New 5Q: Joe Bob Briggs

I haven't run a "5 Questions With..." feature in a while, but I couldn't resist asking a few questions of Joe Bob Briggs around the time that he and I met to discuss sex in '70s cinema. The questions I had for him about his new book, Profundly Erotic: Sexy Movies That Changed History, reach well beyond that narrow focus, though.

Here are some other recent interviews you might enjoy:

• Rachel Kramer Bussel speaks to close personal friend Will Leitch about his debut YA novel, Catch.
  
• TomPeters.com runs occasional interviews with "cool friends," usually because they've got new books out. Recent chatters have included Eamonn Kelly of the Global Business Network and Ray Kurzweil, each addressing in their own way the fact that the future is so bright, one must wear shades.
  
• It ran a while ago, but I'm always pleased to stumble onto an interview with George Saunders, one of my favorite short story writers.
  

Interview Roundup:
Sgt. Rock Is Going to Help Me

• "Living legend of comics" Joe Kubert talks about the new Sgt. Rock story he's writing for DC—and why his graphic novel Jew Gangster ended up with iBooks. Excerpts from both books are included.

• "Seattle's best writer... is an Englishman" is the front-page headline trumpeting the Seattle Weekly interview with Jonathan Raban, admiringly described as "a backwater media critic chronically sought out by media monoliths" though, as former Amazon editor James Marcus points out in the piece, "he transcends the regional-writer rubric the way Faulkner did."

• UK readers discover Sara Gran, who spills some of the beans regarding her new novel, Dope. Sara's recently started a blog, too, where she writes about everything from reading Charles Portis to volunteering with the ASPCA in New Orleans.

• The American Booksellers Association's Bookselling This Week gets personal with Laila Lalami, who admits that she moved to Portland for Powells. Hey, don't think the Beatrices haven't considered it, too...
  

Interview Roundup

• James Ellroy wins the Jack Webb Award for "[advancing] the gloriously deserved positive image of the Los Angeles Police Department," and talks with the National Review about the honor and why the city's cops get a bad rap.
  
• Jonathan Lethem's going to be at Makor next month, and he discusses short story writing with the 92Y bloggers, along with the Mets, Marvel comics, and why he wrote his Brooklyn novels outside the city: "There’s something about the slight feeling of exile that brings my imaginative relationship with this place to life."
  
• Rachel Kramer Bussel was doing interviews at Gothamist all last week, and I'm just now catching up with her conversations with Elizabeth Merrick and Julia Powell.
  

We Call to Your Attention

Robert Birnbaum interviews Jonathan Lethem, who calls the tendency towards lateness in the New York Times Book Review "a good thing." He explains:

"I myself actually turned in a very late piece—I reviewed the Kafka study K by [Roberto] Calasso three or four months after it was published. It’s not a bad thing. It breaks the spell of everyone necessarily hanging on that review, at the instant of publication, to set the tone for everything else. It might free us and also free up the Times from any sense that it's somehow in charge."

He adds that "review" isn't even the right word to describe those articles: "The word that the theater trade uses is the right one—notices. People were last Sunday put on notice that my new book was to be found, if they hadn't spotted it already. That's all that matters."

Interview Roundup

• My longstanding hostility to Paolo Coelho is a matter of public record, so it's not going to surprise any of you that I think his latest interview, with the AP's Angela Doland, strikes me as being just as insipid as the previous ones--and as his books. At least this time around, the story buries the usual sobbing about how the Coelho isn't as big in America as he is in Europe, focusing instead on how the guy whose latest novel had a combined international print run of 8 million copies tries to live a simple life--while spending four months of the year in France, another four in Brazil, and the rest making publicity appearances around the world as four assistants answer his fan mail.

• Bruce Sterling has a long conversation with a writer from a fan site for J.G. Ballard, "the first science-fiction writer I ever read who really blew my mind."

• Speaking of long conversations, here's Robert Birnbaum and Stuart Dybek.

• And the 92nd St. Y continues to post interesting material to its blog--recent items include short interviews with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who's going to appear on Oct. 16th with Barbara Ehrenreich, and Ken Follett, who just seems to enjoy talking about thrillers.

• Oh, one more, because it's sui generis: Alan Moore asks Brian Eno questions.
  

Interview Roundup: Now Mark's Heart Is Full

With the publication of Mark Sarvas's interview with John Banville, The Elegant Variation has pretty much fulfilled its reason for being, and Mark can now retire from blogging. But I'm glad he won't.

• Before she got famous on Room 222, Denise Nicholas was a theatrical activist in the civil rights movement, an experience that drives her debut novel, Freshwater Road. She talks about how her long-held dream to write about those years came to fruition after she joined a workshop led by Janet Fitch, and took the bold step of burning her diaries so as to avoid relying on them instead of her imagination.

• A bunch of first-time writers, including yours truly, got together with Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network to talk about how we got our deals and what we'll be doing to convince you to buy our books. Richard Nash of Soft Skull drops by to tell us "it’s all about expectations management." And you know what? He's right.
  

Interview Roundup: The Sequels

• Frederick Busch explains to Robert Birnbaum why he didn't go back and reread Girls before starting the sequel, North: "I sort of knew enough of the former events. What I didn't want to do was imitate myself. And it's easy to do. I knew the structure. I knew there would be a one-word title. One-word chapter names. I knew that Jack wouldn't have a last name and his dog wouldn't have any name. And I knew that a crucial moment would come in a cornfield, just as it does in Girls. And I felt that was all I needed to know."

• Scott McLemee talks to Barbara Ehrenreich about "treading the fine line between investigative journalism and participant-observer ethnography" in Bait and Switch, her sequel of sorts to Nickel and Dimed. Find out why she "often felt extremely soiled, compromised and generally yucky about the whole venture."

• Those of you who love to hate Deborah Solomon (you know who you are) were probably chomping at the bit when she responded to Andre Codrescu's vision of New Orleans as a "glorious mess" of a tourist trap by asking, "Must you be so defeatist?" Personally, I was more entertained by her comment on Senator Mary Landrieu--"it's nice to see women in positions of leadership"--since all Landrieu really did worth remembering during the crisis was get yelled at by Anderson Cooper. Unless you count her ineffectual threats to punch the president in the nose...
  

Philip Roth's Pre-Science Fiction Endeavors

Sunday's NYT Arts & Leisure section puts Philip Roth on the cover in recognition of his double-barreled entry into one of the most substantial guideposts to our nation's canon, the Library of America. The first volume combines Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go, while the second volume runs from When She Was Good through Portnoy's Complaint to Our Gang and The Breast--a lineup that's led Jonathan Yardley to suggest already that the comprehensive inclusiveness of this projected eight-volume series is "nuts."

Self-Described Media Obscurity Gets Still More Ink

Despite my fervent hopes we might have heard the last of Paolo Coelho, but no such luck: NYT reporter Alan Riding is the latest witness to Coelho's constant moaning: "I am not in the United States what I am in France or Spain or Germany...I have never broken the barrier of the press. In the United States, I am a great success, but I am not a celebrity." Riding's headline suggests that Coelho's "writing in a global language," to which one might well respond: yeah, that of the lowest common denominator.

As was the case with Eleven Minutes last year, I did actually open a copy of The Zahir and try to read it, but this is pretty godawful stuff, folks. I mean, I'd sooner finish The Traveler than read even one more chapter of Coelho...and I'd seriously consider picking up Lauren Slater's short story collection again, too.

This'll Keep You Busy for a While

The Loggernaut reading series website features six interviews, including a conversation with Daniel Alarcón, whose short story "City of Clowns" includes "one of the most compelling instances in recent literature of a man performing cunnilingus on a woman who is wearing stilts," at least according to his interviewer.

"In Lima I briefly dated a girl who owned a pair of stilts. I can't really say much more about it, except to add that I write fiction and have an active imagination."

The conversations with folks like David Means and Paula Fox are a bit less salacious, by comparison. But just as lengthy--heck, this crew is going to pose a serious West Coast challenge to Robert Birnbaum if they keep at it. Speaking of which, the interviewer so prolific he has to spread his work out on two different web sites chimed in last week with the transcript of a long talk with James Howard Kunstler.

That's Me in the Spotlight...

Next month, I'll be appearing at Fall for the Book and James River Writers to speak about bookblogging on panels with Happy Booker, Reb Livingston, and Caroline Kettlewell. The Richmond Times-Dispatch generates a little advance buzz for the James River Writers festival by emailing me some questions, including one that allowed me to muse about the impact of blogs on newspaper book reviewing:

"Before blogs, if you hated your local paper's book section, you might write the editor a letter, where your complaint was probably seen by one person, maybe two, and then disposed of. Now, the complaints--and the praise--are out there for the entire world to see. Every book review editor can, if they want to, find out what readers think not just of their performance, but that of every other major review department. How seriously they take that, though, remains to be seen."

Here Comes the Weekend

• Two months ago, I made note of the lengthy review Amazon had given Mackenzie Bezos' The Testing of Luther Albright. Since then, the first-time novelist's gotten some excellent notices, from folks like Kate Bolick of NYTBR, that don't even mention her family connection to Amazon. The hometown paper isn't so genteel: Seattle Post-Intelligence book man John Marshall gets her talking about that and her background in Princeton's creative writing program...I'm going to have to see if Jennifer Weiner can give me some good gossip on that front!

• Roxana Robinson wrote about "women's fiction" in last Sunday's Chicago Tribune, but the way she described romances and thrillers along the way rankled M. J. Rose, who made the case for genre fiction, aiming to refute the idea that "thrillers are every bit as shallow as romances: They're just as simplistic, just as formulaic and, just as often, poorly written." I think the key there is "just as often," which isn't the same as "always." And, I think, it's time to let out the dirty little secret: so-called literary fiction can be just as simplistic, formulaic, and poorly written, too. I should know--I'm judging some for the Litblog Co-op this week!
  

In the "Those Who Can Do" Department...

I don't know too much about The First Post, which sort of looks like a British version of Salon, but their first lead story is an interview with John Irving, or rather a partial transcript of a conversation between Irving and Radio 4's Sarah Montague. Now, I've noted some awfully bad reviews for Until I Find You, as I'm sure you have, but Irving's not worried:

"I'm not really concerned about book reviewers. They don't write books themselves... People who don't write them can't tell me how to do it."

Fair enough, then, but what does Irving do when confronted by a reviewer who does write books? His reaction to Marianne Wiggins' criticisms has been widely reported, of course, but did he learn anything from the negative assessments of April Bernard and Adam Mars-Jones?

As Predicted, Here's Robert Anton Wilson...

Not in the New York Times, as I had hoped, but this interview in Santa Cruz's alternative weekly, Metroactive, is a good look at the twilight years of "the most ripped-off artist of our time," who blazed the trail for everything from The Da Vinci Code to What the Bleep Do We Know? His email correspondents include LSD inventor Albert Hoffman: ""He's a fan of my books, and I'm a fan of his drugs."

I picked that link up from a site which also gave me a pointer towards Wilson's answers to 23 more questions; the same article reports that the old trickster's got at least one more book left in him, as Email to the Universe is...well, it's probably a bit optimistic to say that it'll be showing up in your local bookstore, unless there's some really hip people running it or it also sells magickal paraphenalia on the side.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: if you really want a novel to blow your mind and make you question two millennia worth of received history, pick up Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati. It's been nearly twenty years since I first discovered a copy in my public library, and I'm still waking up with the shivers some nights.

Can Robert Anton Wilson Be Far Behind?

I'm not sure what entertains me more about the NYT profile of Colin Wilson: that the Times is devoting column inches to the prolific British author, or that the first GoogleAd randomly selected to resonate with the author of The Outsider, a classic articulation of the alienated existentialist, should volunteer "how to know that God loves you."

Note The Responsibility-Taking Active Voice
Or, a Leader Romance Fans Can Trust

While I was busy doing research, the SB,TB crew put up an interview with Gayle Wilson, the Romance Writers of America president-elect, although Wilson makes it plain "she is answering for herself, and not as a spokesperson for the RWA" when she says things like "I believe that one of the biggest problems this year has been our failure to communicate promptly and appropriately with our members...We have... made mistakes.  We regret them, and we have learned from them.  I know that simply saying that will not reassure outraged members, but I hope that by our future actions we can restore the trust that was damaged this year."

It's very exciting, though, to see the RWA's incoming leader state unequivocally that "the organization doesn’t define the genre; the genre defines the organization.  And the genre is vibrant and growing and evolving."

Interview Roundup: 1-2-3-4, I Love the Marine Corps

• The new issue of Old Town Review includes an interview with Nathaniel Fick, a young Marine Corps veteran who was sent to Afghanistan and Iraq almost immediately after completing his training for the Recon Battalion. His memoir, One Bullet Away, comes out later this fall. I got a copy at BookExpo; I have read it, and it is the best memoir I've read in at least a year.

• There's also a new issue of Ruminator out, and it has soundbites from Fran Lebowitz, including the story of how she wound up on Law and Order:

  "I auditioned to be a regular judge on the show, not an arraignment judge. I knew as I was doing it that I was failing my audition. Every actor tells you that at that point you just say 'Thank you,' and leave. But I didn't. The second I finished, I said 'Look, I know I failed my audition. But the reason that I failed it is because I’m not an actor. This is too big a part for me--give me the part of the arraignment judge, which is just a couple lines. I would be excellent at that because I'm very judgmental. I also make snap judgments, so I'm perfect.' They were kind of dumbfounded.  Luckily, they thought this was so hilarious, they gave me the part."

• From B.E.E. & Me, the latest manifestation of Jaime Clarke's Bret Easton Ellis thing, comes a link to this long interview that started in 1996 and ended nearly two years later.
  

Interview Roundup: Here in the Hall of Heads

• As recently noted, the new Bret Easton Ellis novel, Lunar Park, is all about Bret Easton Ellis, but don't ask him if it's real. "I just don't want to answer any of those questions," he tells Edward Wyatt (NYT). "I don't like demystifying the text." As he continues to muddy the waters, he also utters a line that he surely knows (perhaps even expects?) will come back to haunt him someday: "No matter how often you reinvent yourself, you're writing the same book."

• Rachel Donadio composes a lengthy profile of V. S. Naipaul for NYTBR, noting that his observations of the Islamic world make him "a prophet of our world-historical moment." And one who's brimming with confidence, at that, declaring himself "much, much better than Conrad" and suggesting that if you think he was influenced by Conrad, well, that's just because you don't know Naipaul as well as Naipaul does. Then again, keep in mind that this is a guy who's been declaring the novel dead for about a decade, most recently last fall.

• Newsday catches up with Lydia Millet, who's been on a roll this year, publishing both Everyone's Pretty and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart with Soft Skull Press. I've seen her read from both novels at events here in New York in recent months, and her stuff is definitely worth checking out.

• "Moorish Girl" Laila Lalami meets up with fellow author-blogger Damian McNicholl for an email chat about her upcoming short story collection:

  "I've been told that my book is political, which sort of surprised me, as this wasn't my goal at all when I wrote it. I was mostly interested in the characters. But I suppose we live in an age when class is so rarely addressed seriously than when it is, it becomes a political statement. Anyway, I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind about anything. I just hope that people get to see the world through my characters' eyes, for a little while."

• Dan Glaister of The Guardian drops by the offices of graphic novelist (or should we say "narraglyphic picto-assemblist"?) Dan Clowes to learn more about Ice Haven, his followup to Ghost World.
  

Interview Roundup: Where It Will All End, Knows God!

• Nerve chats with Francesca Lia Block about the magical realism of her YA Weetzie Bat universe is dragged into the darker world of her adult fiction in Necklace of Kisses. "I don't think of any of my books as YA. I find the label limiting," she clarifies. "However, I was just at ALA, and I won that Margaret Edwards Award and because of that, I was around these really brilliant and interesting people who are in the field and I learned it's hard to get a YA book published now without controversy, whereas in the past, when I was published, it was the opposite. I think now you have to have the blowjobs or you're not going to get the contract."

• When Beth Dugan of Bookslut chats with Lisa Glatt, the author's husband, poet David Hernandez, pops in with the occasional additional insight into the difference between writing short- and long-form fiction and which of Glatt's stories people think are really about her, including "Waste," a.k.a "the pee story."

• Robert Birnbaum's latest long, long talk is with Camille Paglia, mostly about poetry, but he also gets her started on her crusade to save art from the avant-garde and the academics...and don't forget the Internet:

  "We are getting worse writing, worse art. Part of the reason for the much worse writing is that young people have so many other distractions in terms of their time--so many things to do, that reading books has just shriveled. They are assigned books, but few kids read books for pleasure. Too much else is going on. Now I'm a champion of the web... [b]ut the style of the web, not only the surfing skimming style that you learn--dash, dash--you absorb information not by reading whole sentences. It’s flash, flash, flash. Email, blog, everything is going fast, fast, fast. So the quality of language has obviously degenerated. It’s obvious."

  As proof of the declining standards in prose, Paglia suggests that Time today stinks in comparison to its early years, when it had "a kind of snarky, famous style that was created in the '20s and '30s, a smart style. But oh my God, it was beautifully written." Yes, that's right, it's nostalgia for the days when backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind.
  

El Cuatro Episodio de Bat Segundo

Better than radio, it's Internet radio, as Bat Segundo's roving correspondent, who sounds an awful lot like a bookblogger we know, interviews Amanda Filipacchi and Kevin Smokler in his latest hour-long show. (Actually, there's very little Spanish in the program, but it was either that for a headline or a lame Tribe Called Quest joke, so I took the easy way out.)

Amanda'll be turning up here in a week or so, taking part in an Author2Author feature. Look for it!

Interview Roundup: Pairing Off

My friends at Small Beer Press have been getting a lot of attention recently, most of it centered around the publication of Kelly Link's second short story collection, Magic for Beginners. Publishers Weekly did a story on Kelly and her partner, Gavin Grant, in last week's issue, and now their local paper, the Valley Advocate, profiles the duo and their affinity with "newer writers, people whose stories fit into neither Asimov's nor Tin House, but were still lovely and good." Of course, nowadays, with Kelly showing up in One Story, a Tin House appearance doesn't sound quite so implausible.

This next item isn't quite an author interview--if it had happened here, I would have called it an Author2Author--but Stephen King and John Irving got together recently to talk about writing, and Manchester Journal reporter Sarah M. Grant had the recorder running while she jumpstarted the conversation.

I Liked the Book, Though

Like Sarah Weinman, I'm a bit ruffled by today's NYT profile of Laura Lippmann, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. The part that gets me is this:

"Ms. Lippman's book is one of several in recent years to probe the sometimes fraught nature of female friendships, particularly among adolescent girls, whose insidious ways of bullying each other are so distinct from the physical aggression of boys. The trend began with Mary Pipher's best-selling Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls in 1994 and reached its apogee when Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees & Wannabes (2002) became the 2004 movie Mean Girls. But unlike those books, or this year's The Friend Who Got Away, an anthology of essays by well-known women writers, Ms. Lippman's entry is not segregated in the 'relationships' section of the bookstore. It is first and foremost a gripping mystery novel..."

• Three books (before Laura's) in eleven years is a trend? I mean, I know Michael Cader says three of anything is a trend in publishing, but there's gotta be a time limit.
  
• Who's been stocking Pipher and Wiseman in "relationships" rather than, say, "parenting"? Which is just one of the fundamental differences between those two books and The Friend Who Got Away, in which many of the disintegrating friendships take place among adults.
  
• Do bookstores ordinarily put fiction in non-fiction sections if they happen to be "about" a certain subject? I don't expect to find Gore Vidal on the history shelves, after all...
  

None of which detracts from the high readability of Laura's novel, To the Power of Three, though, and I'm glad to see she's getting some attention for it!

Interview Roundup: Mister Garfield Got Shot Down

• Lisa Selin Davis (who read at the excellent Brooklyn indie shop BookCourt last night), spoke to Gothamist about her debut novel, Belly, which "grew out of my studies in urban planning and environmental psychology, two graduate degrees I didn't finish," but is a lot more gripping than that particular sound bite makes it seem. The organizers of the First Fiction Tour think so, too: Davis has been invited to take part in a seven-city reading series this October.

• Robert Birnbaum gets into it with Sarah Vowell, and there's more about James Garfield than you've seen in any other interview this year! "Pretty much every time Lincoln used a hanky there is a plaque for it," Vowell observes. "But Garfield... he was only president a few weeks. So he didn't really get to do that much. That's one reason. And there were problems and dramas. And it was a relatively undramatic period. Which is another reason we don't learn much about it." As always with Birnbaum, there's plenty, plenty more where that came from...

• The UK and US editors of Cosmopolitan, Kate White and Sam Baker, both have new murder mysteries out, so my friend Emily Gordon talked to them for Newsday.

• George Gilder lets little girls fight his battles for him. OK, now that I've roped you in with the snarky half-truthful lead, check out this Boston Globe profile, focusing on how every time the godfather of the digital economy tries to get out of the "intelligent design (ID)" debate, they pull him back in. He likes the theory--which rejects "the belief that the universe is a purely material phenomenon that can be reduced to physical and chemical laws"--not because he's particularly religious, but because it matches what he sees in information theory. Of course, his protests of reluctance might carry a little more weight if he wasn't the cofounder of the ID-touting Discovery Institute. (For a backgrounder on the subject, try Evan Ratliff's Wired article, "The Crusade Against Evolution." As it happens, Gilder wrote a defense of ID in that same issue.)
  

Talk Talk

If you can't wait for me to get around to more interviews, there's a whole new blog devoted to conversations with famous writers, including Beatrice allies such as Martha O'Connor, Lauren Baratz-Logsted and M. J. Rose. Meanwhile, Dan Wickett's conducted the seventh in his series of roundtable e-mails with editors of literary journal editors; this installment includes Steve Erickson and Bradford Morrow.

And three cheers to Maud Newton, the latest bookblogger to land on the pages of the New York Times Book Review, delivering her take on Josh Emmons' novel The Loss of Leon Meed.

Listen Up You Primitive Apes!

Usually, you'll recall, I find the Salon book section about a month behind the East Palookaville Gazette when it comes to the books and writers it features, but they can be pretty good at landing celebrity interviews in a timely fashion. Witness the conversation with Bruce Campbell, whose Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way has been pretty darn funny so far, and I can't wait until next week when I'll get to finish it. Why write a novel starring yourself just a few years after your memoir, you may ask?

"Honestly, it all boiled down to the fact that it didn't make sense to write anything else that was autobiographical. Mostly because, as I joked in the book, according to my publisher I hadn't done enough to warrant another one. So this was a way to put together material that doesn't fall too far from my tree, so to speak."

It's a Question Cornucopia!

Just wanted to let you know that I've posted a comparative slew of "5 Questions With..." items in the last week, from my own queries for Barry Yourgrau to an exchange between Catherine Wald and Dee Power, both of whom have gone out and solicited some great advice from authors and other publishing insiders on how to make it big, or maybe just make it, as a writer. The Q&As are kinda fun, and I know they've been somewhat sporadic, even with friends chipping in; I'll talk about a potential solution to that in the near future...

You can also hear Catherine talking about authors coping with rejection last week on the Leonard Lopate Show. And she'll be at the New School tonight in a panel that also features authors David Ebersoff and William Zinsser, along with Mary Kay Blakely in (presumably) a moderating role.

Interview Roundup: Nothing Up Our Sleeves

• Did you see Saturday's NYT piece on Ricky Jay? I'm a huge Jay fan, and the profile was all the more exciting because he's been all over my pop culture landscape lately, from the Deadwood DVDs to the wonderful /New Yorker profile reprinted not only on Jay's website but in Mark Singer's new collection, Character Studies, and a most excellent book which recently showed up in my mailbox: Extraordinary Exhibitions. Said book, in fact, being the occasion of the Times interest...as who could not help but being riveted by the large reproductions of broadsides advertising such attractions as Toby the Sapient Pig and George Anderson, "the living skeleton!" All supplemented with Jay's learned commentary; of one attraction, for example, we are reminded that

  "no matter how much one is mired in the complexities of life, no matter how seriously one is inclined to take oneself, no matter how depressing are the day's events--these vicissitudes are all assuaged by the presence of 'The Giant Hungarian Schoolboy.'"

  Who was, the playbill declares proudly, "Always on View--Alive."

• Science fiction writer Charles Stross (who I hope will be showing up here very soon) has two novels coming out in the States in a span of weeks. The Hidden Family, the second half of a two-volume, dimension-hopping thriller, should be at your local bookstore now and Powell's says they've already got copies of Acclerando, a collection of linked stories tracing one family's path through a nanotech-transformed future. With the latter book, Stross is also following the example of writers such as Cory Doctorow and giving away the goods under a Creative Commons license:

  "What this means in a nutshell is: you can download it. You can read it, and give a copy (under exactly the same terms) to your friends. You must not sell it, modify it (other than converting to a different file format for storage or reading) or file off the serial numbers and pretend you wrote it. You must specifically not create derivative works such as movies or TV adaptations or role-playing games or translations into other languages, without obtaining a separate commercial license. If you do any of these things, I and/or my agent and publishers will come after you with lawyers, guns, and money -- but mostly lawyers."

  But this is an interview roundup, you say--where's the interview? Well, the Scotland branch of the Times caught up with Stross , "the geek taking over the galaxy," focusing mostly on Acclerando but also delving into yet another book, the Hugo-nominated Iron Sunrise (just out in mass market).

• It's not quite a trend yet, but here and there I'm starting to see "outtakes" from newspaper interviews with authors showing up on the blogs. First it was a bit of back-and-forth with David Sedaris at Emdashes, and then a week later House of Mirth runs some questions posed to Jonathan Coe.

• I remember first hearing about "the Grotto" back when I lived in San Francisco and Po Bronson was a satirical novelist (and pretty darn good at it, too) rather than the business journalist he's become in this century. Back then, as the Associated Press dispatch notes, it was a Victorian home occupied by six writers; now it's a former animal hospital that hosts twenty-one authors who pay just $1.50/square foot for writing space--sorta like the Writer's Room run as an autonomous collective (and with a waiting list just as long, it seems like).

Can We Shut Up About Paolo Coelho Now?

A couple of blogs picked up on Elizabeth Day's interview with Paolo Coelho for the Telegraph, in which "the world's biggest-selling novelist"* reveals that for all his success, he's still an asshole, as evidenced by the story of how he delayed an international flight to go smoke in the airport:

"I knew that it was a little bit cowardly of me not to have a reaction on the spot. I should have said to the steward, 'You saw me smoking? F--- you.' Then my soul could have been cleared of any bad feeling."

And while the consensus of the critical world is that Coelho's a bad, bad writer, he says it doesn't bother him: "I write from my soul... I know who I am." Whatever. I'll admit that showing Coelho up as a self-absorbed jerk is a welcome change of pace from the "poor little rich author" treatment he usually gets from the American press, but now perhaps it's time to let him jet between his two fancy homes in media obscurity until he does something truly noteworthy like refine his impression of Castaneda by starting a cult.

* "Since the publication of his first work, The Pilgrimage, in 1987, he has sold 65 million books, making him the best-selling author in the world--above John Grisham, Tom Clancy and the seemingly unassailable J.K. Rowling." Even if that's true, two words: Stephen King.

Interview Roundup: Formal Gloves? Before Labor Day?

That's Lionel Shriver on the left, accepting her Orange Prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is now officially recognized as the best novel written by a woman and published in England last year. The Guardian reports on the surrounding hubbub, but Three Monkeys scored an interview recently, where the expatriated author discussed writing about American school shootings from halfway around the world: "One of the ironies of leaving a country behind is that it follows you; if anything, ex-pats are more actively engaged with their country of origin than the people who stay home. After all, US residents are much less aware of being 'American' than Yanks who live abroad, where you’re unremittingly 'American' to other people." (Thanks to Mark Sarvas for pointing me to these items...)

Blogger Marlow (Untouched by Work or Duty) Riley chats with Jonathan Coe about his musical influences, while Gothamist spoke to Carrie McLaren, the editor of the Brooklyn zine Stay Free--which has its own blog. And Kevin Holtsberry of Collected Miscellany starts up a conversation with Michelle Herman.

Catching up with the literary magazine AGNI, I spotted an interview with onetime Beatrice guest Thomas Sayers Ellis, who describes his poetry as "American, African-American, American-African, Black, genuine Negro, Afro Colored and Not for Sale, Sold or Souled Out." He adds, "My style is derived from a gathering of aesthetics, a purely democratic approach to form, to what can be contained, let a brother loose, Free TSE, and to creating my own containers. Intention, then, is tricky so I prefer surrender--there’s a weightlessness there that gives the body over to water, absolute form and formlessness, stress less, what both Bruce Lee and Fela Kuti spoke of." Hard not to like a guy who can namecheck Bruce and Fela back-to-back!

