph: I’d written an essay about my son, and had such a good time that I immediately wrote another about my first husband. I realized the person I adored could also be the person who drove me bananas. I didn’t intentionally sit down and say to myself, “I will write a book about the various men in my life and the influence they’ve had in the construction of my identity.” That thought would have made me cringe.

BT: Your style of describing a character involves a series of short sentences relaying facts about the person — his likes, dislikes, wardrobe items, what you know or don’t know about him. This unadorned description seems to be particularly male. Was this a purposeful style that emerged when writing about men?

DJ: You’re pointing out a tic in my style: my love of a list. Lists are everywhere, from Letterman’s Top Ten to the Facebook meme “Twenty-Six Things about Me.” A list lets you organize a lot of information in a short space, impose order on chaos, make big leaps, and juxtapose strange details. But I think my lists are less about gendering writing and more about my interest in how prose sounds — its cadence, its rhythms, its starts and pauses and stops.

BT: Some of the stories in the book are absolutely hysterical — the guitar recital in “Mary, Queen of Arkansas,” your son’s run-in with his friend’s cat in “The Boy, Again.” These scenes could have been “you had to be there” moments, but your writing allows the original hilarity to come through. How did you accomplish that?

DJ: That’s the thing about an anecdote, right? It’s usually only hilarious if you were there. Sometimes, though, the story is interesting even if you weren’t there, and for me, that happens when I care about the people in the story. My students and I call this “Species Recognition.” Readers need to recognize these people as fellow humans.

But while the story needs to be good, and the characters need to be developed, there’s still the matter of what it means and why should the reader care. In order to push the anecdote beyond “You had to be there,” the writer needs to reflect. The writer needs to answer to the question of, “So what?” And the best answers go beyond the obvious, the clichéd. For me, a good piece of writing will lead me to two reactions: recognition — I know exactly what you mean — or revelation — I never thought of it like that. The best writing gives me both.

BT: You criticize many of the male characters in the book, sometimes harshly, but your compassion for each is also readily evident. Did you actively try to strike this balance?

DJ: I never want to demonize the people I write about, but I don’t want to valorize them, either. I’ve always loved that what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about men: “A man is a god in ruins.” I think we’re all gods in ruins, men and women alike, all of us capable of compassion and vengeance, forgiveness and grudge-holding.

BT: Is it easier or more difficult to write about characters who actually exist? And how much dramatic license did you allow yourself?

DJ: In nonfiction, people have already done what they’re going to do, and said what they’re going to say. Several of the essays were worked on in real time, as I was living them, so the details were right in front of me. But in other essays, like the one about my father, I relied almost entirely on memory and its sometimes steady, sometimes slippery path between the hippocampus and cerebral cortex. Is my memory accurate? I say it is. Is it the same story my brothers would tell? You’d have to ask them.

BT: The title of the memoir is an actual quote uttered in a devastating moment, when you knew that your first marriage was over. Why did you choose this as the title?

DJ: “I’m sorry you feel that way” is, for me at least, the most obnoxious and passive-aggressive thing one human being can say to another. But as a title, it’s good. I came around to it mostly because of the subtitle. I like how that subtitle hits all those roles I play.

Boldtype: The language in your stories is sometimes familiar, sometimes totally off the wall. (In “On the Show,” Ellis says, unforgettably: “I’d eat the whole damn child just to get a taste of the thing he squeezed out of.”) What are your sources? How much comes from your own imagination, and who are the real people who inform your dialogue?

Wells Tower: I do keep an ear out for people hitting interesting licks with language. That particular line is a perversion of something a friend of a friend picked up on a fishing boat in Alaska. The original, horrid remark was, I think, “I’d drink a gallon of her pee just to see where it came from.” A wee bit too awful to be of literal use, so I rejiggered it. I guess I do a fair amount of that, stealing lines from real humans and then twisting them around in ways that appeal to me.

BT: In terms of subject matter, Raymond Carver came to mind as I read your book. Was he an influence?

