Captain Berserko

Flanked by beloved volumes, McGuane is taking no shit for literature today; he won’t join the chorus of doom-mongering about the death of reading and the fate of fiction in a digital age. He tells a story about his recent fishing trip to Belize, how he saw all these media types, including Brokaw, hunched over their BlackBerries and iPhones, madly clicking away. And he told them, “You know, guys, my side — the novelists — are going to give a clearer picture of the truth years from now than you guys.” He asked them: What gives a richer portrait of the ’20s? Newsreels, newspapers? Or The Great Gatsby? “I strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do,” he says, “and that is embody the human spirit. And whether or not literature gets marginalized by some machine, that or a hula hoop or a 3D movie, I couldn’t give a shit less.”

— from an article in Men's Journal entitled "Captain Berserko writes a Better Ending"