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Salvatore Scibona's first novel, The End, was published by Graywolf Press in 2008. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. Riverhead will publish a paperback edition in Fall 2009. German and French editions are forthcoming in 2010. Scibona's short fiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Best New American Voices 2004 and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize. He administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what's the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
I don't know if it's the most accurate thing, but a reviewer named William Giraldi exposed to me a priority I'd unconsciously employed for a long time. He was critiquing another reviewer's comparison of The End with the novels of Saul Bellow:

Scibona's story pivots on spiritual malaise instead of what Emerson called Man Thinking. Bellow cares considerably less for the spirit than he does for the mind. But when Scibona's people delve into intellectual matters, that delving is always in service of spirit.

I love Bellow completely; his more eggheady riffs never seem arid to me because he does not treat ideas as vacations from life but as the beating heart of life. All the same, Giraldi boiled down what makes an idea urgent to me: it becomes urgent when it spills out of the character's mind and infects her spirit.

What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers' lives for the better?
Read: Independent People, by Halldór Laxness; the Great Icelandic Novel, about sheep and the hard life. A transcendent, hugely compassionate book: even the cows have souls.
Watched: CNN at about 10 p.m. last election night, when Wolf Blitzer called Ohio (my home state), and thereby, in effect, the election, for President Obama.
Listened to: Two peerless albums: Judee Sill by Judee Sill (1971), and In an Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998) by Neutral Milk Hotel; both of them sui generis folk records twisted by Jesus.
Eaten: The Hillbilly Potato Leaf tomato: a 2-pound monster, yellow with red and pink striping, sweet as honey, as dense as the meat of a bass; an heirloom from Ohio. Like most heirlooms, the fruit does not ship, so grow it from seed or buy it at a farmer's market between August 15 and September 30.

Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn't look at you screwy)?
Janet Reno's, naturally.

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Hemingway said that not eating made him write better, but that will happen when your food is booze.

I've had lean days, but never starved. If you grow up, as I did, in the company of a lot of old people who really did starve during their childhoods, you learn to make breakfast foods into supper and enjoy it. My great-grandmother used to serve a loaf of bread and a bowl of dandelion leaves, picked from the yard, at the end of the day's work on her farm; and she lived to 94.

What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
One in which the reader invests herself completely in the characters, and never thinks of the writer as a person she might meet in the regular world. The reader's primary relationship is not with the mind of the writer but with the mind of the book. Ideally, the reader should regard the flesh-and-blood writer as superfluous.

Have you ever written anything that you'd like to take back?
I've taken back nearly every word I ever wrote. I published what was left over. The stuff that's in print represents the subset of what I've written of which I feel least ashamed. Once the thing is printed, I choose for the sake of good mental health to repent nothing, and as quickly as possible to forget I ever wrote it.