Excerpt from D'Stair's interview:

Q: Grant’s collection of short stories/vignettes in Lost Souls offers a different tone and pace compared to Emotionless Souls, yet has a somewhat similar structure that reflects something of a James Joyce approach. Amongst the US Indie writers is this mode opted for by many?

A: Well—I actually have an answer, but first need to clarify something. I find the approach or the content (or whatever we are to call it) of Grant’s work and work like it to be very anti-Joycean. By this I mean that a distinct characteristic of Grant’s work is that it is less concerned with “actuality” or the delving into the intricacies of “tangible people/reality” and seems more concerned with delving into and compartmentalising, analysing, breaking down into component the “unreal” people that seem to populate literature—or better to say populate the literature that Grant’s work seems to have grown out of the influence of.

For example, there is much superficial marking of influence from Brett Easton Ellis, a well known American novelist, in Grant, but the imperativeness, the actual, personal, genuinely-lost-and-searching gravity which I find in Ellis is not present in Grant, nor does it seem to be something Grant is trying to ape—one of the attractions of his work, to me. So, in opposition to Joyce, who I think was little interested in anything “strictly artificial”, Grant attempts to humanise as much as possible (and seems well aware to “fully humanise” is impossible) sketches, caricatures, (and even at times to build from something genuine) and see if structure, expectation, rhythm can denude the particular out of it, make it a shell—hence, I felt and still fell, the insistence on titles like “emotionless” and “lost”—not in the usual, personal intonations, but in the sense of these fragmentary identities, hopeless to ever be total, being explored and, through hyper attention, revealing their void.

Read the full interview at: http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2011/07/31/mon01.asp

For more information go to http://www.davidsgrant.com