Rick Moody: ‘Writers Are More Desperate Than Any Time Since I’ve Been Watching’

In a candid interview at Big Think (embedded above) novelist Rick Moody worried about the future of experimental fiction in a publishing industry obsessed with book sales and the bottom line.

Here’s an excerpt: “writers are more desperate then at any time since I’ve been watching what’s been happening closely. And I worked in publishing in the last big recession in the early 90′s, so I saw some of it at that time. I think people are just really scared that they’re not going to get published at all, and as a result, they’re trying to shoehorn themselves into pretty rigidly formatted kinds of things. One of those formats is conventional realistic contemporary fiction, which doesn’t necessarily… I mean, there are no dead bodies or no robots in that fiction at all.”

At the same time, Moody worried about “how we draw attention to those many tens of thousands of novels” that are self published. Moody appeared on the show to promote The Four Fingers of Death–a novel inspired by a real-life B-movie classic.

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