Bradford Morrow
Bradford Morrow's novels include The Diviner’s Tale, Ariel's Crossing and Giovanni's Gift. He is the founding editor of Conjunctions and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. A Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College, he divides his time between New York City and upstate New York.
Morrow's latest novel is The Forgers.
From his Q & A with Karen Russell at Omnivoracious:
KAREN RUSSELL: The Forgers is a totally sui generis existential thriller that introduced me to the world of rare book collecting, a world where I know you have serious street cred. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how the idea to write The Forgers came to you?The Page 69 Test: The Forgers.
BRADFORD MORROW: The Forgers opens with a simple, disturbing, and to me compelling sentence, “They never found his hands.” My editor, Otto Penzler, had asked if I would write a story for a series of bibliomysteries he publishes, and once I’d settled on exploring the rarefied, high-stakes world of literary forgeries, I thought to myself, What would a ruthless forger most want to deprive a rival of having? Pens, nibs, inks, antique papers, subterranean connections in the rare book world? No, his hands, of course. So I began with that single image and all the narrative possibilities and challenges it offered. The rare book community, a collective of brilliant eccentrics among whom murderers don’t generally mingle, is one I have been a part of for my whole adult life—first as a dealer, later as a collector—so most of my research was already done by the time I wrote that sentence and those that came after.
My experience of writing The Forgers was one of extraordinary, unstoppable momentum—the story very quickly matured into a novella and the novella soon burst into a novel. And while, yes, it is a literary thriller, it is also a heartrending (at least to me) love story—love between two people, as well as a love of antiquarian books that, for some, crosses ethical borders into...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
