Adam Ross, author of 'Mr. Peanut' and 'Ladies and Gentlemen'. Photo: Eric England.

Ask any aspiring novelist for their wish list, and it will probably go something like this: get published; have book blurbed by major literary stars; bask in the wave of critical approval and popular acclaim that follows.

It may sound like a pipe dream, but for Adam Ross this pretty much sums up the last few years of his life. His debut novel, Mr. Peanut, was published in 2010, and Stephen King himself called it “The most riveting look at the dark side of marriage since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. Not bad for your first book. The critical acclaim quickly followed, and Adam Ross has rightly become one of the most talked-about new writers on the literary scene.

Adam Ross’s follow-up – an insightful and often hilarious short story collection called Ladies and Gentlemen – has recently hit the bookshelves, and we managed to catch up with Mr. Ross to ask him about his fiction. Or should that be Mr. Peanut?

Dan Coxon: I see that you’ve written journalism and non-fiction as well as fiction, particularly your ‘Mondo Nashville’ column. How has this experience fed back into your fiction writing?

Adam Ross: In so many ways. For me, the primary challenge of journalism is “how do I tell this story?” because unlike fiction writing, which relies on imagination and often whole-cloth invention, the content is there for the taking. Structure and angle are therefore all, and these challenges are similar to telling a story in fictive prose. They are formal, architectural. As well, you have to know your subject well enough to write with authority, so good researching skills are central.

Finally, there’s a very subtle albeit important lesson I learned as a journalist and that came during the editing process. You have limited space and so you have to often edit down a story to its essentials. This made me not only very trusting of my editors at The Nashville Scene (where I was an editor as well) but also very unsentimental about my sentences. Many good ones were eliminated in service of the story. Be willing to kill your darlings, intones Faulkner. Dude was absolutely right.

DC: Were you surprised by the attention and praise that Mr. Peanut received, given that it was your debut novel?

AR: How could I not be? First I was simply thrilled to have a book deal, but then Stephen King drops a blurb bomb, Scott Turow reviews me on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani presses a stiletto heel to my cheek and then gently licks the blood from the wound, I’ve got a two-page spread in The New Yorker with one of those funny cartoons of my mug, and by now we are deep into dream land, long odds, lottery-winning winning sorts of events to befall a debut novelist. If I’d ever harbored dreams of such success, I’d long forgotten them in the many years Mr. Peanut took to write.

What I’ve been most thrilled about, honestly, is how the book continues to provoke conversation. That fact, to me, signals that it has the chance at long life, which in my opinion is the most you can hope for as a writer.

DC: I know that many writers work on short fiction before they progress to novel writing… where do the stories in Ladies and Gentlemen stand in relation to Mr. Peanut? Did any of them precede it, or are they all new?

AR: They run parallel. The stories that comprise Ladies and Gentlemen were written during breaks that were thrust upon me while drafting Mr. Peanut, because there were stretches where I was simply stuck, quiet and quite anxious times when I was figuring out how to link up its disparate narratives. Meanwhile I had all these other ideas that presented themselves on what seemed like a much more manageable scale and I desperately wanted to get a taste of The End of something, so I’d honor inspiration at these times; and when my agent was ready to shop Mr. Peanut I also had thirteen or more stories under my belt which we boiled down to seven and which, we discovered, orbited similar themes as the novel. Also not a bad deal psychologically for a debut novelist because it’s a companion book to Mr. Peanut, really, and allows me to avoid the sophomore slump in one fell swoop.

DC: It seems to me that many of your stories are actually to some extent about the nature of storytelling itself – the characters tell stories, within stories, within stories. Is this a theme you consciously wanted to explore, or is it just the way your imagination works?

AR: Both. On a conscious level I am very intrigued by the responsibility of the storyteller to the listener—the moral dimension of the act, the gift offered of willing suspension of disbelief—as well as the listener’s responsibility to the storyteller. When you ask someone to tell you their story, what are your subsequent obligations to them and yourself, especially if the story is somehow privately instructive or revelatory. In this way, Ladies and Gentlemen is very similar to Mr. Peanut because in each book the driving questions are “How well do we know ourselves?” and “What do we do with this self-awareness?”

DC: I also want to ask about your influences, but while avoiding the obvious ‘who do you read’ question… so in light of my previous question, which author (or authors) would you want to write the story of your life?

AR: There’s nothing wrong with the obvious question. I’m a huge fan of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Alice Munro, Cormac McCarthy, Homer, Nabokov, Italo Calvino, James Salter, Isaac Babel, Richard Ford, J.M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo – the list goes on and on. But given the fact that I’m a father of a five- and four-year-old and have been married for sixteen years I think it might be a good idea to have someone wildly imaginative write my life story. Let’s pick Haruki Murakami. He’d make my humdrum existence fantastical somehow.

DC: What can we expect from you next? Is there another novel in the works?

AR: Yes. I’m researching a novel about a musical actor and his son that’s set in the early 1980s, New York City. It’s the sunny period in the project’s life because I know the first and last line of the book and so I’m thrilled about it, obviously, it’s simply genius, because I haven’t actually written a word yet. Once I do, it’s all downhill from there.

Ladies and Gentlemen is available now from all good bookstores, and the Random House website, priced $25.95.