ABSTRACT
Anne-Marie Picard interviews British novelist, Booker Prize winner, and journalist Howard Jacobson about his satirical novel, Pussy (Penguin, 2016). In the shocking aftermath of Trump's election, with as much Dickens as Swift, and memories of Rabelais, the novelist writes “in a fury of disbelief,” wanting “a fast attack with no quarter given. No quarter given, not only to Fracassus,” the Trump character, “but the world in which his rise was made possible.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Anne-Marie Picard
Professor of Comparative Literature & English at the American University of Paris, where she teaches psychoanalysis, French literature and linguistics, Anne-Marie Picard most recently authored From Illiteracy to Literature. Psychoanalysis and Reading (Routledge, 2016).
Howard Jacobson
Born in Manchester, England in 1942, novelist and broadcaster Howard Jacobson was educated at Cambridge University. His first novel was Coming From Behind (1983). Subsequent novels include Peeping Tom (1984), The Very Model of a Man (1992), No More Mister Nice Guy (1998), and The Mighty Walzer (1999), which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000.
His two non-fiction books Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993), an exploration of his own Jewish roots, and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997), an analysis of comedy and its functions, inspired related television series.
Howard Jacobson's most recent books are The Finkler Question (2010), winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction; Zoo Time (2012); J (2014); Shylock Is My Name (2016); and Pussy (2017).