An Interview with Michael Martone - by Matt Baker (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A literary prank, An Interview With Michael Martone is collection of interviews with the author Michael Martone. All nine interviews were originally published as nonfiction. Eight of the interviews are fictional.

Review Quotes

"A fact is a thing done. A fiction is a thing made. In Matt Baker's fruitfully redundant interviews, it's as if these made things, fiction or not, once they're made, become more real. It's like making robots, winding them up, and then they're alive and in your life."

--Matthew Baker

"Matthew Baker's mischevious An Interview with Michael Martone squares the facts of a life with the stories about a life. As they question the nature of identity in nine candid conversations, Martone and Baker blur the lines between reality and invention; I was never fully sure where Martone ended and Baker began."

--Michael Martone

"Matthew Baker's An Interview with Michael Martone exposes the myth that artists are solitary individual geniuses--it's far more collaborative than what we might think it is. The book examines why we are holding onto the notion of individual geniuses being so very special and so worth legal protection."

--Matt Baker

"The crisply scored four-squared and grounded interviews found in Matt Baker's An Interview with Michael Martone read like the amalgamation of a complicated polyculture inscribed on a land-use map of some lost Eden. Oh, ancient and sacred crop rotation! Here, forage; there, pasture. Here, a wood lot; there, a quadrant of sweet, sweet corn. Everywhere fertile, vital, fulfilling, full up. These interviews spring. They celebrate the vast variety, the infinite possibilities found in a bounded space. Each of these acres aches to be read."

--Matthew Baker

About the Author

Matt Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures. Born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, he is a former editor of Oxford American. He currently resides in New York City.