SOURCE: “Tim Parks: The Novelist, an English Expatriate in Italy, Takes a Look at His Neighbors in His First Nonfiction Book,” in Publishers Weekly, July 6, 1992, pp. 35–36.

In the following interview, Field provides an overview of Parks's life, career, his beginnings as a writer, and his experiences in Italy as recounted in Italian Neighbors.

“I'd always sworn I wouldn't write a corny book about Italy,” declares Tim Parks. “After all, am I a novelist or am I a novelist?”

He is a novelist. However, Parks also belongs to another old and honored breed: that of expatriate author. And this second calling has led him, indirectly, to write Italian Neighbors, currently out from Grove.

Though hardly “corny,” the book concerns the Italian village of Montecchio, near Verona, which the British-born Parks now considers home. As his first nonfiction book, Italian Neighbors—called “delightful” and “amusing” in PW (Nonfiction Forecasts, May...