Kate
Pullinger is a novelist who also writes for film and various digital
platforms. Born in Cranbrook British Columbia she went to high school
on Vancouver Island, dropped out of McGill University,
worked for a year in a copper mine in the Yukon, traveled, and
eventually settled in London. Pullinger has written two short story
collections; her novels include When the Monster Dies (1989), Where Does Kissing End? (1992), A Little Stranger and most recently The Mistress of Nothing which has just won Canada’s GG Literary Award for best English Fiction (to be awarded this evening).
The Mistress of Nothing (2009),
takes its inspiration from the life of Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, and is
set in nineteenth-century Egypt. I met with Kate yesterday afternoon.
Among other things we talk about what it’s like to win the GG, class
structures, and the future of the book (check out her website here). Please listen here:
Listen here as famed author of Life of Pi and self proclaimed political gadfly Yann Martel 1) Absorbs a barrage of punishing jabs I throw at him over his latest book What is Stephen Harper Reading?
and 2) Punches back at a Canadian Prime Minister whom he considers to
be a visionless, ‘fact’-mired, fiction-eschewing ideologue.
Galway Kinnell was
born February 1, 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island. He has been hailed
as one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the
20th century. Educated at Princeton and Rochester Universities, he
served in the United States Navy, after which he spent several years
traveling, in Europe and the Middle East. His first book of poems, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960, followed by Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964).
Upon
his return to the United States, Kinnell joined CORE (Congress of
Racial Equality) as a field worker and spent much of the 1960s involved
in the Civil Rights Movement. Social activism during this time found
its way into his work – Body Rags (1968), and especially The Book of Nightmares (1971), a book-length poem concerned with the Vietnam War. Other books of poetry include Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990) and A New Selected Poems
(2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; He has also published
translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, François Villon,
and Rainer Maria Rilke. Honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a
Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of
America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts
and Letters. He has served as poet-in-residence at numerous colleges
and universities, and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
from 2001 to 2007.
We met recently at his home in Vermont to talk about his work. Please listen here:
Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)
was born in Armenia in 1908. His photographer uncle, George Nakash,
brought him to Canada in 1924. After apprenticing in Boston with John
H. Garo, Karsh settled in Ottawa in 1932, where he began his
professional career. By 1936 he was photographing visiting statesmen
and dignitaries, among them President Franklin Roosevelt.
His
December, 1941 portrait of a bulldoggish Winston Churchill, symbolizing
Britain’s wartime resolve, brought Karsh international attention.
Among the most widely reproduced portraits in the history of
photography, ‘Churchill’ was also one of the first to carry the famous
"Karsh of Ottawa" copyright.
I
met recently with Jerry Fielder, Curator and Director of the Estate of
Yousuf Karsh to talk about Karsh and the books that contain his works.
Born
in SouthÂport in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in MalÂvern,
WorcesterÂshire, studyÂing for a degree in EngÂlish and AmerÂican
LitÂerÂatÂure folÂlowed by an MA in
ComÂparÂatÂive LitÂerÂatÂure, at the UniÂverÂsity of Kent. He lived for
a year in Sicily before movÂing to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught
EngÂlish to techÂnical stuÂdents for eight years, before returnÂing to
England.
In his first novel, GhostwritÂten (1999), nine narÂratÂors in nine locÂaÂtions across the globe tell interÂlockÂing storÂies. This novel won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortÂlÂisÂted for the GuardÂian First Book Award.
His second novel, number9dream (2001), was shortÂlÂisÂted for
the 2002 Man Booker Prize for ficÂtion. It is set in modÂern day Tokyo
and tells the story of Eiji Miyake’s search for his father.
In 2003 David Mitchell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty ‘Best of Young BritÂish NovÂelÂists’. In his third novel, Cloud Atlas
(2004), a young Pacific islander witÂnesses the nightÂfall of sciÂence
and civilÂisaÂtion, while quesÂtions of hisÂtory are explored in a
series of seemÂingly disÂconÂnecÂted narÂratÂives. Cloud Atlas was shortÂlÂisÂted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
David Mitchell lives in IreÂland. His latest novel is Black Swan Green (2006)
We
met recently in Toronto to talk about experÂiÂmentÂaÂtion and realÂism,
plot, charÂacÂter and all that good stuff, but also about the
greatÂness of John Cheever, high brow and pulp ficÂtion, good pot
boilÂers, the cosÂmos, cosmi, conÂnecÂtions, meldÂing verbs,
platÂitÂudÂinÂous proÂfunditÂies, critÂics as platyÂpus taxiÂdermÂists,
poetry in prose, the oriÂginÂalÂitÂies of happy blunÂders and culÂtural
juxÂtaÂposÂiÂtions, Perec’s W, monÂkeyÂing with strucÂture, planÂning
your funeral, evalÂuÂatÂive criÂtiÂcism and the delightÂful
experÂiÂence of readÂing Chekhov’s short storÂies.
Crime novelist Denise Mina is the author of a trilogy of novels set in Glasgow: Garnethill (1998), which won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger; Exile (2000); and Resolution (2001).
Sanctum (2002), is the story of a forensic psychiatrist, convicted of killing a serial killer. The Field of Blood (2005) is the first in a new series, the second in the series, The Dead Hour, was published in 2006, and the third, Slip of the Knife, in 2007.
Mina also writes short stories, one of which, ‘Helena and the Babies’ from Fresh Blood 3 (1999), won the Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Short Story Dagger. Two short stories and a play, Hurtle (2003), have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her latest play is Ida Tamson. Her lastest novel is Still Midnight (2009).
We met recently in Ottawa where Mina was the international guest of honour at Bloody Words, Canada’s national mystery conference. Our
conversation cuts a wide swath across the socio-political (alcoholism,
the accurate depiction of mental illness, the courage of the mentally
ill) the psychoanalytic (detective stories as re-enactments of the
primal act) and the technical (cozy endings, realistic puzzles); please
listen here:
Terry Griggs is the author of a collection of short stories, Quickening, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and two novels, The Lusty Man, and Rogues’ Wedding, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award. She has also written two books for children, Cat’s Eye Corner, shortlisted for a Mr. Christie’s Book Award and a Red Cedar Award, and most recently a sequel, The Silver Door. In 2003 she received the Marian Engel Award. Born on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, she currently lives in Stratford, Ontario.
We met recently in Ottawa to talk about her latest ‘farce noir’ comic mystery novel, Thought you were Dead,
and, as a result about: cartoons, dead flies, Nabokov, Pnin’s zany,
self-mocking speech and ways, fending off intimacy, how comedy sharpens
your judgment, wordplay, names and book titles, the male-female divide,
ambiguity, contained chapters, Philip Larkin, naked women on book
covers, and The Monkeys’ Michael Nesmith’s mother who invented liquid
paper.
Ha Jin was born in China in 1956. After
Tiananmen Square, he emigrated to the United States. Unlike most exiled
writers Ha Jin was not established in his native language; he had no
audience in Chinese, and so chose to write in English.
He has published three collections of poetry, including Between Silences and Facing Shadows, and three collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words, received the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, won the Flannery O’Connor Award. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. In 2004, he published War Trash, which also won the PEN/Faulkner Award.He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
We met recently in Ottawa to talk about his first book of non-fiction The Writer as Migrant (University of Chicago Press). Adapted from The Rice University Campbell Lecture
he delivered in 2006, the book consists of three interconnected essays
exploring the experience of migrant, ‘exiled’ writers in relation to
their ‘home’ countries and languages. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin
Yutang, Homer, Joseph Conrad , Vladimir Nabokov and others all
contribute to the conversation. Please listen here:
This past Spring at the Blue Met Writers Festival, Donald Antrim conducted
a workshop entitled: Fiction and Memoir: "Writing Ourselves" It was
designed to explore the ‘challenging and often frustrating process of
reading into one’s own work;’ and to identify aspects of that work
which may have been underdeveloped, unnoticed, or even, avoided. As the
syllabus put it:
"Fiction
and memoir are not, as a rule, brought together in workshops. And yet
many of the concerns that are most important to all of us—the technical
production of form; the experience of psychological drive within the
narrative; and the tangible-seeming, built-from-scratch, moral or
immoral world our characters inhabit—are experienced by writers of
fiction and memoir. Whatever we write, we may all have cause to wonder
about the overt and the embedded evidence of our own experiences, even
in works in which autobiographical material is scrupulously occluded.
Perhaps, in opening the class to writers of non-fiction and fiction,
there will be a fruitful exchange."
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel, The Hundred Brothers and The Verificationist: A Novel. His latest publication is The Afterlife
(2006). He lives in Brooklyn, New York. We talked about workshops in
general, and what happened in Montreal specifically. Please listen (may
have to crank it a bit) here:
A.B. Yehoshua was born in 1936 to a fifth-generation Jerusalem family of Sephardi
origin. His first book of stories, "Mot Hazaken" (The Death of the Old
Man) was published in 1962. He was an important member of the "new
wave" generation of Israeli writers who differed from earlier writers
by focusing on the individual rather than the group. Franz Kafka, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and William Faulkner were all formative influences.
