Dan Rhodes gets some love from the Bookslut:
Have you heard any recent literary award announcements and thought, they got that exactly right?
Obviously the judges of the Clare Maclean Prize were bang on. More often than not I won’t have read the books so it’ll be hard to say. It was good to see the insane Dylan Thomas Prize won by a great collection of stories (Fresh Apples, Rachel Trezise again). Most fiction prizes fetishise the novel, which makes me cranky.
I read a quote of yours, “Maybe one day I’ll write a nine hundred page epic but, if anything, my books will get shorter, I think,” which reminded me of the film director Barry Sonnenfeld, who said he was the one director who would go back and make his movies shorter. Do you ever want to edit anything out of your published work?
I wouldn’t edit my old books at all. I take great care with the words, and by the time they reach the printers they are just as I want them to be. Going back and making changes would just be meddlesome.
Since you made a stand in favour of short novels, I noticed both Ian McEwan and Philip Pullman have gotten in on the act. Do you think the tide is turning in favour of books that can be fit in one’s jacket pocket?
I would hate to think that I was part of a movement that included a book as dreadful as On Chesil Beach—I can’t think of a worse advertisement for the short novel. It’s not long books that bug me per se, it’s filler. I have no idea if shorter books are on the rise. I think there’s still an exasperating perception that longer books are better value for money than short ones.
Further: Fool’s Gold, 3:AM‘s 2007 interview with Dan Rhodes / A small but satisfying kick in Blair’s nuts, 3:AM‘s 2003 interview with Rhodes / Paul Ewen, he of London Pub Reviews fame, reads Gold in situ
