Alex Stein’s marvelous Made-Up Interviews with Imaginary Artists moves powerfully against the grain of received notions of what constitutes a book of interviews. Combining philosophical rumination and elegant digression with fascinating interviews that have been subtly but significantly reworked, Stein has brought a new variety of convive to the cross-genre table. The result, while offering the rewards of traditional interview compilations —access to the minds of first-rate thinkers such as Lorna Dee Cervantes and Cecilia Vicuña — also offers the reader a growing sense of just who or what the mysterious, deceptively self-effacing facilitator of these proceedings might be. For Alex Stein too is gradually, carefully revealed to us too as the book proceeds. This Alex Stein may or may not correspond perfectly with the Alex Stein who has signed his name to the manuscript, and it is in this touch of fictionality, which always illuminates rather than obscures, and speaks volumes about the knowability/unknowability of the self and what the self seeks to apprehend — that a handsome portion of the pleasure of this fine project resides.

—Laird Hunt