The Portland Mercury has a lengthy Q & A with Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin’s Lament. (Reviewed here; for the record, Auslander has publicly claimed that the book’s title was in no way inspired by Portnoy’s Complaint, but I call shenanigans.) He explains that he’s working on a novel this time, not a memoir or collection of short stories, but the theme is familiar:
I’m writing a novel now. It’s called Leopold Against the World, and it has to do with, if that was about how terrified of God I am, this is about how terrified of people I am. Even when you take God out of the equation it even makes it worse. You’ve got God to blame for people being assholes, but you take him out of the equation and we’re just these brutal people that murder millions of each other every few years. It’s a hard way to grow up and it’s a hard thing to know about. But it’s all about man’s inhumanity to man and God’s inhumanity to man. But it all comes down to the same thing, which is how do you get through your life with an awareness that it kind of blows, that we die, and brutally, often, and in large numbers by other people’s hand.
markathitakis.com 