“I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom.” Lorin Stein introduces The Paris Review’s new Winter issue, and includes excerpts from the Art of Fiction interview with Jonathan Franzen.
The Art of Fiction No. 207: Jonathan Franzen
“And this dancing took many deaths.”
“We envision a library full of blood,” reads the “About” section of the Black Cake Records website. “We want the very best blood, & we want it everywhere.” Intrigued? You should be. The project, begun in 2013, serves as “a forum for producing & disseminating audio archives of contemporary poets reading their work.” For an introduction, you can start with “Trench Mouth” by Danniel Schoonebeek, whose debut collection, American Barricade, was published last month by YesYes Books.
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Kingsolver Wins the Orange
In a reprise of this year’s Rooster final, Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna comes out on top this time, besting Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (and four other finalists) for the Orange Prize.
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When Five Years Pass
“New houses get built, and new songs are sung … and I am the same, in the same trembling state.” Things are not going very well at the newly built Federico García Lorca center in Granada, Spain. Patience is wearing thin as members of the García Lorca Foundation continue tangling with government officials over control of the center, which is intended to house nearly 20,000 items — manuscripts, drawings, musical compositions and artworks valued at more than 20 million euros.
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Occupy Writers
Scores of authors have banded behind the Occupy movements via the (intermittently overloaded) site OccupyWriters.com. Among them is Lemony Snicket, who’s penned thirteen observations about the protestors (kindly mirrored by Neil Gaiman).
Unknown Parables
“The rest of her speech to the U.N. that day is an exact outline for what she wanted the rest of the Parable books to be about — a way out that she did not live to write herself.” For Electric Literature, Kristopher Jansma explores the unwritten Parable books of acclaimed sci-fi author Octavia Butler. Pair with our consideration of Butler’s novel Kindred.
The Blood Countess
Julie Delphy‘s second film as writer/director/actress is released in Europe this month. The subject is 16th century Hungarian/Transylvanian countess Erzsébet Bàthory, known for murdering young girls to bathe in their blood and considered by some the first female serial killer. Judging from the trailer, Delphy’s film doesn’t appear to equal earlier visions of the Bloody Countess (French Surrealist Valentine Penrose‘s hallucinatory biography, for example, or Terry Gilliam‘s Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci) in The Brothers Grimm).