Don't be ashamed if you've never heard of Richard Wiley. It's not your fault. He has never written anything close to a bestseller; Oprah has yet to designate him the flavor-of-the-month for her television book club.

Yet, Wiley has an impressive literary vitae: After studying at the venerable Iowa Writer's Workshop under John Irving, Wiley's first novel, Soldiers in Hiding, won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award. Wiley's subsequent novels — Fool's Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, and Indigo — all received favorable notice in America's flagship book periodical, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Despite this, only his most recent book remains in print — Ahmed's Revenge, published by Random House in 1998.

Currently, Wiley is on the faculty of the department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program he founded along with Douglas Unger.

J.J. Wylie: Which do you think is harder to deal with, the uncertainty you felt before publishing anything or the frustration of having what you've published go out of print?

RICHARD WILEY: The second is more insidiously frustrating because you think with every publication you are making progress. The first feeling is just a rite of passage. It's akin to having a child; it's a great burst of happiness that your subsequent publications are only a shadow of. You are happy with each publication, but they're nothing like your first. Before you get published, there's some part of you that says it's never going to happen, so, when it does happen, it's nothing but joyous. But, however, when your books go out of print without coming back into print — or they go out of print too quickly — then it's like dealing with some controllable form of cancer. If you think about it too much, it'll consume you, so you don't think about it too much, except to get pissed off every once in a while.

JW: Soldiers in Hiding won the PEN/Faulkner award for best fiction in 1987, and it was the first first novel to do so. Did it surprise you that critical acclaim didn't translate into commercial success?

RW: It never does. The PEN/Faulkner doesn't do that, except for David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, which was also a first novel. Somehow the PEN/Faulkner catapulted that book towards being a huge bestseller. But it's the exception. There have been best-selling PEN/Faulkner winners, but they were from writers who were already bestsellers before winning the award — like Roth's Operation Shylock. But unless it's from writer who is already famous, the PEN/Faulkner will not make a novel into a bestseller. Many obscure books like mine have won it and stayed obscure.

JW: Recognizing that neither is the real reason you write, which would you rather have: the award or the sales?

RW: The sales, without question. The sales because that means more people have read your book. The award is nice, but that and fifty cents might get you a cup of coffee. I don't mean any disrespect to the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. I love that I got that award, and it has meant the world to me. But, within the context of your question, I'd rather have the sales. I would like my books to be more widely read. Though the money that would come with more sales would be nice, it's more important to me that more sales would mean that more people have read my book.

JW: After the publication of Soldiers in Hiding, Fool's Gold — the least read of your novels — was published. Does that make it a kind of favorite stepchild of yours?

RW: Beside being the most lyrical and esoteric of my books, it was actually the first book I wrote, even though it was the second one published. So, it's a favorite of mine in that way, too. I haven't read Fool's Gold in a long time, but it's the most writerly, if you will, of my books. It pays more attention to language in certain ways than some of the others do. It kind of sits in a corner all by itself.