Zero Degree Everything: An Interview with Tom McCarthy

In this interview, Tom McCarthy considers his relationship to the novel and its history as a form, including the changing conditions of the contemporary literary world that have allowed for his existence within it. He provides a schematic for understanding the various modes of his own work and his interfacing with a set of “displacements” running through and around various “vanguards.” Along the way, he discusses dead media, money, sound, post-Snowden politics as a literary problem, and the financial utility of Finnegans Wake.