AN HOUR LONG INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN SPINRAD

AN HOUR LONG INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN SPINRAD
AT THE UTOPIALES FESTIVAL IN NANTES FRANCE
the questions are in in French, the answers are in  English
November 2012



 I was in Nantes for the Utopiales festival, the most widely attended true mulitmedia sf  event in the world (circa 50,000 attendees this year), and the best mix (literature, cinema, art, video games, science, etc.) and for the launch of my lastest LE TEMPS DU REVE, doing half a dozen or so panels and about a dozen magazine, internet, and television interviews in Nantes, and more in Paris.
   Yes the novel, WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME, was written in English and translated, but no I haven't been able to find an American publisher as yet, so this nationally publicized French edition is the world first edition.
   How such thing could happen, or rather not happen, despite my being Guest of Honor at the forthcoming World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio next year and this being well-known, but on the other hand the same thing can be said for my last novel OSAMA THE GUN (OUSAMA in France) as well as the one before that, MEXICA (a best seller in Mexico), is a rather short sad tale I've gone into in detail before, involving Sonny Mehta the honcho at Knopf torpedoing the one before that, THE DRUID KING, causing my BookScan numbers to acquire such a stink that in the US, it now seems, whatever I write, whatever its subject, whatever its literary quality has been effectively blackballed by a conjunction between one powerful publishing executive's patheticaly petty vengeance and the iron rule of the publishing Nielsens.
  Which explains why, while I'm a respected literary lion and maybe second-rank cultural icon in  France, in publishing terms, I've become something of an invisible man in the  United States.
  Which explains why I feel like a favorite son in a country of which I am not a citizen, and why I feel like an exile in the country of which I am,
  And may be this interview will go a little ways to demonstrate that I am not talking through my hat.

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