Gabriel Brownstein's origins are not so easily Googled, though his fiction is blowing up all over the real world and the Web. His latest, a novel titled The Man from Beyond, has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, Kirkus, Bookseller.com and countless other print and electronic outlets. His earlier work, a short story collection that shares a name with an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story with the addition of an apartment number, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, was the recipient of the 2002 Pen/Hemingway Award for new fiction.

Steven Hansen: I was able to Google plenty of information about your professional life (book credits, academic records and teaching positions, etc), but not much about how you got there from wherever it is you came from. The best I could find was a blog where some guy named Neil deMause claims to have played Frisbee with you in 1970s New York City. By this tidbit and the fact that most of the fiction I have read of yours is set in New York City, is it safe to assume you grew up there?

Gabriel Brownstein: Yes. I grew up in New York, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Columbia University. I live in Brooklyn now.

Neil's claims are accurate.

SH: Other than a foray to Ohio for your undergraduate degree in English at Oberlin College, it appears you've stuck pretty close to home for most of your life. I noted that Kirkus, aside from busting your chops in general, wrote this in specific in their review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W : "...A careful portrait of a very small world: likely to appeal to New Yorkers and New York-ophiles but not-so-likely to travel well." Have other people and organizations accused you of being too provincial? And was winning the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award particularly gratifying in light of this criticism?

GB: I don't know if anyone else has accused me of being too provincial. And winning an award is really nice, really gratifying, but mostly in light of the praise a book receives, not so much in light of the criticism. I do my best to put nasty reviews out of mind.

But being a New York writer is an odd thing. It's like being a regional writer, except not too many people think of your region as a region; they think of it as a center. Nobody talks about J.D. Salinger or Grace Paley as "regional" writers. But they both have a specific region-Manhattan-and their fidelity to that region is part of their greatness. It's not too, too different from Flannery O'Connor and rural Georgia. A writer has her world to portray-and you don't really get to pick which world you come from.

I'm a fairly provincial New Yorker, which is to say, New York is all I really know, and the only place I feel really comfortable. I think having a region is a great asset for any writer-it gives your fiction a context. It must be very different for writers who feel like they do not have a place to naturally call home. But I did resent that dig in Kirkus-the first review I ever got as a writer-and I resented it as much as a New Yorker as I did as a writer. I mean: "A careful portrait of a small world"-that's fiction!

SH: Well taking the good with the bad, I'd say Benjamin Button did very well indeed. Speaking of which, you borrowed that title from an earlier story by F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as the character that ages in reverse (the protagonist in Fitzgerald's story but not in yours); your novel The Man from Beyond also borrows characters and general situations (the seance with the Doyle's and Houdini that instigates their battle in the press). Is this a conscious effort on your part to pay homage to past writers who have inspired you?

GB: With Benjamin Button, it started out as a game, an experiment. I was writing some autobiographical stories. The stories were not working as well as I wanted. I started to play with them in this way: by including, explicitly, the stories that I'd been thinking of when I was writing them. And when I started to do that, the writing got me excited. So I went with it. I wasn't really trying to pay homage, and the stories that I picked were sometimes kind of random. I was working in those days in a space that was an afterschool-tutoring center in the afternoons, but in the daytime and weekends was empty. And there were anthologies lying around. And when the writing got stalled I would often browse their shelves. And so different stories in the collection came about in different ways. The story that's called "A Penal Colony of His Own," was a story I had been working on for years, about the nervous breakdown of a dear friend. And I had written dozens of failed drafts. And at some point I began to think of the Kafka story as a model. One thing Kafka does exceedingly well in his great story is to give you the sense of speaking with madness, a brilliant troubled man who is seductive in his madness. And so when I finally rewrote my story making the connection to Kafka explicit--and it's really written over the Kafka story; there's some of the Muir translation of Kafka in my story--then my story perked up and clarified itself. Some of the later ones I used the original story as almost a first draft of my own work.

Benjamin Button is one of those. With The Man from Beyond, I did what a lot of writers of historical fiction do: I took a real story and built a world around it. I read a book by Houdini, called A Magician Among the Spirits, and while reading it, Houdini kind of took over my brain, got me very excited, and the story spun itself out from the book before I had a chance to get a handle on it. In order to keep the story and make it real, I had to do a lot of reading about the time and place, and my research, such as it was, was split pretty evenly between fiction, history, biography, and memoir. Dos Passos was big.

I don't know if I plan in the future to do any more things like that: to write based either on someone else's stories or on someone else's life.

SH: Before getting your current professorship at St. John's, I noticed you had taught at Barnard College. Seeing as how that's a girls-only school, that has to be a candidate for 'Favorite Previous Job' right? My only question would be why'd you leave?

GB: It was a part-time job. I taught the intro English class.

SH: Has teaching had any adverse affects on your own writing? Or has it been a positive influence?

GB: Almost every fiction writer I know teaches. And almost all of them complain about their teaching. I complain about my teaching, too, but on the other hand, I get a lot of pleasure out of it, and I work with nice people, and I get enough money and benefits for the family.

