CONVERSATIONS WITH HUMANS: LARS IYER

A weekly author Q&A series that scratches beneath the surface and discovers it has won £5 on the lottery. This week, we question Lars Iyer, who will be reading from his debut novel Spurious at Blackwell Manchester tonight at 6.30pm.

Q. What's your 3rd favourite novel of all time? And why?

Third favourite? A random favourite instead: Clarice Lispector’s The Passion of G.H., a dialogue (of sorts) with a cockroach.

Q. What is the longest conversation you've ever tried to have with an animal, and what was it about?

Spurious is a Passion of G.H.-like dialogue with the tiny snails which fall through the hole in my kitchen ceiling. And a dialogue (a one-way dialogue) with the damp itself, which says the same thing as God to Moses: I am that I am.

Q. If your books could be printed on something other than paper, on what would you print them?

If it were possible to print in an ink of dryness on walls of damp, that would be my wish. To print with dry ink, the printed words swallowed up by a fresh wave of damp by morning.

Q. Let's have a Madchester-style revival but for fiction writers instead. Who gets to be Bez?

I would be Bez, a kind of idiot jester, shaking my maracas at the sky.

Q. What's the best colour for a book cover? No, really. I like red.

Brown, damp-brown, mottled with green.

Q. Plug any current book or project you're working on: please use as many long words as you can.

I am always working at the blog Spurious, and with long words like apocalypse and Armageddon.