“Humanity Keeps Making the Same Mistakes”: An Interview w/ Mark Haber
I had the opportunity to meet Mark Haber for the first time late in 2024 while he was in Berlin as the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Peter Szondi Institute. I had come to Berlin from my hometown of Prague, and we met in a pleasant café in the West Berlin neighborhood of Wilmersdorf. Mark was kind enough to bring me a copy of his novel Lesser Ruins, which I was eager to read, having loved his previous novels Reinhardt’s Garden and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. Since then, Mark and I have kept in touch, and I was particularly interested in talking with him about his new novel Ada (Coffee House Press, 2026). Mark also has taken on the role of acquisitions editor at Coffee House Press, an independent book publisher with a global perspective located in Minneapolis, MN. This May we traded notes on writing, reading, publishing, and literary culture in contemporary times.
Seth Rogoff: To read a Mark Haber novel requires intensity of focus and attention. Your novels have few, or, in the case of Ada, no chapters or even paragraph breaks. Sentences continue at times for pages. How do you think writers should approach—if they should consider it at all—the general decline of attention span in our society and the concomitant decline in both the quality and the quantity of reading? Do you think your type of fiction writing has become a bastion of resistance, defending what Marshall McLuhan called the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” the world of print media and all its implications for society and selfhood? Is this preferable to trying to adapt to and/or accommodate these broader cultural transformations?
Mark Haber: That’s a really interesting question. I can only speak for myself, but I don’t see my books as a bastion of resistance in the face of waning attention spans. I’m really selfish in that I write the kind of books I would want to read. My first audience is myself. I think this should go for all writers. Be selfish. If you do have a specific “audience” in mind then perhaps you’re writing with the intention of selling it, or with the idea that it will be adapted for a series or a film, which is the opposite of literature.
I do love all kinds of writers and books—books with short, episodic, even breezy chapters, to blocks of text à la László Krasznahorkai—so my style isn’t meant as a challenge or a flag posted on the mountain of focus and concentration, but simply the way I want to tell a story. I understand and appreciate the fact that my books carry the inherent challenge of dense unbroken text, a style that requires sustained focus, but when writing Reinhardt’s Garden I had this epiphany. I realized that the pacing and rhythm of my books—combined with the absurdity—worked best in this sort of feverish, ecstatic style. Both complimented the other. I think that’s the key: You have an idea, a story, and you find the best way to tell it, the style that’s most natural and suited to your imagination. It’s that universal question of substance over style or style over substance, and to me they’re intertwined. My writing is also very voice-driven and the minds of my narrators are crazed and myopic, so to chop it apart, to pause or allow breathing room, would be a huge disservice to the momentum.
To a reader unaccustomed to dense blocks of writing, of long, winding sentences with little interruption, it does present a challenge. But I’ve never intentionally written anything difficult or self-serious, that’s never been the goal. In fact, the words “accessible” and “readability” are not bad words to me. But to give justice to what I’m doing I’m obligated to find the best way to do it. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I find pages filled with unbroken text quite beautiful. It’s like the current of a river, and the reader, if they’re willing, jumps in and allows the prose to take them wherever it’s going. It has to be done well, of course.
But these rapid changes in technology, from the way books are digested, to the changes in physical media, are impossible to overlook, and all of them take away from and degrade the quality of our concentration. I tend to ignore most of it. Not because I’m a luddite or I’m burying my head in the sand, but because the writing itself takes so much time and work. Also, I’ve found what makes me happy and the path I want to be on, which is writing books, telling stories, and everything else is out of my hands. I have no control over anything after that. The decline in people’s attention spans and our inability to concentrate is a very real problem, but I can only do what I’m doing and hope people discover, not only my books, but the pleasure of reading and the benefits of having long, weird, and sustained thoughts.
The novel reached the height of its cultural importance in the 19th and 20th centuries as a reflection of what we might call the bourgeois world, and, especially with literary modernism, as one of the principal artforms used to critique that world. From your positions as both an editor at Coffee House Press, one of the best independent presses in the United States, and a novelist, what are your thoughts about the current status of the novel? What would you define as the novel’s cultural role today?