The "What Happened While I Was at BEA" Interview Roundup

• While Mark Sarvas was with me at the bookblogging party, he turned The Elegant Variation over to Daniel Olivas and Luis Alberto Urrea, the latter of whom explains how he came to write The Hummingbird's Daughter:

  "First, I hear insane folk tales in Tijuana. Second, I live in Sinaloa for a couple of extended periods in my youth and hear more crazy stories. Third, I get a job as a bilingual TA in a Chicano Studies department and find out to my astonishment that [my aunt] was an historical figure and I read a text about her which begins something--I don't know yet what it is. Fourth, I meet a curandero who reveres her and recognizes me immediately as one of her relatives. I start to think hmmm...this could be an interesting thing to pursue."

• Also in the blogging world, Stephen Elliott chats with a sex advice columnist about how "writing Happy Baby was like coming out of the closet for me." He explains, "It made me immensely more comfortable about my desires. Now I can’t write about sex anymore because I don’t have the same shame associated with it. I mean, without the shame and the conflict, why write about it?"

• Dan Wickett's Emerging Writers Network spotlights Keith Gessen, translator of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices From Chernobyl, while the Internet Review of Science Fiction checks in with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who ditched BookExpo hoopla to hang out at the University of Toronto's vampire symposium last weekend. She identifies her long-running series of novels about the immortal bloodsucker Saint-Germain as "historical horror" because, she says, "I find human history far more horrifying than the activities of a vampire."

It's a Hard Case Life For Us...

Mere months after landing Stephen King, the tough guys at Hard Case Crime have done it again. The official word goes out tomorrow, but here's the scoop: Jason Starr and Ken Bruen teamed up for a dark crime comedy called Bust. Hard Case editor Charles Ardai says, "These guys are well versed in the pulp tradition and know how to tell the sort of story that grabs you by the throat on the first page and doesn't let you go until the last. This is definitely a stay-up-all-night-to-finish-it sort of book." And knowing the house--and Starr and Bruen's solo work--as I do, I'm confident there's very little embellishment on that.

Sound Bites

NPR offers Barry Yourgrau talking about NASTYbook on Weekend Edition. He'll be reading from it at the National Arts Club tonight, where he'll be joined by Patrick McGrath.

Meanwhile, Internet broadcaster Kacey Kowars speaks with Sarah Weinman, the creator of Confessions of an Indiosyncratic Mind, the bookblog for mystery and suspense fiction. If you're thinking about doing a blog, Sarah's account of her experiences will give you some very useful tips on how to go about things.

It's an Item Promoting a Future Item!

Robert Birnbaum's at it again, this time with my old college classmate (it's true!) Kevin Guilfoile, in which they touch upon the charges of "hypocritical clubbiness" raised by Galleycat... and observe that she never did get around to fulfilling her promise to comment directly on whether Kevin's novel, Cast of Shadows, was actually any good or not.

For the record, it is. And Kevin'll be around in a couple weeks to answer some questions about it in an Author2Author chat with his college philosophy professor, Tom Morris, who's had some publishing successes of his own over the years... (I wanted to take Prof. Morris's class, but I ended up learning Aquinas from the guy who created Father Dowling, so there.)

There's a Larkin Verse I Could Quote Here

Richard McCann does an interview with Conversational Reading about Mother of Sorrows, "a wonderful, quiet collection of interlocking short stories that describe the coming-of-age and subsequent life of a gay man." McCann's reputation is spreading throughout the blogosphere; the Happy Booker is also a big fan.

"Initially [McCann says], I believed that I was writing Mother of Sorrows to find my own perspective and my own way of telling family stories; I wanted, that is, to free myself from family myths in order to discover what I took to be my own version of 'what happened.'  In the end, however, I see this was a more complicated effort:  that the effort to free myself from my family's myths was also a way of holding tight to my family in words forever."

It's worth noting that H.B. calls McCann's book a novel when she speaks to him. Novel or short stories? It's an issue that's come up with a lot of books lately; Philip Hensher recently explored the subject starting with Tim Winton's latest and working his way back, but it's funny that instead of discussing any American literature, he cites Robert Altman's Short Cuts (a "clear misreading" of Raymond Carver shorts, though "highly fruitful" in Hensher's view) and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

Interview Roundup: From Mommie Dearest to Hollywood Wives

• Francine du Plessix Gray and Sean Wilsey swap notes on writing a memoir about your parents. Observes Gray: "We’re driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath." She refrains lording it over Wilsey how waiting until they're all dead reduces the likelihood of unpleasant lawsuit rumblings.

• Mary Kay Zuravleff gets the "hometown writer makes good" treatment from WaPo in a lengthy profile that probes her relationship to the Smithsonian, the Asian art wing of which appears (disguised) in her newest novel, The Bowl Is Already Broken. You probably remember my earlier recommendations of this charming social comedy--I hope they made sufficient impression upon you! And the museum is only one vehicle deployed to explore deeper concerns; as Zuravleff puts it: "I start my novels with a question, and the question that starts this book is: What is valuable to you? And: What would you sacrifice to preserve that which is valuable?"

• As the wives of both heads of Imagine Films deliver novels this season, how does the coverage shake out? As far as NYT is concerned, Gigi Levangie Grazier's Sunday magazine profile trumps Cheryl Howard Crew's style section tagalong. Then again, Howard Crew seems to have won over her reporter, Monica Corcoran, a bit more than Grazier succeeded with Alex Witchel (who comes off slightly bemused, at least to this reader), and she was the talk of the town in The New Yorker last month as well.
  

Lunchtime Thrills

One of the best parts of this "job" is getting to hang out with writers, especially when you get to mix and match them in interesting combos. When I found out that Alafair Burke and Michele Martinez were not only both former prosecutors turned novelists but also shared the same publicist, I told myself this was a lunch date just calling out to be scheduled, and last week I was finally able to put it together. We met at a café near the law firm where Martinez worked briefly before she became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in 1993. Why did she give up prosecuting large-scale narcotics cases for writing, I wondered? "It was a classic work vs. motherhood thing," she said; she'd been increasingly frustrated with trying to balance her caseload and childrearing, and then one night she had a nightmare that struck her as the perfect first scene for a novel (and is, in fact, the opening to Most Wanted).

I'd assumed that Burke's turn to mystery writing was inspired as much by her family background--her dad is James Lee Burke--as by her experiences as a deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon, but she pointed out that while she'd devoured mysteries growing up, her father hadn't really started writing them until she was already away at college. When the conversation turned to how supportive the mystery writing community is in general, though, she had a great story about how, when she'd temporarily stopped trying to write her first novel, Judgment Calls, a friend mentioned the manuscript to Michael Connelly, who quizzed her about it, then waved Jonothan King and exclaimed, "She's got 260 pages, she knows who did it and why, but she hasn't finished it!" As you can guess, they put on a little friendly pressure to see it through, and, well, she's about to see the third book starring deputy DA Samantha Kincaid, Close Case, published this summer.

Both authors talked about the difficulties in turning prosecutors into dramatically interesting characters and keeping the action flowing. They readily admitted that real-life prosecutors don't normally face anything like the dangers experienced by their fictional counterparts; taking out a prosecutor in the real world only ensures that another one will get assigned to your case. Burke revealed that she has to work the hardest to get the story's pacing just right and move Kincaid into the courtroom, while Martinez said that although "you never feel like you have the perfect plot," the crime parts come a lot easier to her than figuring out how the personal life of her protagonist, AUSA Melanie Vargas, will unfold. I'm guessing that, especially given the new twists a prosecutorial emphasis adds to the genre, legal thriller fans will gladly come back next year to see how things turn out.

The Interview Roundup Is Looking for Kadak

• Harlan Ellison takes on "tough questions for tough Jews," then does it again and again. Find out why he's never going to get invited to Israel again, and why interviewers should say as few words to him as possible: "You want to ask the questions and answer them, too? You can hang up and you won’t need me and I can go back to work."

• Even before I'd settled down this weekend to finally read the SF Chronicle version of Dede Wilsey's possible lawsuit against Penguin over her stepson Sean's memoir, Oh the Glory of It All, Joyce Wadler hits the NYT Styles section with a cover story on the whole mess, which features my new favorite moment in responding to silly questions from reporters:

  Recalling a 1994 dinner at Lespinasse, [Sean Wilsey] said his stepmother told him he was an unplanned, unwanted child and referred to his job as "your homosexual job at Ladies' Home Journal." He said she also informed him that, "Your father thinks you're a faggot." How was he able to remember so precisely?

  "What, are you kidding me?" Mr. Wilsey said. "That is like tattooed on my brain. Have you ever had anyone say stuff like that to you? It enters your brain like a knife and it never leaves."

  Of course, there's also the curiosity raised by Dede's allegation that Sean has "much more money than he admits to," compounded by a mysterious TriBeCa loft that's off-limits to reporters--which Sean claims he bought with the proceeds generated by shrewdly investing a $60,000 trust. Mind you, a fellow who grew up in San Francisco might well have had some good stock leads in the mid-'90s...

• And the resuscitation of the "5 Questions With..." feature continues this week as Martha Burzynski interviews memoirist Edwin John Wintle.
  

Interview Roundup: Cut Short by the Common Cold Edition

• New York magazine scores twice in this week's issue, talking with Nicole Krauss and deciding "she stands a better chance than most" female halves of literary couples at not being subsumed by her husband's reputation--then Q&Aing Neil Olson, the agent who's just about to see his first novel, The Icon, released. He admits his day job has "made me much too aware of what works and doesn't work. The idea that I would write purely artistically is a naïve idea."

• Refusing to wait until National Novel Writing Month rolls around again, Grant Bailie locked himself into a cubicle last Friday as he, Laurie Stone, and Ranbir Sidhu seek to create complete novels by June 4th. It's all part of a Flux Factory art project--apparently, in addition to bathroom and shower breaks, they'll also be let out on Saturday nights to read whatever they've come up with that week. No word on whether they'll be allowed to come see the panel on May 15th with Myla Goldberg and Tom Bissell, or whether any of them will get to call Harlan Ellison a wimp for being able to outpace him by about four weeks. (See Monday's NYT for
  more details.)
  
• Martha O'Connor will be showing up on this blog soon--in the meantime, the Marin Independent Journal gets her talking about her debut novel, The Bitch Posse.
  

Headline Awaits Just the Right Sunday/Sundae Pun

Karen Quinn and Jill Kargman were already deep in conversation when I got to Serendipity yesterday afternoon. Jill had just started talking about attending the Chanel-themed Costume Institute gala in her capacity as a Style.com columnist. Jill actually grew up within blocks of the ice cream parlor, so she told us about seeing Andy Warhol in the 'hood when she was younger, then coming back to Serendipity as an Interview staffer when they installed an Andy doll as a hanging decoration.

We got to talking about their novels, and Karen explained how she initially wrote The Ivy Chronicles on a three-month deadline after she left the private school admissions consultancy that inspired her novel, and how she's trying to work out a more comfortable daily schedule as she finishes her second book. Jill, meanwhile, continued her successful collaboration with day school classmate Carrie Karasyov, putting together the plot of Wolves in Chic Clothing over the phone (Karasyov's in Santa Monica), then taking the scenes in alternating stints. The two of them are currently working on a YA novel, to be called Bittersweet Sixteen. (Which she said will be a little bit edgy, but nowhere near as controversial as Rainbow Party.)

While they drank their frozen hot chocolates and I dug into a hot fudge sundae, Karen offered a few suggestions on private school applications for Jill's daughter, while Jill talked about how Karen's 13-year-old might enjoy boarding school, based on her own teenage experiences. Both of them said they love living in and writing about New York City, and have no plans to either move or change themes.

Interview Roundup: Steve Stern Is the New James Wilcox

• ...at least, that seems to be the gist of Peter Eiddin's recent NYT profile, which describes Stern as "a literary darling looking for dear readers." Harold Bloom and Gordon Lish both lavish praise on the writer--Bloom in particular is gaga for his latest novel, The Angel of Forgetfulness--but so far neither their praise nor that of reviewers across the country has translated into breakout sales. (Note: Of course, the slightest glance at Stern and Wilcox's books will tell you they aren't in the same camp at all; what I was referring to was James B. Stewart's 1994 portrait of Wilcox in the New Yorker.*)

• Speaking of NYT, John Strausburgh interviews Harry Mathews, who was seen by Parisians in the '70s as "the very model of the upper-crust, Ivy League-type the [CIA] often recruited... [so] he must be CIA." Thus the "autobigraphical novel" My Life in CIA, which I think it's safe to say will be the best book of its kind since Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. (I've got a copy, and I'm dying to get into it when I get a chance.)

• Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Ms. Shiono? Japan's Daily Yomiuri interviews Nanami Shiono, a Japanese historian who's written ten volumes about the Roman Empire. One of them, The Fall of Constantinople, is coming out this summer from Vertical...quite a departure from their J-pulp foundations.

• Alicia Erian talks to David Mehegan (Boston Globe) about her debut novel, Towelhead, specifically about the difficulty of writing scenes involving sexual molestation of a teenager who, Mehegan reports, "narrates her experiences in excruciating, fine-grained detail, as a kid would relate them." She's excited about where an excerpt from her next novel has ended up: "I'm a girl and I'm going to be in Penthouse, with my clothes on. I want to play with the big boys, you know? I want to have a manly career, go the route that men go. I don't want it to be that women can't have intensity about sex and have these ideas. It's not just the territory of men."

• MobyLives has clung hard to the furor over Paul Maliszewski and his Bookforum article interpreting Michael Chabon's "Golems I Have Known" as a Holocaust fraud. Earlier this week, Dennis Loy Johnson interviewed Maliszewski, giving him a chance to tell his side of the story...while noting that listening to Chabon's lecture online "firmly establishes that Paul Maliszewski is not misreading anything, and in fact only having the same reaction any listener is likely to have."
  

Interview Roundup: Got Me So Down, I Got Me a Headache

• Salon talks to Paula Kamen about accepting a daily existence that feels, as Andrew O'Hehir paraphrases, "like having ground glass in her eye, sometimes like having a railroad spike driven through her head, sometimes like having a barbed fishhook twanging at her optic nerve." (Kamen's own description of life as a "Tired Girl" can be found in her memoir, All in My Head.) In another section of the website, it's hard to imagine who the editors think they're fooling when they claim "James Atlas explores subjects writers rarely tackle: limitation and loss." Or maybe they just don't read much.

• N.M. Kelby and Aimee Bender recently exchanged emails about writing with mindfulness, finding humor in the darkness, and Bender's description of writerly obligation:

  "I think we owe readers a window, meaning we need to get out of our own heads enough to show something past ourselves, something larger. But we also owe readers voice, meaning we cannot pretend we are not there, making the glass of that window and the window frame. We have to be there. It's such a hard balance--both being there, and also getting out of the way."

• I have to admit I hadn't heard of Kamila Shamsie before reading the interview with her in the Telegraph, but I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for her next novel, Broken Verses, when it comes out in the U.S. in a month or so.

• The Miami Herald is the last paper in the world I'd expect to be catching up with Jeanette Winterson, or to be making cheeky juxtapositions of "lesbian desperado" and "fish pie" in doing so, but this is what a book tour leads to, I suppose.
  

Interview Roundup: The All Camille Paglia Edition

Why? Because there's enough interviews promoting Break, Blow, Burn to quote from, that's why...some bits stand out in a nice way, some in a glaring way, and I'm just going to throw them all together and let you sort them out. I'd recommend following through and reading the full interviews, too, if you're up to it.

• In the California Literary Review: "The terrible tsunami waves that swept through the Indian Ocean in December provided but another example of human impotence in the face of natural power.  I have repeatedly written about the illusions we must live under in civilization.  The slightest tremor of the earth's crust can turn everything to ruin--something I realized as an adolescent in my study of archaeology."

• From Bookslut: "Third-rate Yeats is what I found in [Seamus] Heaney. That guy is a coward. He has never written a poem that addresses, passionately, or engages with, his own country's terrible political state, the cataclysms for centuries. People praise him as if he is a bold speaker? He's not a bold speaker."

• From Salon: "Before me, only poli-sci or history professors would write Op-Ed pieces. You just didn't do that if you were in humanities. In the early '90s, some Harvard woman snob actually said to a reporter about me: 'Oh, we don't consider anyone serious who writes articles for the newspaper.' That's where things were back then. They all tried to write books directed toward a general audience, and none really succeeded until Stephen Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare--which as far as I'm concerned is ultimately a product of my pressure on the profession in the early '90s, when I called for literary critics to address the general audience."

  (She adds, "As someone who teaches Shakespeare, however, I don't think it's a very good book...Greenblatt's Shakespeare isn't one I recognize from my own study of the plays." This isn't especially surprising, given that earlier in the interview she displays a blatant inability to detect when Gawker's Intern Alexis is being ironic.)

• From Newsday, on Paul Blackburn's "The Once Over" (MP3): "This to me is a classic poem of my time. There's a mysterious girl in a beautiful dress, and everyone is staring at her. That's it. That's the entire thing. It's so wonderful, the way he captures that moment, and that's the purpose of reading poetry--which is that it teaches you to notice what other people don't notice. To find significance in the insignificant."
  

Just Who the Hell Is She, Anyway?

Lola Ogunnaike (NYT) profiles New Yorker cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto, who has a six-page autobiographical comic strip about her recovery from breast cancer in the current issue of Glamour, where's she the in-house cartoonist. The article notes in passing that Marchetto's work has appeared in the Times, but doesn't get into much detail about how they never should have cancelled "The Strip" in the first place, as it was one of the few genuinely entertaining (or for that matter biting) things the Style section has ever run. (I mean, Modern Love? Puh-LEEZ.)

Marchetto says she plans to turn the Cancer Vixen strip, which was as long as twenty pages in its original draft, into a book à la Our Cancer Year, which should be interesting; those of us who enjoyed SHE back in the day might well anticipate more from Marchetto in the non-gag vein.

Brooklyn, Talent Magnet of the 20th Century
(Today's Episode: 1940)

I'd been meaning to get in touch with Sherill Tippins for a while to talk about February House, her chronicle of the year that W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee spent together in a Brooklyn townhouse--the kind of story you couldn't make up for fear nobody would believe you, but it's all true. I'd even tried to set Tippins up for one of the first Author2Author dialogues, but then the other writer I had in mind got assigned to review February House... Anyway, with a little help from Liz Penn, the two of us finally met for lunch earlier this week. We chatted a bit about the Readerville forum, where fans are peppering her with questions about the people and the period; she joked that the conversation was taking some unexpected turns, such as the fascination with how everyone smoked in the '40s--and glamorously, at that. We chatted a little bit about my film book, too, which is how I discovered that she'd worked for Dino De Laurentiis after graduating from college. (She also cowrote, and ended up production managing, a low-budget comedy that starred a young Brent Spiner and the playwright Leonard Melfi.)

After an appropriately timed review by Amanda Vaill in NYTBR two months ago, February House has been picking up steam recently. In early March, Michael Upchurch (Seattle Times) observed that Tippins "maintains a near-perfect balance in presenting each of [her subjects'] cases with clarity, humor and insight." (His review got picked up all over the place, too, from Detroit to Tallahassee.) And just last week, Rex Roberts (Washington Times), who lives near the site the actual February House once stood*, notes that Tippins "mixes gossip with exegesis like a seasoned biographer." Sometime during all this, Dennis Drabelle called the book an "irresistible bonbon" in WaPo, though I had a hell of a time trying to find the original link and had to settle for a reprint in the San Jose Mercury News. Without launching into full-on reviewer mode, I think it's pretty swell, ranking up there with Frederic Morton as far as pop history/group biography is concerned.

* Tippins used to live in that neighborhood as well, until she and her husband moved into Manhattan, where they have a first-floor space in what used to be the headquarters of one of the more prominent avant-garde movements in New York during the '60s.

"Performing the Atwood" Sounds Kinda Dirty,
Given My Memories of The Handmaid's Tale

China Mieville weighs in on the battle between the literary elite and science fiction/fantasy writers for Believer readers:

"As a kid, you grow up reading SF, fantasy, and horror and you do have that slight sense of literary embattlement. We exaggerate it for the purposes of radical chic, but nonetheless you do get a lot of shit for it. And so many writers perform the [Neal] Stephenson maneuver in reverse--they perform the Atwood--they write things that are clearly weird or in the fantastic tradition and then bend over backwards to try to distance themselves from genre. Or you have writers like Vonnegut who write science fiction in their early years and then continue to write it but make a big public pronouncement about how they no longer write science fiction. Of course it is their right to do, but it always at least disappoints me and at worst enrages me. I have so much enormous respect for Neal. He’s saying essentially, 'Whether or not you think you can see aliens or spaceships in this book and therefore you don’t think it’s science fiction, the sensibility I bring to it is born out of my relationship with genre. Essentially, this is a geek historical novel, and more than that, it’s a science-fiction geek historical novel.' I could kiss him."

Interview Roundup: Brendan Bernhard's Been a Busy Bee

If you were here last year, you may remember how enthusiastic I was about Charles McCarry's Old Boys. Well, I'm even more thrilled by the republication of The Tears of Autumn, which kicks off Overlook's restoration of all the McCarry thrillers to your local bookshelves. (Powell's also apparently has a few first editions for $95 each; those of you who know more about such things would know if that's a bargain better than I would, though it certainly sounds like one.) Brendan Bernhard (LA Weekly) recently spoke with McCarry, who laughingly explains his decade in "deep cover" espionage:

"What it means is that you have an ostensible occupation, a cover job, and that you don't go about introducing yourself as a CIA agent. You don’t work out of an embassy, in fact you don’t go near an embassy, and all of your meetings and reporting take place clandestinely...It's one of the most boring occupations in the world, punctuated by moments of ecstasy. You sit around for days, sometimes for weeks, waiting for something you think you have made happen, to happen. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. Or waiting for an agent to show up. They're famous for not doing that, or showing up in the wrong place or on the wrong day, wrong hour."

Unfortunately, the article gives a way a lot of the novel's plot twists, but then again, McCarry's theory about the Kennedy assassination is put forward fairly early on; a lot of the pleasures of the book are in how McCarry fills in the details and ties the strands together. Bernhard can also be seen writing about John Ashbery for the New York Sun; he's not terribly impressed with the poet's latest material, but is open enough to get contrasting opinions, and is generally respectful to Ashbery's earned position in the contemporary poetic pantheon--though the headline certainly hints at an undercutting undercurrent. I may totally be imagining this, but it almost feels as if the story's simply going through the motions; there just isn't the same electricity that there is in the McCarry profile, or the story he filed two months ago on Bruce Wagner.

Dan Wickett talks to the multitalented Ron Rash in the latest addition to his Emerging Writers Forum, while Robert Birnbaum gets into it with Tom Bissell for The Morning News. Bissell also shows up at Largehearted Boy, putting together a playlist to accompany the stories in God Lives in St. Petersburg, in which we learn that "Animals in the Wind" was written to the strains of "Adagio for Strings." There are also tracks--and this really ought to be an iMix in the Apple Store, dammit--that range from the Beach Boys to Wilco to "pubescent lesbian pop sensations" TaTu.

Beware of God and Man at Harvard

Sara Ivry (Nextbook) questions Shalom Auslander, who sounds like he could make Wendy Shalit's eyes roll back in their sockets with the stories in Beware of God or maybe just with his take on his Orthodox upbringing:

"I remember going into the laundry room on Friday night at a young age and going OK, I want to see what happens if I put this light on. And you do it and hold your breath and wait to die. And you don't. You shut it off before your parents find out. At some point, you do the math: If God didn't kill me, my parents will. How are you supposed to grow up wanting to be around that?"

Over at Harvard, though, Crimson staffer Daniel J. Hemel wonders if maybe Auslander's material is "narrowly targeted only to those who have suffered the trauma of a bris." And I know this is the 21st century, and things have gotten ever so much better, but my first reaction was still, "Oh, like Harvard's got anything meaningful to say about Jewish culture, right." But that's possibly a function of having recently read Kai Bird and Michael Sherwin's excellent Oppenheimer bio, due next month, which speaks frankly about how, while he was a Harvard undergrad, the college attempted to institute a quota to bring down the number of Jewish students. As James O. Freedman relates, the formal effort failed, but Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell still managed to cut the Jewish enrollment in half with informal suggestions to the admissions committee. (Amazingly enough, he actually argued that fewer Jews at Harvard would reduce anti-Semitism, since Christian students wouldn't get resentful if there weren't so many Jews on campus in the first place.)

All of which I guess kinda veers off the subject of Shalom Auslander...but Maud Newton has more info if you're interested.

Interview Roundup: Where the Story Takes You

Robert Birnbaum's back in action, pigeonholing Nick Flynn on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City:

"It wasn't any preconceived reason to write it. I don't sit down and think, 'This is the book I am going to write next.' This is the book that came out, really. As I was writing it I started to think why I might continue writing it, to keep going with it. Some of those reasons were that it seemed like it didn't want to be written. It seemed like I was pushing against something; it seems like it was something that other people had a hard time keeping in their heads. The sentence with the words 'father' and 'homeless' in it, people's eyes would go blank. So that seemed a good place to go."

MediaBistro scored one of the first interviews with new Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, who hopes to extend the magazine's ability "not to become defined with some particular moment or school or generation, but to stay quite current and in the moment with the changing times." He'd love more readers, he adds, but he won't try to reverse-engineer a magazine desirable to a large audience. He'll just keep doing the Paris Review, and "if we do it right and more people know what is in there, more people will be reading it."

Dana Gioia's legacy at the National Endowment for the Arts is already a bit more radical than that. This profile remarks on his successes in restoring the agency's somewhat tarnished reputation in political circles, to the point where the most conservative mass of executive and legislative personnel is steadily increasing NEA funding.

Interview Roundup: The Mountains Are High, The Valley Is Low

NextBook interviews Sam Apple about Schlepping Through the Alps, an account of Apple's travels with a Yiddish-singing goatherder--whose life, it seems, has transformed, much of it anyway, into one long, brilliant piece of political performance art:

"He realized [Apple says] he was in this unique position to bring Yiddish music to Austrian audiences in the countryside that wouldn't otherwise be exposed to Jewish culture. As he said to me, he wanted to introduce them to a culture their fathers and uncles helped to destroy. To draw them in, he would integrate the songs into a program about being a wandering shepherd. Now he's done this program in most of the small towns where he passes with the flock each year."

Meanwhile, Steve Elliott talks with the Chicago Tribune about the traumatic past which he's transmuted into four novels, including the widely acclaimed Happy Baby.

And Mark over at The Elegant Variation called my attention to a cover story in the Valley Advocate (which looks to be a Connecticut weekly) about author Michael Bérubé and his blog, the latter of which has just been added to my bookmarks.

Plenty of Unusual Mental Images You Need
(And One You Might Not)

When I stumble onto a newspaper like The Register-Guard of Eugene, Oregon, I'm just dying to know what sort of local media history took place to lead to the creation of that hybridized name... but my main purpose in turning you to that paper today is their interview with Bruce Holland Rogers, the author behind ShortShortShort.com, where he sells $5 annual subscriptions that provide readers with a steady stream of short-short stories such as "Don Ysidro," which actually won last year's World Fantasy Award for best short fiction. How did he come by the domain name? "I had to call the Web site 'shortshortshort' because somebody was already squatting on 'shortshort.com,'" he told the reporter.

Warning: Blatant "Clubbiness" Ahead; Deal With It

I took a film class with Kevin Guilfoile when I was an undergrad; he was two years ahead of me at Notre Dame, just as Nicholas Sparks was two years ahead of him, and I was two years ahead of Ted Leo. So I can't really review Cast of Shadows--and I haven't picked up my copy of the latest Publishers Weekly yet, so I don't know too much of what got revealed about the story behind the book's cover. But I can steer you towards last Sunday's Chicago Tribune profile, which describes him as "a nice-guy talent who is some combination of James Thurber, Stephen King and Saint Francis."

It's also interesting to see how different reviewers find different hooks to discuss the novel, in which a scientist uses DNA from his daughter's murder scene to clone the killer with the aim of discovering who he is years later when he can figure out who the kid looks like. Cher Phillips (Independent Florida Alligator) leads with a reference to the British government's authorization of stem cell cloning (and a comparison to the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel); Art Winslow (Chicago Tribune) offers a thoughtful consideration of the domestic terrorists in the anti-abortion movement, which Guilfoile extrapolates into an anti-cloning movement in hisstory's near-futuristic setting.

