Conversations with Steve Erickson

Erickson is a subterranean shadow figure despite his prestigious honors, his dream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp and paranoid late-century postmodernism essential to any appreciation of the last four decades of American fiction. He's at once thoroughly of his time and distinctly outside it. In these two dozen interviews over the course of as many years, Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and political visions are inextricable from each other, diagnosing the American condition since World War II only to reveal that the nation's triumphs and failures have been consistent since its inception, and that he presciently described our present long ago.
(from the introduction by Matthew Luter)

"A restless historical consciousness that devours epochs and artistic phenomenon the way a shredder lattices up your secret documents in recyclable collages. Erickson has never repeated himself once in a career that spans decades. His subjects are the West, America, film, music, history, desire, except that he exceeds all these. He is never less than innovative and never less than heartfelt. Political rage and human longing are each as liable to be motivating forces, and the writing in every single novel is inspiring and singular with lancing moments of intensity."
Rick Moody

"Erickson's novels read as if written for the readership of other worlds. These worlds are not different from ours so much as parallel, the real turned upside down, inside out, alternate cityscapes populated by dreamers, informed by a rarefied innocence that, transposed through metaphor to describe our own condition, offers our reading and dreaming lives, here and now, a modicum of hope and even redemption. What results is nothing less than a new creation myth. What is created is nothing less than us."
Joshua Cohen