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Ben Greenman, an editor at the New Yorker, is a writer who is seriously weird. He is also seriously funny. Yet the best of the stories in this collection are more than funny.”  That’s the San Francisco Chronicle on A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love — but that was last year.

November 2008 saw the publication of Correspondences, a limited-edition, hand-crafted collection which spawned the Postcard Project, a collaborative experiment that invites readers to fill in gaps in the text.

Ben’s official site features samples of his essays, short fiction, and humor pieces. (Don’t miss the Sarah Palin musical.) He is also a contributor to the mp3 blog moistworks. Ben will be reading at Melville House Bookstore in Brooklyn on December 11.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

If I wasn’t writing, I’d listen to music, but no one pays you to do that. Or maybe I’d run one of those sleep studies where people come in and get fitted with electrodes and then fall asleep in a laboratory bed with laboratory cameras watching them as they doze off. There’s something nice about that: something alienating and erotic and rational and deeply irrational all at the same time. Or maybe I’d stream time backwards twenty years and end up playing defensive tackle in the Canadian Football League. I think I could do it. I’ve got the size, plus the will to tackle.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

There are three that spring to mind. Joseph Conrad’s Victory, Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures, and Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb. There are pieces of everything in there, and if you scrambled them all up and redivided them, I think you’d have enough insight into human nature, verbal inventiveness, and hard information to last for quite a while. Plus, I’d love to have them on the “Also By Ben Greenman” page in future books.

Name one website you couldn’t live without.

I’d say coudal.com, the site for a Chicago design firm, both because they do great work and because they find so many other great diverting sites, and also the AllMusic Guide, because…well, the answer’s right there in the name. All Music. I keep giving multiple answers to single questions. Sorry.

What are you working on now?

I’m just finishing up a novel for next spring called Please Step Back. Melville House is publishing it; it’s the story of a funk musician who is vaguely like Sly Stone and tracks him from the late fifties until the mid seventies. I am also finishing a collection of short fiction, another novel, and a set of essays. We’ll see what actually gets done. Time will tell. Time is always telling everyone everything.

Whiskey or yoga?

Does anyone say yoga?


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