"There Isn't Any Film Culture, Just an Awful Lot of Films"
(Orson Welles)

I haven't run notice of a Robert Birnbaum interview in a while, even though he keeps churning them out--and I use the verb deliberately, because they're like buttah!--so I'm quite happy to completely derail your plans for this morning by sending you to his conversation with film historian David Thomson, which provides me with my only likely chance to say The Whole Equation is merely the tip of the iceberg. Thomson issues some sentiments longtime Beatrice readers might recognize from the account of his dialogue with Geoffrey O'Brien:

"[A]s you know movie people are not overly critical of their own passion. It’s a hot bath they want to jump into and stay there. This is a book that in many ways raises questions and worries. About the overall achievement and culture of film. It asks the question, 'Is it really an art? Are we doing it justice when we treat it as an art? Or isn’t it something more complicated and a bit less than art?' So I think there are some people for whom film is a church who think that there is something heretical, possibly, in this book. And there is. I foresaw that there would be some people like that who were offended by the book. But for me it was a collection of things that had to be said."

Following the Links Might Be NSFW

Gossip blog Gawker got on the Instant Messenger with Sam Lipsyte, which is great fun if you like sarcasm like I like sarcasm, but the intriguing part is the link to Nerve.com's first monthly Henry Miller Award for best sex scene in a work of literary fiction. "Each month's highest-ranked entry will proceed to the year-end competition," the site announces. "Two winners of that contest will be announced: grand prize (as chosen by a panel of a celebrity judges) and readers' choice. The judges' pick will receive $1,934, commemorating the publication date of Tropic of Cancer." The reader's choice will live secure in the knowledge that he or she could get lucky whenever they want in any bookstore in the country.

Interview Roundup: Millet, Waxman, Ishiguro
(Not Every Headline Can Be Brilliant, You Know)

Joshua Glenn (Boston Globe) emails back and forth with Lydia Millet (who I heard read last month) about Everyone's Pretty, which gloriously fulfills her belief that "so-called sympathetic characters are vastly overrated.... I like complex and multiply flawed characters partly because really most of us are them--most of us are not Barbies and Kens but Shreks."

Sharon Waxman gets the Mediabistro spotlight, offering Jill Singer a reminder that Rebels on the Backlot isn't meant to be your typical Hollywood tell-all:

"The models I had in mind were really the great foreign correspondents' books that I had read and loved over my whole career, whether it's David Halberstam's fantastic books about the '60s and Vietnam or Tom Friedman's book about the Middle East. Those were the books that I loved as a young journalist coming up, so I tried my best to do that kind of a book in the entertainment world."

To be honest, this interview wasn't quite as engrossing as last month's Forward profile, as Gabriel Sanders seems to have gotten Waxman to open up about herself a teeny bit more. Christina Patterson (The Independent) elicits similar responses from Kazuo Ishiguro--not surprising since they grew up in the same town.

My Inner Child Is a Huge Nerd

Daniel Robert Epstein does the Suicide Girls interview with Grant Morrison, who's looking sharp in a white suit and talking about his latest radical overhaul of DC's "C-list superheroes" in the Seven Soldiers maxi-series. Along the way, he reminds me of what motivated my long-term attachment to comic books twenty years ago (including, once he came along, his surrealist take on Doom Patrol):

"I think comics were more interesting when they were written for children because when people write for children it seems to free them up to be less self-conscious. Traditional American superhero comics are being written for an older audience now. I think that since superhero comics started being aimed at adults they've become a bit too self conscious and a bit less visionary. I don't know why that is because adults should enjoy fantastical stuff as much as any child... I write for the intelligent 14 year old because that's how old I was when I really got into comic books in a big way. I was a smart kid and I liked Jim Starlin's Warlock and Dr. Strange by Steve Englehart because even though they were written and drawn by heads doing cosmic, philosophical acid stuff it was still soap opera action comics with monsters and villains and it fed me on so many levels."

Morrison also says he's working on a Pop Magic book, "an account of all the occult stuff I've studied and the personal system of magic I've developed over the years," which ought to be a heck of a lot more interesting than what passes for magickal instruction among most books on the subject.

Interview Roundup: Looking Out My Back Door

The Elegant Variation caught an interview with Michelle Huneven at LAist (which caught me offguard at first, because I thought it was titled "The LAST Interview") in which she explains the humble origins of her most recent novel:

"I set Jamesland in the Atwater/Los Feliz/Glendale area because that’s where I lived at the time. I’m a lazy researcher and this made research very easy for me. I walked all over the place there--not only along the river but all over Griffith Park. I saw these places season after season, year in and year out, and formed an intimate connection with them, and intimacy is always a good thing to write about, even when it’s with wrecked rivers and modest neighborhoods."

BoingBoing co-editor Cory Doctorow talks to O'Reilly Network (and, no, that's not a euphemism for Fox News) about what's going on with his science fiction writing. He's up for a Nebula, you know! And his short story "Anda's Game" is going to be in this year's BASS anthology. But mostly I'm looking forward to Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, because "a fantasy novel about Wi-Fi" is exactly what I need to read.

Over in France, Simon Hattenstone (Guardian) catches up with Robert Crumb, because apparently they've gone nuts for him in England, with a fine arts retrospective, a cinema series, and Lord only knows what else.

Duty Calls; Be Back Shortly

Today's a professional obligations day, so while I'm writing book reviews and going over the initial proofs for Stewardess, you may want to distract yourself with last week's Gothamist interviews, conducted by Rachel Kramer Bussel. It's (mostly) a batch of conversations with nonfiction authors, from Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio of The Girl's Guide to Starting Your Own Business to ABC's John Stossel, who could probably tell that girl about all the ways The Man will try to regulate her business into oblivion.

Interview Roundup: Fear, the Great Mind-Killer

Everybody with a bookblog seems to have an opinion about the Jonathan Safran Foer profile in the Sunday Times magazine: Galleycat dubbed it "Worst Profile Ever" before summarizing other reactions, while Tom Scocca pokes fun in today's New York Observer, which doesn't allow the non-paying public to view its archives, so we're lucky Gawker saved the funny bits. Me, I kinda liked the article--I certainly found Deborah Solomon more pleasant to read when freed from the relentless personality dueling of her weekly Q&As, and sure, Foer comes off as annoyingly precocious in spots, but if I could have an office where I didn't write, I'd probably do it, too. (Actually, I suppose I can, since I use a laptop with WiFi. So why don't I?) And I found this quote awfully meaningful:

"As a writer, I am trying to express those things that are most scary to me, because I am alone with them. Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances."

(Plus, it occurred to me later, plenty of great profiles are about the "romance" that develops between reporter and subject. How many of these people, perhaps already predisposed to slamming Solomon and/or Foer, would be knocking Joseph Mitchell for his infatuation with Joe Gould, or Joe Gould for pestering Mitchell all the time?)

Meanwhile, in the pages of New York, Boris Kachka checks in with Francine Prose, whose latest novel takes on "the sentimentality of the 'Holocaust industry,' the egotism of professional humanitarians, and the spotty morality of a victim-besotted media that edits out all ambiguity." But, she advises, she's not a satirist: "I like the characters, and I want the best for them. They're all trying to be good in that way that people in nineteenth-century novels were trying to be good. On the other hand, they live in our culture, in our city. And everybody is just scamming everybody else a mile a minute." Of course, to me, well-known for my love of Dawn Powell, that's a way to write good satire, but whatever other people want to call their stories is fine by me.

Bruce Wallace's LAT interview with Haruki Murakami (who kept popping up in Beatrix the first few weeks, as reviews of Kafka on the Shore poured in) begins by trying to loosely connect the disasters in his fiction to the real-life St. Stephen's Day tsunami. I don't know that it entirely works, but it's certainly true that "Murakami has created a canon from the metaphors offered by giant waves and wars, terrorist gases and earthquakes." One interesting tidbit in the cultural background Wallace builds up to contextualize Murakami's position in modern Japan: the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, is "a novelist who became a popular politician with his knack for pushing nationalist buttons." (His fiction doesn't seem to have made it over into English, but Powell's has used copies of his 1991 book The Japan That Can Say No.)

Well, That Was Awkward Timing...

Last Thursday, Edward Wyatt (NYT) profiled Martha Beck, who claims to have "recovered memories of ritual sexual abuse more than 20 years earlier by her father, Dr. Hugh Nibley, professor emeritus of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University and arguably the leading living authority on Mormon teaching."

That same day, Dr. Nibley dropped dead, although a family spokesman told the press that his health had been declining for quite some time, and the rest of the immediate Nibley family has long been on record as doubting Beck's story at just about every level.

The recovery of those alleged memories--and if you've ever read any Elizabeth Loftus, you know there's a lot to be said against the entire "repressed memory" phenomenon, particularly as it relates to allegations of abuse--is the central focus of Beck's new book, Leaving the Saints, which comes out next month. Wyatt does a good job of outlining the potential problems with Beck's version of events--again, especially considering the whole "repressed memories" angle--and while it seems clear that the criticism Beck's facing from Mormons is excessively aggressive, it's somewhat hard to fully accept her statement to the reporter that "she did not intend Leaving the Saints to be an indictment of Mormonism" when she adds a subtitle like "How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith."

Magical Realism for Young Adults

Dinitia Smith (NYT) profiles Francesca Lia Block, one of my favorite authors writing about Los Angeles. (Her Weetzie Bat is my absolute favorite Hollywood character since Gavin Lambert's Daisy Clover, and some days I can't decide whether Block is Bruce Wagner for teenagers or Wagner is Francesca Lia Block for grownups, but I always recommend both...) My first reaction was "jeez, it's taken the Times long enough," but I quickly realized that there was a specific occasion involved in calling attention to Block today: She's receiving a lifetime achievement award from the American Library Association. I'm less than convinced, though, that the reason (or even a reason) her work finds favor with more and more older readers is that "more young people are living with their parents after college and still leading an adolescent lifestyle," and I'll be curious to see how Weetzie makes the transition to full-on "adult fiction" in Necklace of Kisses this summer.

photo: Jamie Rector

Interview Roundup: Visualization and Perception

I discovered the artblog Vividmind today, and it led me to an interesting conversation between the late Spalding Gray and the Dalai Lama on visualization and meditation. I've also been catching up with some Gothamist interviews from last week (conducted by Nichelle Newsletter) with authors Danyel Smith and Bennett Madison, both of whom have new books coming out in the months ahead. And Bella Stander (BookReporter) chats with Julian Fellowes, who explains his new novel, Snobs, as "a rather caustic look at the British upper classes and their obsession with rules."

"There certainly were mixed feelings as to whether or not I had, in some way, betrayed my own kind by holding them up to ridicule [he adds]. Of course, lots of people thought they had sat for the portraits--although they were mostly wrong. Characters, as you know, are usually an amalgam of different acquaintances and seldom drawn from a single model. Having said that, there were one or two pretty close depictions, and one person in particular was very annoyed. "Really!" she said. 'A lifetime of avoiding the newspapers, and now look!' Although, in my defense, I never gave away her identity."

Interview Roundup: Comfort Levels

Stephen Policoff speaks frankly about why his debut novel for adults, Beautiful Someplace Else, never quite took off last year despite the pedigree of the James Jones First Novel Fellowship; the editor who bought the book left his publisher before it came out and, he says, they pretty much gave up on him; "not that a quirky literary 1st novel by an unknown was likely to get a ton of attention anyway, but very very little was done to get the novel out to people who might write about it."

Meanwhile, I can't for the life of me figure out why the Engine Comics interview with Alan Moore prints the comic book master's responses in such a tiny default typeface, but if you jack it up a bit, Moore has some interesting reflections on writing, including the admission that during the writing of Watchmen, "I was going through one of my clever periods--probably emotional insecurity, I thought: 'People will laugh at me 'cos I'm doing superhero comics. I'd better make 'em really clever, then no one will laugh.'" There's also some hints about Lost Girls, which will bring Dorothy Gale, Wendy Darling, and Alice Liddell together in a Paris hotel just before World War One breaks out to tell each other more explicit versions of their stories than what the famous books have handed down to us for more than a century. And then in the back half of this lengthy chat, Moore gets all kabbalistic on the unsuspecting reader, then wanders back to comics...

Now, because The Believer has not put its dialogue between Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster on its web site, until you go out and buy that issue you'll have to make do with Auster's lunch date with Craig Offman of the Financial Times, which concludes on the observation that "along with William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, he is reportedly the most shoplifted novelist in New York." (Not Kerouac?) Auster isn't too impressed with himself, though: "We all just happen to be at the beginning of the alphabet."

To Hell With Love

I had an unusual traffic spike last Friday, and discovered that a lot of people had stumbled upon one of my archived interviews because it's Google's top-ranked item for searching "Emma Forrest." OK, I thought, that's interesting, but why is everybody Googling Emma Forrest all of a sudden? Turns out somebody at the Associated Press spoke to her about the general uselessness of men in happily coincidental timing with the publication of her new novel, Cherries in the Snow.

(One quibble; the reporter notes that Forrest got her start in celebrity journalism when she was 13 and did an interview with Ian McKellen, "who starred in such films as Richard III, X-Men and the Lord of the Rings trilogy," for her school magazine. Said interview, however, took place back in 1990, when none of those films were even in development, and McKellen was either talking primarily about his stagecraft, his role as Iago in a TV-movie Othello, or maybe his performance in Scandal.)

He Should Form a Club with Christine Schutt
(And Matthew Sharpe Can Be Treasurer)

As a rule, I no longer link to New York Observer stories because they no longer offer free access to anything more than seven days old, but you might want to look at this week's front-page story on Sam Lipsyte, the fiction writer known and loved among bookbloggers for his "combustible mixture of aphoristic wordplay and wild, explicit invective," as Wesley Yang puts it. The article centers around the difficulties Lipsyte had in finding an American publisher for his second novel, Home Land, which was finally released as a trade paperback original after twenty-four publishers refused it, some against the advice of their editors:

"Long after other agents would have moved on to easier sales, his agent, Ira Silverberg, persisted. He sold the book in England, where it came out in February 2004 to rave reviews. Mr. Silverberg's crusading zeal was about more than what promised to be a rather meager commission. (The book sold for $15,000.) Mr. Silverberg had something he wanted to prove. 'There's nothing wrong with the book,' Mr. Silverberg apostrophized, thinking of the editors that turned it down. 'There’s something wrong with you! And to the powers that be that didn't find this book funny, to them we say now: Ha, ha. Because a lot of others did.'

Based on firsthand experience, I'm currently recommending Home Land with full enthusiasm, in the full knowledge that you're either going to love it like I did or be utterly nonplussed. Go on, give it a try!

Telling It Like It Is

The Emerging Writers Forum lands an interview with Tom Bissell, in which we discover that God Lives in St. Petersburg was originally titled Death Defier and Other Stories from Central Asia. Tom explains the change: "It was concluded, after careful research and study, that no one in his or her right mind would buy a book titled Death Defier and Other Stories from Central Asia."

Oh, and here's a story I forgot to tell from the Bissell reading the other night. Tom came over to say hello to the Significant Other and me when he arrived, and we joked about whether his sworn nemesis would show up, and I mentioned said nemesis and his group by name at one point. So after Tom goes to say hello to other friends, the S.O. turns to me and says, "I didn't know those were the guys who hated Tom. Didn't they try to ruin [another friend's] reading years ago?" And I said, "Yep, same guys." So she asks, "What's their problem, anyway?" And I broke it down as simply as I could: "Tom and [another friend] have book deals, and they don't."

Catching Up With My Best-Laid Plans

Back in December, when I was racing to get Stewardess done on time, I managed to carve out a few hours one afternoon to meet Janet Desaulniers and chat about What You've Been Missing, a collection of short stories--including "After Rosa Parks"--that was last year's winner of the John Simmons Award from the University of Iowa Press. And then, of course, I promptly mislaid the notes I'd taken--but I found them today! (As to why I couldn't just blog without the notes, chalk it up to my writerly neuroses.)

Looking over the page of scribbled sentence fragments, I'm reminded of the fascinating backstory behind the collection. She was "discovered" in the slush pile of the New Yorker in 1980, and the buzz surrounding the publication of "A Late Show" there led to talk of a book deal that, for various reasons, never quite worked out. She continued to teach writing, publishing a new story every now and then, until about two years ago, when she pulled the original manuscript she'd submitted to Knopf out of a drawer and decided to work on it again: taking the best stories from her original assortment, adding a few things from her more recent work, and sending the new "cleaner, clearer" connection to Iowa, as a result of which there we are chatting in an empty wine bar before she goes off to read one of her stories at a nearby bookstore...

Now, these stories blew me away; just read "After Rosa Parks" and you'll see what I mean, and you'll want to get the whole collection for yourself. And you'll also want the Iowa Short Fiction prizewinner, Merrill Feitell's Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, which includes "The Marrying Kind." And, of course, I just got back from Tom Bissell's reading, and I'm thinking that this just might have to be the year I really, and I mean really, get back into reading short stories. And you'll probably reap some of the rewards of that, I would imagine. Which is about as close to a 2005 mission statement as you're likely to get for Beatrice, but let's see how it plays out...

But Will It Feature a Little Man in a Bunny Suit?

The Internet Review of Science Fiction lands an interview with science fiction and fantasy powerhouse Michael Moorcock, in which we discover that plans are in the works for an Elric movie.

(It's also revealed that he's been writing reviews of fantasy books for the Guardian; see, for example, this rave for The Etched City, the debut novel by K.J. Bishop.)

A Not-So-Cheery Blast from My Past

When I became serious about collecting comic books in high school--which is to say, when I stopped buying just from the local drugstore and went to actual shops that not only got Marvel and DC three weeks earlier, but got all sorts of great independent books--one of my early favorite writer-artists was a guy named William Messner-Loebs, whose black-and-white series Journey was a great yarn about an American frontiersman: no superheroes, no crazy battles, just some really fun storytelling. Heck, I was such a Messner-Loebs fan I even bought issues of the official Jonny Quest comic book because he wrote it. Though Messner-Loebs went on to do a lot of stuff for DC, he was never quite a fanboy idol like, say, John Byrne, so his personal life was to a large extent a mystery. It wasn't until I followed a link from Mark Evanier's blog yesterday to a profile of Messner-Loebs in the Detroit News that I discovered he had lost his right arm shortly after he was born.

Apparently the last four years have been very rough for Loebs, beginning with a car wreck and snowballing to include foreclosure and the theft of the mobile home he and his wife got afterwards.

"To make matters worse [the article adds], when he lost the house, Messner-Loebs was not working. 'I thought I'd be getting a job any day, but it didn't work out,' he said. His last comic book work was in early 2000. He speculated that he hasn't gotten work because of leadership changes at Marvel and DC Comics. 'There are very few people in comics who remember who I am--it's been over four years.'"

That's a real shame, considering that a lot of the editors at those houses have to be around my age, maybe a little older, and must have seen his work both at the big houses and for the indies at some point. (My personal favorite is his graphic novel Epicurus the Sage; good luck tracking it down, though.) Newsarama says that current A-list author Mark Millar's trying to get Messner-Loebs a Marvel job, but you might also want to look at ACTOR (A Commitment to Our Roots), a not-for-profit established to offer financial assistance to comic book creators in need.

photo: John Galloway

Oh, Now Isn't This Interesting?
(Deborah Solomon, Take Notes!)

Boris Kachka (New York) interviews monologuist Mike Albo and writing partner Virginia Heffernan, co-authors of The Underminer, a novelistic study of "the best friend who casually destroys your life."

[Albo]: The very first time we came up with the idea, I was living with Virginia, and she told me a female friend of hers had just undermined her: "She told me, 'You know, I don’t really want to be in this war between--'"

[Heffernan]: "Between you and Sofia and those guys." I didn't realize that all these forces were marshaled against me! And she was passing it off as being really careful. So I just cried myself to sleep that night.

photo: Jeremy Liebman

With a Dash of Dead Ringers For Texture

Brendan Bernhard (LA Weekly) profiles Bruce Wagner, "our premier 'Hollywood novelist,'" who reveals his narrative strategy in its broadest terms:

"I infect my work with madness, then let it settle. The story is infected by something--like in David Cronenberg’s films. My job is to be realistic and poetic at the same time, so that people have a sense of being transported somewhere else. I’m very sentimental at the same time as I’m very cold-hearted."

As a fan of both Wagner and Cronenberg, I'd say that's about right: somewhere between Shivers and eXistenZ. The article's fairly long, but frequently fascinating. There's a particularly interesting section early in about how, according to Wagner, "most people in Hollywood don’t read anyway, and therefore his books go largely unnoticed by the very people he’s writing about," while the West Coast literati seem to know him but not necessarily love him: "Nor did he make it into the 1,000-page anthology Writing Los Angeles, published by the Library of America in 2002, which did find room for lesser-known contemporaries such as Lynell George, Carol Muske, Rubén Martinez and D.J. Waldie." We also learn that he's friends with both Dana Delaney and James Ellroy...which makes me smile to think of Mad Dog pestering Wagner for an introduction, although I'm sure it didn't happen that way in real life.

photo: Debra DiPaolo

The Brontes, However, Were Lousy Dating Gurus

As I mentioned last week, one of the effects of the blizzard that hit New York was that I missed a couple author appearances, including one by Lauren Henderson to promote Jane Austen's Guide to Dating. If your curiosity was raised by the title, the Telegraph confers with Lauren as she "leaves the world of rampant rabbits, serial cosmopolitans and toxic bachelors behind, to advise girls on how to snare a man the Regency way." (Yes, that last comma is rather oddly placed, I agree.)

"I think the books are coded instruction manuals--but they can be novels, too. They are about the best way to find someone who's going to be a life partner for you. What Austen is about is the continual process of observing the behaviour of people around you. And whether you're country dancing or grinding your bum into someone at a hip-hop club, it comes down to the same fundamental things."

It's Enough to Make Richard Posner Dig Poetry

On the eve of the publication of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser grants an interview to Dan Wickett. What with Wickett being so respectful and all, Kooser doesn't get to show his sassy side much, but he explains, among other things, his belief in the poet's need for cost-benefit analysis:

"What I mean is that for every choice a poet makes, as to every word, every punctuation mark, there can be seen to be a cost and a benefit. The use of a period instead of a semicolon, in a particular poem, may change the emphasis slightly. Is that change of emphasis a benefit, or has it cost something? You might choose to write with no capital letters, say. The benefit of that might be a certain colloquialness of feeling, but the cost would be that your readers might have a hard time following the sense."

It's Not As If She Couldn't See It Coming

My first entry in my new book review blog, Beatrix, was about initial reactions to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, especially about the degree to which certain reviewers seemed to take it for granted that the author was telling tales out of school, as it were, by repackaging her own adolescence as fiction. Now, Sittenfeld responds to the reactions as Felicia R. Lee (NYT) takes notes:

"'In a way it's flattering that it seems so real,' Ms. Sittenfeld said, adding that at Groton she was less an outsider than is Lee at the fictional Ault School, with more friends and more of an identity through writing. 'But is it so easy to believe that I have no imagination and I can't invent dialogue or those scenarios?'"

It Scarred Me For Life, In the Good Way

Birnbaum has it out with Louis de Bernières and learns about certain recurring pleasures:

"I sometimes go back and read the books that I loved when I was a kid. There was one about smuggling called Moonfleet by John Meade Faulkner. It’s a wonderful adventure story. All about finding diamonds in rotten coffins. And crypts under churches full of smuggled brandy and that kind of thing. I still read that book with great pleasure."

(Click on that link, by the way, for a free book. Well, a free ASCII file, anyway, but it's as long as a book, because it has all its content!) As it happens, Moonfleet is one of my favorite Fritz Lang films--and, yes, it's just as warped as you think a children's adventure story directed by Fritz Lang would be. Especially with George Sanders and Joan Greenwood as a debauched lord and lady. And people took their children to it!

I Could Make a Pun About Mansfield Park,
But Then Again, I Probably Shouldn't

Rachel Kramer Bussel's back in the Gothamist interviewer's seat, and she starts her latest cycle by speaking with Genevieve Field, the former Nerve.com founder (well, you can never really be a former founder, but you know what I mean) and current editor of Sex and Sensibility, an anthology of women writers addressing life among the singletons. The roster includes several of my favorite authors, such as Elissa Schappell, Lily Burana, Lynn Harris, and Jennifer Weiner. But not, Field admits, herself:

"I actually wrote the essay that I might have written for the book in Glamour [February 2005 issue, on mistakes she made while dating and the lessons she learned from them]. I think it’s important to look at the things you did wrong along the way to make a good go at the relationship you end up in and I did a lot of things wrong. I feel that as an editor at Nerve and now at Glamour, I’ve really made a career out of making people write about difficult things and be open about things that are more easily held close to the chest. I feel that I owe it to those writers to be open as a writer myself, and I like to focus on my mistakes."

Some Unlucky Copyeditor's Going to Get Can'd For This

Deborah Solomon uses Simon Winchester as the foil for her questionable interviewing charms in this week's NYT Magaine, but an unfortunate transposition ruins her best shot at a wisecrack:

"You Brits are so anxious about advancing your station in life that it's amazing you get can out of bed in the morning." (italics mine)

This, however, was not my favorite Solomon bit; that would be the turn-on-a-dime transition: "One problem I have with geology is that it reduces existence to rocks. Do you believe in God?" As I've mentioned before, Solomon's verbal tactics are perhaps not quite as annoying when you realize she's trying to be playful; at least one interview subject says she's actually pretty nice. But this week's installment won't be making it into her greatest hits portfolio, except perhaps on the strength of Winchester's snappy answers, i.e., defining bad geologists as "the ones who don't find the copper deposits they are sent to find."

You Won't Want to Ask Her Out Bowling, Though

Sara Ivry (Nextbook) grills Jennifer Traig about how her obsessive-compulsive disorder manifested itself with a fixation on keeping shomer shabbos. Traig's memoir, Devil in the Details, may surprise some readers by how much humor she finds in her condition:

"As crippling as it can be, it can also be terrifically entertaining. I can say that because I'm lucky and didn't have an incapacitating case. I've met parents whose kids have just the most severe OCD and are just completely nonfunctional and are considering surgery. My heart really breaks for them, but for the majority who have it, it's a little bit funny. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. It makes it much less scary."

Yes, I'm Aware It Was a Rhetorical Question

Rob Hiaasen (Baltimore Sun) profiles debut novelist Paul Mandelbaum, who "might be the first University of Maryland graduate to invent a character who is dying because he ate a human brain during an expedition to New Guinea." That's one of many plot strands in Garrett in Wedlock. Among those who have praised the trade paperback original: Carolyn See (WaPo), who tries to frame potential reader reactions to the interweaving problems Garrett faces thanks to his wife's ex-husbands within a red state vs. blue state emotional spectrum, then observes:

"[T]he last chapter here disappointed me. It seemed to cover behavior that's been done to death in literary terms, with an ending that came straight out of a creative writing class. But what's a trite final 29 pages compared with a previous 266 pages of surprise, originality and joy?"

Plenty, some might say, but I haven't gotten to those 29 pages, so I'm not ready to venture an opinion. (I thought it was a bit cute to see that Mandelbaum's official website pulled the "266 pages of surprise, originality, and joy" bit for a blurb, though...) If you want a little help making up your mind about a possible purchase, he's put up an MP3 from a bookstore reading.

This Means Something. This Is Important.
(As Roy Neary Might Say)

Dan Wickett scores back-to-back interviews with John Haskell and Dean Bakopoulos for his Emerging Writers Forum. Haskell, who has been reading from his first novel, American Purgatorio, in Manhattan recently, says:

"I've always felt that serious fiction deals with more than just some character doing some thing, that the writer is talking about society or a person's relationship to society, or a person's relationship to what it means to be alive. To that extent, I hate reviews that act as consumer bulletins. Consumer bulletins aren't bad, but what I would like to see is a dialogue. Fiction writing has been relegated to the sidelines because the necessity of fiction, the necessity of looking at the human predicament, is largely glossed over."

I'm thinking that perhaps the review American Purgatorio has received from Joy Press (Village Voice) might be to his liking. Carolyn See (WaPo) also tries from the opening line to engage the reader in a rhetorical dialogue; the only problem with this strategy is that it takes her three paragraphs to get to the book.

Now I Feel Better About All the Bad Novels I've Ever Read

David Mehegan (Boston Globe) writes about the growing reputation of novelist Jennifer Haigh as her second book, Baker Towers arrives in bookstores and the author begins a 40-city tour. Along the way, Haigh reveals the advantages she discovered in quitting her magazine editing job to focus on fiction and, eventually, applying for an MFA in creative writing:

"The famous Iowa program helped her, she says, but not in the way she expected [Mehegan writes]. The feedback she received on her own work didn't help much. However, 'I spent hundreds of hours reading other people's misshapen or ill-conceived first drafts. It sometimes feels like a waste of time that you'd rather spend on your own work. But week after week in these workshops, you are forced to articulate what is wrong with this chapter or story. Other people's errors are so apparent. Your own never are. In the process, you acquire the skills to do that with your own work. It's a brilliant system.'"

