Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s Mission with Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director at McSweeney’s. They discuss security breaches at the McSweeney’s office by overenthusiastic fans seeking a physical connection to their favorite publisher of physical books; his tendency to act as “the Joe Lieberman of publishing” in his editorial career, carrying unchanging tastes through changing times; Geoff Dyer, the writer with whom he has worked the longest, and how the subject-independence of Dyer’s writing parallels the subject-independence of his editing; the counterintuitively un-self-indulgent qualities of “Dyeristic” prose; memoir booms vampire booms, and the eternal bad-book boom; how he finds the real action in hybrids of fiction and essay, and how those forms provide the surprises that all art should; his life in New York publishing before his homecoming to the San Francisco Bay area, and how he has come to regard the ecosystem/echo chamber of the New York literary scene at a distance; the dominance of food and technology over books in Bay Area culture; David Byrne‘s new How Music Works, and other books that you want certain authors to write; and the potential usefulness of the authorly switcheroo, as when Dyer planned to write a book about tennis but wrote a book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
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