Rick Moody
Rick Moody
Hiram Frederick "Rick" Moody IIIis an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike, and in 1999 The New Yorker chose him as one of America's...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 October 1961
CountryUnited States of America
I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.
I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.
The Diviners is such a big, woolly yarn, yet it's the fastest any book has come to me since The Ice Storm.
The Diviners ... an elusive, but surely huge, television saga ... that opens with Huns sweeping through Mongolia and closes with a Mormon diviner in the Las Vegas desert.
All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt - you know, I'm an artist, man, I don't do that family stuff - has begun to seem really important.
You don't have these perfectly transparent, simple thoughts. You have thoughts that are all cluttered up, like overused bookshelves.
I'm trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like music to me.
I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.
I'm not the guy to ask about the most up to date stuff.
Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
In general, each form is a relief from the other forms. I can't write a novel after a novel. I just use up all the material each time, and I need to rest.
I always feel I have made unfilmable books. I even felt that way about a book of mine that was later made into a movie. But my wife, who has made two films, thinks this one would make a very original film. I'm all for original films.
I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.
I published a bunch of my older books in e-book format with Open Road, which is great and has tons of hard to find older books available there.