Author Adam Sternbergh
Last year Adam Sternbergh, a Toronto-born journalist who currently resides in Brooklyn, N.Y., published his debut novel, Shovel Ready, a sci-fi/noir hybrid set in a near-future New York that has seen better days; its sequel, Near Enemy, arrived in bookstores this month. Both novels star Spademan, a garbage-collector-turned-hitman who is awfully precise with a box cutter.
Whose sentences are your favourite, and why?
There are so many great sentences, in so many varieties of greatness, that I'll just stick to those that I long to emulate and/or enjoy with gape-mouthed amazement. Martin Amis and Nicholson Baker carry the banner for Team Maximalist. Joan Didion's sentences, by contrast, are cut glass. No one does more with the juxtaposition of a few perfectly chosen words than Canada's own Derek McCormack. (One favourite example, about a skinny musician playing in a country jug band: "Stringbean on gourd.") And when I recently reread The Yiddish Policemen's Union, I tweeted, "On every page of Michael Chabon, there's a metaphor that would be the best metaphor you thought up in your life, if you'd thought of it." I stand by that.
Which historical period do you wish you'd lived through, and why?
Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon was published as a novel in 1930 (after being serialized in Black Mask the year before), and Raymond Chandler's debut, The Big Sleep, came out in 1939, so if you want to time-dump me anywhere in that decade, that's fine with me. Seriously, what a time to be alive – when you could stroll to your local newsstand and pick up a pulp magazine featuring a freshly written Raymond Chandler story, and watch these writers invent a whole new genre.
Which books have you reread most in your life?
Confession: I'm a slow reader. And I always feel shamelessly under-read. I could fill this page with the names of essential authors I still haven't gotten around to, and those are just the ones I want to read, not the ones I feel I should read. One book I've read multiple times, and will read multiple times in the future, is For Whom the Bell Tolls by you-know-who. It's more fashionable now to dislike (or, worse, dismiss) Ernest Hemingway than to like him, and even though this book was rapturously reviewed at the time, it isn't now popularly considered to be his best. But this novel checks all my boxes. When it was published in 1940 (that decade again!), a critic at The New Yorker wrote, "I do not much care whether or not this is a 'great' book. I feel that it is what Hemingway wanted it to be: a true book."
Who's your favourite villain in literature, and why?
Can I say three? Iago is the gold standard, because he's not the menacing voice booming from the mountain fortress, he's the trusted confidant pouring poison in your ear – which to me is infinitely more unsettling. Second: The Joker, who has long outgrown his pulp-rack beginnings to achieve a larger mythic resonance, mostly because his gleeful, anarchic malevolence is such an unsettling analogy for the climate of the current age. (Name another villain who's inspired not one but two classic film performances.) Last, the Judge from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Among his many quotable aphorisms: "War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner." I find that thought endlessly chilling.
Would you rather have the ability to be invisible or time travel, and why?
As a writer, I think you're supposed to wish to turn invisible because of, you know, observing unseen the human condition and all that. But given the fact that the Internet now allows us unhindered access into pretty much all the sordid recesses of human endeavour, I'll choose time travel, mostly for the reasons stated above. Those fresh Chandler stories aren't going to read themselves.