Emmet Reads

The text that follows is based on five meetings that took place over the past three years. Once the process began, Brodkey made a habit of pronouncing “for the record” (and often most epigrammatically) on the phone when no tape recorder was available, or in a restaurant, or even at a party where no pen was at hand. Some of this additional material has been added to the text. The whole, some three hundred and fifty pages, was edited, rearranged and revised by the interviewer, by Brodkey, by the editor of this magazine, and finally deemed by the subject to be “compromised” and “tainted,” but ultimately a text he would allow to be attributed to him.