Anya Ulinich, author of Petropolis, talks to World Literature Today: “What else can a person do when she gets home after a ten-hour work day – with a toothache that she can’t afford to fix . . . – but fall on the couch and watch whatever is in front of her face?” . . . Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories is just out, talks to Sarah Manguso for The Believer: “At the origin of the work there has to be strong feeling, if it’s going to be any good. Of course, that strong feeling can be a delight in language.” . . . The Book Bench unearths a 1978 John Updike interview with a Croation periodical, which finds the Rabbit Angstrom author halfway through his tetralogy. . . . Edwin Frank of NYRB Classics talks to Omnivoracious, and selects his favorite books in the series (via). . . . And James Ellroy submits to interrogation at The Paris Review: “I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist.”
A Quintet of Interviews for Your Delectation
A Stake in the Conflict
Reporting on a war in your homeland is tricky business, but in the fifties, Albert Camus (whose collected articles on the Algerian War of Independence are now available in book form) managed, in spite of his investment in the conflict, to get it right.
Kindle Spam is Here
Inevitable: Spam is increasingly cropping up among the self-publishing hordes on the Kindle.
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Death by Bookcase
At the Telegraph, Sir Tom Stoppard briefly explains his desire to be killed by a falling bookcase.
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Making Mistakes
"These were my two first mistakes about honesty: I thought it meant relentless self-flagellation, and I thought it could redeem everything." Leslie Jamison and Anna Holmes discuss the mistakes they made as young writers.
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“Dying in Svalbard is hard—being buried is, in a way, much harder.”
For two weeks last summer, Colin Dickey sailed around the coast of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. On one occasion, his voyage was stalled by heavy fog, and his group was obligated to anchor near Amsterdamøya. As one does, he used the occasion to ruminate about scurvy – or “polar night disease” – which claimed the lives of many sailors buried in the area’s graves.
Greene Family Biography
Jeremy Lewis introduces his new biography of Graham Greene and his remarkable family, Shades of Greene, for the Telegraph.
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