After years of rejection, novelist Hernan Diaz sent a manuscript, unsolicited, to a small publisher. That novel, “In the Distance,” a re-imagining of the American Western, became a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. His second novel, “Trust,” a shifting narrative about a wealthy couple in turn-of-the-century New York City, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction last week. The author spent this spring traveling to his native South America, where “Trust” was just published. Now he’s on book tour in the United States for the book’s paperback publication.
BOOKS: What are you reading while you’re traveling?
DIAZ: I just finished Helen DeWitt’s “The English Understand Wool,” which is delightful and weird. I’m reading Katherine Anne Porter’s classic “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” for the first time. I just finished the first of the three novellas in the book. It’s so good I feel like just giving up writing. I’m also about to finish Melville’s “White-Jacket,” which he wrote right before “Moby-Dick.” The novel is an exposé of the Navy’s disciplinary practices and use of flogging. The book is weird in this proto-Moby-Dickensian way.
BOOKS: Do you read a lot of classic novels?
DIAZ: Left to my own devices, that’s where I tend to go — the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century. I’ve read all of Dickens. I love the Brontë sisters and George Eliot, the most ethically profound novelist that I know of. I’m coming off as some monocled, top-hatted eccentric, which I’m not.
BOOKS: When were you first drawn to those authors?
DIAZ: In my late teens in Argentina, when I discovered Henry James and then made my way backwards from him to the Victorian novels and French realism and naturalism. English translations of those books were hard to come by in Argentina. I could have read them in Spanish, but I had this love affair with the English language. That is why I moved to London and then New York City in my early 20s.
BOOKS: Do you mostly read fiction?
DIAZ: I’m fully in camp fiction. I only read nonfiction toward a novel that I’m working on.
BOOKS: What nonfiction did you read for “Trust” that you would recommend?
DIAZ: Liaquat Ahamed’s “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. To me, the best writer about money is John Kenneth Galbraith. I also read Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” about Robert Moses. Caro’s prose is so perfect that you forget that you are reading.
BOOKS: Who have you been reading for contemporary fiction?
DIAZ: “Dr. No,” the new Percival Everett novel, which was great fun. The unlikely hero is a mathematician who studies the concept of nothing and wants to harness it as a weapon. The last great, great book I read was Joy Williams’s “Harrow.” Her work is very important to me. Nobody writes sentences like her. Also, she has been concerned about the environment for decades, but in a nondidactic way and with a great sense of humor. Her range is amazing. She has written novels, short story collections, micro-fiction, and brilliant essays as well as a travel guide to the Florida Keys.
BOOKS: Do you prefer physical books or e-readers?
DIAZ: Sadly, I’m on the road so much there’s a lot of Kindle in my life. The fonts are ugly, the page layout is ugly. I think e-readers have been designed by people who hate books and don’t understand how a reader navigates a text, the haphazardness of cracking a book open at any point, the nature of note-taking. I’m a compulsive note-taker and underliner, but I don’t want to pay overweight charges on my luggage when I travel.
BOOKS: How would you like to change as a reader?
DIAZ: Oh my God, I’m the slowest reader on planet Earth. When someone is reading over my shoulder, it’s so embarrassing because it’s clear I’m very, very slow. I don’t like audio books, which would increase my intake of literature by a lot.
BOOKS: Then how do you manage to read so much?
DIAZ: I’ve given up a lot of sleep for reading.