Antoine Wilson | The Nervous Breakdown

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel Mouth to Mouth, available from Avid Reader.

Wilson is also the author of the novels The Interloper and Panorama City. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Quarterly West, and Best New American Voices, among other publications. He is a contributing editor at A Public Space.

He has received the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the San Fernando Valley Award for Fiction, and has been a finalist for The National Magazine Award, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award, and the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award.

He has taught writing at the University of Iowa, the University of California San Diego, the University of California Los Angeles Extension Writers’ Program, Stanford Continuing Studies, and the Otis School of Art and Design.

Born in Montreal and raised in California and Saudi Arabia, he now lives with his family in Los Angeles. He can be found on twitter at @antoinewilson and Instagram at @theantoinewilson.

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If you’re comfortable, we can start.

I thought we started already. In fact, it seems like you’ve always been here.

I’m very familiar with your new novel, PANORAMA CITY, but how would you describe it to a random person in a bar?

It’s about a village idiot who wants to become a man of the world.

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PART ONE
tape 1, sides a & b
MAYOR

If you set aside love and friendship and the bonds of family, luck, religion, and spirituality, the desire to better mankind, and music and art, and hunting and fishing and farming, self-importance, and public and private transportation from buses to bicycles, if you set all that aside money is what makes the world go around. Or so it is said. If I wasn’t dying prematurely, if I wasn’t dying right now, if I was going to live to ripeness or rottenness instead of meeting the terminus bolted together and wrapped in plaster in the Madera Community Hospital, if I had all the time in the world, as they say, I would talk to you first of all about the joys of cycling or the life of the mind, but seeing as I could die any minute, just yesterday Dr. Singh himself said that I was lucky to be alive, I was unconscious and so didn’t hear it myself, Carmen told me, I’ll get down to so-called brass tacks.