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Love and Other Pranks: An Interview With Author Tony Vigorito
Tony Vigorito’s third novel, Love and Other Pranks, was described as “the single wildest novel I’ve ever read,” by bestselling novelist and countercultural icon Tom Robbins. Here, performance philosopher and all-around renaissance artist Michael Garfield interviews Tony about his latest book.
Michael Garfield: Love and Other Pranks explores two parallel love stories set in different time periods. On the one side, it is a high-stakes caper set amidst the hedonism and hypocrisy of a New Age cult in modern-day San Francisco, while on the other side it is a mystical treasure hunt and swashbuckling pirate yarn set amidst the avarice and brutality of 18th-century Caribbean colonialism.
Since it’s such a yin-yang of a book (or a Möbius strip), let’s start with a double question: How is love a form of piracy, or how is piracy a form of love?
Tony Vigorito: The pursuit of love — not just in the romantic sense, but also in the universal sense — is an act of rebellion of the highest order. In the same way that the archetypal pirate is both refugee from and revolutionary to their culture, love is a refuge from the sense of isolation and separateness that so agonizes the human experience while also pointing the way toward a revolutionary expansion of human consciousness.