I have to plead ignorance! I really don’t know the novel’s cultural role today. I feel like everyone is in their own bubbles. A new novel might seem like it’s exploded, that it’s everywhere you look. There’s the notion that, here is a book and it’s making a difference. But that’s hardly ever the case. It’s usually a big deal in a very tiny pocket of interest. I’ve seen books touted everywhere for months and a part of you thinks: wow, everyone is reading this. Then you see the number of copies sold and it’s paltry. So there’s “marketing” and there’s the reality of what’s happening, and there’s often a stark difference. I think books play a role in the culture of today, but honestly it’s probably, sadly, very limited. Also, these days people (even writers) tend to see a book as adjacent to something they consider more important, like a series on some streaming platform, a movie deal, as if the book is only a step to getting somewhere “better.” Books are seen as merely a stepping stone and to me that’s not only offensive, but reductive. To me, the book is the thing. Its cultural role is still relevant, but not as relevant as serious readers and writers like to think.
The thing is, books have so much working against them. People are obsessed with podcasts, with YouTube and TikTok, social media in general, so many other platforms for entertainment, everything is begging for our attention, so it’s difficult to know the role and the reach of novels. I also think books—literature—have always attempted to reconcile the line between “art” and “entertainment,” so who knows? Selfishly, I hope the novel and literature are around for as long as people are. It will obviously change shapes and perhaps not even be recognizable two hundred years from now, but for me, literature has given me life. I can’t think of anything that’s given me such solace and hope and beauty. I can’t even think of a world without books because it’s inconceivable. But already in my lifetime I’ve seen the huge shift in literature’s importance (much of it tied to the decline in the liberal arts as well as the internet and its attendant issues). So my only argument for literature and why it needs to be supported is that I think it’s life-sustaining and life-giving. Books are a perfect invention. But if the world decides to move past that or digest them in a different way I have very little say in that.
As far as Coffee House and the role of independent presses in the United States, I think their role is only as important as the role of readers. It’s a delicate ecosystem, today especially, it’s incredibly fragile. Getting and keeping people’s attention is incredibly difficult. I think the novel still plays a role in our culture, but that’s something equally shared by readers and both have to support the other. The publisher is important, and so are the writers, but you have to have readers.
Your last two works, Lesser Ruins and Ada, center Europe: its culture, in the case of Lesser Ruins, its history in the case of Ada. What does Europe, or these fantasies or myths of Europe, mean to you? Does European culture and history reflect something about the contemporary US?
In a lot of ways I’ve always felt like an orphan. I think most writers have rich interior lives because the world is a hard place, especially for dreamers. I’ve always felt out of place wherever I’ve lived: Florida, California, Texas, Minnesota. I’ve never lived anywhere and thought: Yes, I’m finally home. In general, the United States is a very provincial place, even the big cities can be navel-gazing and self-obsessed. Let's just simply say: the US is a provincial country on a provincial planet. And to me, the only answer to provincialism, or small-mindedness, is art and literature. Literature is an escape to the other, to possibility. Not the answer, but the belief that says: This can't be all there is. I think part of my affinity and affection for Kafka, and it’s true for a lot of writers, is the alienation that’s intrinsic, the acute feeling you’re an outsider. Much like Kafka, literature became my homeland because books I understood, words and stories made sense. The world didn’t. It still doesn’t. I know that probably sounds pretentious and over-the-top, but it’s true. I can have a bad day and know when I get home books will be there. I can walk into a stranger’s apartment and if there’s books I already feel better. Growing up in Florida was like a blank slate, it was both suffocating but also liberating; it felt a bit barren, so I escaped into my imagination and spent years and years enjoying a very rich inner dialogue.
Besides the enormous influence European and Spanish-language writers (and their translators) have had on me, I simply love Europe and Latin America as locations, including in different historical periods. Also, I’m living in the here and now and it’s completely boring! I already know how people think and behave in current times. There’s no mystery or magic to me. Your question was spot-on: a lot of my stories are built on the myths and fantasies of Europe. So writing about, say, France in the 1600s is not only an escape, but as close to fantasy writing as you can get without it being fantasy. I grew up in Florida in the 70s and 80s, so what could be more fantastical than a novel narrated by a peasant in 1600s Prussia or the mayor of a village in the Argentine Pampas? When you go back in time, to a place you’ve never been, it enters the speculative. Much like Kafka’s version of Amerika.
To my mind, my books are not rooted in reality and never were. Perhaps they’re realism-adjacent. The Argentina from Reinhardt’s Garden and the France of Ada are my interpretations of it, drawn from films and books and my imagination, all of it creating (I hope) a new place that’s not quite Argentina and not quite France, but something other.
