Virtual Memories Show #133:
Stona Fitch/Rory Flynn – What If We Give It Away?
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“One of my favorite things is to take a character, figure out what’s most important to them, and then take it away and see what they do.”
Stona Fitch joins the show to talk about balancing his careers as a novelist, a publisher, and a freelance writer with family life. We discuss his new novel, the crime thriller Third Rail
“My mentor Russell Banks told me, ‘Go to Miami, you’ll see everything.’ He also said I’d be a great plumber.”
We also talk about what possessed him to write Senseless
“My wife said, ‘Stona, I think you’ve found a brand-new way for writers not to make money.'”
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We talk about a bunch of books in this episode. Here’s a list of ’em (Note: if I ever go to a Patreon crowdfunding model for the show, this is the first thing that goes subscriber-only):
- Third Rail: An Eddy Harkness Novel
- Dark Horse: An Eddy Harkness Novel
– Rory Flynn
- Senseless
- Strategies for Success
– Stona Fitch
- Give + Take
– Stona Fitch
- Printer’s Devil
– Stona Fitch
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel
– George V. Higgins
- The Girl on the Train
– Paula Hawkins
- Gone Girl
– Gillian Flynn
- The Next Queen of Heaven: A Novel
– Gregory Maguire
- Beautiful Ruins: A Novel
– Jess Walter
- Citizen Vince
– Jess Walter
- I Served the King of England
– Bohumil Hrabal
- The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
– Bruno Schulz
- Book of Numbers: A Novel
– Joshua Cohen
- The Goldfinch: A Novel
– Donna Tartt
- Against the Day
– Thomas Pynchon
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
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About our Guest
Via Stona’s site:
NOW
Praised by critics and readers, Stona Fitch’s novels are published widely throughout the world and have inspired other works, from graphic novels to films. His latest novel, Third Rail
Give + Take
In 2008, Stona founded the Concord Free Press, a revolutionary publishing house that publishes and distributes original novels throughout the world, asking only that readers make a voluntary donation to a charity or person in need. The first nine CFP books have inspired nearly $500,000 in generosity.
Stona lives with his family in Concord, MA, where he is also a committed community activist. He and his family work with Gaining Ground, a non-profit farm.
THEN
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1961, Stona Fitch grew up in the midwest and south. While an undergraduate at Princeton, he received the Creative Writing Program’s Lannan Award for Fiction. He also served as chairman of The Daily Princetonian, and wrote for The Anchorage Daily News.
After graduation, Stona reported briefly for The Miami Herald before moving to Boston and joining its burgeoning underground music scene. In 1984, he joined the seminal Boston-based pop group Scruffy The Cat, playing electric banjo, mandolin, accordion, and organ–as well as writing songs. He recorded two albums–High-Octane Revival (a New York Times top release of 1986) and the highly regarded (and rare) Tiny Days–before leaving the band in 1987. During this time, he worked as a dishwasher and cook at the Hoodoo Barbeque, a notorious punk-rock hangout/crime scene in Kenmore Square.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, which seems to have become our unofficial theme song. The conversation was recorded in the Boston Marriott Burlington on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
(Harper) by 
), the challenges of writing about Long Island, how his years at Interview magazine honed his ear for dialogue, his fascination with rootlessness, why it’s too easy to parody the contemporary art scene, and more! 
– Rachel Kushner
– Ron Rosenbaum
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
– Nelson DeMille
– Bret Easton Ellls
– Michael Dirda
– Alex Garland
– DH Lawrence
and how most critics got it wrong, his own obsession with ‘aftermath culture,’ the clash of temporal personalities and atemporal idiots, and the history of the 
– Kazuo Ishiguro
– Kazuo Ishiguro
– John Clute
) and her first two books (
and 
), her house-on-fire list of books to save, her quarrel with Plato, and her adoration of Simeon’s Maigret novels. Bonus: I tell a long, awful and emotional story from last weekend (it starts around the 75:00 mark, so feel free to stop long before that).
– Rick Atkinson
– Rick Atkinson
– Rick Atkinson
– Michael Chabon
– Charles Dickens
– George Eliot
– Ulysses S. Grant
– Vassily Grossman
– Vassily Grossman
– Joseph Heller
– Homer (tr. Fagles)
– Homer (tr. Fagles)
– Henry Marsh
– David Mitchell
– Montaigne
– Plutarch
– Shakespeare
– Shakespeare
– Tolstoy
– Tolstoy
– Tolstoy
– Virgil (tr. Fagles)
– Evelyn Waugh
(WW Norton), her solution to sexism in the publishing world, her misgivings about contributing to a website of authors’ 10 favorite books, her attraction to surrealism and fairy tales, her garden-of-forking-paths approach to fiction, and more! 
.
– Amanda Filipacchi
– Kazuo Ishiguro
– Siri Hustvedt
– Marcel Proust
– Primo Levi
– Edith Wharton
– Charlotte Bronte
– Dostoevsky
– Oscar Wilde
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
– Shirley Jackson
– Jane Austen
– Haruki Murakami
– Walter Kirn
– Walter Kirn
– Lionel Shriver
– Lionel Shriver
– A.M. Homes
– Roxana Robinson
(Viking/Penguin 1993), 
(Carroll & Graf, 1999), 
, joins the show to talk about Chanel’s impact on women’s fashion and French national identity, how she managed not to get tried for collaboration after the war, the one figure from our age who compares to Chanel, what it’s like teaching the accordion-and-beret crowd, and more! 
– Walter Isaacson
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
– Scott Herring
– Jonathan Strauss
(Princeton University Press, winner of the Kayden Award for outstanding manuscript in the humanities), 
(Princeton), and, as co-editor, 
(University of Nebraska Press, winner of the 2011 award for book design from the American Alliance of Museums). Her new book is 
– Thomas Berger
– Thomas Berger
– Daniel Boorstin
– Daniel Boorstin
– Joseph Conrad
– Cyril Connolly
– Edmund Crispin
– Michael Dirda
– Michael Dirda
– Lloyd C. Douglas
– Clifton Fadiman
– Clifton Fadiman
– Clifton Fadiman
– William Gaddis
– Jonathan Galassi
– Robert Hichens
– Homer
– Michael Innes
– Clive James
– Rudyard Kipling
– Nikos Kazantzakis
– Judith Krantz
– Alison Lurie
– Charles Mackay
– Jay McInerney
– Baroness Orczy
– Ayn Rand
– James Salter
– Neal Stephenson
– Thoreau
– John Williams
– William Zinsser
Michael Dirda is a weekly book columnist for 
, and of four previous collections of essays: 
, 
, and 
, in addition to his newest collection, 
! We also talk about her need to try different genres, that pigeonholing process, how abandoning the supernatural for her Cass Neary novels was like working without a net, how her success at writing may be attributable to the Helsinki Bus Syndrome, what it was like to be at the punk scene in the mid-’70s, how she learned to strip down her prose for her recent (and excellent) noir crime novels, just how she ended up in coastal Maine, and more! 
– Jennifer Marie Brissett
– Julian Cope
– Pamela Des Barres
– Daryl Gregory
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Thomas Harris
– Greill Marcus
– Sally Mann
– Legs McNeil
– Kem Nunn
– Jean Stein, George Plimpton
– John Steinbeck
– JRR Tolkien
– Laura van den Berg
– Rob Young
(Henry Holt).We talk about what it means to miss New Jersey, what makes The Shore different from any other seaside amusement region, what he learned while writing for the YA category, what he unlearned from his copywriting day-job, the value of 