Author
of nine novels, three books of short stories, four plays, and four
collections of essays, Yehoshua has won the Brenner Prize, the Alterman
Prize, the Bialik Prize, the Israel Prize for Literature, the National Jewish Book Award and many, many other international prizes.
His most recent novel, Friendly Fire,
explores the nature of Israeli familial relationships, personal grief
and bitterness. We met recently at the Blue Met Writers Festival in
Montreal to talk about the book. Our conversation touches on the
Jewish diaspora, hatred and minorities, a two state solution, gestures
recognizing good, the metaphor of fire, domestic violence, Apartheid,
South Africa, solutions, marriage, and marriages between Arabs and Jews.
M
G Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before coming to
Canada in 1978, he attended MIT and the University of Pennsylvania,
where he specialized in theoretical nuclear physics. From 1978-1980 he
was a postdoctoral fellow at the Atomic Energy of Canada, and from 1980
to 1989 he was a research associate at the University of Toronto.
During this period he developed a keen interest in medieval Indian
literature and history, co-founded and edited a literary magazine (The Toronto South Asian Review, later renamed The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad), and began writing stories and a novel. In 1989, with the publication of his first novel, The Gunny Sack, he
was invited to spend a season at the International Writing Program of
the University of Iowa. That year ended his active career in nuclear
physics. Vassanji is the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. He
has won the Giller Prize, twice; the Harbourfront Festival Prize; the
Commonwealth First Book Prize (Africa); the Bressani Prize and the
Order of Canada.
We met recently at the Blue Met Writers Festival in Montreal to talk about his most recent work: a brief biography of Mordecai Richler for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.The
discussion touches on Richler’s outsider status, his struggle with and
acceptance of Jewishness, making one person’s story everyone’s story,
cities, streets and communities, mothers and fathers, growing out of
groups, humble origins, irony, great novels versus journalism, and
honesty.
This from Contemporary Writers:
" Zoe Heller was born in London in 1965 and educated at Oxford
University and Columbia University, New York. She is a journalist who,
after writing book reviews for various newspapers, became a feature
writer for The Independent. She wrote a weekly confessional column for the Sunday Times for four years, but now writes for the Daily Telegraph and earned the title ‘Columnist of the Year’ in 2002. She is the author of two novels: Everything You Know (2000), a dark comedy about misanthropic writer Willy Miller, and Notes on a Scandal
(2003) which tells the story of an affair between a high school teacher
and her student through the eyes of the teacher’s supposed friend,
Barbara Covett. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for
fiction, and was recently released as a feature film, starring Cate
Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench."
Nino Ricci’s first novel, the best-selling Lives of the Saints, won international acclaim and a host of awards, including, in Canada, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in England, the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize. It was followed by In A Glass House and Where She Has Gone, which completed the trilogy that Lives of the Saints began, Testament, co-winner of the Trillium Award, and,The Origin of Species which won Ricci his second Governor General’s Award.
Born
in Leamington, Ontario, to parents from the Molise region of Italy, he
completed studies at York University in Toronto, at Concordia
University in Montreal, and at the University of Florence, and has
taught both in Canada and abroad. We met recently at the Blue Met
Writers Festival in Montreal to talk about his most recent work: a
brief biography of Pierre Trudeau for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.
Topics
covered include the Italian Canadian attachment to Trudeau and the
Liberals, immigration, gun slingers, alluring leadership qualities,
fear of failure, media strategies, bilingualism’s mixed legacy, the
Charter, budget deficits, the pride of being Canadian, and
philosopher-kings.
Meir Shalev,
(pictured above with his sister) one of Israel’s most celebrated
novelists,was born in 1948 in Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav. He is a
bestselling author in Israel, Holland, and Germany; and he has been
translated into more than twenty languages. His novels include A Pigeon and a Boy, Fontanelle, Alone In the Desert, But A Few Days, and Esau.Russian Romance (The Blue Mountain) is one of the top five bestsellers in Israeli publishing history. Shalev is often compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Prizes he has won include the Juliet Club Prize (Italy); The Chiavari
(Italy); and The Brenner Prize of 2006—the highest Israeli literary
recognition awarded for his novel, A Pigeon and a Boy, published in the US by Random House in 2007.
I
met Meir at The Blue Met Writers Festival in Montreal recently. We talk
here about, among other things, television, satire, The Daily Show,
great sentences, labels, Gogol, gardening and farming.
Crime novelist, film director, children’s author and award winning journalist, Margie Orford
was born in London and grew up in Namibia and South Africa. She has
studied under J M. Coetzee, and worked in publishing with the African
Publishers Network. In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and
while in New York she worked on a groundbreaking archival retrieval
project, WOMEN WRITING AFRICA: The Southern Volume. She lives in Cape
Town, where we met recently to discuss another of her many projects: Fifteen Men,
a collection of writing by South African prisoners, all of whom are
serving very long sentences, with whom Margie spent a year leading a
creative writing course. This book is the result. We talk here about
her experience.
Damon Galgut is a writer based in Cape Town. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1984), when he was seventeen. Small Circle of Beings (1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), the story of a young white man on military service who suffers a nervous breakdown. The Quarry (1995), was made into a film by a Belgian production company. The Good Doctor
(2003), is set in post-Apartheid South Africa, and explores the
relationship between two different men working in a deserted, rural
hospital. It won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region)
and was shortlisted for both the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and
the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His latest novel
is The Impostor (2008).
We
talk here about national and personal trauma, corruption and
realpolitik, the shadow of J.M. Coetzee, South African literature as
boundaried by massive inequalities, childhood cancer, ambiguity, the
new class system, real world maturity and the need for compromise.
His book, A Dry White Season (1979), was made into a film starring Marlon Brando while An Instant in the Wind (1976), the story of a relationship between a white woman and a black man, and Rumours of Rain (1978) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Devil’s Valley (1998) explores the life of a community locked away from the rest of the world, and The Other Side of Silence (2002),
set in colonial Africa in the early twentieth century, won a
Commonwealth Writers regional award for Best Book in 2003. He has also
written a collection of essays on literature and politics, Reinventing a Continent (1996), prefaced by Nelson Mandela.
He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. His latest novels are Praying Mantis (2005) and The Blue Door (2007). His memoir,A Fork in the Road, has just been published.
I
met Andre Brink recently at his home in Cape Town. (His lovely young
wife Karina greeted me at the door and led me into his book-lined
study. Before entering the house however, I encountered this in the
garden:
).
Once seated we talked mostly about his life, about his father, about
love and duty, justice, Apartheid, inter-racial sex, J.M. Coetzee,
Nadine Gordimer; his love affair with poet Ingrid Jonker, her suicide,
her poem ‘Plant me a Tree,’ English as his second language, Picasso,
recommended wines and staying in South Africa, despite his nephew having been shot dead by intruders last year at his home just north of Johannesburg.
Chris Cleave
was born in London and spent his early years in Cameroon. He studied
Experimental Psychology at Balliol College, Oxford, and now writes a
column for the Guardian newspaper. His debut novel Incendiary
won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted for the 2006
Commonwealth Writers Prize, and is now a feature film. Chris lives in
London with his wife and two children.
We met recently to talk about his engaging, important new novel Little Bee.
Topics discussed include masks, truth-telling, trauma, trust,
happiness, the struggle to survive, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and its
deficiencies, asylum seekers are true heroes, engaging with the
developing world, people in transition, life-changing events, sexual
adventurousness, making sense of life retrospectively, inane reality TV
shows and the need for refugees to tell their heroic stories
convincingly.
Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning
was born in Sheffield, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford,
where she read Modern Languages. She worked as a teacher and social
worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary
Supplement in 1974.
President
of English PEN, she was awarded a CBE in 1998. She is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the
universities of Southampton, Ulster, Dublin and York. Her biographies
include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, 1977; Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981), which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize; and Rebecca West: A Life (1987), and Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (1983) and Trollope (1992) both of which won the Whitbread Biography Award.
We talk here ostensibly about her latest book, Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries 1941- 1973
but in fact, mostly about the nature of biography,the difference
between editing letters and writing lives, fabricating dialogue,
compiling data, selecting facts; the importance of place, material and
familial limitations, life over art, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville
West, Sissinghurst, and text versus context.
Born,
raised and currently resident in Ottawa, Canada, Christian McPherson’s
poetry has appeared in a variety of print and online journals. He has
won the John Spenser Hill Award and the Ottawa Public Library Short
story Award. We met recently to discuss his first published collection
called Poems that Swim from my Brain like Rats leaving a Sinking Ship. Please listen here as we talk, among other things, about death, the misery of TV news, and a light hearted approach to life:
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Ross Raisin is a young British author born in Keighley, Yorkshire.