Also, the importance of influence can’t be overstated. A small scene in a César Aira book, for example, may stay with me for five or ten years and suddenly, unconsciously, I see the Pampas are a location in a story I’m writing. I think I’m always trying to write my version of Don Quixote blended with all the other writers I love: Dostoevsky, Thomas Bernhard, Saul Bellow, Mercè Rodoreda, W.G. Sebald, Donald Antrim, Roberto Bolaño, Rikki Ducornet.
Writing about these periods and how they speak to our contemporary times is meaningful because humanity keeps making the same mistakes. So the delusions of grandeur in a fictional character, like the narrator of Ada, speaks to us about our own intolerance and cruelty, our egos, about the messes we make for ourselves, to people like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin and how (and why) we keep allowing monsters and autocrats to control us. I don’t think literature (or in this case, satire) changes the world, but it can move the needle a bit, or at least place a mirror in front of us.
In Lesser Ruins, there is a battle of obsessions inscribed on a more traditional father-son conflict. In the case of this novel, the father is obsessed with the idea of writing a book-length essay on the Early Modern French writer Michel de Montaigne while the son is obsessed with current trends in electronic music. While the father’s obsession pulls him back to European high culture of the past, the son’s obsession results in a kind of global and future-oriented cultural perspective. For the son, the question of culture’s center comes down to Bogotá versus Berlin—New York is never mentioned. What these perspectives share, in other words, is a de-centering of today’s cultural hegemon, the United States. Would you say there is a cultural or artistic politics in this view of culture? Do you, as an editor closely connected to world literatures, see a more radical energy, or something aesthetically more interesting, coming from certain parts of the globe?
I love this question! In a word, absolutely. I can’t imagine making New York or Brooklyn the nucleus of a book or a story I’m writing. Part of it I think is being Generation X. I grew up in a time where if everyone was doing the same thing then you immediately looked for something else. I don’t mean this in a contrived way as in: I’ll do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.I want to be different. It’s more organic and fundamental. But if everyone is going to Iowa to learn creative writing or moving to Brooklyn to become a writer, why in God’s name would I want to do that? It’s not a criticism of the place itself, but more of people’s lack of imagination. During Borges’ lifetime, Buenos Aires was considered a bit of a backwater. The same with Prague and Kafka. These were major historical cites, but they paled beside the rest of Latin America or Austro-Hungary at the time. And look what came from those places? I immediately recoil when I discern a trend or a movement. I can’t help it.
So the son in Lesser Ruins is obsessed with electronic music and one of the benefits of the internet is all of these microgenres and rabbit holes where you’re able to discover artists from all over the globe. Is Norwegian Space Disco real? Yes it is. It’s an actual genre that produced some incredible music in the early ‘00s incorporating funk, disco, and dance. You find all of these movements in culture—dance, music, painting—and they’re not always in NYC or Paris (I mean, Berlin is a given as far as dance music and clubs). And music, like literature, has its own language. If I meet a plumber from the same city I grew up in and a writer from Ghana, I’ll have a lot more in common with the Ghanaian writer. So I wanted to highlight the fact that house music transcends language and culture. There’s great Japanese house music, great house music from Bristol and Sweden. And I wanted the son’s passion for dance music to sort of say: there’s something beyond language that all of us understand. The way handclaps or a kickdrum drop at a precise moment in a song are as understood in Detroit as in Mexico City or Copenhagen.
I’m not typically drawn to books that are hyper-contemporary, at least in subject. If a book is about, say, online dating, or a couple trying to find their purpose in the Bronx or LA and there’s lot’s of texting or using Uber or bitching about the price of matcha, or simply an effort to be extremely of-the-moment, I’m immediately checked out. I don’t think those more “commercial” books speak to my imagination. For instance, there’s a lot of American writers who are really talented, but the subjects they’ve chosen hold no interest for me; their concerns aren’t my concerns.
But these are personal reading quirks, not quirks as an editor. If it's good, it's good. I’m also not the sole voice for acquiring books for Coffee House and never will be and never want to be. Our executive editor, Kaija Straumanis, has a long background in editing, largely from books in translation. She’s a translator from Latvian herself, so this isn’t one person’s taste and I would never want it to be.
