Gabriel Smith Writes Like He Has Nothing Left to Lose
The most exciting thing to encounter in the world of publishing is a writer who doesn’t sound like anyone else. I first read Gabriel Smith at the Drift, where our then fiction editor spied his story, “The Complete,” in the slush, so it’s been a thrill to help bring out his debut novel, Brat, in my other role as an editor at Penguin Press. Brat is sharp, wickedly funny, moving, unusual, spooky, haunted, textually layered—the adjectives sort of flow endlessly. It’s a book you’ll keep turning over in your mind long after you’ve read it, which is why I relished the opportunity to chat with Gabe about the project of Brat and the process of writing fiction. I sent over some questions in the format every writer and editor loves most—Google Docs—and I hope you’ll enjoy his responses (and Brat itself) as much as I did.
Kiara Barrow: The U.K. edition of is being published with the subtitle “A Ghost Story.” For the U.S., we went with the slightly more classic “A Novel,” in order to more straightforwardly telegraph its scope, ambition, and basic genre. Perhaps we were too quick to assume American readers have a lower tolerance for a tongue-in-cheek subtitle. Nevertheless, I’d love to hear how you think about genre and this book, which, yes, features ghosts, and to my mind draws on other literary traditions including horror (body and otherwise), the gothic, and the perhaps slightly more contemporary autofictional mode. How important are generic conventions to you? Is thinking about them productive or constraining?
