Take a ride with the acclaimed China chronicler

Peter Hessler made an immediate name for himself in 2001 with River Town, the story of the two years he spent as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in a Sichuan school and learning Chinese. The outstanding journalism about China (in places like The Atlantic and The New York Times) that followed that clear-eyed and moving book confirmed that he was a real voice to be reckoned with, someone willing to try to get a handle on China with a refreshing balance of open-mindedness and rigor. By the time he came out with his ecstatically reviewed second book, Oracle Bones, a look at Chinese history with his signature attention to ordinary people in undistinguished places, he was already the China writer’s China writer, and probably the most read among expats. Below he talks about his eagerly awaited new book, Country Driving (reviewed here), the story of his journeys all around the nation.

We've seen you describe yourself as shy, yet in Country Driving you strike up conversations with huge numbers of strangers. Were these interactions more difficult than you make them seem?
In the first part of the book, I drove alone across China, with an empty passenger's seat.  I picked up hitchhikers along the way, and in a situation like that a conversation is pretty natural.  It's easier than talking on a train or somewhere else, because there¹s a lot of privacy.
Also, I¹m not very shy in Chinese. I wrote about this in River Town, how I realized that I have a different personality in the different language.

In Chinese I¹m less guarded and probably more jokey, as people generally respond well to that.  A lot of this comes from my Peace Corps experience, when I was one of two foreigners in Fuling. The pressure was very intense at the beginning; there was an enormous amount of attention on me.  I was either going to learn to deal with it and interact with people; or I would have to retreat to my apartment and spend two years alone.  It took a while but in the end I became comfortable with most situations.

An interview with the busiest bookworm on the Bund.

Your funniest/favorite/weirdest festival experience ever was... ?
There was the time I lost two festival authors before the festival had even started! Mohammed Hanif, who was in the bath and missed his flight, and Tony Ross, who arrived at Pudong Airport without a visa for China. But my favourite remains interviewing Pico Iyer, who is just as gracious, intelligent, funny and sharply insightful in person as he is on the page. Not all authors are like that!

Speaking of which, who would you never have back?
Truly? No one. Some authors have been more fussy than others in the planning stages, but once they get here, they’re all fine, and everyone has added something valuable.

Erotic literature is the lap dancing of the book world – it’s legal, borderline indecent and probably wouldn’t be welcome at your gran’s morning tea parties. Nevertheless, we love it, and we know you do too (especially you uptight puritans who profess not to). We put eight erotic enquiries to erotic lit’s reigning queen, Lit Fest author Linda Jaivin…

It is necessary to be good in bed to be able to write good erotica?
Ha. Only a lover could judge the first and a reader the second. If that’s a personal question, you’ll have to ask someone who has been both my lover and reader. I think good erotica could be written by a virgin with an excellent imagination and a flair for language.

talks writing, Nazi-abetting, Dominican identity, Chomsky and Star Wars.

Can we assume that there is an autobiographical element to Oscar Wao?
In this case the assumption would probably be correct. I wrote this novel as a way of avoiding that question. I never really wanted to hear that question again. So I think the problem with me, as always, was that I sort of saved on the talent budget by using the set from my life. You know? But almost everything in this book is entirely made up… It’s hard to be a writer without in part being nerdy and certainly Oscar’s nerdiness, Juniors nerdiness, Lola’s nerdiness all have a home in me, but I’m kind of nothing like any of the characters. I mean Junior comes the closest, but even he spends so much time talking about people that are completely made up so how could be real in that case.