To Get All The Author Interviews,
You Gotta Go Past the Book Blogs

Nichelle Stephens is doing the interviews at Gothamist this week, and she's spoken with self-help book packager Karen Salmansohn and AP reporter Pauline Millard. Millard is also working on fiction (and read recently at Brooklyn's Barbès); she insists 2005 "will be the year that I finally get an agent and make some sense out of that novel I wrote last year." Beatrice hopes to be there when it happens, the way it was for Salmansohn back in the day.

You Probably Won't Get a Novel as Good as Revolutionary Road This Way, Though

A year and a half ago, in reviewing A Tragic Honesty, I wrote [in PW] that Blake Bailey "has done a great job of sorting through the facts of [Richard] Yates's difficult life, assembling them into a story that mirrors the best of his subject's fiction. Robert Birnbaum interviewed Bailey and explored why the biographer "spent three years researching a man's life, who, it appeared to [Birnbaum], was probably miserable for at least the last half, maybe all of his life, every day of his life." Bailey's short answer? "Yates's life was always more depressing to other people than it ever was to him. As long as the writing was going well, Yates didn't much care."

Further details should disabuse any of you who still find the writing life inherently glamorous:

"[L]et's not lose sight of the fact that Yates, through whatever chaos of mental illness and alcoholism, was extremely disciplined as a writer. Yes, he would wake up colossally hung over every morning--every morning--and throw up. Just a routine thing because not only was he hung over, [but] he had pulmonary problems and he needed to clear everything out. Then he'd write for four hours...

"He would have maybe a couple of Michelobs at lunch at the Crossroads [a bar near Mass Ave on Beacon Street], and then he would take a nap and then he would write again in the afternoon, having written four hours in the morning. And then he would go and get drunk for dinner. But goddamn, by that time he had written for seven hours."

If you don't have time to read the full biography, try a quick introduction to Yates, or at least avail yourself of Stewart O'Nan's appreciation.

Kinda Like Howard in Melvin & Howard

T. C. Boyle sits down with Robert Birnbaum and explains the narrative function of Alfred Kinsey in his latest novel, The Inner Circle:

"Whenever you use a historical character in a work of fiction, that character becomes yours. I have learned as much as I could about him. Not having known him myself, personally, through his biographers primarily and I want to assess what I have learned. I want to make him walk and talk and deliver speeches. But as with Dr. Kellogg, in The Road to Wellville, I don’t want this character to be central. I want this character to put in motion what will happen to invented subsidiary characters..."

But, he's careful to note, "I am not a biographer. I am not writing history. I enjoy history because it enables me to reflect on who we are, how we got there and what it means."

Meet the 21st Century's First Dynasty of Letters

(at least, the first I know of...)

Last month, on my way to a meeting with my publisher, I had the pleasure of getting together for lunch with Keith and Masha Gessen. I'd been introduced to Keith by his former professor, Mary Karr, then saw him again a month or so later at an n+1 reading. By then, I'd gotten a copy of his older sister's book, Ester and Ruzya, a family history focusing on her two Russian grandmothers and their difficult paths through the twentieth-century Soviet Union, and I knew she'd surely be in town for her publicity efforts, so I suggested the three of us try to meet up.

So we did, and had I not been in the middle of book-writing hell, I would have had much more presence of mind to take notes and craft a decent story, but as it is, we just sort of chatted for an hour or so about how their parents brought them to the United States in the early '80s, where we grew up about ten miles from each other in various Boston suburbs, and how Masha decided to return to her homeland while young Kostya changed his name to Keith and became part of a fresh new crew of public intellectuals. (Well, okay, I'm being a little silly and hyperbolic there.) Also, Masha urged me to tell the world that Keith makes the best scrambled eggs in the entire world.

I bring this all up because in recent days, Joanna Smith Rakoff has profiled Masha for Newsday, while an NY Observer piece by Wesley Yang on the n+1 boys includes some quotes from Keith. Masha gets the easier ride from the media, though it should be noted that by Observer standards, Keith and crew come out less scathed than usual. Masha also cites Keith for providing her with a crucial motivation. Describing a letter she wrote to her sibling about their grandmothers, she tells Rakoff:

"I put their stories side by side, saying, 'This grandmother made this set of moral choices. And this grandmother made this set of moral choices.' And he wrote back saying, 'These are very interesting stories, but what [is your] point?'... That [question] had me thinking for a while... And then I realized that I needed to write a book about the answer, a book about the ways in which people make moral choices. About the kinds of moral choices that they make ... in a situation where there is no moral choice."

I'm still making my way through Ester and Ruzya whenever I can grab an hour or so of free time, but it's a very gripping story and I would definitely urge it upon you.

Tell Your Boss You Need to Listen As Important Research

Dave King, the author of The Ha-Ha, was interviewed on Leonard Lopate's WNYC radio show. Where did King get that striking title? Let's find out...

"A ha-ha is [King writes], in simplest terms, a sunken fence used to contain livestock without interrupting a view; the goal is to create an optical illusion so that the land appears to roll on continuously, with no evidence of this concealed division. In the novel, there's an actual ha-ha, of course, and it plays a major role in the story, but initially all I wanted was to present the convent grounds as an urban, rather than rural, paradise: a little compromised, a little artificial."

If for some reason you don't catch King on the radio, he'll be reading several times in New York City this month, then hitting the road--see his website for the full details.

The Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular

Remember two weeks ago when I asked Leslie Klinger my five questions about The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes? Today NYT reporter Mark Weingarten gets face time with Klinger and finds him quite an engaging fellow...and reasonably well grounded, too (not obsessed with the weather like that Baring-Gould chap).

"I don't think anyone really thinks that he's real," Mr. Klinger said. "But we play The Game in order to heighten our enjoyment of the series. It gives us the justification to spend inordinate amounts of time on these stories. If they were just potboiler fiction, how could we explain our intense interest?"

David Mehegan Came to New York and Didn't Say Hello?

Boston Globe staffer David Mehegan interviews Louis Auchincloss in his Park Avenue apartment. "I've stayed pretty close to the things I've observed myself," Auchincloss admits, "and the operation of the managerial society on the Eastern seaboard." But when you're as good at it as he is, I don't really think you need to diversify. And he explains how he gets it all done:

"If I'm on the surrogate's calendar [the New York City Surrogate's Court, which handles estate cases], the case might come up the moment I walk into court, or it might be called an hour and a half later. I'd always have a little notebook that I could write in, in that time. A real writer would learn that trick very quickly if he had to. You shut your mind on and off perfectly well; it's just a matter of habit. A lot of writers have to have complete silence and the fire going, their slippers on and a drink, all very comfortable and so on."

Fame Makes a Man Think Things Over

Writing for Australia's The Age, Gerard Wright catches up with James Ellroy, who's got another collection of true-crime reportage, unrestrained soul-bearing, and hyperkinetic novellas out (this one's called Destination: Morgue!). He also shares the narrative strategy for the third volume of his Underworld USA trilogy, which will pick up in the summer of 1968 and track American history until just before Watergate because "I don't give a shit about it":

"Nobody got killed and it's been done to death. J. Edgar Hoover died in May of '72, that's a good place to end it--I'm not necessarily saying that I will."

Ellroy also shares his attitude towards Hollywood adaptations of his work, an attitude Ursula K. LeGuin might do well to contemplate: "If it's a bad movie, I have no right to criticise it for attribution because I took the money. I will always option anything I write to anybody who's got the money."

For the Boston Globe, Alex Beam profiles Bernard Cornwell, "the least-known best-selling author in Massaschusetts." I have to admit I thought the Sharpe's series maestro still lived in England, which I guess proves his point. Beam notes that Cornwell hasn't quite achieved the success here in America that Patrick O'Brian did, even though Cornwell's books are, in the reporter's view, "better plotted." But apparently plans are afoot to change that in '05...

Have I Mentioned How Much I Like Daniel Handler Yet?

Because I really, really do--and his latest interview, with Dave Shulman of the LA Weekly, just adds to my enthusiasm, even if Dave tries a little too hard to keep up with his subject, character-wise.

[Handler says:] "I mean, if you read twelve novels published for teenagers that are out by major publishers right now, the amount of experimentation--in terms of subject matter, style and language--is just way to the left of the same twelve novels that are gonna be published during the same period by the same publishers but for adults. There’re novels from the point of view of fetuses. Feti? Fetuses. And characters who go blind without reason midway through the novel. And all sorts of things that, if you were writing that for adults, you would only be published by some crazy, leftist, independent press, at best. And instead, if you write that for children, you’re being published by Simon & Schuster."

When I Was Reading, Peter Cushing Came to Mind...

Regan McMahon, SF Chronicle book reporter, chats up Daniel Handler on the eve of the release of A Series of Unfortunate Events, one of two movies I can't wait to see (the other being The Life Aquatic). I'll be curious to see how Jim Carrey does as Count Olaf, but Handler seems pretty happy:

"He was a good choice. I was hard pressed to think of a living actor. Whenever they would ask me I'd say, 'James Mason.' And they'd say, 'James Mason is dead. ' And I'd say, 'That's a very good point.' Jim Carrey not only isn't dead, but on the scale of the movie that they were working on, it was clear it was going to be a movie star who was going to be Count Olaf, and out of that short list he's really the only one who can be hilarious and scary at the same time. Even in his lightest comedies he's sort of a scary guy; he's unhinged. He appears to be unhinged in real life as well. I mean, he uses his own natural unhingedness to play unhinged characters.''

Maud also calls attention to Handler's answering of questions from Independent readers in the voice of Lemony Snicket, which is rather amusing in spots, as when he warns "there are countless people in Hollywood evil enough to play Count Olaf."

Science Fiction Fans Wail, Gnash Teeth

New York Sun reporter Ruth Graham chats with Jonathan Lethem. Who knew his brother was a "famous-- or notorious, depending on how you regard graffiti--graffiti artist"? (Well, you probably did, but I don't get out much.) We also learn that "Mr. Lethem's first four novels were experiments in form," which is apparently how the publishing industry now refers to early science fiction novels by respectable mainstream novelists these days. (It probably wouldn't be fair to blame Lethem himself; after all, he's been upfront from the beginning about his broader literary aspirations, and he certainly hasn't shied away from the fantastic in his recent work.)

Interview Roundup: California Dreaming

Juan Felipe Herrera speaks about poetry with the new online literary journal Dislocate, and gives aspiring authors some mildly head-scratching advice:

"You don't always have to write. You can consider not-writing, because there is something beyond writing, which is where our writing comes from. A poet who does that is Li-Young Lee. Ginsberg did that exploration. I think all indigenous poets make that exploration, that extra step. If you look at the indigenous tradition, their chanting, their singing, their arts, their rituals, but there are other things connected to the universe, or it's called rain or it's called an ocean. The indigenous were non-writers because their systems, their beliefs, were attached to something much bigger than themselves."

Meanwhile, James Ellroy tells the Onion A.V. Club about a restorative technique that's more lucrative than not-writing, namely writing for Hollywood:

"I exploited my reputation as a novelist to take rest periods between novels. A novel is very taxing. To earn money writing movies... I don't disdain the process--I don't condescend to the process--but I know full well that the motion-picture business is largely dysfunctional, and that the majority of all commissioned screenplays fail to be filmed for one reason or another. So I go at it to the best of my ability, but I honestly don't care if any of these screenplays I work on ever get filmed. I don't think about it."

I'm pretty sure, though, that the adaptation of My Dark Places, with David Duchovny as James Ellroy, is probably still on track. Personally, I'd have seen Ellroy as a Stacy Keach type, or maybe a Dennis Franz, but we'll see.

Apparently, A Different Yale than the One W. Attended

Robert Birnbaum talks to author Lan Samantha Chang about life as "a child of immigrants, raised in the Midwest" and how she chose her college:

"I think I should have wanted to party, growing up in Wisconsin that was kind of the norm, wanting to party. Actually, when I went to college I discovered that mostly people want to party. But I have never been a party person. I have also been kind of a one-on-one person, an introvert. I was just thinking, why Yale? I had heard that you had to take more classes at the same time there, than other schools. It just seemed more serious."

Hanging Out With Nigel Slater and Damian McNicholl

Nigel Slater (left) was still feeling the effects of jet lag after his flight from London when he came down to the café at the Soho Grand Hotel, a few hours before he was scheduled to read from his memoir, Toast, but he was still up for a chat. I'd invited along Damian McNicholl (right), author of A Son Called Gabriel, because I'd imagined that putting together the two authors, who've written about growing up in Wolverhampton (Slater) and Northern Ireland (McNicholl) in the '60s, might spark an interesting conversation.

After trading notes on London neighborhoods for a bit, we turned to the origins of Toast in Slater's column for the Observer. A piece that he'd written about the memories associated with the British brand name foods he'd eaten as a child ran on a Sunday, the very next morning the phone calls from people offering book deals started coming in. Despite steady pressure from the publishers of his cookbooks over the years, Slater had "never joined the celebrity band of cookery people," he said, carefully bracketing his personal life away from his public life. So a frank account of his childhood seemed counterintuitive at first, but he eventually became more comfortable with the idea.

Meanwhile, McNicholl had finished writing what he called a "cutting-my-teeth" novel which he almost immediately shelved, turning next to what he readily acknowledges as "a semi-autobiographical fiction--though I won't tell anybody which parts are real." He described much of the writing process as "expunging demons," and said he would occasionally reread the previous day's pages with tears in his eyes. "I'm very pleased to hear you say that," Slater interjected; he had gone through a similar experience writing Toast. "I was writing about a lot of things I'd never really tackled before, like my mother's death," he explained. McNicholl believes their emotional involvement with their material works in their favor. "When people pay twenty-two, twenty-three dollars for a hardcover book," he said, "they want to read something that's going to move them."

I hadn't known about it when I started Toast, but both stories deal with their authors' sexual confusion as young kids, dealing with the subject in a "fuzzy" (says Slater) way that allows, McNicholl observed, readers to "make the leap" for themselves. "It's like the comedy programs that don't have the laugh tracks added on," Slater added. He noted that when the memoir first came out in England last year, people wondered aloud if it was supposed to be a coming out book. "I'm happy if they're not sure," he admitted. McNicholl pointed out that his novel was as much about the corrosive effect of family secrets as it was about any one character's sexuality, which led the three of us to talk about how all families, including our own, had something kept hidden from the outside world.

Then McNicholl and I chatted with Slater about his American book tour, which was just beginning its second leg. McNicholl had written for Beatrice about touring, and Slater had been in the States a few weeks earlier to read on the West Coast, so they had some stories to tell about favorite bookstores. Slater had never read to an audience from the book when it was published in England (though he did do both the audiobook and an adaptation for the BBC), so this was all a new experience for him, but he's finding the American audiences "delightful." On that note, he cheerfully excused himself to take a quick nap before heading out to Borders, and I took McNicholl to a pub down the street for a quick pint before his own reading that evening at Junno's.

More Support for the NBA Nominees

Galleycat interviews Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and Me Three gets Christine Schutt to expand on some things she's told other interviewers. Both worth a look if all you've heard about these nominees is in the press and maybe here, but the Bynum piece in particular has a lot of great stuff in it about her grad school background and what was on her mind as she wrote Madeleine Is Sleeping.

The Identity Theory of Emerging Writers

Robert Birnbaum posts his latest Identity Theory interview, chatting with Don Lee about, among other things, writing his first novel, Country of Origin:

With my friends I kept on referring to it as the TFN, the fucking novel. But in retrospect, it really wasn't that hard. I was able to discipline myself so that--one decision that I made was if I was going to write this in any kind of reasonable amount of time, I had to make it a plot-driven book. It was the first novel I had ever attempted. And I knew I could get bogged down and it would take me eight or ten years or something if I didn't have it really relying on story. So that was a deliberate choice, to make it a quasi mystery or play with the mystery genre. That made it a lot easier for me. I was able to switch it on and off, so come Friday morning I was at my desk and was able to write.

Dan Wickett also talks with a first-time novelist, Dayne Sherman, who likes having gone with a smaller house, MacAdam/Cage, because "David Poindexter, the publisher, takes my calls, warmly. He answers my e-mail [and] practically everyone in the company knows me by personal association." And when the time comes, one assumes, they won't "forget" to submit his books to the National Book Foundation, like some of the major publishers do with their writers.

The Interview Roundup Gravitates
to Jewish Authors of a Certain Age

Last month, when Imre Kertész came to New York, John Freeman of Newsday met with him--but the story hasn't made it into the paper until now:

Although Kertész has been labeled a Holocaust writer, he says the influence of communism was equally powerful, and it was through this second survival of sorts that he became the writer he is today. "You constantly, constantly think about the idea of suicide, especially if you live under a dictatorship," Kertész says. "I believe I would have written very different novels had I lived in a democracy."

David Mehegan of the Boston Globe gets close to Cynthia Ozick, which includes this rather astonishing bit: "She was an Alfred A. Knopf author for 32 years, until moving to Houghton Mifflin for Heir to the Glimmering World and in all that time never had a book tour. Why not? she was asked. She shrugged and said: Because they never asked me." (emphasis added) The news that, under Knopf, Ozick "never felt I had a readership" simply boggles the mind, though they can't have ignored her completely, since she was a two-time National Book Award finalist while published there.

Over at Nextbook, Natascha Freundel talks to Amos Oz, who was also recently featured in the New Yorker, the subject of a David Remnick profile--and, not surprisingly, a long Jerusalem Post interview.

2000 Zero Zero Party Almost Out of Time

Joe Fornabaio/NYT

"What is hip?" you ask the Sunday Styles section. J.T. Leroy, it tells you. Warren St. John profiles the "the de rigueur literary recommendation for a certain set of hipsters" who "has been embraced by established writers including Tobias Wolff, Michael Chabon and Mary Gaitskill, and by a cadre of celebrities with, as it happens, their own troubled pasts, like Courtney Love, Winona Rider, Tatum O'Neal and Billy Corgan." But although it's the publication of his new illustrated novella that's made NYT take notice, Leroy's been quite well-known for more than four years, since the publication of his first novel, Sarah. Of course, his popularity is pretty much among readers who, unlike the Sunday Styles target audience, don't need to be told who Billy Corgan is. Mind you, the deft and imaginative "baby celebrity" hasn't exactly escaped notice from the Times in the past, but (a) maybe the folks at the Review don't talk to the Styles people or there's nobody left at the Review who remembers those pieces, (b) the Styles people don't think they get the same crowd the Review draws, or (c) why pass up a chance to tell a good story one more time?

Now, if they could just do something about running these stories before the author's New York City readings...

Sink Your Teeth Into This Delicious Madeleine

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum suggested we meet for lunch at a Korean restaurant around the corner from her office; the National Book Award-nominated novelist still makes ends meet by working as a consultant for non-profit organizations. "I used to be a teacher before I went into graduate school," she recalled. "I took the job right out of college, naively thinking that it would be the perfect job for a writer--I'd get out at 3:15 every day and have long stretches of vacation... I had no sense going into it of just how incredibly consuming teaching is, and when I came back from graduate school, I made the choice to stay away from teaching for a little while, do something a little more contained that I could leave at the office when I went home at the end of the day and wasn’t as emotionally consuming."

As the youngest of the five nominees for this year's fiction award, and the only one nominated for her first book, Bynum's arguably gotten knocks a little bit harder than those dished out to her four colleagues, but she's taking things in stride, noting that even if the book was attacked, its cover still appeared--in full color--on the front page of the NYT arts section. "At first, I was really taken aback," she said, moving some jab chae onto her plate, "but the negative tone has been so constant, so one-note, that your skin gets a bit toughened. It's the third piece the Times has run and they all seem to be making the same point, so a certain kind of immunity has built up."

"It's thrilling to have this conversation going on and to have my book be part of it," she continued, "and I feel like I'm in such good company." She noted that while much of the press coverage has dwelled on the so-called similarities of the nominees, she finds their work very different from hers and from one another--and not as obscure as everyone makes out, either. "I'd fallen in love with Joan Silber's "The High Road" when I read it a year ago in the O. Henry collection," she enthused, recalling how much she enjoyed meeting Silber at the group photo shoot a few weeks earlier.

But what of her own book, Madeleine Is Sleeping? Where does its fragmentary, deliberately dreamlike prose come from? "It started for me in a time of great intellectaul agitation," she explained, "when I was suddenly being introduced to a lot of authors like Borges and Calvino and Cortazar as well as theorists like Barthes...I was in such a state of excitement and agitation from reading all this and I wanted some way to apply all that stimulation to my writing." Many of the characters and situations, she acknowledged, are "borrowed" from other texts so that she can give them her own spin. The title character, for example, was inspired by a footnote in Foucault about a man in 19th-century France who had been institutionalized after being caught receiving sexual favors from a young girl. What, she wondered, had been the girl's story, and why hadn't anyone thought to tell it? Another character was inspired by her fury at the treatment of a secondary character in the film Tous Les Matins du Monde; as she remarked, with a bit of a laugh, "So often fiction seems like an opportunity to rewrite stories when you're not happy how they turn out."

So where does Bynum go from here? Her boss will be shutting down the consulting firm at the end of the year, and Bynum said she might be ready to return to teaching, perhaps even teaching creative writing now that she's a published author. In the meantime, she's savoring the nomination: "This whole process has been so astonishing that not much could diminish my delight."

Kate Walbert Is Our Kind of Author

I called Kate Walbert a little after 8:00 p.m. Veteran's Day, after she'd put her two children to sleep, and asked if she had seen Caryn James' complaints about the National Book Award shortlist that morning. "It's been brought to my attention," she laughed. "To tell you the truth, I couldn't untangle a lot of that article, but whatever. At this point, it's funny. There’s been this whole trajectory of angles on the five of us, and each one seems to suggest there’s something terribly wrong with these choices. This is just another angle... but they're calling attention to the books, and that's good."

"It's hard to step back at this point and be clear about what the nomination has meant or what it's going to mean," Walbert reflected, but she's gratified by one aspect of the new attention brought to Our Kind, her collection of short stories. "It's almost like the book's being republished. There's such a short shelf life for books now, I don’t know how long it was out there, maybe a week. And I’m a W, too, which adds to the problem. What I’d give to be an M or a P," she laughed. The shelf life is even shorter, perhaps, for short story collections, even ones linked thematically, as hers is by its focus on a group of suburban women "of a certain age," as the Times "Metropolitan Diary" might say. She joked about an upcoming reading at the public library in Darien, Connecticut, as an excursion into "Our Kind territory," but insisted "it's not really Connecticut women I picture, although I've been around a lot of them. It’s a blend of women I've known and knew as a child, the sort of women who would play bridge with my mother while I eavesdropped on their conversations. I've always been interested in that generation of women; I find them to be so unique--a little too late, a little too early."

The women in the stories are bonded together by Walbert's use of the first person plural voice, a move that took her by surprise when she wrote the first story, "The Intervention," in the mid-'90s. "After I wrote it," she explained, I thought, 'Well, what is this strange little thing?' But every six months or so, regardless of what I was working on, I would sit down and write another of what I called my 'we stories.'" She found the voice like "writing in a straitjacket, but it's the classic scenario for writers: you dig the hole and then try to find your way out." Her tentative plans to move towards a first person singular voice by the end of the cycle never panned out, she added, "and the more I wrote in this voice, I realized you can’t get inside anyone's head specifically, so that forces you to learn everything you know about the characters through what they say about themselves, and then ask yourself whether that's believable or not."

Taking the controversy over the shortlist in stride, she passed along her daughter's compliment for getting a sticker on her book and remarked, "Any time would be a tremendous thrill, but I'm so happy to be on this particular list, the first list that's all women, and be able to stand back and watch the reaction. And it gives me four great writers to read." She has become friendly with the other nominees, and though she observes "a sense of circling the wagons," she believes there was more to their camaraderie than that. When they met for the first time, she recalled, "it was just five people who love books. We talked a little bit about the press, a little bit about our Amazon rankings, and then we talked about the books we were reading. I think the bond came out of that more than anything else."

You Missed the Party, But Don't Miss the Boat

Maud Newton interviews Josh Melrod, one of the editors of The Land Grant College Review, which raises funds not by holding readings here in Manhattan, but by hosting parties like the one last night where the booze flowed freely and smokes were handed out gratis:

There’s a lot of reasons that we stopped having readings at our fundraisers and launch parties, the main one being that we want a lot of people to come. We learned from experience that more people show up when there’s beer and music instead.

Chipping in for the kegs (cases?) were, among others, LGCR board members Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, and Nelly Reifler, who appears in the second issue. Nelly Reifler, that is. Not Auster and Hustvedt. But they'd fit right in with the other first-rate talents who are popping up in this magazine, as you'll see when you poke around the archives online.

Hanging Out with Joan Silber & Lily Tuck

National Book Award nominee Joan Silber (left) isn't too upset by the backlash against a fiction shortlist that includes her "ring of stories," Ideas of Heaven, and books by four other women. She's actually managing to enjoy being at the heart of a literary scandal. "I didn't think that was ever going to happen to me," she joked over a late morning coffee at Housing Works recently.

"And it's not personal," she went on. "The wounding thing is when people say they don't like the books themselves. The general attacks just seem… stupid."

Fellow nominee Lily Tuck (right) agreed, and pointed out the industry's confused (or even "double-faced") posturing over the awards. "Last year, when the National Book Foundation nominated Stephen King for a lifetime achievement award," she recalled, "there was a huge hue and cry about how he was a popular writer, not a literary writer. Now they're screaming and yelling that we’re too literary and not popular enough." She's glad for the nomination, though, especially because it offers new life for her novel, The News from Paraguay. "The book was about to disappear completely," she recalled. "It wasn't exactly remaindered, but it had been sent back to the warehouse." Silber added, "There's a sticker on my book now, so whatever happens, I feel that I'm more on the map, and that's enjoyable."

I mentioned a point that had come up in my earlier conversation with Christine Schutt about Knopf's bottom-line decision to turn down her novel, which finally found a home at Northwestern University Press, and asked if either of them had felt themselves in similar jeopardy. "I feel fairly safe at HarperCollins now," Tuck said, "and I have a lovely, lovely editor who's very supportive. But before that I switched publishers three times, and each time it was a struggle to find a new one." Silber had a similarly "long, zigzagging" career trajectory: "I started with Viking and published two books with them when I was young, and then I had a long time when I couldn’t publish with anybody. I finally published with a small press, Sarabande Books, moved to Algonquin and now I'm with Norton."

The two authors were acquainted with each other before the National Book Foundation released its nominations; Tuck had thrown a book party for mutual friend Margot Livesey where she met Silber, and the two had stayed in touch. But the bond between them--and the other three nominees--has strengthened in the last month. "We met as a somewhat besieged group," Silber said. "The attacks made us draw closer together." "We all feel very supportive of each other," Tuck noted. "Of course everybody would like to win, but it’s not like we’re horribly competitive." Both noted that they were actually too distraught over last week's election results--each had spent time canvassing in Pennsylvania--to dwell too much on the negative chatter. Of next week's ceremony, Silber observed, "It's terrible not to let us know in advance. This is the only literary award that does that. They try to make it like the Oscars, and we’re not actors. Although we wish each other well, we're going to have to compose ourselves on the spot either way, and I don't think anyone’s looking forward to that." She is, however, looking forward to seeing her close friend, Jean Valentine, who's up for the poetry award, and the three of us eagerly swapped hints of what we'd be wearing to the party: mostly variations on the "basic black" advice Silber got from previous NBA winner Andrea Barrett. (I'm still sitting on the fence about actually renting a tux, seeing as I'll be well off the main floor for most of the proceedings...) Both were hesitant to discuss the exact nature of their new work, but Tuck allowed that it wouldn't be another historical novel, and both enthused over how much fun the research process was. "I used to speak Spanish, but I can't anymore," Tuck admitted, "and I can't read it, either, but that's probably a good thing. If I could, I'd probably still be reading books about Paraguay instead of having written the novel."

Paris Review Joins the Web

The Paris Review interviews were one of the main inspirations when I decided to start talking with writers, though I can't pretend to anything like their thoroughness. As you can see for yourself starting tomorrow, when the magazine begins publishing its entire archive of interviews freely accessible online. They're releasing two interviews with William Styron (for whom, not so coincidentally, they're throwing a party tonight) and everything else from the 1950s goes live Monday, while the remaining material will be staggered over the next six to eight months. This will certainly make up for losing the tattered paperbacks I horded during college and graduate school until I had to de-accessorize to pay the rent one month...

Get Our Your Calendars

I have very excellent reasons why I won't be able to attend Happy Ending on November 17th, but I'm still kicking myself in anticipation of missing what promises to be a heck of a show. First off, Nelly Reifler will be filling in for regular host Amanda Stern, who's off at MacDowell for the fall. Then there's the literary guests: Julian Rubinstein, Elizabeth Gold, and Hal Niedzviecki. Why am I telling you this now? Well, pretty much because Mediabistro had the smarts to get Rubinstein talking about his amazing true crime tale, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber--but then, calling it true crime is a bit like calling George Plimpton's Paper Lion a sports story or Tom Bissell's Chasing the Sea a travelogue.

[I]t might sound strange, but one movie that struck me about this story was Life is Beautiful. The reason I say it is that one of the things I loved most about the story was that on the surface it was a comedy; it was this hilarious caper. But beneath the surface it was this heartbreaking story, the classic, archetypal, underdog struggle to survive and be somebody. And I saw an opportunity. No one had really looked at this story as a comedy before. It was obviously written about and covered heavily in Hungary, but it was just a crime story. No one in Hungary had reported that he was a Zamboni driver; no one had talked about his pelt smuggling. The other person I thought of is Elmore Leonard. I had the instinct that this was not a story to be dealt with straightforwardly, I wanted to look at it just slightly askance. What happened was too crazy to be played totally straight.

Hanging Out With Christine Schutt

I met Christine Schutt for lunch last week at a diner near her apartment on the Upper East Side, and while we waited for our sandwiches in as quiet a corner as we could find, I asked if she felt that she'd had a chance to enjoy the nomination of her novel, Florida for the National Book Foundation's fiction award, given the almost immediate backlash against her and the other four nominees. She had, she said, though she was "quite surprised" by the negative press. "I thought the judges were very brave to fly in the face of the expected and the commercially proven," she continued, "to take up books that had not sold very many copies, that aspired to a certain daring kind of performance at the risk of being less commercially successful. I thought that was something we all wanted—literature that’s not necessarily easy at first, that asks the reader to participate. But the response has been otherwise."

So she was somewhat nervous when Deborah Solomon called wanted to interview her for the NYT magazine. "'You want to just eat me alive,'" was Schutt's immediate reaction. "But I thought she was quite wonderful and did a shapely little piece. I didn’t feel attacked, though some people thought she was mean to me." (As one of the people who thought precisely that, her more direct experience with Solomon has caused me to rethink my opinion somewhat; I'm wondering now if my reaction is just a matter of ambiguity surrounding Solomon's possible playfulness, which frequently reads as confrontational and badgering.)

Like Solomon, I noted that Knopf, which published Schutt's collection of short stories, passed on the novel. "Gordon Lish, my first editor, had seen Florida and loved it," Schutt recalled, "but he had been fired and wasn't there to back it. The editor who took over from him liked Florida enormously, but I don't think she had the power to put it through...I had the impression, though nobody said it to me, that they just weren’t impressed by the sales for Nightwork. It was just a corporate decision." I observed aloud that another division of Bertelsmann had been Matthew Sharpe's publisher until they made the same corporate decision and turned down The Sleeping Father, which similarly found a home at a small press and then found broad recognition (in Sharpe's case, a Today book club nod). Stories like his and hers seem to undercut the argument from big publishing houses that books that aren't obvious commercial blockbusters are bad for the industry; if anything, they indicate that the biggest players might ever-so-slowly losing their touch for picking good books. "It’s about time that the industry started thinking about what it could do for writers," she nodded, "and how we might be able to keep more of these midlist writers afloat as opposed to offering celebrities million-dollar advances. You live long enough to see it happen again and again, and you get used to it, but still... If you gave Madonna a smaller advance, you might be able to cultivate more assiduously the Mark Costellos, the Matthew Sharpes, the Matthew Derbys…I know a lot of great writers who could stand to be taken up by the industry, and it would be to the betterment of the culture, I think." (Before we left, she would hand me a copy of Noon, a literary annual edited by another one of those writers, Diane Williams.)

The problem affects even those nominees who were published by the major houses, as Schutt learned when she tried to buy their books. "I couldn’t find a single book by these women in the bookstores, except for Madeleine Is Sleeping, and that’s only because it came out so recently," she vented. "I don’t usually go into Barnes & Noble, but I did this time, and I went to the information desk and... it was as if I was talking about stale bread." She did, however, know many of the other women before they all got the nod from the Foundation, and one of them promptly suggested that they form an email group to keep each other posted about developments in the coverage of their nomination, a show of generosity that left her very impressed. For now, she's looking forward to joining the four authors on a road trip to the public library in Darien, Connecticut for a group reading this weekend, and then the awards ceremony next week. "I’m really looking forward to meeting Garrison Keillor," she enthused. "I listen to "The Writer’s Almanac" whenever I’m in Maine and what I’ve always admired about him is that he finds obscure poets. I’m quite charmed by that, whether somebody’s helping him or he’s reading all these poems by himself… People say the poems are difficult, but he proves they aren't."

Christian Oth

Snark: Treat It Like a Barrelfish Hunt

Two of my favorite bloggers get together when Maud Newton interviews Terry Teachout about "the process and ethics of formal and informal criticism" and other literary issues.

When to be snarky? When you’re writing about something pretentious, especially when other critics have been taken in by its pretensions. In art, pretentiousness is all the deadly sins rolled into one. Or when you’re writing about something that’s unserious by definition, especially when its creators are rolling in dough-–like, say, the makers of Dracula: The Musical, to which I happily gave both barrels and then some in The Wall Street Journal. Such folk are fair game: they have their cash to keep them warm. In most other circumstances, I think snark is usually contraindicated. What’s more, it should never be used on somebody who isn’t in a position to snark right back at you. Fair’s fair.

I'm not sure I buy into the first half of this reasoning completely--for one thing, hating on Broadway producers seems a bit too easy, and for another, I'm not totally sold on the idea that the wealthy (whether artists or producers) are due less consideration because they can shield themselves more comfortably against your criticism--though in all fairness I'd guess that's not the lesson Terry would want us to draw from his remarks. I agree much more solidly with another portion of Terry's statement on this subject: "If not used in scrupulous moderation, [snark is] bad for the soul." Which I suppose will lead some of you readers to mutter about the state of my own soul, and I wouldn't entirely disagree...although I do try to keep on the right side of the line between forceful criticism and blatant snark, though I'm sure I fail from time to time. I also think he's absolutely right that mockery is the best response to pretension; or, as I told one person who asked me if I thought ridicule was an effective means of communication, "Yes, when I wish to communicate that I find something ridiculous." (Now, if I did practice ongoing snark here, it might read an awful lot like this blog, which I just found out about this evening.)

Terry, by the way, can also be seen in yesterday's NYTBR where he illuminates the life and work of Anthony Powell with barely a trace of snark, and that only for the unclever prose of Powell's biographer.

Toronto: Our New Hub for Author Interviews

James Adams of The Globe and Mail checks in with Man Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst, who's back in North America and ready to resume his creative writing classes at Princeton. He finds the media's emphasis on treating The Line of Beauty as a big gay novel "quite depressing," given how much more there is to be found in his work.

While Hollinghurst was up in Toronto, one of that city's novelists, M.G. Vassanji, came down to New York. He's from an Indian family that had been living in Kenya for two generations when he was born, and came to America in the 1970s for a college education, an experience that proved transforming in more ways than one. "I had never understood loneliness," he recalls in conversation with Daphne Uviller. "I'd only heard of it in pop songs. In such a tight community, like the one I grew up in, it was never an issue."

If You Haven't Downloaded Eastern Standard Tribe Yet,
Do It Now(Even if You "Don't Like Science Fiction")

Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite contemporary novelists, talks to English Matters, the newspaper for George Mason U.'s English department, about why he puts his books out under Creative Commons licenses, making them freely distributable to just about anyone, anywhere. To those who say such a move would bankrupt authors by taking away their royalties, he raises this point well worth considering:

[I]t's important to recognize that writers who have careers as writers, middle-class or better income as writers, are sui generis; each one makes his or her living in a way that is totally distinctive from all the others, and is only passingly associated with getting royalties for every copy of their book sold. They consult, they speak, they write magazine articles, they are given writers-in-residencies, and so on. All of those things follow from having wildly successful books, but even very wildly successful books tend not be the things that pay the royalties and make the full middle-class living. Even for writers who have substantial royalties, like Stephen King, they pale, I suspect, beside things like their film revenues and their licensing revenues.

Interview Roundup: Who Do You Love?

GalleyCat referred me to a Newsday interview with David Gilbert, who took up fiction when he was young because "creative writing was the only thing at school that wasn't graded." I'm strongly encouraged by the description of The Normals, Gilbert's first novel, that comes through in the article, even more so by the revelation that Gilbert's favorite writer is one of my own recently acquired pleasures, Stanley Elkin.

Speaking of the question of an author's favorite authors, I've been sitting on this Walter Mosley link for a while, but he has his own take on the subject:

Most writers will lie to you, because, say you're a young black woman writer, of course you're going to say Zora Neale Hurston, even though maybe Nancy Drew really launched you into the world. I could say Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Albert Camus. But for me it was really comic books--the Fantastic Four. Everything you read as a kid has an incredible impact on you. So I'm afraid to answer that question, because I'd have to leave out Jack Kirby, the artist who drew Fantastic Four.

Going for Baroque

I'm still working my way through The System of the World, so I'll have to wait a few days before I can say anything about that to you, but in the meantime here's Neal Stephenson's Slashdot appearance, in which the science fiction novelist takes questions from one of his core audiences and gets to go on at much greater length than any newspaper or magazine would give him--which leads to some great ideas and some great stories.

[A]t the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said, "Ah, yes, you're the one who's going to bring in our males 18-32." And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one question after another while ignoring the Dante writers sitting at the table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them.

Interview Roundup: From Northern California to Baghdad

The Davis Enterprise checks in on Kim Stanley Robinson, making me feel bad that I haven't even held a copy of Forty Degrees of Rain in my hands yet, let alone started reading it. He explains how his science fiction career is linked to his childhood:

"It felt to me that (science fiction) was how to best express what Southern California was about," he says. "Even though it was in symbolic terms, this sense of rapid change and history spinning out of control. ... It was the way Southern California felt... When I was a kid, Orange County was orange trees, and I was reading Huckleberry Finn and thinking I was in Hannibal, Missouri. As a kid, I was pretty wrong about where I was in time and space. Science fiction was a correction. I saw trees get ripped out and replaced by freeways and condominium culture. Science fiction helped me understand it."

After reading the article, though, I'm a bit more interested in his present, where he gets together with other Davis writers like Karen Joy Fowler and Sean Stewart so they can write in the same room without any distractions...Meanwhile, Jordan Rosenfeld of AlterNet chats with Ben Marcus about the "new American short story," like for example what exactly that's supposed to be, which is anything it wants to be, as long as it meets this criteria: "I wanted it to be memorable, to transport me, to consume me, devour me and completely engage and fascinate me, as well as trouble and confuse me. I wanted to be overcome by stories in different kinds of ways."

Robert Birnbaum sits down with Jon Lee Anderson about how "I have been a journalist who’s been in war, but I don’t like the moniker or... all the attendant sort of paraphernalia that comes with being a war correspondent." And I've been sitting on this link for far too long: Bob Sassone of Professor Barnhardt's Journal had a talk a few weeks ago with Will Christopher Baer about how his first two novels are being brought back into print as the third one, Hell's Half Acre, is finally released. I've been sitting on the books themselves way too long, too, and I should really do something about that soon.

Who IS "Your Typical Dirty-Book Writer," Chip?

Ed sums up most of what I would've said about the NYT profile of Toni Bentley, though I probably would've had made some "scummy little" comment about the "no less a highbrow than Leon Wieseltier" line. It's rather amusing, actually, to read through what one imagines as the struggle between Charles McGrath's infatuation with a not unattractive woman writing unabashedly about her anal sex adventures and his refined critical sensibilities, which find her "a throwback" in "the old tradition of hyperbole and overwriting" "nonsense, of course, but it's sometimes splendid nonsense." "Ms. Bentley is not your typical dirty-book writer," he assures us, but frankly, apart from the ballerina gig, she sounds a lot like every "dirty-book writer" I've ever met: well-educated women who aren't afraid to redefine sexual expression in their own terms, as entertaining or as informative as they want it to be. Maybe he should go catch a Rachel Kramer Bussel reading sometime so he can find out what today's "dirty-book writers" are really like.

Jamie Rector/NYT

Personally, I Prefer the Sobriquet "Riot Nrrd"

BoingBoing poster--and one of my favorite science fiction writers--Cory Doctorow has nothing but praise for Wil Wheaton's new memoir, Just A Geek. The IT Conversations website recently recorded Wheaton reading from the book and answering audience questions, then slapped it online for all us...well, geeks.

Yo, Adrian!

I've always had the self-awareness to consider not having read the Adrian Mole novels a substantial gap in my cultural literacy. So I can't say that I entirely get this profile of Sue Townsend in The Independent, but the emotional register of the passages dealing with Townsend's gradual loss of sight is easily grasped. On the other hand, if Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction is really the end of the series, maybe I will find the courage to plow my way through early next year, when The Karen Black Project is behind me... Speaking of which, watch this space all this week for details...

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Those NYT magazine readers who remember Deborah Solomon's interviews with Walter Mosley and Wynton Marsalis might wonder what her beef is with creative African-American men...were it not for the fact that interviews with Ted Kooser, Plum Sykes, and Harold Evans (among others) demonstrate that she spreads the combative condescension around pretty equally. It's a pleasant surprise for both the lazy assumptionalists and the careful readers, then, to see her seemingly cowed in the presence of genius when she interrogates Edward P. Jones. You would be too, I'm thinking, given the singleminded directness with which he seems to approach his vocation as a writer.

There's a "Tiny Social Transactions" Joke Here,
But It's the Weekend & I'm Too Lazy

Like many NYT readers, one of my first stops on Sunday is Randy Cohen's Ethicist column in the magazine. So my curiosity was piqued when he talked to Gothamist yesterday (well, I assume he talked to them before yesterday, but you see what I mean) and learned how location shapes philosophy:

Because most New Yorkers don't depend on a car, were privileged to social transactions that happen a million times a day and bring into focus how we act as members of a community. Ethics is really just the sum total of all these tiny social transactions we have on a daily basis. And New Yorkers have more than most, I'd say because we simply see so many people.

Meanwhile, the Significant Other, remembering my previous thoughts on Toni Bentley and her sodomemoir, alerted me to the inevitable Salon interview. No real surprises here for anybody who's been following the topic, unless you count the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary Salon lets her use to describe the hygenic concerns, which you certainly weren't going to find in the Times.

Frank Discussion

Pulitzer-winning biographer Elizabeth Frank talks to Jennie Yabroff of Newsday about her first novel, Cheat and Charmer, which inspired Michiko Kakutani to get her hate on earlier this week. I've only just started the novel, so I'll wait until next week to say more, but the Kakutani pan strikes me as somewhat lazy in its use of the press kit blurbs as a bludgeon against the author. New York readers who want further opportunity to judge for themselves can catch Frank at her neighborhood bookstore, Three Lives, on October 12.

The All-New England Interview Roundup

Salon kicks off an irregular series of "authors who, while admired by their peers, haven't quite found the audience they deserve" as David Bowman chats with Vermont-based Craig Nova, who makes a blatant bid to attract Maud's interest:

No one understood anxiety of the modern age like Greene did. And his books are still all in print. Everybody reads them. Brighton Rock was in my mind a lot when I was writing this book. Actually my wildest and most enthusiastic high about this book is I would like to think of it as a collaboration between me and Graham Greene and Albert Camus.

Robert Birnbaum gets Jennifer Finney Boylan, who writes about her transformation from James to Jennifer in She's Not There, to drive down from Maine for one of his extended conversations and learns why she believes her audience extends beyond the assumed appeal to transgendered readers:

If you are a transgendered person you already know all this stuff and in fact there are a lot of other books that have a much more complex or heart-rending narrative to them. People who have come to my book, I think, are concerned with the larger question. Which is, “How do you live an authentic life? What sorts of sacrifices will it take from you and from the people around you in order to become yourself? And how do you find that courage? How do you find the strength to do something that truly seems impossible?” And I think those are questions that everybody asks. Because whatever your dragon is—if you will pardon me using Joseph Campbell imagery—everybody has some sort of dragon they have to slay. People find the story of somebody who changed their identity in what seems like a dramatic way—people find that moving and it relates to their journey, whatever it is.

Far Out, Man

One of my favorite books last year was Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head, which is to shamanic drug ingestion what Paper Lion to professional football--that is to say, a remarkable work of participatory journalism. (To strain the parallel even further, it's worth noting Pinchbeck's status as a founding editor of Open City.) So I was pleased to stumble onto an interview Pinchbeck gave to New World Disorder. Mind you, his first answer starts off "I think Gurdjieff has the right idea," and gets deeper into High Weirdness from there, so about half of you who follow this link are going to think I'm a kook for recommending it--just don't say I didn't warn you. Heck, even I think some of his ideas are a little flaky, but others are pretty darn insightful, and the book itself displays a healthy sense of skepticism, though not quite as much as John Horgan's Rational Mysticism, which I recommend even more highly.

Swing Kids Get Nudge from Literary Community

Stephen Elliott's making his way around the country this month, reading from his campaign diary, Looking Forward to It. I'll be doing my utmost best to catch him in Brooklyn on the 21st, but in the meantime--and before I start reading the book itself--I'm brushing up with some help from this online exclusive interview with Newsweek. It's got some background on Operation Ohio, Elliott's plan to organize writers who will spend Election Day calling college students in four swing states--Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Florida--and reminding them to vote.

Reinforcing the Accolades for My Peers

If you've read the NYTBR literary website roundup, let me just repeat the praise handed out to Maud Newton and Identity Theory, both of which happen to have great new interviews. Maud, who the Times singles out for conducting "the kind of conversation that should happen more often in the book world," talks with Chris Lehmann in a new series of discussions of criticism with critics.

I think reviewers often overlook that readers have a pretty direct time investment (and a money one) in the judgments that critics tender. After all, reviewers always get galleys and review copies for free, and are compensated (albeit just barely) for the time they spend reviewing – and can easily lose sight of this. So in my rounds as a regular reviewer, I tried to keep near the front of my mind the sort of readers I used to recommend books to when I worked in bookstores: people with day jobs who are fighting all sorts of demands on their time to carve out enough of a margin of leisure to read on their own. If I tell them a book is worth 30 or so bucks and a far bigger chunk of time – the commodity you can never accrue more of – I had better in good conscience believe I’m right.

Meanwhile, Robert Birnbaum gets into it with Jonathan Ames, which may surprise folks who know him primarily through the recent Wodehouse-hommaging (it's a word if I say it is!) Wake Up, Sir! by beginning with a long segment on writing profiles of football players and Greenpeace activists...or, rather, not being able to write those profiles. But soon enough, Ames dishes insider info: "Some people might have read Hemingway and wanted to write action hunting scenes. I read Wodehouse, and I wanted to write these ludicrous small descriptions of the way a valet might move."

And Don't Forget Castaneda, Even Though He's Dead

Washington Post reporter Linton Weeks wonders why Americans haven't embraced Paolo Coelho. I've said it before, but that was six months ago, so I'll say it again: we already have Tom Robbins, Robert Pirsig and Richard Bach, so what do we need with Coelho? Still, the handful of fans he has in the States can be awfully cute with their pretensions:

"Nearly everyone I have referred The Alchemist to has loved it."... A few readers have felt that Coelho's story was simplistic, Petersen says, "but they just didn't get it."

Yeah, Lord knows it can be hard to "get" groundbreakingly original concepts like "following your dream." Maybe what Coelho needs is to rip off another tried-and-true formula for success in the guru-author field: six hours with Bill Moyers and a camera.

Stephen Fry Doesn't Have a Book Out, But I Think He's Just Swell

And he is promoting a film based on an Evelyn Waugh novel, after all. In which regard Fry chatswith The A.V. Club about Waugh's fiction:

That's what you get in Waugh which is so shocking—you don't get the distribution of reward and punishment that you expect of a novel. Good characters in Evelyn Waugh are constantly being shat upon by fate for nothing to do with their own inner faults. We expect the villain or the hero to have made a choice, and for their fate to be accorded because of that. And what you get in Waugh is this very modernistic idea that it's a kind of chaotic world, and that's pretty frightening.

Reading this article prompted me to visit, for the first time, Fry's official website, wherein I learned that the book I know and love as Revenge is called The Star's Tennis Balls over in the UK. And I see elsewhere that he's getting ready to turn it into a movie, too... Neat.

Interview Roundup: Handler, Boyle, Rosen

I'm a big, big fan of Daniel Handler, and so are many of the site's visitors, based on my server stats. So we'll all be thrilled by the NYT profile by Julie Salamon, which catches up with Handler as he promotes the latest Lemony Snicket book, an indie film that sets Rigoletto in a modern workplace, and the forthcoming Lemony Snicket flick. Among the interesting revelations is a discussion of how A Series of Unfortunate Events is influenced by Handler's family history; his father and grandmother fled Germany in 1938.

For me the central lesson, over and over again, was the sheer unaccountability of fate and where you might end up. That definitely drives the Snicket books. In a lot of children's books if you behave well you're rewarded and if you behave badly you're punished. But anybody who tells a story about getting out of a country by the skin of their teeth, it's not because they were braver or more charming or better people. It's because somebody looked the other way or didn't bother to search the hollowed out heel of a shoe.

The Newsweek interview with T.C. Boyle has been out for a while, but I'm still interested in his thoughts on Alfred Kinsey. "When people heard I was working on a book about Dr. Kinsey and sex," Boyle notes, "I think they immediately pictured something like The Road to Wellville where we’d have a slap-bang kind of comedy surrounding some bizarre medical treatments." Apparently it's not like that, and it though A.O. Scott was slightly disappointed in the "blurry, hasty, unfinished quality" of the novel, it certainly sounds like it'll be worth exploring at some point. (I have to confess that I'm only a sporadic Boyle reader, and have never really given him the sustained attention he no doubt deserves, but at least I feel guilty about it...)

Jonathan Rosen talks to Nextbook about his new novel, Joy Comes in the Morning, and he says that even though his wife is a rabbi, the female rabbi protagonist was actually more inspired by the character of Dinah in George Eliot's Adam Bede. He adds:

I was conscious of how unhelpful what are seen as traditional Jewish novels were in writing Joy, because they're all about the flight from religion, not an embrace or a dance with it. So many Jewish writers take ethnic definitions over religious definitions of the Jewish self. It's now at least possible to understand that there isn't such a great separation between the writer and the traditional Jewish world. You can move in and out of it.

Ted Kooser, You're My Hero

As poet laureate, don't you think you should be better acquainted with European poetry?

Think of all the European poetry I could have read if we hadn't spent all this time on this interview.

Finally, Deborah Solomon gets her comeuppance (yeah, I'm late in mentioning it, but Maud jogged my memory). My other favorite bit was Kooser's response to the question of what enrages him: "Hitting my thumb with a hammer or dropping a cement block on my foot."

Yes, But Was She Ever a Cornflake Girl?

Jennifer Weiner celebrates the publication of her third novel, Little Earthquakes, today, and the media blitz has already begun. She's told Literary Mama about the difficulties of writing for new mothers; "a baby definitely makes it harder, because at this point, she's always going to be the most interesting thing in the room, more fascinating by a long shot than whatever imaginary world I've got going on the computer." And she's spoken to Newsday how her original plans for a followup to Good in Bed and In Her Shoes were derailed by motherhood.

All this hoopla may have rubbed Janet Maslin the wrong way, as she snarls at the book's "three characters who are drawn together by the prospect of new motherhood and fascinated by every last aspect of childbirth." Once, she adds, Weiner's prose was "candy-colored and charming," but now it's just "more formulaic." Fortunately, the Internet lets authors have the last word these days, and Weiner snaps back on her blog:

[T]hat’s the typical reflexive, simplistic, sexist take on chick-lit for you: produced by women writers who aren’t smart or creative enough to see past their own eyelashes and create vivid imaginary worlds; consumed by women readers too stupid or silly or self-involved to even want to read about something that hasn’t already, or might someday, happen to them.

Interview Roundup: Hey Ladies

Bookslut gets a two-fer, landing interviews with Poppy Z. Brite and Cintra Wilson. "Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction," Brite reveals. "In other instances, it's food I dreamed up because I would like to eat it." (And as regular readers know, I'm a big fan, along with other readers.)

Wilson, meanwhile, reveals how difficult the transition from non-fiction to fiction can be:

It was really more like unbuckling my narrative screenplay voice, which has always been too wordy and “writerly,” from its structural bondage. You really don’t have any word-style freedom in a screenplay--they’re too time-restrictive; it’s all action, no adjectives. Screenplays did teach me how to keep a story from straying all over the place, though (hence the structural-formula chicken-wire around all the chapters--there for my own good, to prevent the very present risk of needing to herd 216 different tangential plot-cats at the end). But books are long, so you have enough rope to hang yourself with, too

Finally, she doesn't seem to have an actual book out, but you gotta admire former Playgirl editor turned playwright and monologuist Ronnie Koenig anyway, because you can only have trouble deciding whether you'd rather sleep with Alan Alda or Alyssa Milano if you've got a brilliant sensibility to begin with.

Blasphemous Suggestion: Could It Be the Book?

Elmore Leonard figures out the ending of his latest novel (The Hot Kid, apparently) as an Independent reporter sits by admiringly and learns which adaptations of his work Leonard can't stand:

He regards the 1969 version of The Big Bounce, starring Ryan O'Neal, as "the second worst movie ever made". The more recent version, with Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman, receives an even harsher verdict. Of the 1969 version, he says: "There must be a movie that's worse than this one, but I don't know what it is. Well, now I know! It's the remake. Heh heh heh."

(As for that blasphemous suggestion, heck, I dunno--The Big Bounce is one of those Leonards I haven't gotten around to yet. Though it's a bit hard for me to imagine a film that's worse than Valdez Is Coming...which was a good book. Anybody who has seen either one, feel free to comment!)

I'm Writing as Fast as I Can

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam broods about all those writers outpacing him, and decides they must be on drugs. The not-so-funny attempt at humor starts off with a retread of the attacks on Lance Armstrong and goes steadily downhill from there. Wonkette already spotted the best line in the piece, a sarcastic response from David Brooks, who isn't even all that prolific:

"I would explain my high productivity by my desperate loneliness and my pathetic sadness that causes me work to extreme lengths to fill the hollow void that is my life."

Also, Tiberius Had No Subconscious

Gore Vidal is leaving Ravello, and Joseph Giovanni (NYT) watches him close the old palazzo down, drawing imperial comparisons:

"We have a lot in common," said Mr. Vidal, his mordant wit already primed as he faced a morning's portion of granola earlier this month. To a point. Unlike Tiberius, the Roman emperor who clung to his palace above the cobalt-blue waters until his mysterious death, Mr. Vidal is letting go, selling his 5,000-square-foot villa after 30 years, to move permanently to his other house, in Hollywood. Eat your heart out, Tiberius.

I suppose I could try to link this up to yesterday's Seneca joke, but I've got to run to make a movie on time. Enjoy your weekend, people!

Interview Roundup: Hipster Sluts and Right-Wing Nuts

Gawker continues its excellent 5x5 interview series by chatting with Jardin Libaire--you may recall ages ago when I went to see her read at KGB from her debut novel, Here Kitty Kitty, the protagonist of which apparently has a kindred spirit in The Ginger Man: "I was so inspired that the main character was an asshole. But a wicked, lustful, brilliantly funny asshole. Chick lit is so full of politeness and the desire to please; it was fulfilling and exciting to be rude in the genre, to make a controversial figure that could be disliked."

Robert Birnbaum lingers with Kent Haruf and they wind up discussing his treatment by the Times, specifically the "smart-ass" review that accused him of writing the same book twice, a take he dubs "a quintessential hip cynical eastern view of things." His novels, then, are celebrated in the interview as a bracing antidote to East Coast hipster fiction, an assessment with which the author tentatively agrees:

There is nothing in these books that I am trying to write that is cynical or satiric or ironic. I am not interested in that. There is a place for that. But in my view that is a kind of easy out. You are not really trying to talk about the human condition, which is what I am after. I am trying to talk about, to write about the kind of universal problems that people have everywhere. And I am not interested in being hip or paying any attention to technology or any of that stuff. None of these characters ever talk about cell phones or computers or any of that.

