Pittsburgh lit mag Sampsonia Way, a publication “celebrating free expression and supporting persecuted poets and novelists worldwide,” interviewed Horacio Castellanos Moya earlier this year, before the writer left Pittsburgh to live in Japan. Full interview can be found here. Some excerpts:

HCM: El Salvador is so small and such a criminal country and our history has been so tragic that the only way of surviving, of getting along, is just laughing.

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It’s like, if you are in the street and there is a corpse that has been shot, you are not going to go: “Ohh! He’s dead!” You say, “Fuck, what an ugly guy,” because he is not the first dead person you’ve seen.

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Well, paranoia is another way of being realistic in a violent society. If you go to a bar, what you are checking is to see who has a weapon. That’s the first thing that you check because you don’t want to be surprised.

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INTERVIEWER: So how did you go about constructing the distinctly feminine voice for She-Devil in the Mirror?

HCM: That was my first experience of writing a female character in first person and it was not that difficult. I’ve been surrounded by these kinds of voices: my grandmother—who is dead—my mother and many lady friends in El Salvador. You put six of these women in a room and you wouldn’t know which is the character of my book. They just don’t stop talking.

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Bolaño is an idol, so people don’t read him as a writer. We live in very empty times, so you look for someone to fill your emptiness, and some people read fiction looking for truth, for a kind of salvation, which is why a writer like Paulo Coelho is so popular.

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I mean, the three founders of American literature as we know them were Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. But those three were losers—American literature was founded by losers!