WT: Of course I admire Carver, though I wouldn’t try to write like him. I’m a little too greedy for big words and indulgent usage to pull off the muscular succinctness of Carver’s style. As much as I love him, it’s the writers who obsessively tool their sentences that really make my heart race — Nabokov, Barry Hannah, Nicholson Baker, Walker Percy, Joan Didion, Melville, E.B. White. Nor is Carver somebody I really look to for tips on structure. A writer with his voice, heart, and compact means of conveying large feeling can pull off stories like “Fat” or “The Calm” — shorties whose architecture is pretty close to anecdote. I haven’t got those sorts of gifts. Structure-wise, I tend to look to short stories with a few more moving parts, e.g. the works of Richard Yates (Swiss clocks, nearly all of his short stories), Flannery O’Connor, Cheever, Andre Dubus, Poe, the usual suspects.

BT: You inhabit characters of all ages and sexes, including a few men that could have been you. Why did you decide to tackle so many perspectives, and what do you consider your great successes and failures (if any) in that regard?

WT: I’m sure I don’t know. Most of the stories in the book went through many, many violent revisions. Lots of total guttings and wholesale reconstructions, often with complete shifts in the casts of characters, P.O.V., tense, etc. With each story, there seemed to be some element — a setting, an incident, or something — that made me want to keep bashing away at it, and the characters who wound up in the final drafts were generally the last of a batch of puzzle pieces I’d tried to cram into place. With a couple of exceptions, I can’t really recall sitting down and coldly deciding to tackle one demographic or another. In most cases, the stories insisted on their particular populations after much grueling trial and error. As far as their successes and flaws go, I can safely say I’ve lost all perspective there. If left to my own devices, I probably would have gone on revising until I went insane, but fortunately, my editor finally pried the manuscript out of my hands.

BT: Your title story — a tale of heartbreak in love and war among Vikings — differs pretty noticeably from the others in the collection. How does it fit in, and how did it come to be the book’s namesake and final word?

WT: Its historical prankishness aside, I suppose that story takes up a few of the common themes of the collection — loss, loneliness, the difficulty of making a family work. But none of these stories were part of a deliberate effort to fill a volume with a coherent, unified body of work. The nine stories in the book are simply the keepers from the first seven years or so of my apprenticeship at short fiction. I’ve tried to skin the cat in several ways in there. Some stories aim to win with humor, others with language stunts. In others, I made a deliberate effort to shy away from trusty tricks and tell a simple, earnest tale (“Leopard,” “Door in Your Eye”).

“Everything Ravaged,” I thought a bit too harsh as a title for the book, but after extensive focus-grouping among friends, it emerged as the clear winner. We put it last for the heartsickness and feeling of embattled tenderness of its final lines, which seemed to echo with the other stories in the book.

BT: All your protagonists have monsters under their beds. How does fear act on your characters? How does it act on you as a writer?

WT: Interesting question. I don’t know that my characters are any more paranoid or timorous than the rest of us. If a sense of dread pervades the stories, I’d like to think it’s the usual human dread, the welter of accumulated regret that comes with the terrible awareness, as Ian Frazier once beautifully put it, that life is always “paying out like line.” It’s probably that same awareness that makes me spend most days at my desk.

BT: What do you love about the short story? Do you have plans for a novel?

WT: I love the rigor of the form, the difficult challenge to assemble in a tight space a little machine of emotion that detonates satisfyingly at the end. And, yes, I’m bashing away at a novel as we speak.

I didn’t believe him.

Then, late one night, I was reading on my ten-day-old Kindle while brushing my teeth. I was midway through a crucial point in a story when, just as Bezos had said, I got wrapped up in the world created on the screen. Without thinking, I sat my toothbrush on the counter and tried to turn a physical page — which didn’t exist.

I only paused for a moment to consider the significance of what had happened, but before I hit the next page button, I was a believer in this machine.

In 1631, John Winthrop the Younger crossed the Atlantic to make his home in the New World, and among his supplies on an overfull ship, he packed “a barrell of bookes.” That initial collection Winthrop couldn’t do without grew and flowered in Massachusetts, and when he died, his personal library consisted of more than 1,000 volumes. At the time, it was perhaps the greatest collection of knowledge on the American continent.

With the new Kindle 2 — unveiled this month — I can now carry a personal library of 1,500 books in my pocket, and that is fundamentally changing the nature of what, and how, I read.

Amazon offers more than 230,000 cheap, Kindle-ready books through its online store. Through the Internet at large, I have access to thousands of classics that I can download for free. What used to be a difficult calculation of what I wanted to read, balanced against the cost of a new book and the available shelf space in my apartment, has become a far more simple equation.

When I began to buy more books online (for reasons of economy and convenience), I gave up the experience of browsing and sampling that comes from visiting a library or a store. With the Kindle, that’s no longer the case. Now I download digital samples of every book that perks my interest, and keep them as long as I want for free.

For the first 20 years of my life as a reader, I focused on one book at a time, pushing myself to finish the last chapter before starting something new. With the Kindle, I’ll keep a novel going, even as I read a new biography, and if my mood changes, I’ve always got a selection of unread books waiting for my attention. It often takes me longer to finish an individual volume, but because I’m reading so many things in tandem, my overall pace remains consistent.

I still buy physical books, but I do so primarily as a collector, rather than as a reader. I’m now more comfortable spending $100 on a signed first edition of White Teeth knowing that it only cost me $10 to read this year’s Newbery Award winner. I find myself cherishing all the books that line the shelves in my apartment, because a small part of me knows each one I bring home might be my last.

Apple introduced the iPod on October 23, 2001, and its success has transformed the physical album into a relative artifact. The power of capacity, the freedom that comes with a nearly infinite choice of songs, has trumped every argument about the inherent superiority of a non-digital format.

Readers everywhere are about to face a choice about whether to opt for the same convenience when it comes to print. It’s a decision I’ve already made.

Boldtype: You live in one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses; have you been a longtime fan of his work?

T.C. Boyle: The house is sort of a lost house. It’s in all the books; it’s the first California house that he built, but it was run down and we’ve been restoring it for 16 years. All during that time, I was thinking that I should explore more about the architecture and learn more about him. And when I began to, I realized that he fits right in with [Alfred] Kinsey and [John Harvey] Kellogg, and other of the great egomaniacs of the 20th century, whom I’ve written about, and who have altered our history in much more subtle ways than, say, presidents.

BT: Are there any other “great egomaniacs” that you’d like to examine?

TCB: There’s always a danger in doing such a thing. There was another novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, which I haven’t read, because I don’t want to be in a position of comparing and contrasting. When I did the Kinsey book, unbeknownst to me, Bill Condon was also making his movie Kinsey. We became friends after we discovered each other, and we did a little talk at the Hammer Museum in LA, about two artists doing the same material. But still, if you’re doing someone like any of these figures, somebody else might be doing it too. Particularly Frank Lloyd Wright, because he is such a cult figure. I didn’t realize until I began to explore him that there are something like 1,000 books about him and his works that have been written already.

BT: Meryle Secrest talked about how Wright was at the mercy of his emotions, describing him as “barely a human being.” Did you find that that volatility came through in your secondhand perspectives?

TCB: One of the things that interested me here was: what is true, what is not, and how do we know? Any account of history, of course, is biased. There will be facts that are fudged, and so too the interpretation of the character of these people, which is why it seems ripe for a novelist, and why I chose the approach that I did. I’m not so interested in giving the full portrait of him in any biographical way as I am in wondering what his relationship is with his followers. This is why I was so obsessed with Kinsey and Kellogg before him. I’m very suspicious of authority figures, of icons, of worshipping other people. I’m an independent operator. I love Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, but that isn’t to say that I’m going to worship him blindly.

As far as his passions are concerned, some people have asked me if he was a womanizer. I don’t think so. As with any powerful, magnetic man, women were attracted to him. These women were each his equals, and in some respects his superiors — especially in terms of their taste and sophistication. Wright remained a farm boy from Wisconsin who had only had two semesters of college, despite his protestations to the contrary. It seems that he was sort of moving up the food chain with these women, going for women like Mamah [Cheney], who was college educated and very free-thinking, to Miriam [Noel], who was this sophisticate from Paris, and finally to Olgivanna [Milanoff], with her fetching accent and her youth.

BT: How did Wright’s relationship with his mother, Anna, affect his relationship with these other women?

