Three terrific author interviews for your reading (or listening pleasure):
- Robert Birnbaum sits down with Jonathan Lethem.
- Ed’s latest guest on the Bat Segundo show: T.C. Boyle
- Powell’s snags Zadie Smith for their latest author interview.
Author interviews
Roth Excerpt
Visit this link (and scroll down) for an excerpt of the new Philip Roth novel, The Plot Against America. In other news, Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones is one of 23 people to be given a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. That’s “annual checks for $100,000 for the next five years, to be used however they want,” for those of you keeping score at home. This year’s other literary geniuses are short story writer Aleksandar Hemon (The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man) and poet C.D. Wright (Deepstep Come Shining, Steal Away). Here are profiles of Chicago’s two geniuses.
16 Rounds with the Champ
I recently got in the ring with Ed Champion of The Bat Segundo Show to talk about A Field Guide to the North American Family. A victory, a loss, or a draw? You be the judge. (Helpful Hint: It gets better as it goes on. Guinness is, indeed, good for you.)And, assuming you’re still interested, you can see page spreads, and read an interview, in FILE Magazine. Thanks!
For Fans of the Funnies
I discovered the other day that an ambitious project to publish the complete run of Charles Shulz’s seminal comic, Peanuts, has begun. The books are very attractive and they have rounded up some notable folks to pen the introductions. The first volume, which covers 1950-1952, includes an introduction by Garrison Keillor and is already in book stores. Volume two (1953-1954) will be released this fall with an introduction by Walter Cronkite. According to the publisher, Fantagraphics, the 25 book series will span the full 50 year run of the comic and the books will be released at a rate of two books per year. When it is all said and done, the collection (along with the introductions within) should provide an interesting look into the second half of the twentieth century in America.
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Hubert Selby Jr.
Hubert Selby Jr., a controversial American writer, has died. He was best known for his unsparing look at Brooklyn’s seamy underbelly, Last Exit to Brooklyn, a landmark book that was widely praised but also spawned obscenity trials. His career reached another apogee when his novel Requiem for a Dream, a chilling portrait of addiction, was turned into a movie by director Darren Aronofsky. Here’s the obit from the Times.Also, check out the web only interview with Edward P. Jones at the New Yorker. He talks about Washington, DC, his life, and his upcoming collection of stories. An excerpt: “One of the things that I found out when I did go to college is that people had a very narrow idea of Washington. They thought it was basically the government and the Supreme Court and all of that, and they didn’t know that there were people who had lived there for generations and generations and had really almost nothing to do with the government. That was certainly my mother’s case. She came from the South and was a dishwasher in a French restaurant that just happened to be about a block or so from the White House. Around that time in college, I also came upon James Joyce’s “Dubliners,” and I admired what he had done for the people in Dublin–just everyday, good people. I took a creative-writing course, and I began to think, well, maybe one day I would like to do the same thing for the people of Washington that Joyce had done for the people in Dublin.”
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Serendipitous
I thoroughly enjoyed Pinky’s recollection of meeting Rupert Pole, Anais Nin’s husband and caretaker, while canvassing door to door in Los Angeles 16 years ago.
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Harry Potter Mania Flickers On
J.K. Rowling’s slow, inexorable slide out of retirement continues. As we noted a couple of months ago, “For someone who’s not writing any more books about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling sure is doing a lot of dabbling.”Earlier this year, we wrote about one of Rowling’s post-retirement dabblings, the production of seven handmade copies of Beedle the Bard, a book of “wizarding fairy tales” referred to in the Harry Potter series. Amazon spent $4 million on a copy, and then used it to market a writing contest. Part of the prize, incidentally, was the opportunity “to spend a weekend with the rare and delightful book of fairy tales (security guards included, of course).”Now that prize doesn’t look quite so exclusive, as Bloomsbury and Scholastic have made an edition the book available for the masses for just $7.59 and arriving in early December, just in time for the holidays. Amazon is going one further, offering up to 100,000 pricier facsimile “collector’s editions,” with “a reproduction of J.K. Rowling’s handwritten introduction, metalwork and clasp, and replica gemstones,” as well as various other accouterments.All net proceeds go to a charity co-founded by Rowling.
Appearing Elsewhere
NY-based readers are invited to “Step Inside the Book” at a reading/party I’m doing this Friday with Alex Rose (The Musical Illusionist) and Alex Itin (Orson Whales). Alex will be working his narrative/surroundsound magic, Other Alex will be screening his multimedia books, and I’ll be showing art and reading fiction from A Field Guide to the North American Family. Drinks are on the house, I’m told, so if you’re free, stop by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, at 125 Maiden Lane, between 7 and 9 p.m. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…
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