5 Questions with Daniel Levin Becker, Author of What’s Good

Feb 10, 2022

author photo of Daniel Levin Becker

Daniel Levin Becker is an American critic, translator, and editor, and the youngest member of the Oulipo literary collective. He is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard UP, 2012) and the translator of, among others, Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure (Melville House, 2013) and Eduardo Berti’s An Ideal Presence (Fern Books, 2021), and co-translator of Frédéric Forte’s Minute-Operas (Burning Deck, 2015) and All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963–2018 (McSweeney’s, 2018). He is a contributing editor to The Believer, senior editor at McSweeney’s Publishing, and English editor for the French nonfiction publisher Odile Jacob. He lives in Paris. His newest book, What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language, is published by City Lights Books.

Levin Becker will be discussing What’s Good in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series with special guest Ian S. Port on Saturday, February 12th, 2022!


Where are you writing to us from? 

I’m at my in-laws’ house in upstate New York, just south of the Adirondacks. I was supposed to be back home in Paris by now, but pandemic-era travel is full of exciting surprises. [Editor’s note: Daniel is writing this in early January 2022]

What has been most important for you, personally/artistically/habitually, during the pandemic?

My answer to all three, for better and for worse, is work. In the absence of many of the things that usually make me feel like a complete human, I’ve been able to pour myself into various writing and editing and translation projects. (Finally getting What’s Good into the world, after the better part of a decade working on it, was very affirming too.) My wife and I also started a press, Fern Books, and it felt good to make something new grow during such dark times. 

Which writers, artists, and others influenced this book?

What’s Good benefited from the work of too many critics and hip-hop scholars to name here (though most of them are named in the book), but its main spiritual inspiration came from two collections of lectures: Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, which is generous and freewheeling and what you might call character-driven to consistently magnetic effect, and Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (translated by Patrick Creagh and since re-translated by Geoffrey Brock), in each of which—though there are actually only five “memos”—he aims to identify and discuss one virtue he deems vital and inexhaustible about literature. I don’t think of What’s Good as a book of lectures, exactly, but I tried to osmose qualities of both books into the way I presented the things I was thinking through. 

What books are you reading right now and would you recommend them? 

My go-to book on this trip has been Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov, the summary of which I’ll farm out to the subtitle of the English edition (translated by John Lambert, I assume extremely well): The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia. Whew! I’m a big fan of Carrère’s writing, which is mesmerizingly limpid and unsparingly honest, especially in his non-fiction—which Limonov is, even though it reads like a novel. Yes, recommended.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

I’d open a bookstore on a street—in Paris, probably—that already has a bunch of other bookstores on it, and it would be called Also Books. The bestseller would be for my customers to decide, right? But I’d do my best to hand-sell Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual to anyone who even ventured in to ask for directions.


Check out the book trailer for What’s Good!

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