AC Charlap: Today we are sitting with Istvan Ticoczki, the self-proclaimed world's worst novelist.
Istvan Ticoczki: It is not a proclamation, it is a fact corroborated by every review and lack of book sale.
ACC: And yet you are acclaimed throughout the world as the most consequential and loathed intellect of your time and place.
IT: That too is not acclimation but fact. I was proclaimed by Roger Ebert to be an internet troll who was somehow deposited in the New York Review of Books in the early 1960s and waited for the world to catch up to him.
ACC: You have what might be the singular distinction of being beaten up by Norman Mailer on nine separate occasions.
IT: I refused to ever fight back, as I knew after the second time that provoking Mailer in print would result in my remembrance by posterity.
ACC: You also had separate plates of beef stroganoff deposited on your head by Joan Didion, Eve Babbitz, Mary McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick, and Lillian Hellman.
IT: Don't forget Susan Sontag.
ACC: Why was it always beef stroganoff?
IT: I always keep a plate of it near me for just such occasions.
ACC: And yet you were always invited to parties of the New York literati?
IT: It was always secretly hoped that I provoke people in person, yet people persisted in finding me nice and polite, the literary scenesters were always disappointed.
ACC: And yet you took quite a few beatings?
IT: It was a regular event that I would be punched and slapped, with drinks thrown in my face. At one party I stood in the middle of the room while the other members tied ropes to me like a maypole and proceeded to promenade around my neck so as to choke me.
ACC: How close did you come to suffocating?
IT: Very, but I made sure the event was covered in the next issue of the New Yorker and received a nomination for the National Book Award long list as an act of contrition.
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ACC: Tell me about your novelistic project?
IT: It is 'the Jewish comedy.'
ACC: It's not very funny.
IT: That is where the comedy lies.
ACC: I'm afraid I don't understand.
IT: I wish to convey the entirety of Jewish history as Dante did for the afterlife and Balzac for Paris.
AC: How long have you been working on it?
IT: Seventy years.
AC: How much have you finished.
IT: I have roughly three percent of it complete in rough form.
AC: It sounds exhausting.
IT: I shall complete the rough draft in roughly the year 4823.
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The interview cuts off here for legal reasons. There is more that may be shared in future issues.
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