I've had a lot of crappy jobs and jobs that didn't suit me: working in a publicity office, in a carpenter's shop, as a security guard, as a day-care teacher, as a test prep teacher, as an office temp, in a literary agent's office, as a ghost writer (a little), and as a part-time teacher of basic writing (for years)-most of these were not jobs where I got much respect or money. And none of them were particularly good for my writing.

If teaching works against my writing, it's because it cuts in to my time. This morning, for instance, I had to prepare for class and read and think about Flannery O'Connor and Alice Munro and so I didn't get to do the work I wanted to on my novel-in-progress. But it feels pretty self-indulgent to bitch about reading and thinking about Munro and O'Connor. And the time demands of university teaching are pretty light when compared with, say, working in advertising or publishing or in a law firm. Grading papers can be stultifying, of course, and lots of writers have made some good zingers about their students' effect on their prose. But I think it's basically a stroke of crazy luck that I have a job where the people who write my paycheck actually want to help me find time to write my fiction, a job where I get to talk about the things I love. Maybe I'll feel differently at the end of the semester.

SH: Having cycled through a myriad of jobs, raised (currently raising) a family, and all the other day-to-day stuff of modern life, it's a wonder anybody finds the time to continue writing long enough to hone their skills sufficiently to gain any modicum of success, let alone the degree you've experienced. An expression from the novel My Name is Asher Lev has stayed with me: "Many are called, few are chosen." When did you realized your calling, and how have you stuck it out long enough to become part of that select 'few?'

GB: I've always known I was going to be a writer, something that's kind of baffling to me. I didn't have success for a long time, and I've written a lot of real garbage. But I kept on writing. I think a lot of the keeping on has to do with habit and with pleasure. It's a little bit like going to the gym everyday, maybe. You get addicted. And writing keeps my head more or less together-or maybe putting it the opposite is more true: I fall apart when I stop writing. If I do not work for even a few days, I get short-tempered and irritable and depressed. And while I am pursuing a novel or a story, I feel very ambitious, a drive and need to do the story well. I also, sometimes, get very excited, even gleeful, while I'm feeling confident in my work. It can be very heady.

I certainly don't feel like I'm in a selected "few" that have been "chosen," but I do feel awfully lucky to have a couple of books in print, and to have nice people like you saying nice things about my writing.

SH: What do you think about the proposition that to be 'successful' a writer must market his or her work and, to an extent, themselves (JT Leroy and James Frey stand out as recent examples) as much -- if not more than -- they dedicate themselves to the actual work of writing?

GB: I think at the level I'm on there's not too much demand for marketing. I do a few readings and occasional interviews, but it's not a major drag on my life-it's kind of fun, this for instance, having you ask questions and letting me run my mouth. I suppose I've met people who knock themselves out going from party to party and trying to make connections and make things work that way-but I've never been much good at that, and I've known people for whom all that networking brought as much grief as it did success.

It's funny, as a writer, while you're snug and confident at your own desk, you are simultaneously courting and avoiding attention. And once it's out, the kind of attention a book gets or doesn't get can be quite frustrating and confusing. You can really drive yourself bonkers worrying about which book gets attention and why. It's all very mysterious to me. Pick two good writers, for instance, books with very different virtues: Nicole Krauss is a star, and Judy Budnitz is relatively obscure. If I had to guess, previous to publication, which of their books would hit the best seller lists, well, I would have just thrown up my hands. What's the mechanism behind the success? Or is the mechanism akin to a roulette wheel?

I often have these wild cravings for fame-these desires for everyone to know that my books are excellent books-but then I wonder if fame is more fun in fantasy than in fact. Just from reading his work, one would guess that Delillo had a lot more fun with End Zone than he did with Underworld.

SH: Writers as classic Approach/Avoidance Syndrome psyche jobs? Say it ain't so! But speaking of the need for affirmation, are you demoralized at all that your listing at RateMyProfessor-dot-com only has two responses?

GB: I haven't checked RateMyProfessor. Should I be demoralized? On second thought, don't answer that question.

SH: The two replies you did get rated a smiley face, so it's really not that bad. But back to your writing life ... would you mind giving a brief overview of your novel-in-progress? Also, why have you chosen a novel for your third book instead of a story collection?

GB: The novel-in-progress is kind of nutty. Imagine, if you will, a musical comedy, Notes from the Underground starring Mel Brooks in blackface as Scrooge. In a strange way I think of it also as a short story collection. In all this, as David Foster Wallace used to say, I shit you not.

Writing short stories is really, really hard, and I think my brain naturally tends to the longer form. My collection of stories is, after all, vaguely novel-like, inasmuch the stories are linked, and there's even a story in that book that stretches toward novella length. In the end, I'm not sure I chose a novel instead of a short story. A novel came into my head. A short story hasn't, not for a while.

SH: That's a pretty specific, though amorphous, overview. Have you picked a title? And as to the story v. novel question: most folks would naturally think a novel to be the harder form since it is so much longer than a SHORT story. You are of the mind the story is 'really really hard.' If you had to explain the difference between writing a novel vs. writing a short story to the average Joe, what would you say?

