Mark Sarvas is the award-winning author of the novels @UGMAN (ITNA Press), Memento Park (FSG, Picador) and Harry, Revised (Bloomsbury). Memento Park is the winner of a 2019 American Book Award (Before Columbus Foundation), and the 2019 American Jewish Library Association Fiction Award. It was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and was shortlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize and longlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal.
His debut novel, Harry, Revised, was published in more than a dozen countries around the world, earning raves from Le Monde to The Australian. A finalist for the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association’s 2008 Fiction Award and a Denver Post 2008 Good Read, Harry, Revised, has been called “A remarkable debut” by Booker Prize winner John Banville, and was compared to John Updike and Philip Roth by the Chicago Tribune. He was awarded a 2018 Santa Monica Arts Fellowship and is a 2021 Guild Hall Artist in Residence.
His book reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bookforum, The Huffington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Barnes and Noble Review, Truthdig, The Modern Word, Boldtype and the Los Angeles Review of Books (where he is a contributing editor). He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN/America, PEN Center USA and has judged the PEN Center USA Fiction Award, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Kirkwood Prize and The Tournament of Books.
He began his literary career as the host of the popular and controversial literary weblog The Elegant Variation a Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog, a Forbes Magazine Best of the Web pick, and a Los Angeles Magazine Top L.A. Blog. It has been covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Scotsman, Salon, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, The Village Voice, New York Newsday, The New York Sun, NPR’s Day to Day and All Things Considered, and others. His short fiction has appeared in The Drawbridge, Troika Magazine, The Wisconsin Review, Apostrophe, Thought Magazine, Pindeldyboz and as part of the Spoken Interludes, Vermin on the Mount and Swink reading series in Los Angeles. He maintains an irregular newsletter, Eternal Recurrence.
He teaches advanced novel writing in the UCLA Extension Writers Program and holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from Bennington College. He lives on the Monterey Peninsula.
About @UGMan
Tap into the tumultuous world of award-winning author Mark Sarvas’ poignant third novel, @UGMan, where disillusioned protagonist UGMan wastes his days spewing on pre-Musk Twitter. But don’t be fooled by his online persona. Beneath the surface lies a sensitive man consumed by social media’s alienation and the world’s brokenness.
Mark Sarvas, acclaimed author of Harry, Revised and Memento Park, delivers an urgent narrative that puts a necessary spotlight on the psychological damage of social media. Readers will be drawn in by UGMan’s unsettling monologue, which skillfully weaves together references to history, pop culture, poetry, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and UGMan’s lifelong obsession with the Beatles. Yet amidst the intellectual allure they’ll be confronted with the horrifying reality of the man himself.
@UGMan is a tour de force exploration of obsession, disillusionment, and the dark humor that accompanies them. Prepare to be riveted, shocked, and ultimately moved by this unforgettable tale of a man lost—perhaps forever—in the digital age.
Do you keep a notebook of ideas?
I do. Also Post-Its, emails to myself, journal entries, Evernote files … I’m not quite as organized as I’d like to be, which can make going back to find stuff a challenge.
Are you more of a fan of plot-driven stories or character-driven stories?
From these choices, I’d pick character-driven, though I’m most partial to language-driven stories. Sentences that make me sit up and go “Woah.” But in the end, I don’t care as much about plot as I do about people. That’s what makes me turn the page. It’s easy to see through the mechanics of plot.
Fill in the blank: “People will like your book if they like stories about…”
Honest but flawed people doing their best to struggle through life and make sense of what’s important and what isn’t. With more than a few laughs along the way.
What are your thoughts on typewriters?
Addicted. I have a small collection – about six, I think – including one I bought at a flea market in Paris and then dragged all the way back home. I still write the occasional physical letter to friends on my nicely restored Olivetti Lettera 22.
Would you rather own a bookstore or run a library?
Probably a bookstore because I would not be subject to anyone or anything other than my own idiosyncratic whims. (No novels with footnotes! No writing in the second person!)
What is your favorite website that you use to promote your writing?
Like most writers, I dread the whole promotion piece of it. But I’m most excited by the possibilities of a new newsletter I’ve started on Beehiiv, having left Substack because of their regrettable support of Nazi content creators.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it to be turned into a movie or series?