One of my favorite parts of Lesser Ruins is the relationship between the narrator and the smartphone. The phone keeps making noises and interrupting his thoughts, violating his cerebral and actual space, his memories. It is clear that the narrator sees the phone as a kind of enemy of sustained thinking, the type of thinking he aspires to but is incapable of. Is the phone the great enemy of literature, of the philosophical novel? Of internal life itself? Of life?
I’m as guilty as the next person, of course. I use the phone for pretty much everything. Only looking back can we see what a pivotal shift occurred with the smartphone: cultural, cerebral, physical, mental, literally every single aspect of our lives. It was a turning point. A person can speak into their phone from work and when they get home there’s groceries on their doorstep. I can watch drone attacks on Russian soldiers in a forest in Ukraine in real time. It’s truly insane and much of it is not good. So in Lesser Ruins I wanted to 1) satirize our obsession with smartphones and how it’s become an extension of ourselves and 2) satirize the grumpy narrator himself who loathes the smartphone. No one is safe! You can either use the smartphone or be crotchety about the smartphone, but we’re all complicit, even if it’s against our will.
But yes, the smartphone is clearly a huge impediment to having long, uninterrupted thoughts as well as creativity and interiority. It also makes us less thoughtful as human beings. Smartphones are both progress and an enormous roadblock to progress and I was trying to sort of satirize the conundrum of having something so valuable to us while simultaneously taking us further from where we want to go. To quote E.E. Cummings: “Progress is a comfortable disease.”
Speaking of the internal and the external and social media: we live in a world increasingly externalized. The self is becoming almost more and more an externalized and digitalized persona. This isn’t surprising, as our culture abandoned, or even hostilely rejected, interiority with its rejection of modernism, perhaps partly for good reason. It is hard to discern in your work, given its subtlety and irony, whether you are parodying or celebrating (or both) a type of deep, layered selfhood. Can this self still exist?
I think I’m doing both. I’m attempting to parody and celebrate our faults, our silly foibles and desires. When I’m making fun of something I’m almost always including myself.
I think this deep, layered person can exist, but it takes a lot of work. I think you have to actually be proactive about avoiding all the noise in the world. And whether you want to avoid it or not, you’ll likely find out about the Housewives of some television show or the recent beef between two pop singers, or anything else, because it’s all so ubiquitous. There’s nowhere to hide if you want to participate in the world even in a very small way.
A question on process: what would you say is the originating moment of one of your novels—in other words, when do you know you have the concept, character, etc. that can be transformed or developed into a novel? Can you give a sense of this process either with Lesser Ruins or Ada?
What’s funny is that Lesser Ruins and Ada were actually written simultaneously, at least partially. I started and finished Lesser Ruins first, but had also begun Ada, because two-thirds of the way through Lesser Ruins I thought it was a failure. And then I had the idea for this small, dense book that takes place in a castle. Just broad strokes. But I told my wife what I was doing and she, quite wisely, told me to put a hold on Ada, and go back and finish Lesser Ruins which I’d spent about two and half years working on. So about ten pages or so into Ada, I put it down and returned to Lesser Ruins.
It all begins with the voice. I’m very intuitive. I’m much more of a dreamer than an analytical thinker. I read certain books and I can tell very quickly that the author is very analytical. These writers are often excellent, but they’re usually not the ones I prefer. Sometimes I’m reading a book and my wife will ask if I’m enjoying it and I’ll say, “they’re very smart.” It’s a bit of a jibe, because storytelling to me isn’t about intelligence at all, but about seeking. Some novels are written by writers who I feel are too intelligent for their own good. Brilliance can get in the way! These writers feel like they’re a chromosome away from being great mathematicians or architects, very sharp, exacting, but not always great for flights of fancy.
I love Don Quixote and the work of Garcia Marquez and Rikki Ducornet because I don’t think they initially set out to “say something.” They wanted to tell a story and, by doing this, inevitably, they said something. They had extraordinary imaginations. So over time I've learned to trust myself. A lot of it is sort of a flow state. I’ll read a book and the way an author uses a particular word sends me off. I run to the laptop and end up writing three or four pages all because of the way a writer used a single word.
I go into writing a novel with a very open mind, not knowing exactly what I want to say or where I’m going, and then the happenstance, the small surprises, the meandering of my mind, allows me to eventually find the shape and the tones of the novel. There is a specific moment though, where I can almost envision where the story is going and I’ll sort of nod to myself, like, “Yes, I think I have a novel here.” Once I find the voice (or the voice finds me) I’m off and running and the story finds itself.