GB: Well, the obvious difference--maybe too obvious--is length. But length dictates a lot, aesthetically. There's the famous line from Borges about a story needing to be perfect, which I think is true, and largely a function of length. A short story with a flaw is usually a bad short story; a novel with a flaw could be, for instance, Moby Dick. So a short story exerts a tremendous amount of pressure on the writer, while a novel allows a certain amount of freedom to maneuver.

I think there are a lot of people who think short stories are easier, and maybe even lesser forms than novels, and I think these people are mistaken. There was a review I read of (I think) Rick Moody's last collection of stories, and the reviewer began by saying that short stories were the novelist's workshop, experiments the novelist conducted before getting down to business and writing novels. This, when generalized, is boneheaded. Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis and a number of the best living writers work primarily in the short form, and it is not because that is an easier form. Definitely, some young writers start in the short form and then work their way up to the novel--it does take a certain amount of control to negotiate the length of the novel--but it's a different kind of control, not a different degree of difficulty.

It's a question of how a writer's imagination works. I think my imagination goes long. I think, even in my short stories, they were good individually, but much more effective collectively.

SH: Judging solely by the lopsided ratio of published novels to story collections, one can infer that novels are much more sought-after by publishers. Or perhaps it's just a fact that more writers are writing novels. What's your opinion on this chicken or egg proposition?

GB: As far as I can tell, it's very hard to publish a short story collection, and once they're published, hard to sell them. Any kind of literary fiction faces a tough market, but for short stories it's particularly grim.

SH: When was the last time you played Frisbee? Who with, where and why?

GB: It's been a while. In high school, I used to play with some friends in the neighborhood. We would go to Riverside Park and play, and eventually, we formed a sort of club that played other high schools, and we were good-I wasn't so good, but some of my friends were very, very good-and we were competitive. In college, I played with the college team. Again, I was not very good, but we had a lot of fun. There's a regular game in Prospect Park, near where I live, and I think the last time I played was with them, about eight or ten years ago. I was good for about ten minutes-there's an awful lot of running in ultimate-and then I sort of faded. I don't think I could keep up now-running around with a bunch of twenty-year-olds that do it regularly. In fact, I am sure I could not keep up.

When I did play, I always liked practices more than tournaments. I liked to throw the Frisbee; I liked the curves you could make. I was never very fast or good at defense or at jumping. I liked the patterns of the game, though, and could usually figure out how to be in more or less the right place and so I hope I wasn't much of a liability to any team I played with.

It's a funny game-it attracts people who want to be athletes, but maybe aren't good enough to be on the Varsity soccer team. At least, that was true when I was in college. The hippy-stoner image is not entirely accurate, either; a lot of these guys at high levels of competition are devoted and driven. I was never much good at high levels of competition.

SH: How has becoming a father affected your writing? Do the pros outweigh the cons, or vice versa?

GB: The pros and cons? It's impossible to answer that question. My kids are little-four and six--and outside of my writing, my family, and my job, I don't have much life.

The presence of my kids shapes my writing schedule, that is, when it is possible for me to write. When I'm particularly compulsive, I get up before the kids do, and I write before dawn, but I can only keep that up for a while. I get too tired. So generally I sleep until a semi-reasonable hour (like 6 or 6:30) and then wake up with the family, reading to the kids, getting them breakfast, and getting them off to school.

On days I have to go off and teach, my wife takes the kids to school, and then I write in the hour and a half between their departure and the moment I have to run off to the subway. On the days I don't teach, I drop the kids off at school, come home, and then get to work. On weekends, I tend to huddle at my desk for an hour or two in the morning. Sometimes the kids come visit me.

So in terms of the way the hours of my day are structured, my writing and my life with my children are complexly linked. But when they're gone, they're gone-I'm pretty good at getting to my work, usually with the help of several cups of coffee. What did they call this with Bill Clinton? Compartmentalizing? It can be stressful: getting a child to school, as every parent knows, can be a grand drama-anxiety, despair, passion, anger, tears, and reconciliation. But then I go to my desk and work.

SH: What do you think is the prime motivator of the human condition: Death, Sex, or driving your enemies before you and hearing the lamentations of the women? Why do you think so, and how does it trickle down into your fiction?

GB: There's a lot to say on this subject, Steve, but I don't know if I'm the man to say it. Do you think people go into writing because they want to get laid? If you know anyone who's doing that, please discourage them. As a way to combat death? No. To strike fear into the hearts of the enemy? This does not work. Enemies are not cowed, even by the best novel. In fact, good novels seem to create enemies. And the writers I know--myself among them--are full of fear and cowering; they are all deeply involved in lamentations, as are their women, and their men. What trickles down into my writing, you ask? Isn't "trickle down" Republican for "I'll keep mine and don't you dare touch any of it"? But to answer as best I can: George Orwell's wonderful essay "Why I Write" gives several motivations for writing, and the first is (if I remember) "sheer egotism." And Joan Didion borrowed his title for that wonderful essay of her own, and she starts out by saying that the three words in his title share a sound she loves, and the sound is: "I, I, I." I like the sound of those words, too. I like the sound of my own voice. I like to play with words. And I think that that play is somehow important--though exactly how or why it is important, I cannot say.