13 Questions for Mark Haber

Written By David Southard

Mark Haber is a fiction writer. He is the author of three great novels: Reinhardt’s Garden, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, named a best book of 2022 by the New York Public Library and Literary Hub, and Lesser Ruins, coming this autumn.

Mark’s fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southwest Review, and Air/Light, among others.

Do yourself a good deed and read his work. It is fantastic.

Mark, self-portrait

What are you reading currently and why?

Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (trans. Sasha Dugdale). I love to read books that sort of dare me to go against my natural instincts. In this case, very somber and serious writing which takes its time. My novels all have this sort of manic, ecstatic pace, which is something I sort of aim for (and which also comes very naturally). But I’m interested lately in slowing down the prose. Same thing with Sebald, whom I love. It’s very stoic and cold and paced very thoughtfully. But by reading these works, absorbing him or Stepanova, and other writers, and trying, in a manner of speaking, to imitate them, this other, third thing is born. I think once you’ve written enough you can’t not write like yourself. So I never worry about influence as much as embrace influence. I love to read books that may have styles different from my own, and by ingesting them make them my own. As a writer it’s sometimes difficult to read for enjoyment because you’re trying to figure out what the author is doing, how they’re doing it and so on, the mechanics become a sort of obsession.

I think once you’ve written enough you can’t not write like yourself. So I never worry about influence as much as embrace influence.

What book(s) most altered your taste in literature? 

There’s so many! 


The other usual suspects: Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Céline, Melville, Vonnegut.

Describe the last time a work of literature affected you physically.

Probably The Rainbow by DH Lawrence. It gave me shivers, for all 400-plus pages. The descriptions of nature, the different generations of a family, the passing of time. On the surface it seems like this very conventional book interested in the pastoral life, the intrusion of industry, in a word, realism, but there’s something almost mystical about The Rainbow. It’s a lovely masterpiece. 

Please share a passage from the book nearest at hand.

It’s In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale) 

“Her apartment now stood silent, stunned and cowering, filled with suddenly devalued objects. In the bigger room television stands squatted grimly in each corner. A new huge fridge was stuffed to the gills with icy cauliflower and frozen loaves of bread.”

How do you treat the books you read?

Probably a habit from my bookselling days, but I treat my books with loving kindness. I baby my books. I have those book darts and little post-its that I’ll put inside a book or sometimes I’ll buy the hardcover and treat the paperback a little rougher. I probably have three or four different editions of 2666. But I would never fold a page, which is not a criticism of people that do because I envy people who don't mind dogearing or roughhousing their books.

What quality do you most appreciate in a novel? 

Probably inventiveness and love of language. Take William Gass, reading him you can just tell he’s reveling in language and what words can do. The same with Virginia Woolf. To me, language is as important as the ideas or the stories the author is trying to convey. So inventiveness (imagination, possibility, etc) and love of words.

To me, language is as important as the ideas or the stories the author is trying to convey.

Who is an author you feel should be more widely read?

Well, one hopes writers and books will find their audience. But I’ve always believed it’s better to be underrated than overrated. If you’re overrated (or extremely successful) you have to constantly prove yourself or perhaps there’s this external pressure to satisfy expectations. There’s a freedom in being underrated because no one expects anything from you. It’s very American to think of success in terms of sales and readership, but I don’t think a wide readership is the reward for a great writer. The reward is the work. Accolades and a huge audience are great, but that relationship between me and the words, with my imagination, that’s the beauty. I have a rich interior life and that’s the gift. I hope readers come to my books, but it’s okay if they don’t. 

OK. I digress. Authors who I think should be more widely read: Bernard Malamud, Helen DeWitt, Donald Antrim, Fleur Jaeggy, Richard Flanagan, Reinaldo Arenas, Jen Craig, Adam Ehrilrich Sachs, David Markson, Wolfgang Hilbig, Evelio Rosero, Santiago Gamboa.

What book are you avoiding reading?

I’m not putting off Ulysses exactly, but I feel that it’s the sort of book you need to read in a class, to have your hand held by a professor or someone intimate with the mechanics of the book. I could be wrong. My impression is that it’s very difficult. I’ve also never had a strong desire to read it. Certain books strike as being analogous to algebra. Ulysses just seems like a very algebraic book.

What book, author, or style do you find overrated/overvalued? 

Not really a style, but a book where someone, usually young, is experiencing a lot of personal troubles, usually in New York City, that sort of book holds negative interest for me. I just don’t care about a thirty-something and their dating life or their MFA program or whatever clever urban thing is happening. I don’t like cleverness, I don’t like wink-wink, I’m being clever. I also don’t think those books will hold any truths in ten years, and maybe that’s not their goal. But there’s something very provincial about them, something gross and navel-gazing. A Willa Cather novel which takes place in a small Nebraska town is a thousand times less provincial than a ‘literary-type NYC novel’ because it feels like those books are only speaking to the author and their inner circle. 

In their defense, said writer may say ‘I write what I know’, because there’s that old adage ‘write what you know’ but maybe it should be ‘write what you don’t know.’ Or ‘write what you want to know.’          

A Willa Cather novel which takes place in a small Nebraska town is a thousand times less provincial than a ‘ literary-type NYC novel’

I also dislike books that are blatantly written in the hopes of becoming a film or some limited series. Just write the screenplay if you dislike books so much. To me a book is great because it can’t be anything but a book.  

What book would you like to be the last one you read before you shuffle off this mortal coil? 

Probably Don Quixote (again!). It’s episodic, filled with hijinx and humanity. It’s a comedy and a tragedy and it’s positively endless.

If you were to design a literature course around a singular word, what word would that be and what three books might appear on the reading list? 

The word: lush.

It would be: Ema, the Captive by César Aira, The Autumn of the Patriarch by Garcia Marquez and The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis. Yes, I know, all Latin American. But also, awash in language and possibility.

In what character in literature do you most recognize yourself?

Probably Don Quixote and Sancho Panza combined. A wise fool who takes everything but himself seriously.

Why read literature?

I would have a different answer depending on the day. To be less alone or, conversely, to be alone. To escape reality, if for a small moment, because reality is often quite terrible and books can literally remove you from the tedium or heartbreak or unjust aspects of being alive on this silly planet.




David Southard
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