He has studied at the University of London, worked as a trainee wine
bar manager and completed a postgraduate degree in creative writing at
Goldsmith's College. His debut novel Out Backward (God's Own Country in England) was published in 2008, and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
It features Sam Marsdyke, a disturbed adolescent living in a harsh
rural environment, and tracks his journey from an oddity to a
malevolent, insane, psychopath.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Nadeem
Aslam was born in Pakistan in 1966, moved to the UK as a teenager and
now lives in London. He studied Biochemistry at the University of
Manchester, but left to become a writer. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds
(1993) won a Betty Trask Award and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award,
and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which took 11 years to write, won the 2005 Encore Award and the 2005 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
We met in Toronto recently at the IFOA, to talk about his latest novel The Wasted Vigil,
about technique, self knowledge, writing 100 page biographies of his
characters, the universal from the particular, Afghanistan, war,
politics, love, the ignorance of history, Flaubert, Proust, isolation,
engagement and Yorkshire.
This is part three of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum, Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O’Connor thought best constituted a good short story. I’ve listed some of them here.
Anne
Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, studied English and Philosophy at
Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to study for an MA in Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is a former RTE
television producer. Her short story collection, The Portable Virgin was published in 1991, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Two collections of stories, Taking Pictures and Yesterday’s Weather were published in 2008. Her novels are The Wig My Father Wore (1995); What Are You Like? winner of the 2001 Encore Award ; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002); and The Gathering (2007) which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
We
met at the IFOA in Toronto recently to talk about the short story, and,
in so doing , about Beckett’s Happy Days, housewives with problems,
ideology, awakenings, characters’ voices, self deception, just doing
it, James Joyce and women writers.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Joe Dunthorne is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters at UEA,
where he was awarded the Curtis Brown Prize. His poetry has been
published in Reactions 5, Magma, Smiths Knoll and Tears in the Fence.
His work has been featured on Channel 4, BBC Radio 3, 4 and in The
Guardian and Vice magazine. We met recently at the IFOA in Toronto to
discuss his debut novel, Submarine, why the behavior of teenage boys is
often seen as abominable, the importance of getting laid, ambiguous
characters, depression, the brilliance of novelist W.G. Sebald, East
Anglia University, how humour works, and dustjackets which both attract
attention
and complement content.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
AMITAV GHOSH is one of India’s best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances and The Hungry Tide.
Born in Calcutta in 1956 Ghosh studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi,
Alexandria and Oxford. His first job was at the Indian Express
newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote
his first novel, which was published in 1986. He is married to the
writer, Deborah Baker, and has two children, Lila and Nayan. He divides
his time between Kolkata, Goa and Brooklyn.
We met recently at the IFOA in Toronto to talk about his most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, the
first volume in a planned trilogy. Among other things we discuss how
novels tell the stories of silenced, unheard voices, sailing,
Mauritius, multi-racial crews, opium, the Caste system and the
pleasures of research.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry,
Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit
http://nigelbeale.com)
Junot DÃaz
was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of
Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John
Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award,
the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the
2008 Pulitzer Prize. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and
the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
We met recently at the IFOA in Toronto,
and talked about, among other things storytelling as a way to give
voice to lost life, unique characters, 9/11 and America’s dual
response: Why don’t they like us? and We’re gonna bomb them into the
stone age; gaps, how to inject humour and energy into a text, and the
Dominican Republic as the egg from which the U.S. eagle sprang.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry,
Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit
http://nigelbeale.com)
Rivka Galchen was born in Toronto. She grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen, was a professor of meterology at the University of Oklahoma. Her novel Atmospheric Disturbances features a character with the same name, Tzvi Gal-Chen, a professor of meterology and a fellow of the (fictional) Royal Academy of Meterology.
Galchen attended Princeton University, where she was an English major, and applied in her sophomore year to an early-admissions program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai in 2003, with a focus in psychiatry. After completing medical school, she completed an MFA at Columbia University. Farcically, Atmospheric Disturbances
was nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction (she
left the country when she was four years old). No way she was going to
win; still, on the flip side, provides nice exposure for both prize and
author.
We talk here among other things about denial, death,
fathers, unreliable narrators, James Wood, Walter Benjamin, science,
consensus knowledge, and being stoned.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry,
Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit
http://nigelbeale.com) Please listen here:
Nam Le has won this year’s £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize.
It recognizes the best young writer in the English-speaking world with
the goal of ensuring that the inspirational nature of Dylan’s writing
lives on.
I met with Nam in Toronto recently at the IFOA. This is part two of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum,Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O’Connor thought best constituted a good short story. I’ve listed some of them here.
Nam Le is author of The Boat,
a collection of ’stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the
streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a fishing
village in Australia to a floundering vessel in the South China Sea, in
a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling.’
We talk, among
other things, about never condescending to the reader, the prose having
to be smarter than its author: tapping into things seen, but a just
beyond their ken; gaps and allowing the reader to put their experiences
into them; getting into the consciousness of characters; relinquishing
ego; the difficulty of writing short stories — and the greatness of
those who can do it well; spring-boarding detail and gearing it for
expansion; and affecting paradoxical senses of recognition, wonder and
redemption.
Joseph Boyden has just won The 2008 Giller Prize for his novel Through Black Spruce. We talk here about the novel, and the psychic distance Joseph requires to write
novels about Northern Ontario and the Cree; the similarities between
North and South, James Bay and New Orleans; snowmobiling over vast
amounts of snow-covered bush, isolation in the wilderness; bridges
between communities, oral culture, First Nation humour, respect for
myths and legends, and soapboxes. Please excuse the abrupt ending!
These points live dramatically in the
person of Louis Slotin, a scientist from Winnipeg involved in the
Manhattan project and development of the atomic bomb, and Lista’s
desire to capture a day in his life. On May 21, 1946, Slotin conducted
a dangerous experiment referred to by his fellow scientists as
"tickling the dragon’s tail." Using a framework of existing poems, in
the way that James Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey, Lista has borderline plagarized them in a collection which documents this May day. The book will be entitled Bloom. Anansi will publish it.
"Out of admiration for the virtuosity of
Slotin’s achievements - with the attendant hubris and arrogance
necessary to take risks and make anything new - and taking on those
qualities in his own work, Lista’s poems do glitter, but more lastingly
than that word would suggest. Dazzle too has a showiness I don’t mean
to imply but the wit is so apparent. At the same time the tone is held
and is exactly what the subject requires in this poetic construction."
Revisiting my Salon des Refuses
experience in the last post, I am reminded of how rarely one encounters
great literary work. Poetry especially. Pablo Neruda, Ted Hughes, Robin
Robertson…I knew immediately upon first reading their poems that
something extraordinary was happening. Their words rubbed up against my
experience and sensibilities in ways that satisfied like few others
have.
I felt something of this while reading the handful of poems Michael sent me (please find three in a future post) in advance of our conversation. We talk here about the suicidal dangers of emulating Joyce’s Ulysses,
and the book’s unapproachability; punning, the multiple meanings of
bloom, epiphanies, coincidences, translation, sex and physics, life and
death.
This is part one of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum, Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O’Connor thought best constituted a good short story. I’ve listed some of them here.
We start with Rebecca Rosenblum, author of Once, " a collection of sixteen stories portraying the constricted and confused lives of the rootless twenty-somethings — students, office techies, waitresses, warehouse labourers, street hustlers — who inhabit them. These are stories grounded in the all-too-real comedy and tragedy of jobs and friendships and romances, books and buses and bodies." This debut collection won The Metcalf Rooke Award.
Margaret Visser (born May 11, 1940) is a writer/broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Barcelona, and France. Her subject matter is the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life.
Her books include Much Depends on Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, The Way We Are, and The Geometry of Love; all have been best sellers. Many have won awards. Her most recent work is called The Gift of Thanks,
published by HarperCollins. It asks: What do we really mean by Thank
you? What are the implications of gratitude, and why are we so enraged
when we meet its opposite?
In this conversation Visser tells us, among other
things, that gratitude involves thinking, that gift giving takes the
place of war, that apparently simple actions and behavior are in fact
surprisingly complex, and that gratitude and gift giving is natural
because humans beings are innate imitators. Oh yes. And we also talk
about sexual gratification!
This from Random House:
"Miriam Toews…was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of
Steinbach, Manitoba. She left Steinbach at eighteen, living in Montreal
and London and touring Europe before coming back to Manitoba, where she
earned a B.A. in film studies at the University of Manitoba. Later she
packed up with her children and partner and moved to Halifax to attend
the University of King’s College, where she received a bachelor’s
degree in journalism. Upon returning to Winnipeg with her family in
1991, she freelanced at the CBC, making radio documentaries. When her
youngest daughter started nursery school, Toews decided it was
time to try writing a novel."
