This was not written in any quiet space. I wrote it in pretty much every café in Minneapolis. I wrote it at a train station, I wrote it when I was on tour for Night Women. I wrote it with music playing all the time. The window right behind Microsoft Word was Firefox. I’d be distracted by music, distracted by websites. I don’t recommend writing a novel like that. But that’s part of the reason why, one, it’s so discursive… I knew I had to let in as much of the world and as wide of the world. I was literally just feeding on that, it was very much a public novel.
“Marlon James is Not the Updike of Jamaica, and Other Revelations” at lithub.com