In this interview, we chat with Michael LaPointe about navigating the pipeline between impulse and expression, breaking the genteel picture of literature, finding liberation in failure, and so much more.

Michael LaPointe is the author of The Creep, a novel published by Random House Canada. He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and he was a columnist with The Paris Review. His work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays, and he lives in Toronto.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Affliction; Continental Drift; Rule of the Bone; The Sweet Hereafter – Russell Banks 
• Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs 
• The Adventures of Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi 
• Bleak House – Charles Dickens 
• Play it as it Lays – Joan Didion 
• The Lover – Marguerite Duras 
• Middlemarch – George Eliot 
• American Psycho; Less Than Zero; The Shards – Bret Easton Ellis 
• Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 
• Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat and Thin – Mary Gaitskill 
• In a Lonely Place – Dorothy B. Hughes 
• Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata 
• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Sula – Toni Morrison 
• The Sorrow of War – Bảo Ninh 
• Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon 
• All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque 
• Voyage in the Dark – Jean Rhys 
• Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger 
• Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby Jr.  
• Alice James: A Biography – Jean Strouse 
• The Invisible Woman: The Story Of Nelly Ternan And Charles Dickens – Claire Tomalin 
• Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte 
• Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton