Weird: France & Belgium

Susannah Hunnewell interviews Michel Houellebecq, France’s controversial literary icon, for The Paris Review’s “The Art of Fiction” series: “There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things.”

At Salon, Cornel Bonca reviews Roth Unbound, a new “hybrid” biography of Roth that New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote after months of interviews. Although the book glosses over Roth’s personal flaws, it gives a great overview of his work, Bonca writes.

Last year, Netherland author Joseph O’Neill helped open the Maya School, a school for Syrian refugee children in Turkey. Now he’s asking for donations of additional funds to keep the school operational. “We have set up a transparent and cost-effective partnership with Turkish counterparts of great integrity and knowhow,” O’Neill writes. “Of the $16,000 we raised last year, $3000 still remains. That tells you how far your dollars will go.”

“I cannot help feeling, on being invited to contextualize my own fiction, that the least qualified person possible has been asked. It is more still: hesitance, dread, that as a blind man in a failing aircraft I have been offered the yoke. I imagine it is the same for other writers, for the very fact that you write a story, and not a critical essay, suggests that near everything you hope to say lies outside the bounds of explicit statement.” Despite all that, here’s an essay by Greg Jackson at Granta in which he attempts to contextualize his own fiction.