When asked, Marlon James is hard-pressed to name his favorite story. It's admittedly a nearly impossible request to make of anyone, and surely more so of a novelist, whose trade relies so deeply on both intake and telling, however tangled, of tales. Unable to name just one, James improvised.
"My favorite stories usually tend to be stories about voyages, whether it's the Odyssey or it's ‘Sinbad' or it's Huckleberry Finn," he said. "If John Gardner is right and there are only two kinds of stories, ‘a stranger comes to town' or ‘people go on a trip,' then I'm definitely into the ‘people go on a trip' kind of stories. I've always liked journeys, journeys where people meet sea monsters, or human monsters. There's something about people leaving everything they know and going into what they don't know where you actually learn a lot about people."