Quite A Party
Q: If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
A: Chekhov. I don’t want to know anything in particular—I’d just like to carve up a pheasant with him, served with new potatoes and green beans from the garden. Then we could polish off some dodgy Crimean wine and play a few rounds of Anglo-Russian Scrabble and lose track of time and the score. If Isaac Bashevis Singer could be there, too, I think they’d get on well. And if Dorothy Parker could drop by at some point, and maybe Katherine Mansfield, and Sylvia Townsend Warner…. And suddenly it’s a party.
—David Mitchell, whose book Cloud Atlas has been turned into a movie that comes out next week, interviewed in The New York Times Book Review. We’re just happy he invited Sylvia Townsend Warner.
