EDITOR’S Note
N JUNE 2011, THOUGH IT SEEMS MUCH FURTHER BACK, I flew to Madison, Wisconsin, to see the novelist Sam Savage, whose third book, , was due out from Coffee House Press that fall. Five years earlier his debut, , had made waves as one of those—who quotes Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce as he devours books, both literally and figuratively, in a Boston bookstore. Savage was sixty-five years old when his first book was finally published, and it sold more than a million copies worldwide. So of course I went to see him. At the time, he had been suffering from a genetic lung disease for thirty-five years, and I wanted to talk to him about that, but I also wanted to ask him what he had done during that five-year hiatus from writing, when the whole artistic enterprise had seemed pointless. What does such a gifted writer do, if not write?
