Fantastic Metropolis

Nicholas Kaufmann: How did you manage to land self-proclaimed literary teen idol Zoe Trope, author of Please Don’t Kill the Freshman (HarperTempest), for the introduction to 3000 MPH?

Nick Mamatas: Actually, I think the HarperCollins mass mind-control apparatus proclaimed Zoe a literary teen idol. I found her on livejournal, actually, as we shared a mutual lj “friend” in horror/indie author Jemiah Jefferson. I started reading her journal, and made some pithy comments in it, then we started corresponding.

One of the more odious-to-me things about the small press is the practice of slightly bigger names writing introductions for small fries in an attempt to scare up some sales. The intros are usually too short to be anything other than a rip-off, and vapid too, along the lines of “I met Nick Kaufmann at a convention. He was nervous and lonely-looking, but at least he didn’t smell of rancid bacon fat like everyone else. Then I read his stories and they were the most thrilling tales ever, except for the 500 authors I wrote introductions for last year.”

Zoe’s introductory love letter to me is a literal one (“Dearest Nick, Will you make out with me…”) and thanks to publishing’s fascination with youth and the aforementioned mind-control devices, she actually is going to be ridiculously famous by the end of the year. But she’s a zinester, too, and she keeps it real, so I can’t help but be very pleased.

Nicholas Kaufmann: There’s a lot of smart humor in your stories, such as when Socrates kills Zeus and goes through his purse in “The Birth of Western Civilization.” Your non-fiction, on the other hand, is often very serious. “Brother Theodore is Dead,” for example, is a sad and touching remembrance of the underground New York performance artist. Is this indicative of any sort of mindset, a belief that the real world is too serious, too important, for the lens of humor?

Nick Mamatas: Brother Theodore died after being crippled and nearly immobile for years. He was still pretty funny, but he wanted to die, then he did. That’s just naturally sad to me. I don’t think all my stories are “funny” in the yuk yuk kind of way. Satires can be dark. And some of my essays are pretty funny, according to readers. The fact that real life is absurd is what fuels the humor in both the essays and fiction.

Nicholas Kaufmann: In “Old Boilers and Old Men,” you talk a lot about the strange competitiveness between you and your rather obstinate father, as well as some observations about being Greek that you definitely won’t find in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” How do you think your background affected you as a writer and as a person?

Nick Mamatas: Well, like many Greeks, I’m an egomaniac and obsessed with philotimo, an untranslatable term that usually gets translated anyway as “love of honor.” It really has to do with personal independence, a rejection of arbitrary authority, personal generosity and loyalty to friends, hostility toward various asswipes rather than feigned politeness, and an embrace of contradictions. All good things for a writer, I think.