Like a City of Tents in the Wind

An interview with author Tucker Lieberman

Back in 2022, I interviewed

Tucker Lieberman

for my blog a few months before his philosophical hybrid novel Most Famous Short Film of All Time was published. I’m republishing the interview here in the hope it will get more eyes on Tucker’s work.

Tucker Lieberman is a novelist, memoirist, literary critic, poet, editor, and photographer based in Bogotá. I was fortunate enough to offer editorial input on his forthcoming novel, Most Famous Short Film of All Time (tRaum Books, 2022); now that it is soon to be released, we sat down at our keyboards a hemisphere apart to chat about the book.

DS: Tell me about the genesis of the novel. Was there a scene or image that came to you and grew into a larger story? Or did the story arrive more fully formed?

TL: In 2015, I made a messy pile of nonsense scraps of text that I shuffled like a deck of cards. It had therapeutic value for me and I privately referred to it as “a novel.” Of hundreds of pages (unpublishable for various reasons), two key scenes wouldn’t let me go, and I pulled them out to become standalone stories.

The first was about a man who’s following a ghost and believes he’s on a game show. Despite a theme of suicide, it was essentially lighthearted. It was fairly easy…