I suppose a movie; I don’t think the premise could sustain 10 episodes.
Who is your dream audiobook narrator?
Benedict Cumberbatch. He’d be perfect for my long unpunctuated rants. Kind of like Sherlock on nasty pills.
Do you try to hit a certain page or word count with each writing session?
When I’m not on a residency, my daily target is two pages a day, about 500 words. As I’ve told my students over the years, doing this gets you a full manuscript in four to six months, and it’s an amount anyone can do each day. On retreat, I do a lot more – I just returned from two weeks in southwest France at Studio Faire, where I wrote eighty pages of my fourth novel in that window.
Do you have any writing rituals?
Other than relentless procrastination? Probably not. Although I do print and date each day’s labor, so I have a pretty complete ongoing picture of how the book is taking shape. And I do start each morning with reading back the prior day’s output. Maybe more habits than rituals.
What are your passions/obsessions outside of writing?
A long and eclectic list as I rarely do anything halfway. I’m a lifelong Beatles obsessive, as we see in @UGMAN. I love cycling, chess, reading philosophy, most things France, modern art especially the early 20th century. I’m pretty dog crazy. I’m a bit of James Bond nerd with a strong preference for the older movies. But I suppose above it all is my passion for literature, reading, which though related to writing is my Big Bang, the thing out of which everything else flows.
Have you made any public appearances to promote your book?
Not yet but I will be launching the book on July 9 at Diesel Bookstore in Santa Monica.
Who would you most want to read your book, living or dead?
My ideal reader is probably the critic James Wood, who would fully get all the deep literary references AND the pop culture stuff.
Who is on your Mt. Rushmore of greatest/inspirational authors?
John Banville, John Berger (my dog is named for him), Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith.
What is your favorite bookish possession?
I have a signed galley of my favorite John Berger novel, To The Wedding. I bought it second-hand, I never got to meet him, sadly. But it’s a treasure. An almost unbearably moving novel.
Have you ever mentored another writer with their writing?
Yes, hundreds literally. I have been teaching novel writing at the UCLA Extension Writers Program since 2009, and many of my students have published (I even have two Reese picks among them), gone on to get MFAs and more. I’ve held private writing workshops, arranged writing retreats, and continue to work one on one with writers editing their novels. I love helping writers find their way, and watching the light bulb go on.
What is the most unique way that an idea for a piece of writing has come to you.
Twice I have had an entire novel come into my head while looking at a painting. The first was my second book, Memento Park; and the other is a new one I am working on now, so hush-hush there.
Are you a big reader? Do you own a large collection of books, or are you more of a borrower?
I tell my students there are almost no absolutes in teaching and learning writing – except one. You cannot write fiction if you do not read fiction. Period, full stop. Most of the writers I know are obsessive readers and are much happier talking about what they are reading than what they are writing.
My personal library is about 3,500 books (I hate moving!) and I am always reading something, often a few at a time. Always. (Right now, I will shout out Matthew Specktor’s newly published wonderful book The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, a masterful look at how Hollywood shifted in the 1980s, told through the prism of his own experience as a son of a Super Agent. It’s a pure joy to read.)
Have you ever gone away to work on a piece of writing? If not, where would you go if you could?
I enjoy going to writing residencies (though I don’t love applying to them). I’ve already been to two this year, one in Sonoma, and one in France. I’ve got a third lined up in Virginia later this summer. These are incredible opportunities to unplug from the rest of your life and worry about nothing but your writing.
What is an annoying thing that a non-writer has assumed about writers or the act of writing?
That you can write a novel without being a reader of novels. That it’s easy. That it’s like the writers they see on TV and in the movies, who are all glamourous and rarely sit at a desk. That it’s all about inspiration when it’s really all about discipline.
How do you measure the success of your writing career?
I’m not that interested in common measures of success – money, sales, awards. I’ve watched that kind of envy consume other writers, it leads to madness and bitterness. Success for me is did I stick the landing? Does the book work? Did it do what I set out to do? And when I get the occasional random email from a reader telling me how much my book mattered to them. Nothing beats that.
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