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Brian Morton is the author of five novels, including Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon. He has been a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Pushcart Prize, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award and the Kirkus Prize in Fiction. He's also written two detective novels under the pen name Raymond Miller. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.
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How did the idea for Florence Gordon originate?
Florence came first, before I had a picture of any of the other characters, before I had even a vague idea of the story. I really don't know why I started writing about her. She just showed up. The other characters took more time to come into focus. One of the most enjoyable surprises that occurred during the writing of it was the gradual deepening of the relationship between Florence and her granddaughter, Emily. I really hadn't anticipated that at all.
The title character is a feminist firebrand who made a name for herself as a women's rights activist and theorist in the 1970s. Was she modeled on a famous female in history?
No, she wasn't. I had a clear picture of Florence's contemporaries: I knew who she'd hung out with; I knew who her friends and rivals were. I'm thinking of people like Ellen Willis, Vivian Gornick, Alix Kates Shulman. But she wasn't modeled on anyone—and she'd be offended by the suggestion that she was!
What do you think of the preconception that male writers can't accurately write the female voice?
I'm not really sure that there is such a preconception—or at any rate, I don't think there should be. After all, has anyone ...
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; The Wrong End of the Telescope; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. (more)
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John Banville, the author of seventeen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and ... (more)
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