Description

Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory meet with Derek Pell in his apartment in Manhattan. The discussion begins with Pell’s book Assassination Rhapsody, a satirical deconstruction of the Warren Report. From there, it continues on to the various things that Pell does, both in terms of satire and in terms of collage within books. Much of the discussion ranges around the limits of satire including what Pell does under his pseudonyms of Doktor Bey and Norman Conquest. Pell explains how he came to use the pseudonyms, the work that he does under those names and how they have become almost a separate part of his own personality. The end of the discussion is dominated by the notion that American writers do not know how to properly write erotic fiction and that it comes out as pornography instead which is what Pell has been satirizing in some recent work. An edited version of this interview appears on pages 270-286 of Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors, ed. Larry McCaffery, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.