I do most of my writing in the back corner of a coffee shop, so on my desk are cream and sugar (the place puts them there—I drink my coffee black). I’m a few years into compulsively drafting a novel. The pile of chapters and revisions from its current incarnation (as there have been many) sits next to my bed in a wooden box and measures fourteen-and-a-half inches tall. Across from the bed, under a table, is a cardboard box with the drafts of a story I’m almost done with. It’s about an anti-Semite in a made-up town called Greenheath. Being a short story, the pile is shorter. Thirty drafts later, it has left behind a stump four inches high.
Nathan Englander
I’m working on a novel about a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, set in Budapest and Paris in the late 1930s. On my desk are a lot of French architecture books and old photographs and maps. I love maps. I have a passion for orientation. I like to know where my protagonist is going, even when he’s lost. My grandfather, on whose experiences the novel is roughly based, was rarely lost. He walked everywhere. “I had a garret apartment in Rue des Ecoles,” he told me in a recent interview. “I didn’t have furniture, so I took what people left in front of the building. I found a bed of steel and bought a mattress. I didn’t have money to buy coffee every day, so I made a sweet tea. I had a glass for jam; I used it for a mug. I made one cup of tea for breakfast with a little sugar, and a croissant. And after that I went to my school, l’École Speciale d’Architecture. It was a mile and a half from my apartment. I never went in the Metro because I wanted to see all the houses. I was walking...
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