She’s written four to date, including A Complicated Kindness which won the GG’s Award for Best Fiction in 2004. We talk here about her latest The Flying Troutmans,
about her father’s struggle with depression and the stigma that still
surrounds the disease, about road trips and siblings, the definition of
love, the film Little Miss Sunshine, writing novels with movie deals in mind, trust, abandonment and Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Kate
Pullinger is a novelist who also writes for film and various digital
platforms. Born in Cranbrook British Columbia she went to high school
on Vancouver Island, dropped out of McGill University,
worked for a year in a copper mine in the Yukon, traveled, and
eventually settled in London. Pullinger has written two short story
collections; her novels include When the Monster Dies (1989), Where Does Kissing End? (1992), A Little Stranger and most recently The Mistress of Nothing which has just won Canada’s GG Literary Award for best English Fiction (to be awarded this evening).
The Mistress of Nothing (2009),
takes its inspiration from the life of Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, and is
set in nineteenth-century Egypt. I met with Kate yesterday afternoon.
Among other things we talk about what it’s like to win the GG, class
structures, and the future of the book (check out her website here). Please listen here:
Listen here as famed author of Life of Pi and self proclaimed political gadfly Yann Martel 1) Absorbs a barrage of punishing jabs I throw at him over his latest book What is Stephen Harper Reading?
and 2) Punches back at a Canadian Prime Minister whom he considers to
be a visionless, ‘fact’-mired, fiction-eschewing ideologue.
Galway Kinnell was
born February 1, 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island. He has been hailed
as one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the
20th century. Educated at Princeton and Rochester Universities, he
served in the United States Navy, after which he spent several years
traveling, in Europe and the Middle East. His first book of poems, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960, followed by Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964).
Upon
his return to the United States, Kinnell joined CORE (Congress of
Racial Equality) as a field worker and spent much of the 1960s involved
in the Civil Rights Movement. Social activism during this time found
its way into his work – Body Rags (1968), and especially The Book of Nightmares (1971), a book-length poem concerned with the Vietnam War. Other books of poetry include Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990) and A New Selected Poems
(2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; He has also published
translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, François Villon,
and Rainer Maria Rilke. Honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a
Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of
America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts
and Letters. He has served as poet-in-residence at numerous colleges
and universities, and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
from 2001 to 2007.
We met recently at his home in Vermont to talk about his work. Please listen here:
Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)
was born in Armenia in 1908. His photographer uncle, George Nakash,
brought him to Canada in 1924. After apprenticing in Boston with John
H. Garo, Karsh settled in Ottawa in 1932, where he began his
professional career. By 1936 he was photographing visiting statesmen
and dignitaries, among them President Franklin Roosevelt.
His
December, 1941 portrait of a bulldoggish Winston Churchill, symbolizing
Britain’s wartime resolve, brought Karsh international attention.
Among the most widely reproduced portraits in the history of
photography, ‘Churchill’ was also one of the first to carry the famous
"Karsh of Ottawa" copyright.
I
met recently with Jerry Fielder, Curator and Director of the Estate of
Yousuf Karsh to talk about Karsh and the books that contain his works.
Born
in SouthÂport in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in MalÂvern,
WorcesterÂshire, studyÂing for a degree in EngÂlish and AmerÂican
LitÂerÂatÂure folÂlowed by an MA in
ComÂparÂatÂive LitÂerÂatÂure, at the UniÂverÂsity of Kent. He lived for
a year in Sicily before movÂing to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught
EngÂlish to techÂnical stuÂdents for eight years, before returnÂing to
England.
In his first novel, GhostwritÂten (1999), nine narÂratÂors in nine locÂaÂtions across the globe tell interÂlockÂing storÂies. This novel won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortÂlÂisÂted for the GuardÂian First Book Award.
His second novel, number9dream (2001), was shortÂlÂisÂted for
the 2002 Man Booker Prize for ficÂtion. It is set in modÂern day Tokyo
and tells the story of Eiji Miyake’s search for his father.
In 2003 David Mitchell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty ‘Best of Young BritÂish NovÂelÂists’. In his third novel, Cloud Atlas
(2004), a young Pacific islander witÂnesses the nightÂfall of sciÂence
and civilÂisaÂtion, while quesÂtions of hisÂtory are explored in a
series of seemÂingly disÂconÂnecÂted narÂratÂives. Cloud Atlas was shortÂlÂisÂted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
David Mitchell lives in IreÂland. His latest novel is Black Swan Green (2006)
We
met recently in Toronto to talk about experÂiÂmentÂaÂtion and realÂism,
plot, charÂacÂter and all that good stuff, but also about the
greatÂness of John Cheever, high brow and pulp ficÂtion, good pot
boilÂers, the cosÂmos, cosmi, conÂnecÂtions, meldÂing verbs,
platÂitÂudÂinÂous proÂfunditÂies, critÂics as platyÂpus taxiÂdermÂists,
poetry in prose, the oriÂginÂalÂitÂies of happy blunÂders and culÂtural
juxÂtaÂposÂiÂtions, Perec’s W, monÂkeyÂing with strucÂture, planÂning
your funeral, evalÂuÂatÂive criÂtiÂcism and the delightÂful
experÂiÂence of readÂing Chekhov’s short storÂies.
Crime novelist Denise Mina is the author of a trilogy of novels set in Glasgow: Garnethill (1998), which won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger; Exile (2000); and Resolution (2001).
Sanctum (2002), is the story of a forensic psychiatrist, convicted of killing a serial killer. The Field of Blood (2005) is the first in a new series, the second in the series, The Dead Hour, was published in 2006, and the third, Slip of the Knife, in 2007.
Mina also writes short stories, one of which, ‘Helena and the Babies’ from Fresh Blood 3 (1999), won the Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Short Story Dagger. Two short stories and a play, Hurtle (2003), have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her latest play is Ida Tamson. Her lastest novel is Still Midnight (2009).
We met recently in Ottawa where Mina was the international guest of honour at Bloody Words, Canada’s national mystery conference. Our
conversation cuts a wide swath across the socio-political (alcoholism,
the accurate depiction of mental illness, the courage of the mentally
ill) the psychoanalytic (detective stories as re-enactments of the
primal act) and the technical (cozy endings, realistic puzzles); please
listen here:
Terry Griggs is the author of a collection of short stories, Quickening, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and two novels, The Lusty Man, and Rogues’ Wedding, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award. She has also written two books for children, Cat’s Eye Corner, shortlisted for a Mr. Christie’s Book Award and a Red Cedar Award, and most recently a sequel, The Silver Door. In 2003 she received the Marian Engel Award. Born on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, she currently lives in Stratford, Ontario.
We met recently in Ottawa to talk about her latest ‘farce noir’ comic mystery novel, Thought you were Dead,
and, as a result about: cartoons, dead flies, Nabokov, Pnin’s zany,
self-mocking speech and ways, fending off intimacy, how comedy sharpens
your judgment, wordplay, names and book titles, the male-female divide,
ambiguity, contained chapters, Philip Larkin, naked women on book
covers, and The Monkeys’ Michael Nesmith’s mother who invented liquid
paper.
Ha Jin was born in China in 1956. After
Tiananmen Square, he emigrated to the United States. Unlike most exiled
writers Ha Jin was not established in his native language; he had no
audience in Chinese, and so chose to write in English.
He has published three collections of poetry, including Between Silences and Facing Shadows, and three collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words, received the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, won the Flannery O’Connor Award. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. In 2004, he published War Trash, which also won the PEN/Faulkner Award.He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
We met recently in Ottawa to talk about his first book of non-fiction The Writer as Migrant (University of Chicago Press). Adapted from The Rice University Campbell Lecture
he delivered in 2006, the book consists of three interconnected essays
exploring the experience of migrant, ‘exiled’ writers in relation to
their ‘home’ countries and languages. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin
Yutang, Homer, Joseph Conrad , Vladimir Nabokov and others all
contribute to the conversation. Please listen here:
This past Spring at the Blue Met Writers Festival, Donald Antrim conducted
a workshop entitled: Fiction and Memoir: "Writing Ourselves" It was
designed to explore the ‘challenging and often frustrating process of
reading into one’s own work;’ and to identify aspects of that work
which may have been underdeveloped, unnoticed, or even, avoided. As the
syllabus put it:
"Fiction
and memoir are not, as a rule, brought together in workshops. And yet
many of the concerns that are most important to all of us—the technical
production of form; the experience of psychological drive within the
narrative; and the tangible-seeming, built-from-scratch, moral or
immoral world our characters inhabit—are experienced by writers of
fiction and memoir. Whatever we write, we may all have cause to wonder
about the overt and the embedded evidence of our own experiences, even
in works in which autobiographical material is scrupulously occluded.
Perhaps, in opening the class to writers of non-fiction and fiction,
there will be a fruitful exchange."
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel, The Hundred Brothers and The Verificationist: A Novel. His latest publication is The Afterlife
(2006). He lives in Brooklyn, New York. We talked about workshops in
general, and what happened in Montreal specifically. Please listen (may
have to crank it a bit) here:
A.B. Yehoshua was born in 1936 to a fifth-generation Jerusalem family of Sephardi
origin. His first book of stories, "Mot Hazaken" (The Death of the Old
Man) was published in 1962. He was an important member of the "new
wave" generation of Israeli writers who differed from earlier writers
by focusing on the individual rather than the group. Franz Kafka, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and William Faulkner were all formative influences.
