You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Ronald Sukenik,

who's one of the co-directors of the Fiction Collective,

which has been bringing us for many years

some of the most exciting work in modern American fiction.

He's the author as well of the collection of pieces called Doggy Bag, which the

Fiction Collective has published under its imprint Black Ice books. He's the author as well

of novels starting with up, continuing without. He's written 98.6. He's written a history of the Bohemian Underground called

Down and In, and he's with us today to talk about the fiction collective and about Doggy Bag.

Now, my own background had been in, I guess, you know, the height of late 60s, eventually postmodernism.

I was taught by John Barth and Donald Barthelme, but your own work seems to come out of a more village hipster tradition.

Who were your influences?

I think we're influenced more by Borges and the Latin American Renaissance of the novel.

I came more out of a line that includes Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, the French of Angardis,

and some older books like Lawrence, Stearns, Tristram, Shandy, and Rabelais.

In addition, I think I was heavily influenced by jazz and jazz improvisation.

When you say the French avant-garde,

are you talking Celine and Sandrard?

...