Q: You often seem a little frustrated with the direction of contemporary American literature. What are some of your grievances?

V: Well, the general level of literacy for writers and readers is far below what it used to be. And we now commonly see books in which people can’t get their possessives right. Publishers send out catalogues and you read the copy and it’s full of grammatical errors. In my parents’ generation and in my grandparents’ generation people really were much more connected to the written word. I won’t say that they were more intelligent or better educated necessarily because I’m sure that they knew far less about what’s going on in other parts of the world, and diversity, and tolerance, and the ecosystem and so forth and these are very important things, but there was a sense that most people with a basic education could read and take some pleasure in reading.

Now people like to write and express themselves but they often resent the work required to express themselves well or even to read books by dead people. It’s often been said that we’re midgets standing on the shoulders of giants and if you step off the giant’s shoulder you’re going to be that much shorter. I think it’s pathetic that readers and writers today are as ignorant as they are, ignorant even of foreign writing.

In the seventies, there used to be this Penguin “Writers From the Other Europe” series and I read a bunch of those books; that’s how I got introduced to people like Borowski, Kundera, Konwicki. It blew my mind. I thought they were great. When I talk with my editor at Viking I always say “Paul, why can’t you guys reissue those?” and he says, “It’ll never happen, there’s just no market for those.” And of course, Dalkey Archive had brought a couple of them back and so forth but it’s really sad. It’s really disturbing and it helps explain how people who are fundamentally good hearted and well meaning and sincere, as Americans are, could reelect a president who is a war criminal, who is a torturer, who has dragged and is dragging our name through the mud. And yet we can still find people who think that he’s the greatest and it’s because people here are so ignorant and so isolated. And I blame readers and writers for that.

Q: Almost your entire back catalogue is in print except for Afghanistan Picture Show. I thought that was interesting because Afghanistan Picture Show seems suddenly very topical again. I was wondering if there’s a hesitance to republish that because you were fighting on the side of people who have become associated with the enemy?

V: Yeah, I don’t know why. It was recently published in German and in Italian. Europeans tend to get a kick out of it because the main character is a naïve blundering American and that’s one of the hobbies of Europeans, to look down on Americans, and not always without good reason.