Author
of nine novels, three books of short stories, four plays, and four
collections of essays, Yehoshua has won the Brenner Prize, the Alterman
Prize, the Bialik Prize, the Israel Prize for Literature, the National Jewish Book Award and many, many other international prizes.
His most recent novel, Friendly Fire,
explores the nature of Israeli familial relationships, personal grief
and bitterness. We met recently at the Blue Met Writers Festival in
Montreal to talk about the book. Our conversation touches on the
Jewish diaspora, hatred and minorities, a two state solution, gestures
recognizing good, the metaphor of fire, domestic violence, Apartheid,
South Africa, solutions, marriage, and marriages between Arabs and Jews.
M
G Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before coming to
Canada in 1978, he attended MIT and the University of Pennsylvania,
where he specialized in theoretical nuclear physics. From 1978-1980 he
was a postdoctoral fellow at the Atomic Energy of Canada, and from 1980
to 1989 he was a research associate at the University of Toronto.
During this period he developed a keen interest in medieval Indian
literature and history, co-founded and edited a literary magazine (The Toronto South Asian Review, later renamed The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad), and began writing stories and a novel. In 1989, with the publication of his first novel, The Gunny Sack, he
was invited to spend a season at the International Writing Program of
the University of Iowa. That year ended his active career in nuclear
physics. Vassanji is the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. He
has won the Giller Prize, twice; the Harbourfront Festival Prize; the
Commonwealth First Book Prize (Africa); the Bressani Prize and the
Order of Canada.
We met recently at the Blue Met Writers Festival in Montreal to talk about his most recent work: a brief biography of Mordecai Richler for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.The
discussion touches on Richler’s outsider status, his struggle with and
acceptance of Jewishness, making one person’s story everyone’s story,
cities, streets and communities, mothers and fathers, growing out of
groups, humble origins, irony, great novels versus journalism, and
honesty.
This from Contemporary Writers:
" Zoe Heller was born in London in 1965 and educated at Oxford
University and Columbia University, New York. She is a journalist who,
after writing book reviews for various newspapers, became a feature
writer for The Independent. She wrote a weekly confessional column for the Sunday Times for four years, but now writes for the Daily Telegraph and earned the title ‘Columnist of the Year’ in 2002. She is the author of two novels: Everything You Know (2000), a dark comedy about misanthropic writer Willy Miller, and Notes on a Scandal
(2003) which tells the story of an affair between a high school teacher
and her student through the eyes of the teacher’s supposed friend,
Barbara Covett. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for
fiction, and was recently released as a feature film, starring Cate
Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench."
Nino Ricci’s first novel, the best-selling Lives of the Saints, won international acclaim and a host of awards, including, in Canada, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in England, the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize. It was followed by In A Glass House and Where She Has Gone, which completed the trilogy that Lives of the Saints began, Testament, co-winner of the Trillium Award, and,The Origin of Species which won Ricci his second Governor General’s Award.
Born
in Leamington, Ontario, to parents from the Molise region of Italy, he
completed studies at York University in Toronto, at Concordia
University in Montreal, and at the University of Florence, and has
taught both in Canada and abroad. We met recently at the Blue Met
Writers Festival in Montreal to talk about his most recent work: a
brief biography of Pierre Trudeau for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.
Topics
covered include the Italian Canadian attachment to Trudeau and the
Liberals, immigration, gun slingers, alluring leadership qualities,
fear of failure, media strategies, bilingualism’s mixed legacy, the
Charter, budget deficits, the pride of being Canadian, and
philosopher-kings.
Meir Shalev,
(pictured above with his sister) one of Israel’s most celebrated
novelists,was born in 1948 in Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav. He is a
bestselling author in Israel, Holland, and Germany; and he has been
translated into more than twenty languages. His novels include A Pigeon and a Boy, Fontanelle, Alone In the Desert, But A Few Days, and Esau.Russian Romance (The Blue Mountain) is one of the top five bestsellers in Israeli publishing history. Shalev is often compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Prizes he has won include the Juliet Club Prize (Italy); The Chiavari
(Italy); and The Brenner Prize of 2006—the highest Israeli literary
recognition awarded for his novel, A Pigeon and a Boy, published in the US by Random House in 2007.
I
met Meir at The Blue Met Writers Festival in Montreal recently. We talk
here about, among other things, television, satire, The Daily Show,
great sentences, labels, Gogol, gardening and farming.
Crime novelist, film director, children’s author and award winning journalist, Margie Orford
was born in London and grew up in Namibia and South Africa. She has
studied under J M. Coetzee, and worked in publishing with the African
Publishers Network. In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and
while in New York she worked on a groundbreaking archival retrieval
project, WOMEN WRITING AFRICA: The Southern Volume. She lives in Cape
Town, where we met recently to discuss another of her many projects: Fifteen Men,
a collection of writing by South African prisoners, all of whom are
serving very long sentences, with whom Margie spent a year leading a
creative writing course. This book is the result. We talk here about
her experience.
Damon Galgut is a writer based in Cape Town. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1984), when he was seventeen. Small Circle of Beings (1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), the story of a young white man on military service who suffers a nervous breakdown. The Quarry (1995), was made into a film by a Belgian production company. The Good Doctor
(2003), is set in post-Apartheid South Africa, and explores the
relationship between two different men working in a deserted, rural
hospital. It won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region)
and was shortlisted for both the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and
the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His latest novel
is The Impostor (2008).
We
talk here about national and personal trauma, corruption and
realpolitik, the shadow of J.M. Coetzee, South African literature as
boundaried by massive inequalities, childhood cancer, ambiguity, the
new class system, real world maturity and the need for compromise.
His book, A Dry White Season (1979), was made into a film starring Marlon Brando while An Instant in the Wind (1976), the story of a relationship between a white woman and a black man, and Rumours of Rain (1978) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Devil’s Valley (1998) explores the life of a community locked away from the rest of the world, and The Other Side of Silence (2002),
set in colonial Africa in the early twentieth century, won a
Commonwealth Writers regional award for Best Book in 2003. He has also
written a collection of essays on literature and politics, Reinventing a Continent (1996), prefaced by Nelson Mandela.
He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. His latest novels are Praying Mantis (2005) and The Blue Door (2007). His memoir,A Fork in the Road, has just been published.
I
met Andre Brink recently at his home in Cape Town. (His lovely young
wife Karina greeted me at the door and led me into his book-lined
study. Before entering the house however, I encountered this in the
garden:
).
Once seated we talked mostly about his life, about his father, about
love and duty, justice, Apartheid, inter-racial sex, J.M. Coetzee,
Nadine Gordimer; his love affair with poet Ingrid Jonker, her suicide,
her poem ‘Plant me a Tree,’ English as his second language, Picasso,
recommended wines and staying in South Africa, despite his nephew having been shot dead by intruders last year at his home just north of Johannesburg.
Chris Cleave
was born in London and spent his early years in Cameroon. He studied
Experimental Psychology at Balliol College, Oxford, and now writes a
column for the Guardian newspaper. His debut novel Incendiary
won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted for the 2006
Commonwealth Writers Prize, and is now a feature film. Chris lives in
London with his wife and two children.
We met recently to talk about his engaging, important new novel Little Bee.
Topics discussed include masks, truth-telling, trauma, trust,
happiness, the struggle to survive, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and its
deficiencies, asylum seekers are true heroes, engaging with the
developing world, people in transition, life-changing events, sexual
adventurousness, making sense of life retrospectively, inane reality TV
shows and the need for refugees to tell their heroic stories
convincingly.
Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning
was born in Sheffield, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford,
where she read Modern Languages. She worked as a teacher and social
worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary
Supplement in 1974.
President
of English PEN, she was awarded a CBE in 1998. She is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the
universities of Southampton, Ulster, Dublin and York. Her biographies
include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, 1977; Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981), which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize; and Rebecca West: A Life (1987), and Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (1983) and Trollope (1992) both of which won the Whitbread Biography Award.
We talk here ostensibly about her latest book, Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries 1941- 1973
but in fact, mostly about the nature of biography,the difference
between editing letters and writing lives, fabricating dialogue,
compiling data, selecting facts; the importance of place, material and
familial limitations, life over art, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville
West, Sissinghurst, and text versus context.
Born,
raised and currently resident in Ottawa, Canada, Christian McPherson’s
poetry has appeared in a variety of print and online journals. He has
won the John Spenser Hill Award and the Ottawa Public Library Short
story Award. We met recently to discuss his first published collection
called Poems that Swim from my Brain like Rats leaving a Sinking Ship. Please listen here as we talk, among other things, about death, the misery of TV news, and a light hearted approach to life:
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Ross Raisin is a young British author born in Keighley, Yorkshire.
