Sigrid Nunez’s fifth novel, The Last of Her Kind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), was published in January 2006. A new edition of her first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God(1995), was also published in January, by Picador. Nunez’s other books include the novels Naked Sleeper (1996) and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), a mock biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s pet monkey. A new edition of Mitz is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press (spring 2007).T Cooper’s second novel, Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes(Dutton), was published in February 2006 and cannot altogether inaccurately be summed up as the Jewish immigrant-Charles Lindbergh-Eminem novel. Cooper’s first novel, Some of the Parts, was published by Akashic Books in 2002. Cooper is also coeditor of a forthcoming anthology of original fiction entitled A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic, August 2006).

T Cooper and Sigrid Nunez first met in 1998, when Cooper was a student in the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia’s School of the Arts and Nunez was working there as an adjunct professor. Their conversation took place in Manhattan over a period of several days this past winter.

18 April 2006

SIGRID NUNEZ: I wanted to tell you a funny thing, since you’ve got a book coming out too. This writer I know said the closest experience he’d ever had to having a book come out was chemotherapy.

T COOPER: That’s drastic.

SN: Somewhere in a letter Virginia Woolf tells Vita Sackville-West that a bookseller had asked her if the two of them would sign copies of their latest books, and Woolf said she told him, “Of course not!”

TC: God bless that woman.

SN: Imagine yourself telling them that at Barnes & Noble.

TC: Hell, I’ve been asked for ID twice when I was trying to sign books in stores.

SN: What do you mean? Who did they think you were? Some stranger trying to sign your books?

TC: I don’t think they’d ever seen an author before—these were Barnes & Nobles in the middle of nowhere, and they had a small stack of my books, but they still thought I was making it all up. Even after I pointed to my picture on the back cover, I just got these blank stares, and then the manager was called.

SN: What a bizarre story.

TC: I remember Paul Theroux saying something in a review of Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene about our living in a time when writers get “bullied” into becoming part of the whole marketing...