Biblio File, Interviews

Ask the Author: Joseph O'Neill and Hal Foster

O'Neill and Foster

​When you're a reader, there's little better than a trusted book recommendation, and who is more trusted than a beloved author? That's why NYPL Ask The Author gets the skinny on author reading habits before Books at Noon and Live@NYPL events. For this installment, we're doubling down with Joseph O'Neill and Hal Foster before they discuss O'Neill's new novel The Dog, which he wrote during his Cullman Fellowship in 2009-2010. O'Neill is the author of five books. His novel Netherland was named one of the "10 Best Books of the Year" for 2008 by The New York Times and won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Prize. He'll be joined by fellow Cullman Fellow Hal Foster, a Professor of Art & Archeology at Princeton University.

When and where do you like to read?

O'Neill: I love reading on trains—especially during weekly riverine round trip from New York City to Rhinecliff, which is half way up the Hudson.

Foster: In a cabin in British Columbia on a rainy day.

What were your favorite books as a child?

O'Neill: I read constantly. I started with cheap Turkish comic books—Teksas, Tommiks, Kaptan Svift—that I barely understood; then came Tintin and Asterix and Lucky Luke (in French); and finally children's books, or books readable by children, that did not have (too many) pictures: Enid Blyton , Agatha Christie, Alistair MacLean, CS Lewis, Desmond Bagley, JRR Tolkien,…  All these visual and written texts were inexhaustibly mysterious, no matter how frequently or carefully I consumed them.

Foster: The Horatio Hornblower novels.

What books had the greatest impact on you?

O'Neill: The first real writing I read with appreciation (and mystification) was poetry and prose fiction that functioned poetically: Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Malcolm Lowry

Foster: Gravity's Rainbow.

Take a moment to champion unheralded writers. Who do you think is not getting the readership or recognition they deserve?

O'Neill: I'm not sure what 'unheralded' means, but I'm pretty sure that the work of James Lasdun, Susie Boyt, Heather McGowan and David Gordon should be even more trumpeted and garlanded than it has been. Among academics, I particularly admire The Romantic Machine, by John Tresch (a former Cullman Center colleague), and Nico Israel's forthcoming Spirals: The Whirled Image of Twentieth-Century Literature and Art.

Foster: Claire Watkins.

What was the last book you recommended?

O'Neill: See Spirals above.

Foster: The Impossible Exile by George Prochnik.

You're hosting a dinner party for three writers. Who's on the invite list?

O'Neill: No f***ing way am I going to host a dinner party for three writers I don't know.

Foster: Rivka Galchen, Rachel Kushner, Lynne Tillman.

What do you plan to read next?

O'Neill: I've talked so often about reading JG Farrell's Troubles that I'm starting to feel that I've read it.

Foster: Colm Tóibín's new novel.

What excites you most about doing a live (and/or LIVE from the NYPL) event?

O'Neill: The extremely intelligent and attractive audiences.

Foster: Excites? Is fear exciting?