He has studied at the University of London, worked as a trainee wine
bar manager and completed a postgraduate degree in creative writing at
Goldsmith's College. His debut novel Out Backward (God's Own Country in England) was published in 2008, and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
It features Sam Marsdyke, a disturbed adolescent living in a harsh
rural environment, and tracks his journey from an oddity to a
malevolent, insane, psychopath.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Nadeem
Aslam was born in Pakistan in 1966, moved to the UK as a teenager and
now lives in London. He studied Biochemistry at the University of
Manchester, but left to become a writer. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds
(1993) won a Betty Trask Award and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award,
and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which took 11 years to write, won the 2005 Encore Award and the 2005 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
We met in Toronto recently at the IFOA, to talk about his latest novel The Wasted Vigil,
about technique, self knowledge, writing 100 page biographies of his
characters, the universal from the particular, Afghanistan, war,
politics, love, the ignorance of history, Flaubert, Proust, isolation,
engagement and Yorkshire.
This is part three of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum, Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O’Connor thought best constituted a good short story. I’ve listed some of them here.
Anne
Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, studied English and Philosophy at
Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to study for an MA in Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is a former RTE
television producer. Her short story collection, The Portable Virgin was published in 1991, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Two collections of stories, Taking Pictures and Yesterday’s Weather were published in 2008. Her novels are The Wig My Father Wore (1995); What Are You Like? winner of the 2001 Encore Award ; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002); and The Gathering (2007) which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
We
met at the IFOA in Toronto recently to talk about the short story, and,
in so doing , about Beckett’s Happy Days, housewives with problems,
ideology, awakenings, characters’ voices, self deception, just doing
it, James Joyce and women writers.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Joe Dunthorne is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters at UEA,
where he was awarded the Curtis Brown Prize. His poetry has been
published in Reactions 5, Magma, Smiths Knoll and Tears in the Fence.
His work has been featured on Channel 4, BBC Radio 3, 4 and in The
Guardian and Vice magazine. We met recently at the IFOA in Toronto to
discuss his debut novel, Submarine, why the behavior of teenage boys is
often seen as abominable, the importance of getting laid, ambiguous
characters, depression, the brilliance of novelist W.G. Sebald, East
Anglia University, how humour works, and dustjackets which both attract
attention
and complement content.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
AMITAV GHOSH is one of India’s best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances and The Hungry Tide.
Born in Calcutta in 1956 Ghosh studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi,
Alexandria and Oxford. His first job was at the Indian Express
newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote
his first novel, which was published in 1986. He is married to the
writer, Deborah Baker, and has two children, Lila and Nayan. He divides
his time between Kolkata, Goa and Brooklyn.
We met recently at the IFOA in Toronto to talk about his most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, the
first volume in a planned trilogy. Among other things we discuss how
novels tell the stories of silenced, unheard voices, sailing,
Mauritius, multi-racial crews, opium, the Caste system and the
pleasures of research.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry,
Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit
http://nigelbeale.com)
Junot DÃaz
was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of
Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John
Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award,
the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the
2008 Pulitzer Prize. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and
the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
We met recently at the IFOA in Toronto,
and talked about, among other things storytelling as a way to give
voice to lost life, unique characters, 9/11 and America’s dual
response: Why don’t they like us? and We’re gonna bomb them into the
stone age; gaps, how to inject humour and energy into a text, and the
Dominican Republic as the egg from which the U.S. eagle sprang.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry,
Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit
http://nigelbeale.com)
Rivka Galchen was born in Toronto. She grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen, was a professor of meterology at the University of Oklahoma. Her novel Atmospheric Disturbances features a character with the same name, Tzvi Gal-Chen, a professor of meterology and a fellow of the (fictional) Royal Academy of Meterology.
Galchen attended Princeton University, where she was an English major, and applied in her sophomore year to an early-admissions program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai in 2003, with a focus in psychiatry. After completing medical school, she completed an MFA at Columbia University. Farcically, Atmospheric Disturbances
was nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction (she
left the country when she was four years old). No way she was going to
win; still, on the flip side, provides nice exposure for both prize and
author.
We talk here among other things about denial, death,
fathers, unreliable narrators, James Wood, Walter Benjamin, science,
consensus knowledge, and being stoned.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry,
Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts...please visit
http://nigelbeale.com) Please listen here:
Nam Le has won this year’s £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize.
It recognizes the best young writer in the English-speaking world with
the goal of ensuring that the inspirational nature of Dylan’s writing
lives on.
I met with Nam in Toronto recently at the IFOA. This is part two of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum,Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O’Connor thought best constituted a good short story. I’ve listed some of them here.
Nam Le is author of The Boat,
a collection of ’stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the
streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a fishing
village in Australia to a floundering vessel in the South China Sea, in
a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling.’
We talk, among
other things, about never condescending to the reader, the prose having
to be smarter than its author: tapping into things seen, but a just
beyond their ken; gaps and allowing the reader to put their experiences
into them; getting into the consciousness of characters; relinquishing
ego; the difficulty of writing short stories — and the greatness of
those who can do it well; spring-boarding detail and gearing it for
expansion; and affecting paradoxical senses of recognition, wonder and
redemption.
Joseph Boyden has just won The 2008 Giller Prize for his novel Through Black Spruce. We talk here about the novel, and the psychic distance Joseph requires to write
novels about Northern Ontario and the Cree; the similarities between
North and South, James Bay and New Orleans; snowmobiling over vast
amounts of snow-covered bush, isolation in the wilderness; bridges
between communities, oral culture, First Nation humour, respect for
myths and legends, and soapboxes. Please excuse the abrupt ending!
These points live dramatically in the
person of Louis Slotin, a scientist from Winnipeg involved in the
Manhattan project and development of the atomic bomb, and Lista’s
desire to capture a day in his life. On May 21, 1946, Slotin conducted
a dangerous experiment referred to by his fellow scientists as
"tickling the dragon’s tail." Using a framework of existing poems, in
the way that James Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey, Lista has borderline plagarized them in a collection which documents this May day. The book will be entitled Bloom. Anansi will publish it.
"Out of admiration for the virtuosity of
Slotin’s achievements - with the attendant hubris and arrogance
necessary to take risks and make anything new - and taking on those
qualities in his own work, Lista’s poems do glitter, but more lastingly
than that word would suggest. Dazzle too has a showiness I don’t mean
to imply but the wit is so apparent. At the same time the tone is held
and is exactly what the subject requires in this poetic construction."
Revisiting my Salon des Refuses
experience in the last post, I am reminded of how rarely one encounters
great literary work. Poetry especially. Pablo Neruda, Ted Hughes, Robin
Robertson…I knew immediately upon first reading their poems that
something extraordinary was happening. Their words rubbed up against my
experience and sensibilities in ways that satisfied like few others
have.
I felt something of this while reading the handful of poems Michael sent me (please find three in a future post) in advance of our conversation. We talk here about the suicidal dangers of emulating Joyce’s Ulysses,
and the book’s unapproachability; punning, the multiple meanings of
bloom, epiphanies, coincidences, translation, sex and physics, life and
death.
This is part one of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum, Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O’Connor thought best constituted a good short story. I’ve listed some of them here.
We start with Rebecca Rosenblum, author of Once, " a collection of sixteen stories portraying the constricted and confused lives of the rootless twenty-somethings — students, office techies, waitresses, warehouse labourers, street hustlers — who inhabit them. These are stories grounded in the all-too-real comedy and tragedy of jobs and friendships and romances, books and buses and bodies." This debut collection won The Metcalf Rooke Award.
Margaret Visser (born May 11, 1940) is a writer/broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Barcelona, and France. Her subject matter is the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life.
Her books include Much Depends on Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, The Way We Are, and The Geometry of Love; all have been best sellers. Many have won awards. Her most recent work is called The Gift of Thanks,
published by HarperCollins. It asks: What do we really mean by Thank
you? What are the implications of gratitude, and why are we so enraged
when we meet its opposite?
In this conversation Visser tells us, among other
things, that gratitude involves thinking, that gift giving takes the
place of war, that apparently simple actions and behavior are in fact
surprisingly complex, and that gratitude and gift giving is natural
because humans beings are innate imitators. Oh yes. And we also talk
about sexual gratification!
This from Random House:
"Miriam Toews…was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of
Steinbach, Manitoba. She left Steinbach at eighteen, living in Montreal
and London and touring Europe before coming back to Manitoba, where she
earned a B.A. in film studies at the University of Manitoba. Later she
packed up with her children and partner and moved to Halifax to attend
the University of King’s College, where she received a bachelor’s
degree in journalism. Upon returning to Winnipeg with her family in
1991, she freelanced at the CBC, making radio documentaries. When her
youngest daughter started nursery school, Toews decided it was
time to try writing a novel."
