It's just a shame because, when I think about the comic novel as you were writing them, they're fantastic covers. Parul Sehgal: I think that is right, we also have to be conscious of ourselves as learning.

Yet I know that some of my favorite books, the ones I held dear and reread are like Grand Green's Entertainments, I don't reread his colonial adventure books. We're supposed to be learning something important through serious thought, not through someone's manipulation of our sense of humor and taking us across it. I think I thought I needed to be a serious writer, is a sin, it's sinful. As I was reading this I was like, 'Why don't I read more books like this? Why do I laugh so infrequently when I'm reading this? What is it about the comic novel? Why don't we see more of them? Why do they feel so rare?'Īndrew Sean Greer: That's a tough question because when people ask me my influences, I end up saying, actually I only have a couple of comic novels that I really love. Parul Sehgal: One of the things I love about talking about Less and Less is Lost with other readers is this shy expression takes over their faces and they'll just say how much they enjoyed it as if pleasure is this subversive feeling that we've forgotten we can get this from literary fiction. Host: Andrew Sean Greer just talked with our staff writer Parul Sehgal. Honestly, that was what was constantly in my mind. Apparently, the challenge was this time not how to write joy on the page, but how to write about my country. Let me go right into that because my family is from the south and I thought I don't understand where family's from. In Andrew Sean Greer's sequel Less is Lost, Arthur Less has now fallen on hard times and so he takes on a series of gigs to make ends meet, which turns into a kind of road trip across the United States.Īndrew Sean Greer: It was right after the 2016 presidential election and I just thought, oh, there's something I don't understand.

Less was a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which is pretty rare for a book as Funny as Less. He's a man whose biggest talent seems to be taking a problem, and making it five times worse. He's the hero of Andrew Sean Greer's novel called Less. Host: Some of you may be familiar with a novelist called Arthur Less, a minor American novelist to be precise.

Novel less is lost