I'm pretty sure you can use satire and irony (and maybe even cynicism) to talk about the human condition and universal problems, actually, and you can even do it with stories set in New York. And I'm definitely sure that East Coast hipster fiction isn't obsessed with technology, though East Coast hipster science fiction might be. Not that there's anything wrong with homespun sincerity: authors like Jan Karon and Phillip Gulley do just fine by it and for all I know Haruf might, too. (Let's see, do I still have that galley of Eventide floating around...?)

BoingBoing recalls a 2003 interview with George Lakoff, one of the popularizers of the language-as-metaphor approach, in which he applied his theories to the contemporary political scene, examining the ability of conservatives to frame issues in ways that serve their agendas. Well, there he goes again:

Conservatives have branded liberals, and the liberals let them get away with it: the "liberal elite," the "latte liberals," the "limousine liberals." The funny thing is that conservatives are the elite. The whole idea of conservative doctrine is that some people are better than others, that some people deserve more.

Interview Roundup

The San Francisco Chronicle talks to Laurenn McCubbin, whose blog I visit from time to time--and whose illustrations for Rent Girl, a graphic novel collaboration with Michelle Tea, I'm looking forward to seeing soon.

A naked girl can't help but be sexy -- there is something inherently sexy about a girl wearing lingerie, in certain poses ... but I don't draw them to get men off. I've had a male friend say, 'Damn you, Laurenn, you've ruined girl-on-girl action for me!'... I don't know. I do want people to think about what they're looking at.

David Lodge tells Telegraph operator Julia Llewellyn how he got into Henry James' head while writing his latest novel, Author, Author, and the more personal struggles he's faced raising a son with Down's syndrome. Of the latter experience, he admits, "I don't think I could have coped with a child who was very, very seriously handicapped... Some people rise heroically to the challenge, but I'm afraid I would feel that artist's splinter of ice."

And David Mitchell, whose Cloud Atlas I'm going to read damn soon, gets into it with the WaPo Book World crew, declaring, "I can't claim that Don DeLillo's monumental Underworld is a model for Cloud Atlas, but reading him always encourages me (like drinking) to take literary risks."

Lance Iversen/Chronicle

More from the Sex-Mad Gray Lady

"Hearst invented the tabloid on the ample back of Fatty Arbuckle," Mr. Stahl said. "He made Virginia Rappe into this virginal victim, when in fact she had given half the Keystone Cops gonorrhea and the other half lice and had been a prostitute since she was 14. People love to see a hero squirming and kicked in the face, because they hated the fact he was partying on a weekday afternoon and they had to work for a living."

Jerry Stahl gives up the goods to NYT reporter Andréa Vaucher.

Two Liberals Sitting Around Talking

I got to interview Hendrik Hertzberg a few months ago for Publishers Weekly; I'd link to it if it was available online, because it was an awfully fun conversation, but I can't. And I'd link to the review of Politics, which is available on Amazon, but it was "balanced" somewhere in the editing chain and no longer quite reflects my sentiments. Specifically, the articles do not "feel distant given the pace of current events;" Hertzberg's a dynamic enough writer (and, perhaps more importantly, reporter) that his work carries a sense of immediacy even when he's describing a political reality a few iterations removed from the contemporary scene.

Anyway, now Robert Birnbaum has got to chatting with Hertzberg. He gets to tell the story of the book's genesis that got cut from my draft due to space considerations, but mostly there's a lot of analysis of the current political climate:

Maybe it’s a failure of imagination but I don’t fully understand why people are attracted to hard-right conservatism. If they are so far off into fantasyland that they believe in a God that interferes in history at every moment and that that God is a right winger who is active in the pro-life movement and in the anti-tax movement, then I can kind of understand that. Then you are thinking, “There is a big authority figure out there who’s got a list of dos and don’ts and I have to obey them.” But for the neo-cons and for other kinds of conservatives I just don’t really get it. I don’t understand why they want to take from the poor and give to the rich. It’s just so unattractive.

Except that things really get interesting once Hertzberg starts weighing in on what's been happening to NYTBR and that punk Stanley Crouch.

There's a "Gray Lady" Joke to Be Made, But Not By Me

Over the weekend, the NYT chats with Laura Lippmann and Zane. The latter doesn't really have much to say, though Ginia Bellafante does put forward the idea that "though written no more artfully than romance fiction, [Zane's novels] are more sociologically complex," though the only evidence that seems to be offered for that claim is that Zane's an African-American writer writing what one academic has called "identity erotica" about African-Americans. Bellafante's dismissal of the rest of the genre is of a piece with the Book Babe slam noted recently, or last month's Sacha Zimmerman slam, or...well, take your pick of ill-informed romance/chick lit dismissals.

Aspiring Authors, Don't Worry About Your Jitters

The Internet Review of Science Fiction gets on the phone with Clive Barker, who hasn't let decades of success completely destroy that nagging fear at the back of every writer's mind:

Of course, there are days when you feel a little more confident and up, but there are days when I'm showering, thinking about the work ahead, and having strong doubts about it. It's not that I don't like doing it—I do like doing it—but I want to do it at the top of my game. One of the reasons why I have moved consistently from one area of the fantastic—the world of horror—to the creation of fantastic worlds, Weaveworld, Imajica, etc., and then into illustration and fantasy for children, and a few more things that have come down the pipe, and which have gone superbly. None of the reasons I've done that is to keep that challenge going, to always have that doubt in myself in the morning, because that's part of what makes the work good. I don't want the blood to dry through repetition. When we put the first Abarat book out a couple of years ago, I was absolutely as anxious as I was when I first put out a book twenty years before, because it's a new area for me, and my inspiration might be misled, and who knows what people would say? I think, for me, and I can only speak for myself, the elements of the subgenres have a way in which they keep me on my toes.

To that end, he completely overhauled the second volume in the Abarat quartet after looking at the galley proofs and deciding that it was all wrong, thus throwing out a year's worth of work.

Interview Roundup

Rachel Kramer Bussel chats with Ned Vizzini for Gothamist, soliciting the declaration, "I genuinely envy the NYC writing community, they remind me of the dorks and rejects I hung out with in high school."

Lawrence Weschler tells Sandra Martin of The Globe and Mail why he hates most celebrity profiles and how much fun it was working for William Shawn at The New Yorker. I've always been a fan of Weschler's work, much of which I reviewed for Amazon when I was there, and greatly enjoyed reading his latest collection, Vermeer in Bosnia, while prepping for a PW interview I'd love to link to but can't, in which we talked about many of the same things he shares with Martin, including his swell new magazine, Omnivore.

Apparently, He Doesn't Have that Telltale Lisp

Salon gets into it with J.L. King, who "might not look gay, talk gay or act gay--but he does have sex with men." Mind you, I know what reporter Whitney Joiner means by the first half of that remark, but I'm still tempted to ask, well, what exactly does s/he mean? How do you "talk gay," anyhow? King's On the Down Low doesn't answer that question, but it does give African-American women a crash course on how to catch their boyfriends and husbands having sex with other guys.

Interview Roundup

The Harvard Crimson tracks down Nieman fellow Susan Orlean, who gave a lecture to a bunch of summer school students. Meanwhile, Ploughshares chats with Amy Bloom. And NYTBR talks with Orhan Pamuk as an accompaniment to the cover review of his latest novel, Snow.

Interview Roundup

I've mentioned my enthusiasm for Old Boys and Charles McCarry before in these pages, so it will come as not surprise that I'm enthused to read Robert Birnbaum's chat with McCarry. Right off the bat, I learned that he co-wrote Don Regan's memoirs, so we partially have McCarry to thank for the revelations about Ronald Reagan being our first New Age president.

The conversation itself is highly interesting, beginning with McCarry's claim that he never met a conservative intelligence agent:

They were, at least in the operations side where I was, there were wall-to-wall knee-jerk liberals. And they were befuddled that the left outside the agency regarded them as some sort of right-wing threat. Because they were the absolute opposite, in their own politics.

He also confirms what others have mentioned in comments here about Overlook's plans to reissue the backlist, quite possibly as early as September. Count me in!

Meanwhile, in the Believer, Susan Choi chats with Francisco Goldman.

I Had a Leon Wieseltier Joke Here,
But I Couldn't Write It Snappy Enough

Dale Peck turns up in the Gothamist interview section, commenting on the condition in which our republic of letters finds itself:

I think anyone who wants to write a book should do so; and anyone who can get a book published should be happy. It’s a fine thing to get paid for, and anyone who does it seriously can at the very least learn something about themselves. The problem with contemporary writing isn’t the number of third-rate books being published, but the number of third-rate books that are being passed off as first-rate by a publishing and literary community that’s so terrified of losing its place in “the culture,” as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace would put it, that it has to resort to special pleading to sell its wares. Used car salesmen are able to get away with selling lemons because they think they can bank on the ignorance of their customers—most of whom don’t know what a carburetor is—let alone that most cars don’t have them anymore. Most contemporary readers are equally unknowledgeable, especially when it comes to the esoteric vagaries of haute fictional traditions—and so have to rely on some kind of endorsement that such-and-such book is good.

Revisiting Truth and Beauty

Lucy Grealy's sister lets Guardian readers know she isn't thrilled with Ann Patchett's account of her friendship with the dead author, and she makes her displeasure personal:

My sister Lucy was a uniquely gifted writer. Ann, not so gifted, is lucky to be able to hitch her wagon to my sister's star. I wish Lucy's work had been left to stand on its own.

Setting aside my disagreement with her assessment of Patchett's considerable gift as a novelist, my primary reaction to this piece is ultimately one of discomfort. If we accept as a starting premise that a nonfiction piece forces the reader to make a judgment about its validity, this particular piece forces readers to pass judgment not just on Grealy's propositions but on the validity of her emotional judgments. And that's not a very comfortable place for readers, no matter what they think of Grealy's feelings once they've read the article.

Interview Roundup

Robert Ferrigno, one of my favorite "crime novelists" ever since The Horse Latitudes, has been filling in for Sarah the last few days, but before he started blogging he found time to chat with the National Review about his latest, The Wake-Up. There, he explains one of the reasons I've always gravitated to his stories:

None of my protagonists are cops, and there is little official police presence. This began instinctively and has since become quite deliberate, as a reflection of the moral imperative of my fictional universe. I don't like characters who are required to do the right thing as part of their job descriptions — so no cops, no firefighters, no crusading attorneys. I prefer the individual who is confronted with a moral choice and, out of his own free will, does the right thing. The fact that the consequences of such action are that things are frequently made worse is part of the moral conundrum.

Meanwhile, John Wray makes me very jealous by getting to speak with another of my favorite writers, Haruki Murakami, for The Paris Review. And, perhaps oddly enough but then again perhaps not, hard-boiled fiction is again a central topic of discussion. Robert Birnbaum's at it again, too, this time with Andrei Codrescu, but they don't have anything to say about pulp or noir or any of that good stuff.

Making Something Out of "The Prince of Nothing"

R. Scott Bakker chats with SFF World about The Darkness That Comes Before, the first volume in his new fantasy series, "The Prince of Nothing."

When you build a world, what you’re doing, it seems to me, is taking a lifetime of shared cultural and historical associations and sculpting them into different shapes. When writing contemporary fiction, you simply say ‘New York’ and all the associations come ready made. But when you say, ‘Carythusal’ or ‘Nenciphon,’ the words are meaningless. The fantasy author really has one of the most difficult jobs in fiction: he or she has to make the meaningless deep with meaning --the more authentic the better, as far as I’m concerned. This is one of the things, I think, that makes Tolkien such a genius.

Some fantasy authors, Guy Kay comes to mind here, take things ‘ready-made’ from that quarry of shared associations. The advantage is that much of the work is already accomplished: once the reader realizes that Sarantium is an alternate Constantinople, the associational image is immediate and clear. Others mine the collective quarry in a more eclectic, fragmentary, or mysterious fashion--here the work can be more difficult, since nothing comes ready-made. Because my interest lies in exploring and extending the conventions of Tolkienesque epic fantasy, I followed his ‘middle approach,’ making use of fragmentary but still extensive parallels, drawing primarily on the Hellenistic Mediterranean, which I find so interesting because of its inclusion of the far more ancient contexts of Egyptian and Sumerian societies. I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.

There's a lot of other great earned wisdom about storytelling and getting through the years before acceptance and publication in the interview, as well as some thoughtful reflections on science fiction and fantasy, so do make your way through all the pages.

Meltzer Brings About DC's Latest "Crisis"

Brad Meltzer gets profiled (briefly) in the Forward for his latest comic book, Identity Crisis, about which more here. I read the first issue when it came out last month, and was impressed by how completely Meltzer had carried over his book-writing style to the comics medium, as well as the levels of fanboy geekdom--I mean, it takes some doing to launch a series your publisher says will shake up the entire "universe" and center the first issue around Ralph "Elongated Man" Dibny.

I admit I am a little bit curious about just how canonical the series will actually turn out to be, as it seems to take place in a DCU that's both post-Crisis (all the heroes exist in one timeline on one Earth) and pre-Crisis (all sorts of heroes know Superman as "Clark," which I'm pretty sure hasn't been the case for years). But maybe that's just a sign of how out of the loop I ordinarily am, that the rules have changed and I haven't kept track. Though the notes in that last link indicate there's room for a lot of questions and I'm not the only one asking...

Moving to the Top of the Beatrice Reading Pile...

I actually was pretty excited to get my advance copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell at BookExpo last month, and I'm not terribly surprised to see the momentum for Susanna Clarke building, with a NYT magazine profile nearly two months before the official pub date. And though I know the focus is all on her, there's one aspect of her personal life with science-fiction critic Colin Greenland (who "discovered" her in one of his classes) that I wouldn't hearing more about:

She fell in love with Greenland and coaxed him up to Cambridge from London, where he had been living for years in a house known for having no heating and being a sort of colony for science-fiction writers.

Anybody know which ones? Comment away!

Lucky 7 on NYT Fiction List for Dickey

Though I became a fan of Eric Jerome Dickey a few years back, I'd lost track of his most recent books, so it was a pleasant surprise to see Felicia R. Lee's profile in today's Times as his latest novel, Driving Me Crazy, is about to hit the paper of record's bestseller list.

Look for the Puppet Show at Comic Con 2005

Newsarama has an interview with Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey about Carey's adaptation (with artist Glenn Fabry) of Gaiman's novel Neverwhere--which was itself based on a miniseries he scripted for the BBC--to be published this fall by Vertigo, the DC "mature readers" line that introduced Gaiman to America's cool kids via Sandman a lot longer ago than I care to dwell on, what with having had a birthday recently and all. Says Carey:

“It's like being called in to add a new wing to a stately home: you're always going to worry about how your efforts are going to look when they're part of that whole. But so much of working in comics is like that, and so much of the enterprise has always been collaborative and cumulative in exactly that way. We're all of us standing on the shoulders of giants, throughout most of our creative lives. You get used to it, without--I hope--ever getting blasé or casual about it.”

The Talking Points Have Been Distributed...

...and July 26th will pretty much be M.J. Rose Day in the literary blogosphere, as all sorts of bookbloggers invite her on board to post about, well, whatever she wants, I suppose. Just check out some of the usual suspects to the right of my home page if you don't stumble upon her in your own daily browsing. I've gotten in on the action myself, by subjecting her to a "5 Questions With..." interview.

Thank God It Was a Phone Call;
Imagine the Fawning That Might Have Gone On In Person

I'm all for comic books, as any regular reader can attest, but today's "interview" with Alan Moore in Salon falls way, way over on the wrong side of the line that separates literary critics from fanboys, as this "question" indicates:

To shift gears a little, my contention in this article is that it's pretty much undisputed that you're the heavyweight champion of comics, but that you should also be considered among the world's literary greats, up there with Pynchon and DeLillo, because of what you do with language and narrative.

"What you do with language?" Come, now, the ironic juxtaposition of caption and image isn't that profound an innovation that we have to start bandying about names like Pynchon and DeLillo. I think Moore actually comes a little bit closer to the truth when he invokes Michael Moorcock as an author with "no chance of ever being given literary respectability because he has dabbled in ignored, disregarded and, some would argue, frankly juvenile comics or fantasy." Not to spin out a metaphor too elaborately, but let's say Moore's like Moorcock in a field that was previously dominated by Asimovs and Heinleins.

That said, I think a lot of his most recent work, and though I wouldn't dream of suggesting that artists shouldn't have political opinions, I would've found it much more useful for an article that claims such literary prowess on an author's part to focus on the literature rather than run through a fairly predictable take on the war and terror and other Bush misadventures.

It's a New York Press Reunion

Jonathan Ames chats with George Tabb about the latter's memoir, in which the classic father-son relationship comes up for much discussion...

I started writing stories about him while he was still alive. Just to get it out of my head and on paper. Truthfully, as mean as this sounds, I wish he was still alive to read this book. To face himself in my mirror, and see what I saw. I still dream about wanting to kill him. In fact, the cover illustration for the book is a reproduction of a drawing I did for the school shrink in second grade. After coming to school with black eyes and stuff, they asked me to draw a picture of "Mommy, Daddy and Me." That's what I gave them. They called my father into the school, where he told me that if I ever drew something like that again, he wouldn't just chop me up, he'd use a chainsaw to make it hurt more.

Click on the cover to buy this Soft Skull release (hi, Richard!) from Booksense. And check out this interview Sarah Stodola did with Ames for Me Three; it's been noted on the bookblogs before, but it's worth your attention.

Robert Birnbaum's Been Busy

One of the literary blogosphere's favorite content generators kicks into overdrive this week, running a chat with Alice Randall on his personal site, Identity Theory, and talks with critic James Wood for The Morning News. Randall's second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, has taken some heat, but the conversation is mostly spent on various extraliterary racial matters, some of which led to the writing of her first novel, The Wind Done Gone, the parody that got Margaret Mitchell's estate all riled up:

To give a specific example, in Japan, where Gone with the Wind is immensely popular, when there were black service men on trial for rape of a Japanese woman in Japan, shortly after this litigation began, what was most likely to influence the perceptions of the Japanese public about those men was what they had read in Gone with the Wind.

Randall's somewhat disingenuous here, as the perceptions of the Japanese public in that case were just as likely to have been influenced by a history of American soldiers raping Okinawan women that dates back to the years immediately following the Second World War, and a 1995 incident in which three African-American soldiers pled guilty to raping a 12-year-old Okinawan would certainly have been more at the forefront of the Japanese cultural memory than some old movie in which every single African-American male was (if I'm recalling correctly) too subservient to even think about committing violence against a woman, let alone rape her.

The conversation with Wood, on the other hand, is hyperliterary, with passages like this par for the course:

The male sentimentality I have been talking about is—well, for instance the stories in [Ford’s] Rock Springs. I found too often that Ford relies on a moment of male violence to create the form to his stories, to close them off. Somebody hitting somebody. The last one that was in the New Yorker, somebody driving their car over a—I suppose the Chekhovian ideal, it’s not quite that nothing should happen in a story because actually Chekhov’s stories are full of deaths and births and all sorts of tragedies. I’ll put it this way: When Virginia Woolf read Chekhov she said something like, “The emphasis falls on such unexpected places so that you hardly realize that it is an emphasis at all.” And that’s what I very much love about Chekhov is this extraordinary subtlety and unpredictability. That the sentimental moment [pauses] is always avoided, just at the last second. So I find in Ford’s stories the emphasis falls too sharply and obviously, often on violence. But he is a fine writer, there is no doubt about that.

Though I think he's just adding that bit at the end so Ford doesn't spit on him at the next cocktail party.

And You Thought Your Revision Process Was Tough

John Irving explains to The Globe and Mail why he's completely rewriting a novel he just sold to Random House four months ago:

"I don't normally like the first-person voice and I can't even remember what rationale led me to think this had to be a first-person novel, but for the five years I've been writing it, it was. And just one morning I woke up and thought: 'Shit. It's not right.' And it's already bought, you know? And I said: 'Well, too bad.' "

If Dale Peck Dug Into His CD Collection

Ever since my copy showed up last week, I've been dipping into the essays in Kill Your Idols, a collection of critical reevaluations of the "greatest" rock albums of all time. I'd been given a heads-up about the book by Dawn Eden, who contributes one of the better essays I've read so far, deflating the mystique that's built up around Brian Wilson's never-finished Smile. So far I haven't always agreed with the critics--I happen to like Imperial Bedroom--and some of their choices just strike me as odd; does anybody really care enough about Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram that the record needs correcting? But it's certainly entertaining.

Co-editor Jim DeRogatis spoke with Mediabistro about how he and his wife, Carmél Carrillo, came to put this all together:

It took a long time to sell. I sent the proposal out for a while, and I got, invariably, "Nobody wants to read a book all of negative reviews." And I felt that was kind of a crock. Roger Ebert has always been one of my heroes, and one of my favorite books of his is I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It's all of his worst pans, and it's very funny.

Fortunately for DeRogatis, now that his book tour's left the New York metropolitan area, he--unlike Dale Peck--probably won't have to worry about getting punched in the face by Stanley Crouch. Especially since nobody in the anthology disses Branford Marsalis' work on Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles. (Carrillo hates on "Russians," but doesn't distribute the blame beyond Sting...)

Science Fiction: An Unreliable Barometer?

Gothamist features an interview with Brian Bienowski, associate editor of Asimov's Science Fiction:

I think SF functions like a muse for would-be scientists. Isaac Asimov wrote about robots, some brainy kid loved the stories and went into robotics. It really seems to be just that simple, sometimes. The science and the fiction influence each other in turn; it’s a two-way street. SF gets credit for presaging scientific advancements, and it certainly has, but I think it’s more from the shotgun approach to futurism. Look at classic SF that featured robots, Scientology, cold-fusion powered cities, and hyper-drives. Three of those four concepts are currently bullshit (though the last two are, at the time of writing, unlikely possibilities). If that SF-gypsy fortune-teller told me I was going to get hit by a milk truck tomorrow, I’d take my chances on the street.

Now, maybe I'm not just as well read on the Golden Age stuff as I once thought I was, but what "classic SF" actually featured Scientology? Hubbard's fanciful Dianetics ideas did appear in Astounding as nonfiction, and apparently A.E. van Vogt once ran a Dianetics center, but did any writers take Hubbard seriously enough to incorporate his ideas, or his later religion, into their sci-fi universes? To the best of my admittedly incomplete knowledge, no.

Star Power

Rachel Kramer Bussel interviews Elise Miller about her chick-lit novel, Star Craving Mad, which apparently includes at least one celebrity sex scene drawn (at least in part) from real life.

Which gives me a chance to plug another novel about young women and celebrity obsession from earlier this year: Emmi Fredericks' Fatal Distraction. Fun stuff, and I was particularly amused by the pop-up "facts" and "aerobics of celebrity spotting" sprinkled throughout. It came out back in February, but it strikes me as an excellent summer read, so go ahead and see if your bookstore still has or can get a copy for you.

Quotable Gottlieb

Publishers Lunch readers have already seen this, but it's worth highlighting again and again. I've been a sort of fan of Robert Gottlieb for a while, ever since his brief stint at The New Yorker, in part because of his excellent sense of perspective on the whole crazy business of publishing:

"The real difference this is going to make to me is that if I'd died a year ago it would have said, 'Editor of Catch-22 Dies,' and now it's going to say 'Editor of Clinton's Memoirs Dies,'." he says dryly. "And I'm not going to be around to know about it."

Now Even the Websites Are Falling Behind the Blogs

Mediabistro has a new interview with Swink founding editrix Leelila Strogov, taking a more industry-oriented tack--unsurprising; after all, this is a media resource site--than the conversation she had with Mark Sarvas a few weeks ago for The Elegant Variation.

Of course, you all might be reading Swink anyway, because it's a good magazine with good fiction, but you'll only find Maud Newton's "Post-Extraction" online. I've heard her read it, and it's definitely something you should check out.

Science Fiction? Lad Lit?
It'll All Boil Down to Marketing

Professor Barnhardt's Journal interviews Ned Vizzini, whose new novel, Be More Chill, revolves around the plot device of the squip, :an ingestible quantum computer that gives you real time social advice."

Basically, it's a pill that makes you cool. You eat it; its coating dissolves in your system and it sidles up to your neurons to communicate directly with your brain, telling you what to wear, how to act, whom to be friends with and whom to ignore.

I kinda liked this concept when it involved putting software cartridges into the back of your head in George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, one of my favorite science fiction novels of the 1980s. But it'll be interesting to see what 21st-century twists Vizzini has added in.

He Won't Like It, He Hates Everything! (Not!)

BookExpo is long gone, but the Book Babes are still getting columns out of it. Today they offer highlights of their conversation with Dale Peck, in a mellow mood, as he talks about what he does like:

I have a great admiration for commercial writers like Stephen King and Danielle Steele. One of the reason why their books do so well is because they believe in what they're doing. They do not dress it up. Especially Stephen King. There is something vital about the way people respond to his work. And he should be proud of that. I've read 20 Stephen King novels and have never seen one that it seemed that he phoned in. When I was a little kid, I was a big fan of Danielle Steele. I would always steal my sister's book.

But their headline's a bit misleading, as Peck doesn't so much "bury the hatchet" as make one more effort to explain what he was doing in all those negative reviews, only this time without Carlin Romano firing back at him.

Lord of Illusions

Thanks to the spiffily redesigned BoingBoing for its link to the Smithsonian profile of magician and author Ricky Jay, whose own website includes "Secrets of the Magus," another profile written several years ago by Mark Singer for The New Yorker. Don't forget to visit the archives of his radio show, as Jay has one of the best speaking styles in show biz, in this blogger's opinion.

The Lehrer/Lehrer Report

About a month ago, WaPo took note of Kate Lehrer's fiction. Today, Aileen Jacobson of Newsday gets in on the act, but with the added development that Lehrer's on a joint book tour with her husband, Jim. The newsanchor/novelist is secure about his wife's latest novel, Confessions of a Bigamist:

"The fact is, I'm just so delighted with what she's done," says Jim Lehrer. "You realize that she's kind of pushed the envelope in a very interesting way. A man bigamist is almost a cliche, a woman bigamist is not," he says. "The heat that I am taking, mostly from friends. ... I can deal with that. With joy."

It's good to see the woman-with-two-spouses theme treated as something other than supernatural farce, that's for sure.

Interview Roundup

Heidi Benson of the San Francisco Chronicle considers Rebecca Solnit and the print publication of Hope in the Dark, a progressive call to stand fast (excerpted here) that made the rounds online last spring.

Yann Martel's conversation with Graeme Smith of The Globe and Mail has been raising eyebrows on several other literary blogs, due to Martell's somewhat tactless acceptance of the burden of success: "You get used to anything... You can get used to living in a concentration camp and you can get used to seeing your book at airports." Even if, as Smith helpfully points out, "he's got concentration camps on his mind as he tries to write his fourth novel, an allegory for the Holocaust about a monkey and a donkey who wander through a magical world afflicted by horrors," common sense in metaphor choices did seem to fly out the window.

Yes, the Boston Globe piece on Philip Pullman starts in 2000; no, your calendar doesn't need adjusting. And, actually, it's more of an appreciation than an interview or profile, but certainly worth looking at all the same.

Maud Newton emailed Stephen Elliott back and forth about writing as part of the interview series that used to be called "Making Book," eliciting a good argument for not judging a writer too soon:

I think the focus we have on first books is just awful. People generally improve as they get older. You learn how to write from writing. I think it's too bad for a lot of authors that the book the most people are going to read and what's going to determine their career is their first one and oftentimes if that book doesn't work out the author is written off.

Tom Piston/Independent

Behind the Scenes at Swink

The Elegant Variation runs an interview with Leelila Strogov, the editor of recently launched literary mag Swink. Great piece, but difficult to excerpt effectively, so just go read it.

Heartburn, Bouncing Roller Coasters...Oh, This Sounds Fun

David Mehegan of the Boston Globe takes an in-depth look at Alice Randall, showing some sympathy for the author whose latest novel, Pushkin & the Queen of Spades was panned hard early on. Later reviewers have been noticeably kinder; Barbara Lloyd McMichael of the Seattle Times calls it "intentionally provocative stuff, designed to open your eyes and make your heart burn," while Yvette Blackman of the Associated Press compares reading the novel to "riding the Cyclone at Coney Island, bouncing high along a track you're not totally comfortable with because it shakes you up."