She’s written four to date, including A Complicated Kindness which won the GG’s Award for Best Fiction in 2004. We talk here about her latest The Flying Troutmans,
about her father’s struggle with depression and the stigma that still
surrounds the disease, about road trips and siblings, the definition of
love, the film Little Miss Sunshine, writing novels with movie deals in mind, trust, abandonment and Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Please listen:
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Lindsey Davis was born and raised in
Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service,
which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour,
the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his
mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs,
the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1989.
Starting as a spoof using a Roman ‘informer’ as a classic, metropolitan
private eye, the series has developed into a set of adventures in
various styles which take place throughout the Roman world. The Silver Pigs
won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 1989; she has since won
the Crimewriters’ Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters
Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best
Comic Detective. She has been Chair of the UK Crimewriters’ Association
and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Her Official
Website is www.lindseydavis.co.uk.
We met recently at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talked, among other things, about the historical mystery genre, Ellis Peters, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
foreshadowing, the treatment of women, killing characters off, good
men, favourite plots and authors, and lessons that can be learned from
the Romans,
Rawi Hage
was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that
country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a
visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the
2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press
will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions,
New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the
absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism,
politics and the writer, canoing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic
poetry and the influence of fathers.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife,
which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother,
Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving
some of America’s most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century."
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talk here about his mother’s death, Camus, writing on the edge, suffering and distraction, luxury beds, Donald Barthelme, anger, sarcasm, loss of humour, collecting books, and the appeal of first editions. Donald also treats us to a reading from The Afterlife, and as part of this, the dedication in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. He is the author of seven novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in
Montreal to talk about reassessing the past, the development and urban
topography of his home town Belfast, cities versus nations, Disney,
Tolstoy’s theory of history, human complexity, his latest novelThe Third Party, apathy, public houses, the minor impact of books, and how happy he is with his oeuvre.
Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel, Be Near Me, has just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
It is the story of an English priest who takes over a small Scottish
parish in a post-industrial town by the sea; a story of art and
politics, love and faith, and the way we live now, which pretty well
summarizes the conversation we had this past weekend at The Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal.
More specifically we talked about tragedy, escape,
the determination not to be determined, fathers, the blurred boundaries
between fiction, memoir and journalism, the United States, the role of
writer in society, Martin Amis and Islamism, parents, writing ones own
life, and coloured doors in social housing projects.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
In honour of Poetry Month,
here is my interview with Canadian poet, critic and more recently,
political writer, David Solway. We first discuss what constitutes a
great poem in the context of ‘political’ and other agendas that some
poets incorporate into their work. According to Solway, great poems
consist of authentic, incontestable, memorable language, with vivid
power, lapidary quality and
prodigious rhetorical flow, which takes time, education, reflection and
maturity to work itself into themes of human importance; synoptic views
of the complexity of human life; a confluence of eloquent language and
major subject which has something important to say and which will
resonate with contemporary and future generations.
Great poems are like Switzerland, says
Solway: candidates must pass through a stringent, careful, fine-meshed
filter before they are granted citizenship.
It is posterity that decides what is
great. Aphoristic memorability and the wish to keep the words alive in
the mind, determines its greatness.
Sally Cooper’s second novel, Tell Everything,delves
into the darkest regions of the human soul, and lends credence to
Kipling’s line: "The female of the species is deadlier than the male."
During our conversation about Tell Everything we discuss topics including: the media and murder, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo,
…body parts in ponds, Rapunsil and crime plays,
three way sex, the blurred, complicated lines of consent, the fear of
self revelation, and love, self protection, shame and acceptance, boxes
and cameras, novel writing as catharsis, iguanas in snow drifts, crime
scene photographs, facing moral issues, true crime magazines, Michael Redhill’s short story The Victim, and women being every bit as predatory as men.
Sally Cooper grew up in Inglewood, Ontario,
population 400. She has an M.A. in English Literature from the
University of Guelph, and has published in such places as Shift, Blood & Aphorisms, Carousel, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and eye weekly. Her first novel, Love Object,
came out in 2002 to critical acclaim. She currently teaches creative
writing at Humber College and lives and writes in Hamilton, Ontario.
Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana.
He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. In 1988he
opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as a
"Book City." This store is arguably the largest single used bookstore
in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000
titles.
I interviewed him as part of a project I’m doing for the Canadian Booksellers Association. We talk about his latest book Untitled Fiction,
his life as a book rancher, having the right books, junk, the fun of
the hunt, book scouting, catalogues, bookstores and cultural vitality,
keeping stock fresh, burning out on fiction and movies, the declining
number of used book stores, and optimism for the future. For more interviews and book reviews www.nigelbeale.com
Poet and novelist John Burnside
was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and
European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A
former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since
1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000),
winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S.
Eliot Prize.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, of his love of Milton, Eliot and ice-hockey, about poetry being written mainly to impress girls (see here
for more on this hot topic), the Madonna-Whore complex, Charles Wright
as the best living poet in the world, and what metaphor does in our
lives
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Elias Khoury is author of eleven novels including Little Mountain and Gates of the City.
He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New
York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of
Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar. We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, about his latest novel in English Gate of the Sun,
of how great literature speaks to what is human and how religion
doesn’t; of how telling stories helps us to overcome death, and how
knowledge helps to overcome power; of keys, loss, hatred and love; of
how important the right to story, memory and language is to the
existence of a people; of the double tragedy of Palestine in 1948, the
real one and the fact that the telling of this catastrophe has not been
permitted; of how reading literature helps us discover ourselves and of
how literature attempts to give meaning to the meaninglessness of life.
Peter Behrens’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Saturday Night, and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, among other things about voice and poetry in his debut novel The Law of Dreams, Winner
of The 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It tells the
story of a young man’s struggle to survive the Great Famine in Ireland
of 1847. On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the
Atlantic to Canada Fergus O’brien encounters death, violence, sexual
heat, ‘boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful
girls – all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural
catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect. ‘
Think Dickens meets J.M. Coetzee.
The book has been hailed by many reputable media outlets including The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Lydia Davis is a contemporary American author and translator of French. From 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son. She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is not Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, but rather Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity, poetry, philosophy and humour. Many are only one or two sentences long.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival,
about the role of the translator, her Swann’s Way, measuring rooms
three inches at a time, becoming Proust as an actor might a character,
dialogue being more of a translation challenge than description because
speech is born of environment and times, and the goal of creating
living language that’s timeless.
C.S. Richardson is an accomplished book designer
who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple
recipient of the Alcuin Award
(Canada’s highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent
lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed,
he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet, and is
currently at work on his second.
We talk here about C.S. Lewis, the role of the book designer, the award winning Bedside Book of Birds, ‘thumbage,’ how the best book design is invisible, the best designers currently at work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, published by Chatto and Windus in England, and Knopf in the U.S. as one of the best designed books in recent memory.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Amanda Earl writes erotic fiction in Ottawa, Canada, as much for her own pleasure as anything else. Her stories have consistently been selected for publication in Carroll and Graf’s annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Amanda publishes and writes poetry, is managing editor of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and hosts Bywords.ca, a website invaluable to Ottawanians interested in local literary events.
We talk here about the definitions of erotica and pornography (a
common joke: “Erotica is when you use a feather. Pornography is when
you use the whole chicken.�), red wine versus white, connecting with
and arousing readers, giving pleasure, the act, golden showers, being
bad, the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, S&M, compelling characters and work as prostitution.
Ronald Cohen is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill 3 Volume Set(ISBN:0826472354) published in 2006: a ‘richly
annotated work’ containing thousands of entries, with detailed
descriptions of each work by Churchill, including information on
content, typography,paper, illustrations, maps, facsimiles, bindings,
dust jackets, publication and printing history, translations, and
library/collection locations, plus circumstances of publication.
We talk here generally about the art of bibliography, specifically
about binding and centriod colour charts, altruism, accessibility,
building road-maps, how many bibliographers start off as disgruntled
collectors, experiencing the thrill and joy of collecting without
having to lay out the dough, bibliography as storytelling, innovative
periodical entry descriptions, errata, when to stop, how Cohen always
got it wrong, surrendering, and uncharted works bolting from the
undergrowth.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Lindsey Davis was born and raised in
Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service,
which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour,
the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his
mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs,
the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1989.
Starting as a spoof using a Roman ‘informer’ as a classic, metropolitan
private eye, the series has developed into a set of adventures in
various styles which take place throughout the Roman world. The Silver Pigs
won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 1989; she has since won
the Crimewriters’ Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters
Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best
Comic Detective. She has been Chair of the UK Crimewriters’ Association
and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Her Official
Website is www.lindseydavis.co.uk.
We met recently at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talked, among other things, about the historical mystery genre, Ellis Peters, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
foreshadowing, the treatment of women, killing characters off, good
men, favourite plots and authors, and lessons that can be learned from
the Romans,
Rawi Hage
was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that
country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a
visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the
2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press
will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions,
New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the
absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism,
politics and the writer, canoing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic
poetry and the influence of fathers.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife,
which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother,
Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving
some of America’s most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century."
