Interviews June 20, 2014

For her new book, The Shelf, Phyllis Rose read an entire shelf of fiction at the New York Society Library (NYSL), by authors whose names begin with LEQ to LES. The enterprise, which Rose refers to as “adventures in extreme reading,” led her to read authors good and bad, well-known and forgotten. The boundaries of the project, in fact, led Rose to unpredictable places: “I would read my way into the unknown—into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no bestseller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not