The interview revisits the whole The Wind Done Gone controversy as a buildup to the real-life tangle of emotional and racial issues informing the new novel, in which "the first sentence of the book--'Look what they done to my boy!'--paraphrases the grieved comment of Mamie Till Bradley in 1955, at the funeral of her lynched teenager Emmett Till: 'Let them see what they have done to my boy.'" Now, having admittedly not read the book, I couldn't say for sure, but based on my limited knowledge of its plot, comparing a successful college football player who's about to happily marry a Russian woman to Emmett Till seems a bit tactless, if not tasteless. Randall's subsequent descent into handwaving psychocliché isn't much more appealing:

"As much as I love blackness and cultural blackness, I really felt the tug of Tanya's love for Pushkin. My ex-husband, after our divorce, married someone who is white. What does that tell my daughter, particularly when 50 percent of black, college-educated women are not getting married today who want to get married? I worry about that, but ultimately we must treat everyone's erotic-romantic choices as their own. I have to move to accept love where it is seen." Writing the book taught her "to allow my child to make her own choices, and to allow black men to make their own choices."

First I've ever heard of that "50 percent" statistic...if you know where she got it from, be sure to mention it in the comments section, eh? You might also explain to me what all these alleged spinsters have to do with her ex-husband, but I don't want to ask for too much.

Hand Over the Keyes

I mentioned Marian Keyes a while back; she's actually one of my favorite chick-lit authors, a fun mix of quick readability and emotional plausibility--that is, her protagonists act and react in ways a bit more believable than the women in some of her peers' novels. The Other Side of the Story is "her best book to date," India Knight tells Telegraph readers, which means I should probably move it a little higher on my to-read pile.

It is far more tightly plotted and better paced than its predecessors, it has texture and form in spades, it had me in tears more than once and, very often, it had me barking with laughter.

Meanwhile, Emma Hagestadt of The Independent chats with Keyes about "her most technically ambitious novel," and elicits a solid summary of her collected output:

"In 1994, when I first started writing, there was no mainstream literature that articulated the unique concerns and confusions of the post-feminist woman. I think chick-lit really helped define who we were. It focused on huge concerns about body image, and talked about our relationship with food, money, and work."

(The photo, by the way, comes from a Sydney Morning Herald reprint of a Guardian profile.)

Ah, But If It Came Back, Would You Cringe?

Nearly two months ago, Beatrice featured Rebecca Wolff and her latest collection of poems, Figment. Today Maud Newton's weekend fill-in, Stephany, points out a new Wolff interview in Poets&Writers:

I graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1993, at the age of 23, and at that time I had what I thought was going to be my first book. But by the time I actually put together what became my first book in 2001, it contained almost nothing from that time. It was all gone.

Building an Audience One Reader at a Time

I finally got around to Robert Birnbaum's interview with Jim Harrison this morning, and was intrigued by the extent to which the conversation dwells upon what is presented as Harrison's comparative obscurity:

My type of writer gains an audience by accretion. I don’t think it’s advertising or anything. Why do I read things? It’s basically word of mouth. Some friend or someone I know whose taste I respect says, “You gotta read this.” Then I read it. I rarely read or buy a book because of a review. I had noticed, it’s interesting, it’s getting a little more like France here, which is curious. There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can’t tell you why. I certainly don’t have a pop audience or a strictly literary audience. It’s all spread out. But that was very gradually acquired.

Also of note: the discussion's transition from the Unabomber to Richard Slotkin, one of my favorite historians...so much so that my grad school rat pack used to sketch out plans for a Chow Yun-Fat Western we'd call Gunfighter Nation. Here's a radio interview Slotkin did in 2001.

Tea Time

Rachel Kramer Bussel chats with Michelle Tea about the queer-themed fiction she's written and edited in recent years. Apparently Tea was floating around in Chicago while I was there last weekend, but our paths never crossed--though I did fleetingly meet Laurenn McCubbin, her collaborator on the graphic novel Rent Girl.

I just hope that people are smart enough to realize if they’re reading a person’s perspective they’re not getting anything else but that one person’s perspectives. I feel like if anyone thinks that they’re reading the archetypal lesbian experience that every lesbian experience in America is having, then they’re kindof dumb, and I don’t really concern myself with trying to fix that problem, because that’s probably a problem they’re having in their entire life, do you know I mean?

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That
(yes, it's a terribly lazy headline, I know)

Allison Burnett, straight guy, wrote a novel narrated by "a witty, erudite, chemically imbalanced, alcoholic, predatory, middle-aged gay man named B.K. Troop," and soon everyone thought he was gay. He tells Mediabistro readers about trying to enjoy the critical reception while worrying about living a lie.

Think You Know Dick?

David Roel has put up a batch of MP3s of an interview with Philip K. Dick. Hear the science fiction master's thoughts on Heinlein, Jung, Vonnegut, and a host of other subjects...plus whatever weirdass movie he was watching on TV at the time (though I have no idea when that might have been, or where).

Brigid Hughes' Dialogue

...with blogger extraordinaire Maud Newton, that is. Hughes, the recently appointed executive editor of The Paris Review discusses the magazine's slush pile policies and the effort to discover new writers:

Talking with new writers--good writers--I've been surprised by how many say they don't submit to the bigger little magazines because they don't think their work will be given serious consideration. It's frustrating, and an attitude I'd really like to change.

Don't Buy a Book, Judge the Cover

The Onion A.V. Club sits down with Chip Kidd to discuss how he creates book covers, why he digs Batman, and the universality of Charles Schulz:

Here's the one cartoonist that pretty much everybody can agree on. Here's the cartoonist that's beloved by both Dan Clowes and my mother. I can't think of anybody else that could fit that description. It's edgy and neurotic in a timeless way, and it's heartwarming and sweet to other people—to the greater global population, I guess you would say. There's just some great common denominator. After doing this book, I don't think I encountered anybody who said to me, "Oh, I never got Peanuts," or "I wasn't into it," the sole exception being my boyfriend.

Said boyfriend, J.D. McClatchy, "was too busy with Trollope to be all that interested in Peanuts," along with running Yale's creative writing department and editing The Yale Review. So maybe he's a Doonesbury man?

"It's kind of refreshing,
being able to have literary conversations..."

Jonathan Curiel interviews Diana Abu-Jaber for the San Francisco Chronicle as she tours for the paperback release of Crescent--and she's happier this time around to actually talk about the novel, instead of being dragged into the political discussions around its publication last year, in the early months of the invasion of Iraq. This Fresh Air show from April 2003 bucked the trend for the most part; another conversation for Aljadid is quite interesting as well.

New Yorkers can see Abu-Jaber at Alwan for the Arts on June 2 and Coliseum Books on June 3.

The Book's Called The Rope Eater,
And I'm Probably Remiss For Not Reading It Yet

Like Mark says, I'd plug Robert Birnbaum's interview with Ben Jones even if he hadn't said nice things about my blog.

It's interesting for me because I haven’t traveled to the Arctic. To me the Arctic was always the most interesting as a landscape for the imagination. The ice is the ice, and there isn’t land, and it’s not rooted in the land, and the transformation that it goes through makes it sort of timeless and incredibly transitory. For me, when I talk to people who have traveled a lot in the Arctic, they say, "Oh, you really described this well." I think that’s great. [laughs] Lucky me.

Maybe Wolfe Needed to Lift Weights

The Elegant Variation uncovers an interview with Henry Rollins about his admiration of Thomas Wolfe, which isn't confined to the prose:

You see all these photos of Wolfe, and he's just standing there in these clothes that it looked like he had already grew out of. You want to ask, "What, did he grow since this morning?" It's like he couldn't find the right tailor, and if he moves his arm, he's going to tear his jacket. He looks like the kind of guy that would knock over the water pitcher to get to the potatoes at a dinner table... He'd want to eat all the food, drink all the water, say all the words and hear all the stories. And then, he'd want to run back and write 5,000 words about dinner.

Not That Auctions Aren't Poetic

Dinitia Smith (NYT) meets Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, co-authors of that hot, hot novel The Rule of Four, soon to be the third-bestselling hardcover fiction in the land. Warning: She pretty much gives away the fictional mystery...and, Publishers Lunch alleges, overlooks some of the details in the real-life tale of its publication. She writes:

In 2001 they finished a draft and gave it to an agent who submitted it to various editors, all of whom turned it down. Susan Kamil, the editorial director of Dial Press, also rejected it, but she invited them to her office to talk about the manuscript and made suggestions...They went back to the drawing board, incorporating Ms. Kamil's ideas. In 2002 they finished another draft. This time editors, including Ms. Kamil, wanted it. "We felt it was only poetic justice to choose Susan," Mr. Thomason said.

Lunch points out that "poetic justice" in this case included an auction which, though the authors refuse to discuss their advance, reportedly brought them something like $500,000. Then again, it sounds like it was money well spent on Dial's part...

The U.S. Conduit for Latin American Fiction

Andrew Bast pulls the curtain back for NYT readers to reveal Gregory Rabassa, the man who has translated all sorts of 20th-century Latin American classics into English for U.S. readers, from Hopscotch to One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Yonkers native is about to release his own work, If This Be Treason, half-memoir and half-meditation on his literary path, and he sounds like a heck of a guy.

Vincent Laforet/NYT

"Move Him to the Back Before He Puts Someone's Eye Out"

The Times has a chat with Julian Rathbone about the financial side of a writing career:

I receive a small income, about £200 a month, from two private pensions that matured four years ago when I was 65. I used my lump-sum entitlements to pay off the mortgage and build a final extension. I get a state pension of £48 a week... All my pension problems would be solved if they were to make a movie of my historical novel The Last English King. When it came out in l996, it was optioned for a film and is still under option. It is possible I could get more than £200,000.

You might be able to track down the 1999 American edition of The Last English King, a historical novel narrated by King Harald's ex-bodyguard, at a used bookstore, but in the meantime, two of his works have just been brought to the U.S. by intrepid distributors. Trafalgar Square brings us another novel, A Very English Agent, while Dufour Editions offers The Indispensable Julian Rathbone, an anthology that includes the complete novel Lying in State. And here is an essay he wrote for Eurozine in 1999 which starts off by discussing what's wrong with modern thrillers...

Ah, But What Do They Drink?

Maud Newton pesters Jonathan Ames with emails until he delivers the goods on the writing life:

Well, if a writer drinks at a colony, they usually drink at night, so let's say they start at 7 p.m. and go to midnight. That's five hours. Then in the morning, they recover from 8 a.m. till 11 a.m. Then they write (with breaks but breaks are part of the writing process) until 3 p.m. before giving up. Then maybe they get a second-wind and throw in a half hour sometime between 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. (when dinner is served). So that's 8 hours of drinking and recovery and 4.5 hours of writing. Well, that seems like a very good ratio, because if any writer puts in 4.5 hours, drinking or not drinking, then they're being very productive. After all, we're not teletype machines. So I don't know how that works out percentage wise -- I'm not good at math -- but I'll give it a shot. 33% of the time is spent drinking and recovering and about 17% is spent writing, another 33% is spent sleeping, and the remaining 17% is probably spent reading, going into town, talking on the phone, going for walks, doing weird obsessive personal hygiene things, looking out the window, and so on.

Everybody Wants Something; They'll Never Give Up

In the U.S., The Narrows debuts at #2 on the NYT fiction bestseller list, and Michael Connelly is doing his best to spread the word to the U.K. as well. Adam Lee-Porter of The Independent visits Connelly at his stately Florida manor and learns just how good life has been to the bestselling author:

Even now he treats himself to a new laptop computer for every book he writes, "because I can."

Marian Keyes, who's been writing fiction for roughly the same amount of time as Connelly, minus a year or two, isn't living quite so large, but she's done well enough to acquire a seaside home outside Dublin and write her romantic dramas in bed every morning while her husband serves her breakfast. The Guardian article's actually a bit light; supplement it with the Richmond.com Q&A and another profile from the Tacoma News Tribune.

Then Everybody Read It,
But How Many Picked Up On It?

The Elegant Variation gets into it with Andrew Sean Greer, mostly about The Confessions of Max Tivoli, like the similarity between one passage in the novel and a scene in Lolita:

I remember when I read Lolita I was 16. And I didn’t get it at all. I thought of it as being like a Scarlet Letter. A serious book that was difficult and I got through it and I was like, “All right, I read Lolita.” And then I read it again when I was 26 and I thought “Oh my God, it’s a comedy? A light, frothy comedy?” And then the next time you read it, it’s like a prose poem about America. And then you read it again … But there was that point when I was writing, that I decided – you know, I was thinking no one is ever going to read this book – so I thought, OK go for it.

Native New Yorkers No Longer Interesting

Rebecca Mead finds the "talk of the town" at a Le Cirque book party for Melanie Craft, who normally spends her days in San Francisco. I'm half convinced, though, that Mead's parodying the TOTT format with passages like this:

Craft does not write under a pseudonym, though she does have an alter ego: Mrs. Larry Ellison, the fourth wife of the billionaire C.E.O. of Oracle. Craft, whose résumé includes an undergraduate degree from Oberlin and stints as a bartender, a pastry chef, and a safari driver, married Ellison five months ago in a simple back-yard ceremony—if any ceremony can be said to be simple when it takes place in a back yard that consists of forty-five acres, is performed by a congressman, and is photographed by Steve Jobs. Craft has honey-colored hair and the kind of radiant beauty that is testament to genes and grooming working together in perfect concert.

Stories Whiz Right By Us

WaPo checks in with Kate Lehrer in a standard "not as famous as the spouse who also writes, but just as good if not better" article, with this curious bit near the end:

On her way back home, she runs into Timothy Dickinson, a Georgetown habitue who's wearing his usual bowler hat and pinstripe suit with boutonniere. He has the uncanny ability to draw on obscure references to add spice and gravitas to almost any conversation. He is sitting on a brick wall and leaning against a shrub. He learns that Kate Lehrer has written a novel about bigamy and he proceeds, in Dickinsonian fashion, to ease into a 20-minute dissertation on bigamy (and apparent bigamy) through the ages. He alludes to everyone from a contemporary politician to a British monarch to writers Dawn Powell and Anais Nin.

I want to hear more about that guy--and this just isn't enough.

Just in Time for the Weekend...

Robert Birnbaum's much-anticipated interview with Jim Shepard:

[O]ne of the things I tell my students—they will often say to me, "What made you think you could do a gay German filmmaker or something?" I'll tell them, "Any one of these voices you are taking on is an act of hubris. Whether you are doing your sister, your mom, some version of your mom or some versions of yourself. Who are you kidding? You are not channeling a real person. You are essentially inventing. And inventing on some sort of unstable mix of what you remember and what you imagine." Essentially, what you are doing when you are doing an adolescent, when you are 46 years old or you are doing John Ashcroft or John Entwhistle or whatever, you are arming yourself with as much hard information and empathetic imagination as you can and then you are saying that it's essentially an imagined sensibility. You are not really recreating someone else.

"We're really good at defending against yesterday's threats."

I just posted a "5 Questions" exchange with Bruce Sterling, but those of you who like the technical details as much as the literary stuff might also be interested in his conversation with security expert Bruce Schneier, who says early in:

When it comes to security countermeasures, people always ask me: "Is this effective?" That's the wrong question; the right question would be "Is this worth it?" When it comes to most anti-terrorist security installed since 9/11, the answer is clearly NO. The "security" we're getting just isn't worth the cost: in money, liberties, or convenience. Security is always a balance of trade-offs. And as security consumers, too often we're getting a raw deal.

They, Too, Were Part of the Greatest Generation

WaPo recounts Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's decade-long efforts to uncover the story of the 761st Tank Battalion, an all-black unit that landed on Omaha Beach in October '44, hooked up with Patton and the Third Army, and played a major part in breaking through the Siegfried Line. Jabbar's book, Brothers in Arms, just came out, and USA Today is equally captivated. It sounds pretty damn interesting; I'll be trying to get a copy myself.

(The story comes to my attention through Rake's Progress, which just set up a new home for itself at Typepad.)

More Gaping Holes in My Literacy Profile to Fill

I first discovered Orhan Pamuk when I read My Name Is Red a few years ago, and I've always wanted to get around to reading more. I'll have new impetus in a while, when Knopf releases his latest, Snow. (Actually, the galley's sitting in a pile next to my desk, so I really don't have much excuse, do I?)

In Turkey, the launch of a new Pamuk novel has more in common with the release of a Hollywood film than the publication of a book. There is media saturation and considerable cachet in being seen with his latest work.

And though I haven't picked them up yet, I've also been captivated for some time by the thought of reading F. V. Morton's travelogues. This review just makes my curiosity a bit more ardent, even though it sounds like the biographer could no longer stand the books after finding out about the man.

What's the Big Deal? It's Not Like
She Called Him a Crypto-Fascist

According to Lawrence Lessig, Philadelphia public radio station WHYY is telling folks that Bill O'Reilly is refusing Fresh Air permission to relicense segments of the interview he did last fall with Terry Gross to promote Who's Looking Out for You? I'm not entirely sure why a news show--and I would classify Fresh Air as a news show--needs permission from interview subjects to redistribute its content, but then I'm no intellectual property expert. Anyway, if you somehow didn't hear this remarkable bit of grandstanding when it happened, it's worth a listen; Gross bearbaits O'Reilly even better than Al Franken did, and he does his best to leave a few claw marks behind.

Speaking of Writers Who Hated
the Movie of the Book...

Stanislaw Lem talks politics with a Russian newspaper, and touches briefly upon the two cinematic adaptations of Solaris (which once inspired your humble editor to make up new words to 'Volare," along the lines of "It's floating, way up there in space..." and yet are still not quite as bad as my lyrics to the theme from The Great Escape).

But the Check Cleared, And That's What Counts
Or, This Wrinkle in Time, Can't Give It No Credit

Madeleine L'Engle shares her opinion of the TV-movie adapation of A Wrinkle in Time:

And did it meet expectations?

Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.

George M. Gutierrez / NYT

Interview Roundup

Pulitzer-winning Franz Wright reflects on his career in a chat with the St. Louis publication Playback, including lessons learned from his father, who also took home the Pulitzer for poetry:

The most important advice my father ever gave me was to abandon the idea of writing a finished poem and to simply keep faith, as he put it, with the notebooks and try, every day, to listen very carefully and write a single clear line—eventually, he contended, the poems would develop and in a sense, in a single fortunate moment, write themselves, and I have often found this to be the case.

Meanwhile, others in the blogosphere have already enthused over the Atlantic Unbound interview with Dennis Lehane.

I start with character. Plot is the last thing that occurs to me. It's funny because Richard Price and I were talking once about how we ended up in the crime genre. Since Clockers Richard has technically been writing what could be called crime novels. I asked him, "How did you end up there?" And he said, "I ran out of autobiography." He needed a skeleton, something to hang the story on. That's also what drew me to this genre. I don't plot well. If you give me a skeleton to work with, I think I'm a much better writer. And the skeleton is the crime or noir framework. Since I'm interested in violence anyway, what the hell.

I'll also confess to sharing his enthusiasm for David Mamet's advice against backstory, though I'm a bit wary of it as well--it sounds awfully hard to pull off for anybody who isn't Richard Stark.

January in Early May

January interviews Lawrence Block, who recently generated a mini-controversy in some literary circles with his thoughts on booksigning. The conversation with Kevin Burton Smith ranges over Block's career, with frequent emphasis on the New York-ness of his writing:

Somehow New York energizes my work. I've lived other places, but I always come back, and at this point, I think I'd really be a fool to set my work anywhere else, never mind living anywhere else.

Meanwhile, Robert Birnbaum chats with Rachel Cohen about A Chance Meeting and the art of creative non-fiction in his latest piece for The Morning News.

"The heart of every man in our platoon
must swell with pride..."

A lot of the political blogs are all over this one: Micah Ian Wright, creator of the antiwar posters collected in You Back the Attack! We'll Bomb Who We Want! lied about being a U.S. Army Ranger, an untruth which figured prominently in earlier press attention to him and his Propaganda Remix Project.

This, frankly, sucks, since the last thing critics of the Bush administration's policy need is credibility problems. On the other hand, if Wright's statements on his home page about getting death threats are true, that sucks even harder. People need to develop some perspective.

Puttering About with Palms and Psalms

Christian Science Monitor reporter Elizabeth Lund interviews W.S. Merwin, who seems pretty happy in a Hawaiian semi-retirement, planting trees and jotting down verse on bits of scrap paper.

In his early books, Merwin's poetry was tight and traditional. Later work, however, was hazier, more abstract, more experimental. Punctuation completely disappeared. Some critics called the work obscure. The challenge in achieving clarity, Merwin says, is that poetry "tries to convey some inner experience that there is no way of expressing. Language evolved not to convey information so much as to convey some inner experience that there was no way of expressing. It was an attempt to convey an inner sense of passion - although it did have information in it - but the feeling was more powerful."

illustration by J. Kehe/CSM

The Chicago Sound

Golden Rule Jones persuaded me to listen to an interview with Stuart Dybek broadcast on Chicago's public radio station, WBEZ. And I'm glad he did. If you've got Real Audio, this 25-minute conversation is worth your attention. Right now, the whole town's reading Dybek's The Coast of Chicago for One Book, One Chicago, and he also did a Q&A with the Chicago Public Library as part of the proceedings.

The lesson inherent in reading the writers in the Chicago tradition is that if you look and listen the material in your own so-called back yard is not only as significant, but as exotic as any you'd find if you traveled the world. A neighborhood such as Little Village or Pilsen resonates in its daily round of life with all the great themes and conflicts: class, assimilation, democracy, race, cultural identity, etc.

Now Quit Bugging Him
So He Can Get Back to Rereading Milton

Harold Bloom dazzles the hell out of James Marcus with his ability to recite scads of poetry from memory, in a Newsday profile that focuses on The Best Poems of the English Language, his recent compendium of, well, the best poems of the English language (at least up to mid-20th century works) rather than the recent unpleasantess. Giving Bloom a chance to argue about how critical standards have declined in recent decades, and about why poetry is still easily loved:

"You don't have to absolutely, thoroughly, cognitively grasp a poem to be fascinated by it. When I was a little boy, already madly in love with William Blake and Hart Crane, I couldn't possibly have understood what I was reading. There is certainly some layer of understanding that is nonrational. And for the common reader, allusiveness registers as a riddling, enigmatic element: a richness of impact that troubles us, even as we can't quite locate where that trouble is from."

I Read It, Even Though It Doesn't Help My Game Any

Robert Birnbaum chats with Stephen Elliott, who just published the novel Happy Baby and is working on a quick book about the 2004 presidential campaign to be published in October, which leads to plenty of political discussion. It's a change of pace, but not one Elliott's worried about:

The stuff I do is all so different. When people read the political book, that comes out later, they're not even going to recognize [that I'm the author]. I write this poker report for McSweeney's site. It's a funny, tongue-in-cheek report of my home games in San Francisco, that for sure, has more readers than anything else I have written. People will recognize me, "You're the guy who writes Poker Report," you know. And I just write whatever I want.

Picador bought the upcoming book on the strength of "Looking Forward to It," Elliott's summer dispatch from the campaign trail for The Believer. Apparently the new issue has a followup on the last days of the Dean campaign, which I guess I'll read next week.

Not Safe for Work, But Still Informative and Entertaining

Gothamist interviews Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex, "a collection of true lesbian erotica stories that span a wide range of activities and settings." Bussell also has a blog and a author site, and she's also recently reviewed Mommy's Little Girl, the latest from Susie Bright, one of this editor's heroes.

Money Makes The World Go Around

Wired News catches up with Neal Stephenson as The Confusion starts appearing in bookstores (and, fingers crossed, in my mailbox). After declaring cyberpunk dead, Stephenson talks at length about the role of money and markets in late 17th- and early 18th-century Europe, and how to work all that into a ripping yarn. I myself eagerly await the continued adventures of Jack Shaftoe... Paul de Filippo proposes that Stephenson's pretty much cast science fiction by the wayside, and grouses, "If we wanted this kind of pure historical romance, we'd be reading Patrick O'Brian." On the one hand, I'd suggest that Dorothy Dunnett is probably a more apt comparison; on the other, I'd suggest that maybe it's not Stephenson who has to conform to genre expectations, but genre expectations that need to expand to include Stephenson's new directions.

Beatrice Beats WaPo Book World to Story

Remember back in February when I interviewed former Amazon colleague James Marcus about the customer review flap? Nearly two months later, the Washington Post finally gets around to the same idea and invites Marcus to write an article on the subject, drawing upon his experience in the site's editorial department:

Day after day, [customer reviews] kept coming, running the gamut from stylish elegance to stream-of-consciousness blather. At that point, they struck us professionals as something of a sideshow -- a virtual mosh pit where the customers could play by any rules they chose. Most of us came to enjoy the racket, with its noisy assertion of electronic populism.

Some of us, I would add, pretty much ignored that racket; the responsibility of writing and/or editing as many as 70-80 book reviews a month left little time to worry any outside yardsticks of opinion other than actual sales figures. (And, admittedly, the NYTBR--every Monday, we'd get the next week's issue and scramble to review whatever we hadn't already covered, because we knew those books would be browsed aplenty.) But that's an exceedingly minor quibble: all in all, it's a fine article--and despite the belated nature of its commentary, undoubtedly much more useful for James than his appearance here, since it not only will reach a larger audience but appears much closer to the publication date of his memoir, Amazonia, which I eagerly recommend despite the impression of me with which it will leave you.

(Discovered through The Millions, another book blog I just started reading.)

Boy, I Hear That One

Claire Zulkey interviews Bruce Eric Kaplan, whose latest collection of cartoons, This Is a Bad Time, just came out. LAWeekly, which runs a BEK cartoon in every issue, recently published an edited version of Kaplan's introduction. Zulkey gets him to talk about inspiration:

Things almost never ever pop into my head. I am amazed by people who say "I was just walking along and I suddenly had the greatest idea for…" I have to sit somewhere and just bang my head against something until something--anything--dribbles out.

Oh, and I found an old review of Kaplan's first book, No One You Know.

Because I Know You Don't Read the Newspaper

Ben McGrath profiles Aaron McGruder, creator of Boondocks, for The New Yorker.

As a talented young black man who is outspoken in his political convictions, McGruder has grown accustomed to inordinately high expectations. The Green Party called him last year, asking if he might like to run for President. He had to point out that he wasn’t old enough.

Fun fact I never knew: Boondocks got its start in the University of Maryland college newspaper--back when it was edited by a young Jayson Blair.

"Experimental Writer Finally Gets Personal"

NextBook talks to Walter Abish about how his recently published memoir, Double Vision, connects to and comments upon his experimental prose.

Meanwhile, Robert Birnbaum has a chat with Vyvyane Loh, continuing his recent trend of hanging out with authors who have some form of medical training.

Write a Literary Novel and Lose 30 Pounds

"Professor Barnhardt" talks to Craig Clevenger about the meal-a-day plan under which he wrote The Contortionist's Handbook:

Any goddamned thing I could afford or get my hands on. Pasta works, ramen, I'm sure you know all of the usual tricks. Dollar sandwiches from fast food restaurants; eggs, lots of eggs. Cheap protein, eggs.

Writing Without a Net

George Pelecanos fills Robert Birnbaum in on the origins of Hard Revolution:

I got to the story by writing those three contemporary [Derek] Strange novels. The more I wrote about him, the more clues I dropped into those books about his past. I was trying to find out for myself where it was going to go. When I finished Soul Circus, I had a pretty good idea because I had worked that drug lord Randall Oliver for two books into the narrative and I knew that everything was going to hinge on the people that came before him – who were going to connect to Strange. It’s all an accident. I didn’t plan anything.

From the Lower East Side to East Texas

The New York Times runs a profile of matzo princess Michele Heilbrun costarring Laurie Gwen Shapiro as the best friend. Heilbrun is the inspiration, though not the role model, for Shapiro's new novel, The Matzo Ball Heiress, which I'm currently enjoying.

Meanwhile, Sarah, taking a breather from her own seder preparations, alerts us to a Houston Chronicle interview with Joe Lansdale, as one of my favorite writers clears another hurdle in the path from cult figure to literary light.

Fandango Claims It Has No Tickets Available, Dammit

I learned from the Literary Saloon that Tom Stoppard is adapating Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials for the big screen. They mention an interview he gave to the British Council about the project, which includes this brief string of unmixed and mixed metaphors:

Well, to his great credit, Philip doesn’t chop up the food on the plate before he gives it to you. He’s the best kind of writer. He writes with his nerve endings open and follows his nose, as it were, and goes to where his instinct tells him.

I was going to look up a Times of London interview referenced in this conversation, but they expect me to pay them to let me look at their old content, so instead here's an interview with Pullman for the European edition of Time.

A Continent Away, Jane Austen Doe Seethes With Jealousy

The San Francisco Chronicle tracks a day in the life of Melanie Craft, romance novelist. Of course, she doesn't actually get to do any writing, because she has to spend a good chunk of the day answering some journalist's obsequious questions about how she met and married software tycoon Larry Ellison, not to mention give the reporter tours of all their various real estate holdings...

