REYoung was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and lives in Austin, Texas, in a limestone cave deep beneath the city. He is the author of Unbabbling, a novel (1997). This excerpt from Margarito and the Snowman is published on Littsburgh courtesy of Dalkey Archive Press.
From the publisher: “REYoung’s latest novel — Margarito and the Snowman — features a nation buried in snow and ice in an obligatory 365 days a year Christmas celebration, a tribe of Mayan warriors in comedy troupe disguise, an existentially challenged hero known as the Snowman on a quest that takes him south of the border down ol’ Mexico way, and a B-grade movie director named Boone Weller with his own agenda. Is it a book? A movie? Told in a shoot from the hip Texas style, Margarito and the Snowman is loose, rangy, battered with an attitude and bound to offend everybody…”
What comes to mind when you think of Pittsburgh?
Iron and steel, coal barges, bridges, the sky glowing red over the river valleys at night, the whitehot inferno of forge and furnace, buildings piled upon buildings, the golden triangle like a plow share cleaving the Ohio River Valley, the whole city gone crazy for the Steelers! The Bucs! It’s going, going, it’s… Chicken on the Hill with Will! It’s the crack of the bat, of a revolutionary war musket, of knuckles against jaw in a shabby milltown bar, it’s robber barons, labor movements, it’s an emerald city emerging out of a century of soot, smog and pollution. A city of immigrants, the whole world is here, Russian and Pole, Arab and Jew, African, Greek, Italian, Turk, German, Mexican, you name it, and everyone of ‘ems got a restaurant.
What books are on your nightstand?
The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art by Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, Woodcutters (Cutting Timber) by Thomas Bernhard, A Shakespeare collection (revisiting), Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, fifty pages away from finally Finnishing, a bunch of other stuff.
Is there a book you’d like to see made into a film?
Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (a variation on Last Summer at Marienbad?). Or David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Or a thousand others.
Who would you most want to share a plate of pierogis with?
Probably the first homeless person I saw. He/She can have them all. I eat no meat and very few sweets.
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