Novelist Rachel Cantor mashes up pizza, time travel, romance

Rachel Cantor, the author of the recently released novel, A  Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World, has always been passionate about pizza – she spent six years of her childhood in Rome and became, she says, “a real pizza snob” – but that wasn’t the reason that she chose it as a profession for her novel’s protagonist.

“He needed to be in a room by himself with a telephone,” says Cantor from her home in Brooklyn. “And I remembered that many years ago I overheard a conversation between two writers talking about their very worst jobs. One of the writers said that he – or she, I can’t remember – had a job as the person who answered the phone for the complaint line for a national pizza chain.

“He had to field complaints from all over the United States and find a way, from prepared company guidelines, to resolve the complaint. When I was looking for a job for my character, Leonard, that seemed perfect. He’s working out of a highly surveilled home office.”

Cantor will read from her novel this Thursday, March 20, at the Central Library, 14 West 10th Street, at 6:30 p.m. Reservations are suggested by clicking here.

Cantor admits that her book – a deftly funny journey through time, French jazz festivals, and Australian food festivals, among other things – is hard to categorize.

“That hadn’t been my intention,” Cantor says, “but I did try to mash up some genres.”

Cantor says the novel was her attempt to take a break from the “more serious writing” she does to support herself . Her more realistic short stories have been published in Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter,  and the Kenyon Review. A Highly Unlikely Scenario delves into more absurdist territory.

“I needed a serious break from my serious writing,” Cantor says.