TCB: He was a mama’s boy. His father left the family when Frank was 17, so he rejected him and his middle name “Lincoln,” instead adopting “Lloyd” from his mother’s side. His father had three other children when he married, and Anna was so fierce that she became like the wicked stepmother, making those children go live with other relatives. She was extremely protective of her one son. This makes for great fiction, because of the collision of Anna and Frank’s various mistresses.

I’m sort of like that myself. My father was much weaker and not as educated as my mother. She was very dominant, and although she never pushed me so much as Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother did, she encouraged me and told me I could do anything. I come from a working class family, and I’m the first ever to go to college, because my mother envisioned that. So I have some understanding of where he’s coming from.

BT: You’ve published almost as many short story collections as novels — do the two mediums balance and inform each other for you?

TCB: In my life, yes. I don’t know about others. Mostly, the writers that we know from the 20th century either specialize in one or the other, and are stronger in one or the other. I love both forms, and I see it in this way: everything that I do is simply a story; everything in the world that I see and want to know about, or want to interpret, is a story in some way. I always have an idea of how complex that story will be. I sit down in specific periods to write a novel or story. I alternate between a longer, historical novel, a book of stories, and a shorter novel. That keeps me interested. I’m equally committed to the story and the novel.

BT: What stories and writers did you enjoy while growing up?

TCB: A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor, is one of my all-time favorites. It’s the one story that woke me up to what literature could be. I went to SUNY Potsdam to study music, but couldn’t hack that, so I became a History major, drifted into English, became a double major in History and English, and, finally, junior year, blundered into a creative-writing class. This is why I continue to teach, and why I love the idea of liberal arts. I wasn’t a very good student in high school or college; I barely got through. I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, didn’t attend the classes I was supposed to attend, and didn’t learn what I was supposed to learn.

I went from being a TV watcher in a working-class household to being an intellectual by surprise, because I was reading what was current then. That is what informed my taste, which is why, when I was at Iowa [Writer's Workshop], I got my PhD to learn about the literature of our language in England and in America. The other stuff that influenced me is what was happening then: Robert Coover, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, and all of the absurdist playwrights. What was current and happening just woke me up. I loved the wicked sensibility, the bleakness of some of the writing, and I loved the expansiveness where anything could be fiction. You don’t have to be constrained by autobiography or someone else’s expectations of what fiction is, or what you ought to do. There are no rules!

BT: What is it about being in the classroom as a teacher that continues to stimulate you?

TCB: It wakes me up. I had great mentors all along who acted as coaches. I love literature, I love what I’m doing, and I want to be that mentor for other people. I write books, but I’ve also been teaching since I was 21. It’s an integral part of my life. I haven’t had to teach for a long time now, but I always will, as long as I can do it. On the selfish level, it gets me out of the house one day a week. If I had to write seven days a week and never leave and never have interaction with other people who love literature and can discuss it on the deepest level, which is what happens in my classrooms, I would have gone mad years ago.

BT: Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer poses the question of whether creative writing can even be taught. Having founded the undergraduate program at USC, what is your response?

TCB: I think it can, but I think you must have a great talent and a great desire. Your teacher is sort of your coach, and can make suggestions, but those suggestions don’t have to be followed. You are the artist, and you are going to do whatever you’re going to do. It’s like a conservatory program: you know how to play your instrument at the highest level, and now you’re going to have time to play it and perfect it and see what happens. You have as role models and guides these writers whom you admire. Of course, it’s an art — some people have a talent and some don’t. We all did fingerpainting in kindergarten, but some went on to do a higher form. You can talk about techniques in class; I think it’s great to do interpretations of things and discuss them on that level, but there are no rules whatsoever.

You perfect your own technique in your own way. Maybe your violin teacher teaches you a better way to hold it or use your bow, but no one really can teach you that in creative writing. By the time you get there, that has become integral to who you are, because you’ve read a lot of literature, and it’s all been synthesized and it all comes out. Any given story you write, or anybody writes, can be discussed with somebody, but nothing matters except what you’re going to finally do. In a workshop, everybody will interpret the work and talk about it, but the only value for you is seeing how an engaged audience interprets what you’ve done. You can make adjustments on the basis of that, or you can not. That’s as far as it goes — it’s not going to teach you anything specifically; there is nothing specific to teach. You’re an artist, so you make your art, and you make your art because you studied other artists.