To read the full review, visit What Weekly.
To read the full review, visit What Weekly.
Laurance Friend: What would you consider the highlights of your life as a writer? What keeps you writing?
Michael J. Seidlinger: The elusiveness of a good idea. I’m always brainstorming, looking for possibilities. Inspiration keeps me writing. A great idea decides the way. As a writer, I need to feel every word or else, there’s no point. If it doesn’t feel right, or feel like anything, it shouldn’t exist. Never waste a word.
To read the rest of the interview, visit Bizarro Central.
Rumpus: I think the Internet is the greatest argument for absurdism, ever. We’re all starring in our own version of Waiting for Godot, essentially. Keeping busy with the inane. How did you approach the idea of online vs in-person emotional need for Zachary? Is there a difference?
Seidlinger: Everything functions as one big grandiose play, and society as a whole is our stage. We are all acting to the best of our abilities so that we may remain unscathed and more importantly—ahead of the curve. There isn’t a difference, at least in Zachary’s case. He views interaction as the act of presenting himself to another, which can (depending on the situation) be frightening. His emotions are precious (I think we all feel the same way, right?) and he feels vulnerable in nearly every situation, be it a tweet or standing in front of a group of people: he finds society in general absurd. Society is absurd, with its demands, its social classes, its structures preventing (while at the same time allowing) people to move in a certain way. We look for opportunities to be better, to be more visible and relevant. The Internet merely accentuates what is already all around us; you could say it really has become our own modern Waiting for Godot. We scroll through our newsfeeds, waiting hungrily for the next trending topic. We post, comment, tweet, favorite, and retweet in hopes of there being something that happens. Our “Godot” in essence is the act of being relevant, of having something take hold. We are emotionally charged only when something happens. If nothing happens, which happens to be most of the time, we continue scrolling, hitting refresh. Staring at screens. Zachary is merely one of us, an example. We aren’t like him but, at the same time, we are.
To read the rest of the interview, visit The Rumpus.
Jay Slayton-Joslin: You recently published an article on Buzzfeed about the anxiety of social media. Do you feel that this is a necessary evil in the modern day age of self-promoting and publishing?
Michael Seidlinger: Oh yeah, you better believe that social media is rewiring how we think, communicate, and function as individuals in modern society. I mean, the 24-hr news cycle alone is a testament to how information technology has restructured the cultural conscience. With artists—be it an author or not—there’s this gravitational pull to the social media platform as a means of both promotion and fascination. In the Buzzfeed article, I wrote about relevancy and the need for validation. It’s very real and almost always, if even not the main reason someone uses social media, one of the things that keeps a person coming back. How often do you find yourself checking your phone for notifications?
To read the rest of the interview, visit Cultured Vultures.
To read the excerpt, visit The Nervous Breakdown.
To promote my forthcoming book, The Strangest, in which the narrator cannot leave the house without running it by social media first, I decided to hand over my free will for 48 hours to social media and do whatever they wanted. It turns out they wanted me blonde.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Strangest.
The novel kicks into its best form once Zachary’s life comes crashing down on him. Seidlinger is then left with lots of existential questions to answer. Luckily, these don’t get deflected, nor do they get big general sweeping answers, but they are discussed. The novel bounces back and forth between wonderfully written and providing answers to the questions that people are afraid to ask. Ultimately, with The Strangest, Seidlinger may have not just written his best work yet, but proven that in an industry lacking originality, even works that do spin off others can be bursting with so much promise and talent that we want this strange to become familiar.
Seidlinger has written one of the most interesting novels about the lack of identity in the 21st century for a long time. It’s a novel that’s uncompromising with its ambition, and there’s no reason it should be. What could have been a gamble turns out to be a grand success, and Seidlinger shows that he’s not just causing waves in the indie lit scene, but any lit scene.
To read the rest of the review, visit Cultured Vultures.
I ended up on social media for a reason, and though the reason escapes me during moments of sheer panic and anxiety, I take part, no matter what — the pursuit of relevancy, or, in the strictest sense of the term, validation, is an imperative that exists as a key part of humankind’s quest for meaning. Self-definition has become intertwined with social media. We are all here for each other.
I wake up staring at my phone. I fall asleep to the glow of the very same screen.
To read the rest of the article, visit Buzzfeed.
I see the body. I don’t know what to feel.
I drop my phone. I drop the gun.
There was a noise.
It was the sound of the screen cracking in three places.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit The Offing.
Vol 1 Brooklyn: How did you first end up reading Camus? And what about The Stranger initially appealed to you?
Seidlinger: I wasn’t much of a reader until after I moved away from music (I’m a failed musician), and it was when I finally went to college that I came across books like House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski, Life After God by Douglas Coupland, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, and, yup, Albert Camus’s The Stranger. It all happened in quick succession. I bought House of Leaves and swiftly devoured countless other books, many of them transgressive, experimental, surreal, and absurdist in nature. The Stranger crept up on me; I believe I bought it alongside a few other titles by Hubert Selby Jr, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. At the time, I had become completely enamored by the Oulipos and other formally experimental practitioners. Structure was paramount and a puzzle I became obsessed with solving. The Stranger was an accident. Amazon “also bought” wormhole style purchase. I think I tossed it into my shopping cart because it was under ten dollars. I had no idea what awaited me. The book completely changed me, more than most. Perhaps more than any other title ever will.
To read the rest of the review, visit Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Seidlinger introduces the playlist:
This is what I’d like to call “a playlist of internet moods,” or really a group of tracks that personally exhibit how one may feel while interacting with the online world, specifically social media. How does it relate to the book? It’s a strange world, you know, social media, and there’s nothing stranger than some of the moods and miseries we feel after having been online, connected, for so long that maybe, just maybe, we start to feel a little… disconnected.
To see his choices and listen to the playlist, visit Largehearted Boy.
The Strangest is a stark and deliberate analysis of life in the 21st Century. Its evaluation of not just social media, but modern presence and its adaptation of what I’ll refer to here as a the new human condition, is, much like Camus’ Stranger, authoritative and convincing. Of the string of, or even genre of, contemporary works concentrated on these themes, I found Seidlinger’s The Strangest to have been, thus far, the most concise and expressive.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Modern Review.
Read the opening chapter of The Strangest on Lit Hub.