'Mr. Peanut' is not about a man who dreams of killing his wife; that's jacket copy, to me. 'Mr. Peanut' is about the dynamism of marriage and the distances - some tragic, some redemptive - that marriages travel over time, and those travels ain't always pretty.

Adam Ross

Categorized in : Man Me Dreams Marriage

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree. by Adam Ross

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

forever tree

Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of... by Adam Ross

Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.

dual-nature age love

You know, as I've grown older, my ideas about sin have changed. I used to believe that sins were things you did, but I don't think that now. I think sins are what you ignore.

believe ideas thinking

I became a writer through drawing first and then a comic book obsession - Marvel Comics, in particular. I invented a world of superheroes starting in third grade with my classmate, Wai-Kwan Wong. In a classroom of forty kids, let's just say there was a lot of undirected time. But this was good because I was a dreamy boy.

boys kids book

People think of travel, of movement, as a kind of reprieve from life. But they're wrong. Movement isn't a reprieve. There is no reprieve. Movement is our permanent state.

movement people thinking

Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: Stop vamping. It has remained a caution.

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There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - were talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

writing football book

I studied Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg under Richard Dillard at Hollins, and that year under his tutelage just completely rewired my brain. Both directors combine moral seriousness with great artistry and, certainly in Hitchcock's case, an enormous respect for plot, for its power to enthrall and delight.

tutelage brain years

I'm interested in the limits of personality, in the possibility of change, and the saving power of art. Do powerful works of art raise our consciousness to such a degree that we refrain from sliding into moral hazard? Do we take note? Or are we doomed to repetition?

possibility-of-change powerful art

By examining characters lighting the way to hell, as it were, are readers spared iniquity? Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

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Simply put, you can read a story in a single sitting and hold it all in your mind. You can experience all of its rhythms, beginning to end, during that span. Consequently it has, I think, greater emotional power than a novel because of this real-time effect. Stories can stun you.

emotional real thinking

I'll never forget reading Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end - the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him - and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon's top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let's just hope market forces don't send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate.

flower new-york goodbye

I can't imagine turning into one of those codgers who no longer reads fiction. I'm regularly stirred by it and suffer no anxiety of influence. Influence me! That was my credo then, as I was developing and learning, and remains so now, as I'm developing and learning.

anxiety suffering fiction

I play golf, but sometimes it's so un-relaxing, I have to play tennis to wind down. Now that I think about it, this process is sort of like when I go out for sushi and have to get a slice of pizza afterward.

down pizza wind sometimes

Personally, I read fiction, in part, because I get to spend time... by Adam Ross

Personally, I read fiction, in part, because I get to spend time with people who aren't my people.

get who time people

Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.

deep drive you voice

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

good you hard-work work

In a crazy way, writing is a lot like any kind of very complex game - like chess, where you have the knowledge as you're composing all of the ramifications of each move, of each choice you make.

game you crazy knowledge

Marriage is a kind of prison for anyone who's miserable in it - men and women alike - and anyone who's suffered through difficult periods in marriage dreams of escape from it.

dreams women marriage men

The best compliment came from Knopf's Sonny Mehta. We were at lunch in New York with my editor, Gary Fisketjon, it was my first time meeting Sonny, and after ordering our food, he turned to me and said, 'Adam, I read 'Mr. Peanut' in two days; every page surprised me, and that, I can assure you, doesn't happen often.'

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