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The Interviews: 1970–1999

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The collected interviews with Ronald Sukenick featured in this Volume 15 of The Ronald Sukenick Edition span thirty years of the author's prolific career as a writer, critic, scholar, and editor. The book sheds a light on specific stages of Sukenick's aesthetics and scholarship from the publication of his first novel Up to his critifictional Narralogues and his novel masterpiece Mosaic Man . Some of the interviews, of which only excerpts or abridged versions have been published, appear here for the first time in their entirety. The book is provided with an index.

RONALD SUKENICK (1932–2004) was one of the most important innovators, editors, and critics of US-American literature. His eight novels, three collections of short stories, and four books of nonfiction/theory, published between 1968 and 2005, have variously been described as avantgarde, energetically performative, dissident, revisionistic, and a threat to all hierarchies. Educated at Cornell University, New York, and Brandeis University, Massachusetts, Sukenick taught as Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1975 to 1999, where he was also director of the creative writing program. Sukenick co-founded the publishing house the Fiction Collective (now FC2) and edited the journals American Book Review and Black Ice Magazine .

376 pages, Hardcover

Published November 27, 2022

About the author

Ronald Sukenick

32 books32 followers
Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.

Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.

After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”

He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.

He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.

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