She is an individual thinker, a determined writer and a loyal partner...If she's not a risk-taker, what else would you call someone who let a reporter and photographer tag along from breakfast until dinner to see what it's like to live the billionaire lifestyle?

A lot of terms come to mind, actually, but uttering them would require making massive assumptions about Craft I simply don't have the data to justify. She seems nice enough, anyway, as viewed through the prism of a hilariously badly written article. No wonder the Significant Other used to call this paper the "Chronic Ill"...

photo by Christine Koci Hernandez

I Know I Should Look for Literary Pullquotes...

...but really, I just can't resist this Laurie Lynn Drummond anecdote:

I took a car door off one time because of a cockroach. I kid you not. I was in uniform. I was getting ready to go to work. This was before we had our own assigned units. I come out and my car was parked off to the side of the driveway because of my two housemates – I had a Three’s Company in reverse. I lived with two brothers. I got in and started my little Mustang. Put it in reverse, went to close the door and there was this big old cockroach on the door. I’d been down there for a couple years and I was calm. I was in uniform. I had a gun. I went to brush it off. That thing flew right down the front of my shirt, in between my breasts. And I went, ‘WHAAH!’ and the foot came off the clutch and my hands went up and smashed the cockroach and the car rolled backward, caught something, and just tore the door off. And then I had to call work. And ask for somebody to come and get me. But it was after I had stripped off my shirt and was mopping up roach guts from my – yeah.

Robert Birnbaum does, of course, eventually get her talking about writing the stories in her new collection, Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You, along with the former life as a police officer which informs those stories.

21st Century Rubyfruit Jungle?

I'm not sure if Helen Walsh is really my sort of bright young novelist, since Brass hasn't made its way to the States, but surely there's something to be said for a 26-year-old lass who casually admits to blowing tons of money on lapdancers and hookers (although whether she'll really cop to the latter depends on when you ask her, apparently). Zoe Williams at The Guardian certainly seems to think so, and enjoys the novel madly besides:

Millie, the protagonist[,]... has a lot of sex, mainly with women, although she does go off-piste with the occasional guy. She has the best - as in the most honestly and evocatively described, not necessarily the highest quality - sex of any contemporary fictitious sex I've read.

Judge for yourself: Canongate has an excerpt online in which Millie performs oral sex on a prostitute in a graveyard.

Mind you, the reporter's schoolgirl crush wavers at times. She suggests that Walsh uses queer theory to position "the behavior of a scumbag" as sexual rebellion, but then goes right back to admiring Walsh for possessing a "natural, easy-going courage that comes from being original without having to try." And I'm thinking, jeez, honey, haven't you ever had a frank discussion about sex with anyone before you met this woman?

The Sunday Herald is decidedly less starstruck, even at times cynical (particularly in describing Walsh's biracial background as an opportunity to "get out the Zadie Smith vote." Ideas Factory falls somewhere in the middle, but seems generally willing to play up the cautionary aspects of Walsh's personal and fictive stories. And Scots writer Laura Hird is so taken with Walsh she's given her a spot on her own web site.

SoCal Stereotypes We Love and Cherish

I applied to the University of California, Irvine, writing program and I was accepted. I went to visit it and I thought it was more than I could handle – in terms of having to get on a six-lane freeway to get a gallon of milk, trying to figure out which one was my building among 16 identical huge high rises in a building complex. I was really frightened of it.

That's a good reason to be afraid of living in Orange County, Francesca Delbanco, but not, strictly speaking, Los Angeles. Eventually Robert Birnbaum gets around to her debut novel, Ask Me Anything--which he liked a bit more than I did, but it's still fairly interesting to see him draw her out on her desire to write about characters "sitting on the fence between two worlds – childhood and extended adolescence and the beginning of wisdom and adulthood."

"Softly, A Legend Passes"...

Harlan Ellison has published his obituary of DC Comics editor and "goodwill ambassador" Julius Schwartz on his official website. I'd quote from it, but Ellison maintains that "copying or distributing any part of this piece for personal use, commercial use, or any other use you can come up with is strictly forbidden," so I'll play it safe and simply suggest that this is one history lesson you'll want to hear.

The Neurology of Writing

I think some people read my book, for example, and the emotional disconnect is that it is very painful for them to think of literature, of writing literature, as this product of this disgusting organ with the consistency of toothpaste. And half of me knows exactly what they mean.

Back when I was doing author interviews regularly, Robert Birnbaum was something of a self-internalized benchmark, i.e., I'd always be checking to see who he'd snagged for Identity Theory and closely examine everything, especially when we'd both talked to the same authors. I never told him that, because you can't exactly email someone and say, "Hey, I pace myself against you, keep up the good work!" Anyway, he's just posted an interview with neurologist Alice Flaherty about The Midnight Disease, in which she looks at the science behind writer's block--and its near kin, hypergraphia. As he himself points out about two-thirds of the way in, many of the issues that come up in their conversation dovetail neatly into his earlier interview with Rafael Campo. Which is one of the things I happen to like about Birnbaum: when an issue sticks with him, from one book to the next, he's willing to bring that theme up front and examine it more closely.

Super Powers

Julia Keller profiles Richard Powers for the Chicago Tribune. Powers has long been one of my favorite writers and while he's not exactly reclusive, he has in general kept to himself and let the books speak for themselves in the public arena, so I always look forward to a rare interview.

"They say, 'He's a novelist of technology, a novelist of science.' I want to say, 'No, I'm a novelist of people.' Of our hopes and fears."

And Don't Forget to Get Your War On

Gothamist interviews David Rees, who may or may not be totally sincere in all his answers:

The real message of "My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable" is that everyone has a reason to be scared and most things in life are out of your control. You just have to talk yourself into staying strong, express your feelings, and always remember how crazy life can be.

Check out his new strip, "Adventures of Confessions of Saint Augustine Bear."

The Queen of "Loser Lit"

The New York Post gets in on the Kate Christensen frenzy, as she describes how much fun it was to write about selfish characters:

"Writing this whole book felt like playing... The characters are all so heedless of each other's feelings. No one is a victim. I found it comforting to write about people like that."

They're certainly fun to read about, that's for sure. Anhoni Patel agrees (in the San Francisco Chronicle) but could've done without the 9/11 references, while Marta Salij (who uses the phrase "deliciously wicked" to describe the narrator and the novel in the same sentence, tsk tsk) praises Christensen's "deft touch" and muses on the protagonist, "Do you find Hugo a little unlikable? Strange -- I think I love him. I'm in love with him, I think. Too bad he's going to be dead soon."

photo: NYPost/Jennifer Weisbord

And He Was Brooks Hansen's Roommate?
That's Gotta Be a Sitcom Pitch

As Charles McGrath prepares to leave the New York Times Book Review, he seems to be getting plenty of love from his comrades at the Sunday magazine. This weekend he profiles his buddy (well, okay, that's laying it on a bit thick) Chang-Rae Lee:

Lee is probably the most unwriterly writer I know. He's cheerful and well adjusted, a homebody, a 10-handicap golfer and a serious foodie. He seldom goes to book parties, and he doesn't follow the literary gossip. In the darker, more invidious corners of literary New York, it is sometimes said of him, as it is of a few others thought to be unnaturally nice, that his apparent happiness and lack of problems must be a coverup for something really messed up.

Not as far as I could tell, when I met him briefly a little over three years ago; his calm contentment struck me as the real deal. McGrath found some sources who have their theories on how Lee can write so convincingly about profoundly alienated protagonists while living what appears by all accounts to be not just a well-adjusted but deeply enjoyed life; I've got some thoughts about still waters running deep but wouldn't dream of thinking I have enough insight to make anything more than wild speculation. And while I don't know much about the new novel that prompted this profile, I've long admired his subtle manipulations of genre in Native Speaker and A Gesture Life. His thoughts on that experimentation: "I'm trying to figure out my own kind of story which, of course, I never will. I don't think I ever will. I hope I never do. Once I do, that's death."

"Being and Nothingness" Makes Perfect Sense in Physics,
n'est-ce pas?

If only I'd been more diligent in keeping up with The Morning News, I could've told you about Robert Birnbaum's interview with Brian Greene the same day I considered Maslin's review of The Fabric of the Cosmos. But I'm just happy to steer you towards the review, which reveals, among other gems, the influence Camus had on Greene's scientific mind:

I don’t think that science changes values per se, by any means. So that isn’t an argument that I’d want to make. An argument that I would make is that an understanding of science and physics, in particular, places everyday experience in a completely different, unfamiliar, very, very rich context. When you learn that there may be more than three dimensions in space. When you learn that time is not what your intuition leads you to believe. That different people moving in different ways are experiencing different gravity fields, that time elapses at a different rate – when you learn these different features of the universe, it changes your perspective on what it means to be alive. What it means to be part of the universe, since the whole notion of universe is so beyond what experience would lead you to believe. And that’s the sense in which I find that this kind of knowledge has an impact on what it is that you do.

(And, yes, I know the difference between Camus and Sartre, thank you, but it's the best existentialist physics quip I could generate.)

She's in Love with the Judith Jones World
(with apologies to the Clash)

Ed found a Baltimore Sun profile of Knopf senior editor Judith Jones, who currently works with Anne Tyler and John Updike but has handled English translations of Camus and Sartre, Sylvia Plath's poems, and Julia Child's recipes in her 46-year career...as well as rescuing Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl from Doubleday's slush pile. Updike, apparently, doesn't like to talk about his books-in-progress, but because's he a good green (at least in one regard), she can piece together the clues:

"He'll never waste paper," she says, "so he'll write me a note on the back of a manuscript page that he's thrown away, and I'll snatch it up and get a glimpse of what he's working on."

The Return of David Mitchell

I interviewed David Mitchell shortly after the American release of his second novel, Number 9 Dream, when he was in the process of moving back to England from Japan, where he'd been teaching English to high school and then college students and writing his novels whenever he could. He's since moved again, to Ireland, but he's still close enough to the UK that when Cloud Atlas came out recently, The Independent and The Guardian found it quite easy to get hold of him. UPDATE: So too The Telegraph. (Thanks, Mark!)

"I have a problem with the way Japan is usually portrayed in the West, as the land of cherry blossoms, geishas, Mt. Fuji, and kamikaze pilots," Mitchell told me back. "I wanted to do what Haruki Murakami does, depicting Japan as it is, and finding the beauty in the ugliness." The Murakami namecheck struck me as an apt comparison; both writers appear fascinated by the surreal surface area of modern Japanese life, poking and probing it to discover emotional underpinnings. Another apt reference point might be the texture of recent William Gibson novels, especially Pattern Recognition (and not just because it's fresh on my mind). Or to put it another way, The Guardian says his "vision of the future is like Naomi Klein's No Logo taken to its ultimate conclusion: a consumer society in the process of consuming itself."

Melissa Denes also discovered something about Mitchell I never picked up on during our phone conversation (in retrospect, I probably made the same assumptions she did):

Until he mentioned it, I wasn't aware that he had a stammer, and though he says I'm kind to say so, it is virtually undetectable - an occasional pause or hesitation between words that I had taken for thinking time. "Having a stammer is like being an alcoholic," he says. "You never actually lose it, you just come to a more practical accommodation with it - and my working accommodation as a child was just not to say very much. I probably had enough going for me in other areas to compensate, but it's like having a faceful of acne on the inside and you can't put lotion on it."

It struck me as all the more interesting because about two months ago, I interviewed Paco Underhill for PW (available to subscribers), and he had also cited a lifelong stutter as a prime factor in his becoming what others have called a "retail anthropologist," a relentless observer of the consumer experience whose Call of the Mall can seem at times like a rough sketch of environments where some of Mitchell's (or Gibson's) characters would fit right in.

The Secret Epidemic

As I type this, I'm listening to Leonard Lopate talk to Jacob Levenson about his new book outlining the AIDS crisis in African-American communities. Levenson's also been giving interviews to newspapers on the east and west coasts. A bit of searching also turned up a book review he wrote for Mother Jones of another AIDS book. ("Showdown in Choctaw County," an article about an Alabaman social worker's daily struggles, forms part of the book's narrative, but it's also available if you're willing to pay Utne for online access or The Oxford American for the back issue.)

Plenty of Spirit Left

photo by Richard Patterson/NYT

I suspect Will Eisner hasn't actually invented the graphic history, as the Times claims, but I can't fault them for believing his new work, The Plot, worthy of attention. The artwork looks amazing, and the story of the full and utter debunking of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion deserves as wide an audience as possible.

(About twenty years ago, I found a couple Spirit reprints in a Smithsonian history of the comic strip and was immediately dazzled by Eisner's work. He's easily one of the most innovative artists in the medium.)

Success at "Loser Lit"

I told Ed about Kate Christensen, and he told me about her interview with The Journal News. Apparently The Epicure's Lament was originally supposed to be about the current narrator's brother and his failed marriage, but Hugo's "desperate hilarity and arrogance" hijacked the story:

Hugo's self-loathing comes from an overweening arrogance... That kind of self-loathing can only come if you have a huge ego, self-regard and ambition that has soured. Hugo thinks he could have been a contender, but the world failed him. I feel that I could have ended up that way so easily.

It's a dim threat I've felt myself a few times and persevered against, so I know exactly where Christensen's coming from on that front, and why characters like Hugo are as compelling as they are repellent. And being able to depict that is what ensures she'll probably never end up like him.

I Am So There Next Year

Carlos Fuentes, in Houston to deliver the "prestigious Farfel Distinguished Lecture," divulges the plot of his latest novel, The Eagle's Throne:

It is a futuristic novel, set in 2020. Once again Mexico has not voted with the United States in the Security Council. There are American troops occupying Colombia; Mexico protests, and the United States cuts off all communications with Mexico, so people have to write letters to each other.

So it's a novel in letters, [based on] a hypothesis which President Clinton gave me. He asked me once why is there no vice president in Mexico. I said, "There were vice presidents in the 19th century, and all they did was plot the overthrow of the president. So the office was abolished." Clinton asked me what happens if a Mexican president dies in office. I said, "Ah, there is a novel there."

A Study in Understatement

I had never read [Dante] at all until my second year at university. But there was a course called Dante's inferno and it sounded kind of cool--and I'm Jewish and we don't believe in hell so I suppose that was intriguing. As soon as I started reading it I just wanted to know more. I was hooked."

That's Matthew Pearl, talking about The Dante Club, his debut thriller from last year. It's set in 1865, when a group of Harvard intelligentsia are polishing Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy and find themselves confronted by a series of murders ripped out of the pages of the Inferno.

Me, I'm sorta curious, given that the investigating policeman is named Nicholas Rey, if Pearl's a film buff as well...

I'm With Him On This One

The Elegant Variation told us (well, me and everybody else who reads it) that Michael Frayn spoke to the Paris Review, and I find his sense of humor iresistible.

When I start I like to know in advance where the story is going, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the story before I begin writing it. Some writers claim that they start not knowing where the story is going to go. Muriel Spark says that she starts with nothing in her head except the title. This is very dramatic--and she has very good titles.

From the Gothamist Collection of Gothamites

Gothamist interviews Danny Gregory, who in addition to writing and illustrating Everyday Matters has an excellent blog which, if you're reading this recently enough, you'll see referenced on the list to the right. Not that it matters, since the link is, after all, right there in that last sentence. Anyway.

New York is just about the best place for a person in a wheelchair. Everything's right around the corner, cabs are accessible and drivers are helpful, buses are lumbering but accommodating, strangers love to lend a hand.

Isn't That In Kucinich's Platform?

David Rees writes a short essay for Powell's Books (my favorite place in Portland that isn't a bar) about the hoops he had to jump through to get the underground hit My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable printed and distributed before landing a book deal:

Photocopy shops should not be privately owned; they should be state-run and publicly subsidized. A tax-paying citizen should be able to collate and laminate anything they want, for free. And if you don't vote, you should not be allowed access to America's photocopiers.

He Also Does a Great Tao Te Ching

The Seattle Times sends a reporter out to talk with Bill Porter, who's been translating ancient Chinese poetry, published under the name Red Pine, ever since he dropped out of grad school in the 1970s and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. His latest, Poems of the Masters, is the first full English translation of an anthology that has served as a standard bearer in China for nearly a millennium. (Take that, Norton!)

"I translate just like a ball player plays ball," Porter said. "I look at it as fun and a performance, and I feel physically involved with it when I do it. It's like dancing with words."

Here's his version of Kao Shih's "To Chang Hsu after Drinking":

The world is full of fickle people
you old friend aren't one
inspired you write like a god
drunk you're crazier still
enjoying white hair and idle days
blue clouds now rise before you
how many times will you still sleep
with a jug of wine by your bed

Sure, Sure, But Where's Your Blog?

T. Coraghessan Boyle talks to Claire Zulkey about what he learned at the Iowa workshop ("to spend less time at Gabe & Walker's Bar and more time at my typewriter"), his "desperate" hair style, and maintaining his own website, complete with message boards where he responds to fan mail: "[I]t does require work, but it is infinitely valuable to me because it puts me directly in touch with the readers. Whereas before no one would know I had a story out in a magazine, now the story is dissected and debated on tcboyle.com before I've even seen it." And, in proof of the joys of doing interviews via email, he corrects her spelling. (Thanks to Stephany, filling in for Maud, for finding this first.)

Dying Languages and Snow Vocabulary

Warren Ellis found an interview with Alexandra Aikhenvald, a linguist who specializes in "dying" languages:

Once I asked, "Can I use this word this way?" and the response was, "Of course, you're foreign, you can say a wrong thing. But I can't say that."

And my favorite comment: I did not realise there could be a word for purple in a language that does not distinguish between green and blue.

Makes me wish I still had my copy of Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao, the really old one with the Easter Island cover...

UPDATE: Language Log discusses the article, paying particular note to howa certan misconception about the vast Inuit vocabulary for snow was inadvertently perpetuated:

"The Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation (they're usually called postbases). The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long, though: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit."

Hot Dog Hot Dog Hot Dog

Dawn Eden found some unused excerpts from an interview she did with Stan Freberg. (Somewhere in the ancestral homestead, I'm convinced I've still got my copy of his memoir, It Only Hurts When I Laugh.) She needs nudging to transcribe the rest of the tapes, so if you like Freberg, let her know. In the meantime, here's a taste:

"I went back to the guy who said, 'Advertising can't force distribution,' and said to him, 'Look, now I've got Kaiser Foil into 43,000 new outlets. I thought you said that advertising can't force distribution. And he actually said to me, 'It can't. Something must have gone wrong.'"

(Rusty Pipes also spoke to Freberg a while back.)

"I'm a Doctor, Not a...Oh, Wait."

"As this weird hybrid of physician and poet," says Rafael Campo, "there is a real important intersection there that I feel that I am witnessing everyday in my work with patients, certainly in my work with words and language." Campo speaks with Robert Birnbaum (of IdentityTheory fame) about how the medical and literary aspects of his life have come together in one identity, among other topics...

More on Peanuts, Because I Can

Comic Book Bin interviews Eric Reynolds, Fantagraphics marketing guy, and Seth, indie comics artist, about their involvement with The Complete Peanuts. Reynolds has a lot of interesting things to say about how the series, which launches in April, will be promoted and about how the comics shops don't seem to "get it" yet. Seth is equally insightful about the artistic aspects, and shares his motivation for being involved:

Schulz was my most formative influence. No artist made me want to be a cartoonist more than Schulz (well, maybe [Jack] Kirby). I loved him as a child and his work spoke to me deeply even then. But, honestly, it was in my early 20's that I came to reappraise Schulz and look at him with the eyes of an adult. That's when I really began to collect all of his books and really study what he had done (and was doing)...[His] drawing was a real beacon to me. His simplicity of design and composition taught me a great deal. Combined with other influences like Herge, [Peter] Arno, [Charles] Addams, John Stanley etc. really made the core of what I wanted my artwork to be like. It was Schulz's profound honesty that made the most impression on me as a young cartoonist ([R.] Crumb also). I'm still deeply moved by much of what made up Peanuts.

Surprisingly, when I went to look up the Comics Journal interview with Charles Schulz, cited by Seth in the interview, it wasn't in their online archives; hopefully Fantagraphics will rectify that by the time the first book's out. But the Norman Rockwell Museum had this interview from 1988. The Charles M. Schulz Museum has a lot of information, and you can view strips online at the official Peanuts website.

Instead of "Critically Significant Issues,"
Let's Say "Funny New Story Ideas."

Science Fiction Weekly interviews Kim Stanley Robinson about Forty Signs of Rain (which those of us who read The Years of Rice and Salt in paperback were led to believe would be called Capital Code), the forthcoming first volume in a new trilogy of environmental thrillers. Or, as he puts it: "Humans trying to control nature, improve the world, it's always bound to backfire more or less. My current books could therefore be thought of as attempts at a new subgenre, call it maybe 'utopian farce' or 'utopian black comedy.' What would that read like?"

In suggesting some possibilities, he also namechecks one of my favorite novels in recent years, The Business by Iain Banks.

Robinson also waves off one suggestion about a potential role model for the president of this future history: "This book is a comedy, and there's nothing funny about George W. Bush. He's a disaster, and I wouldn't want to write about him, it would poison a book to do so. No, in my novel the White House is occupied by a benign sly grandfather, pretending to be a cowboy for fun and profit. Like Reagan but nicer, at least I hope that will remain true."

See Distraction by Bruce Sterling...

Maud found my William Gibson link, and then brought up another, as he speaks to the Financial Times and considers the possibility that American politics "has finally become so grotesque and so peculiar that it's become part of my territory." He also reveals an eclectic reading list that runs from Murakami and Borges to Symons' The Quest for Corvo.

Interview Roundup

Thanks to Jessa at Bookslut for calling two new interviews to my attention. Edith Grossman, translator of Ecco's new edition of Don Quixote:

"Cervantes a feminist! It never occurred to me. I tend to doubt it - at least in any modern sense of the word. I think the issue is less a matter of "women seeking their own identity" and more a question of women disguising themselves as men to escape untenable situations, taking certain risks to claim the husbands who are rightfully and legally theirs, or, in one case, to convert to Christianity. Yet Cervantes seems to admire his strong, virtuous female characters, and by the same token, I don't think it is a coincidence that the cruel and sadistic duchess has ulcers on her legs."

And Whitbread Award-winning poet Don Paterson:

"Even now I get calls from people at the radio saying we're doing a wee feature and we know you love football. I wrote one poem that mentions football! These were the things I was thinking about at the time. And I was massively detained by sex and football... There's no point in saying I didn't invite it."

(Remember, when he says football, he means soccer!)

"Self-Reliance Vs. Self-Esteem"

Ralph Waldo Emerson was "America’s first great public intellectual," writes Michael Knox Beran (in City Journal, an odd place to read about the "Sage of Concord, perhaps, but we take what we can get). "He breathed new life into methods of educating young people that have their origin in the earliest epochs of our national history and that, until not all that long ago, occupied a central place in the American classroom. More important, his vision of the goal of education—the nurturing of independent and sturdily self-reliant individuals—is a particularly American, and a particularly valuable, ideal." This is one of those articles I hate to try to summarize, but Beran has a lot of interesting points about the nature and purpose of education and the role poetry can play in it.

If I hadn't already selected a book that I'm reading a passage from every day of 2004, I would probably be reading A Year With Emerson, published by David R. Godine, which offers 365 excerpts of prose and verse. But that just means that I have one more reason to look forward to 2005, right?

Neil Gaiman interviews Gene Wolfe

...and Borders puts their conversation online, to promote Wolfe's new novel The Knight, which he describes thus:

"I didn't want to write a book based on modern fantasy at all. I wanted to imagine the kind of fantasy world someone in the 11th century might have imagined. Dragons, yes, because they believed they were real creatures. The Aelf to get away from all the cutesy images of elves. Giants like the one David killed—big, thick limbed, lumbering men, men who stood to us the way the larger dinosaurs would stand to lizards and birds."

On his website, Neil suggests the full interview might well appear in the New York Review of Science Fiction, although from the looks of it, that means it would be online sometime around 2008. Looks like we'll have to break down and splurge on the print copy.

You show up at 7:30 without a reservation...

A lot of the New York-based blogs are twittering over rumors that Jay McInerney might be a candidate to fill the newly open Times restaurant critic's desk. (The article points out, correctly, that his celebrity status would seem at odds with the usual anonymity of writers in that position.)

Anyway, I interviewed the guy years ago, for what that's worth. Actually, I'd heard his wine reviews were supposed to be pretty good, so who knows how he'd be at describing eats?

How to Talk About Literature Without Ever Reading a Single Book

I don't, as a matter of habit, link to articles from the New York Times because after a week they vanish behind the paid-access only scrim, so what's the point? But today's Arts and Ideas section has an interesting profile of Franco Moretti, an English/comp lit professor at Stanford and director of the Center for the Study of the Novel. In the article, Emily Eakins describes Moretti's approach as "a heretical blend of quantitative history, geography and evolutionary theory" (and notes that Harold Bloom dismisses him as "an absurdity," with "an audible shudder," no less).

Unfortunately, the article that's causing all the current ruckus, "Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History," is behind a subscribers-only shield of its own at the New Left Review, but they do have some of his work available. Take a gander at "More Conjectures," a sequel to his earlier essay "Conjectures on World Literature." And here's "Planet Hollywood," attempting to suss out the geographic scope of American film's cultural influence. Then read a review of his Atlas of the European Novel.

I've been a fan of Sterling's social-satire-disguised-as-SF for years, and thought The Hacker Crackdown was one of the first books that got the political and cultural implications of hacker culture right (though I said so in cringe-inducing tones, if you look all the way down.) So when PW asked me if I wanted to review his most recent non-fiction book, Tomorrow Now, I jumped at the chance, and I'm hoping the paperback blurbs the part where I called it "a fun hybrid of Robert Kaplan and Faith Popcorn."

My favorite aphoristic quote from the interview: "Fanatical gestures capture the public’s imagination, but they’re just not as important to people’s lives as massive economic arrangements." But his quickie analysis of Jules Verne is interesting, too.

"Engine Failure"

Sorting through a batch of accumulated magazines, I read this interview with Joel Kotkin in Metropolis, which led me to track down this, which he coauthored for the Center For an Urban Future. I haven't read the entire 40-page report yet, but this bit in the summary was worrying enough:

"9/11 also appears to be having a significant impact on the city’s ability to attract and retain two of the demographic groups that were so critical to New York’s success in the 1990s: young, educated people who moved to New York from other parts of the country and foreign-born immigrants. "

Come to think of it, relationship issues aside, I'm reasonably certain I would not have taken the plunge of moving to New York, even the outer boroughs, if I hadn't already done so a year before 9/11. As a non-native, I'm not completely attached to the city--and, frankly, could easily see myself in, say, Seattle or Portland under the right circumstances. But it is my home for the forseeable future, and of course one likes to see one's home community doing well.

In all fairness, though, the summary also notes that many of NYC's worst economic trends were already in motion well before 9/11, which functions more as a placemarker than a genuine catalyst.

Information Wants to Be Free

Since I've started looking at blogs, I've kept my eye on BoingBoing, in part because of my fondness for the techgeek magazine of the same name from about a decade ago, which was sort of the halfway node between Wired and Mondo 2000. Today Cory Doctorow, the primary author of the site, mentioned that one of his short stories had been picked up for two science-fiction anthologies, and in digging down for detail, I discovered that he's made his work available online for free through a Creative Commons license. That includes the short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and the novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

The more I poke around the CC website, the more the concept makes sense to me, and Doctorow's license seems to be a really great success story for it.

Niall Ferguson

Have spent much of Sunday working on a book review due later this week of Colossus, the new book from Niall Ferguson. Can't say too much about it until after the review's turned in and published, but I was interested enough to look up this interview, which although about a previous book hints at some of Ferguson's current themes, and am now eagerly awaiting the full posting of this interview. Oh, and here's another sneak peek at the themes of Colossus, in a recent book review Ferguson wrote for Foreign Affairs.

Tour of Duty

Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty (recently excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly) offers tremendous insight into the character of John Kerry, frankly more than you'll find in his official campaign book, A Call to Service. (And I reviewed them both for PW, so I should know!) (Though in all fairness, Kerry's book isn't at all bad for the genre, and he came off more candidly than Dean did in his book.)

There don't seem to be any reviews of the book online yet, or interviews with Brinkley, though they're sure to come in the next week or so. In the meantime, here's a link to the Eisenhower Center for American Studies, which Brinkley directs. If an interview shows up, I'll revise the post or add a comment or something, but I wanted to give folks a heads up on the book, which has a one-day laydown next week...