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talk here about his mother’s death, Camus, writing on the edge, suffering and distraction, luxury beds, Donald Barthelme, anger, sarcasm, loss of humour, collecting books, and the appeal of first editions. Donald also treats us to a reading from The Afterlife, and as part of this, the dedication in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. He is the author of seven novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in
Montreal to talk about reassessing the past, the development and urban
topography of his home town Belfast, cities versus nations, Disney,
Tolstoy’s theory of history, human complexity, his latest novelThe Third Party, apathy, public houses, the minor impact of books, and how happy he is with his oeuvre.
Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel, Be Near Me, has just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
It is the story of an English priest who takes over a small Scottish
parish in a post-industrial town by the sea; a story of art and
politics, love and faith, and the way we live now, which pretty well
summarizes the conversation we had this past weekend at The Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal.
More specifically we talked about tragedy, escape,
the determination not to be determined, fathers, the blurred boundaries
between fiction, memoir and journalism, the United States, the role of
writer in society, Martin Amis and Islamism, parents, writing ones own
life, and coloured doors in social housing projects.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
In honour of Poetry Month,
here is my interview with Canadian poet, critic and more recently,
political writer, David Solway. We first discuss what constitutes a
great poem in the context of ‘political’ and other agendas that some
poets incorporate into their work. According to Solway, great poems
consist of authentic, incontestable, memorable language, with vivid
power, lapidary quality and
prodigious rhetorical flow, which takes time, education, reflection and
maturity to work itself into themes of human importance; synoptic views
of the complexity of human life; a confluence of eloquent language and
major subject which has something important to say and which will
resonate with contemporary and future generations.
Great poems are like Switzerland, says
Solway: candidates must pass through a stringent, careful, fine-meshed
filter before they are granted citizenship.
It is posterity that decides what is
great. Aphoristic memorability and the wish to keep the words alive in
the mind, determines its greatness.
Sally Cooper’s second novel, Tell Everything,delves
into the darkest regions of the human soul, and lends credence to
Kipling’s line: "The female of the species is deadlier than the male."
During our conversation about Tell Everything we discuss topics including: the media and murder, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo,
…body parts in ponds, Rapunsil and crime plays,
three way sex, the blurred, complicated lines of consent, the fear of
self revelation, and love, self protection, shame and acceptance, boxes
and cameras, novel writing as catharsis, iguanas in snow drifts, crime
scene photographs, facing moral issues, true crime magazines, Michael Redhill’s short story The Victim, and women being every bit as predatory as men.
Sally Cooper grew up in Inglewood, Ontario,
population 400. She has an M.A. in English Literature from the
University of Guelph, and has published in such places as Shift, Blood & Aphorisms, Carousel, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and eye weekly. Her first novel, Love Object,
came out in 2002 to critical acclaim. She currently teaches creative
writing at Humber College and lives and writes in Hamilton, Ontario.
Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana.
He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. In 1988he
opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as a
"Book City." This store is arguably the largest single used bookstore
in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000
titles.
I interviewed him as part of a project I’m doing for the Canadian Booksellers Association. We talk about his latest book Untitled Fiction,
his life as a book rancher, having the right books, junk, the fun of
the hunt, book scouting, catalogues, bookstores and cultural vitality,
keeping stock fresh, burning out on fiction and movies, the declining
number of used book stores, and optimism for the future. For more interviews and book reviews www.nigelbeale.com
Poet and novelist John Burnside
was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and
European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A
former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since
1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000),
winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S.
Eliot Prize.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, of his love of Milton, Eliot and ice-hockey, about poetry being written mainly to impress girls (see here
for more on this hot topic), the Madonna-Whore complex, Charles Wright
as the best living poet in the world, and what metaphor does in our
lives
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Elias Khoury is author of eleven novels including Little Mountain and Gates of the City.
He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New
York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of
Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar. We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, about his latest novel in English Gate of the Sun,
of how great literature speaks to what is human and how religion
doesn’t; of how telling stories helps us to overcome death, and how
knowledge helps to overcome power; of keys, loss, hatred and love; of
how important the right to story, memory and language is to the
existence of a people; of the double tragedy of Palestine in 1948, the
real one and the fact that the telling of this catastrophe has not been
permitted; of how reading literature helps us discover ourselves and of
how literature attempts to give meaning to the meaninglessness of life.
Peter Behrens’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Saturday Night, and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, among other things about voice and poetry in his debut novel The Law of Dreams, Winner
of The 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It tells the
story of a young man’s struggle to survive the Great Famine in Ireland
of 1847. On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the
Atlantic to Canada Fergus O’brien encounters death, violence, sexual
heat, ‘boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful
girls – all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural
catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect. ‘
Think Dickens meets J.M. Coetzee.
The book has been hailed by many reputable media outlets including The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Lydia Davis is a contemporary American author and translator of French. From 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son. She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is not Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, but rather Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity, poetry, philosophy and humour. Many are only one or two sentences long.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival,
about the role of the translator, her Swann’s Way, measuring rooms
three inches at a time, becoming Proust as an actor might a character,
dialogue being more of a translation challenge than description because
speech is born of environment and times, and the goal of creating
living language that’s timeless.
C.S. Richardson is an accomplished book designer
who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple
recipient of the Alcuin Award
(Canada’s highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent
lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed,
he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet, and is
currently at work on his second.
We talk here about C.S. Lewis, the role of the book designer, the award winning Bedside Book of Birds, ‘thumbage,’ how the best book design is invisible, the best designers currently at work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, published by Chatto and Windus in England, and Knopf in the U.S. as one of the best designed books in recent memory.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Amanda Earl writes erotic fiction in Ottawa, Canada, as much for her own pleasure as anything else. Her stories have consistently been selected for publication in Carroll and Graf’s annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Amanda publishes and writes poetry, is managing editor of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and hosts Bywords.ca, a website invaluable to Ottawanians interested in local literary events.
We talk here about the definitions of erotica and pornography (a
common joke: “Erotica is when you use a feather. Pornography is when
you use the whole chicken.�), red wine versus white, connecting with
and arousing readers, giving pleasure, the act, golden showers, being
bad, the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, S&M, compelling characters and work as prostitution.
Ronald Cohen is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill 3 Volume Set(ISBN:0826472354) published in 2006: a ‘richly
annotated work’ containing thousands of entries, with detailed
descriptions of each work by Churchill, including information on
content, typography,paper, illustrations, maps, facsimiles, bindings,
dust jackets, publication and printing history, translations, and
library/collection locations, plus circumstances of publication.
We talk here generally about the art of bibliography, specifically
about binding and centriod colour charts, altruism, accessibility,
building road-maps, how many bibliographers start off as disgruntled
collectors, experiencing the thrill and joy of collecting without
having to lay out the dough, bibliography as storytelling, innovative
periodical entry descriptions, errata, when to stop, how Cohen always
got it wrong, surrendering, and uncharted works bolting from the
undergrowth.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Lindsey Davis was born and raised in
Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service,
which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour,
the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his
mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs,
the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1989.
Starting as a spoof using a Roman ‘informer’ as a classic, metropolitan
private eye, the series has developed into a set of adventures in
various styles which take place throughout the Roman world. The Silver Pigs
won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 1989; she has since won
the Crimewriters’ Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters
Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best
Comic Detective. She has been Chair of the UK Crimewriters’ Association
and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Her Official
Website is www.lindseydavis.co.uk.
We met recently at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talked, among other things, about the historical mystery genre, Ellis Peters, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
foreshadowing, the treatment of women, killing characters off, good
men, favourite plots and authors, and lessons that can be learned from
the Romans,
Rawi Hage
was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that
country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a
visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the
2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press
will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions,
New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the
absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism,
politics and the writer, canoing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic
poetry and the influence of fathers.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife,
which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother,
Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving
some of America’s most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century."
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talk here about his mother’s death, Camus, writing on the edge, suffering and distraction, luxury beds, Donald Barthelme, anger, sarcasm, loss of humour, collecting books, and the appeal of first editions. Donald also treats us to a reading from The Afterlife, and as part of this, the dedication in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. He is the author of seven novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in
Montreal to talk about reassessing the past, the development and urban
topography of his home town Belfast, cities versus nations, Disney,
Tolstoy’s theory of history, human complexity, his latest novelThe Third Party, apathy, public houses, the minor impact of books, and how happy he is with his oeuvre.
Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel, Be Near Me, has just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
It is the story of an English priest who takes over a small Scottish
parish in a post-industrial town by the sea; a story of art and
politics, love and faith, and the way we live now, which pretty well
summarizes the conversation we had this past weekend at The Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal.
More specifically we talked about tragedy, escape,
the determination not to be determined, fathers, the blurred boundaries
between fiction, memoir and journalism, the United States, the role of
writer in society, Martin Amis and Islamism, parents, writing ones own
life, and coloured doors in social housing projects.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
In honour of Poetry Month,
here is my interview with Canadian poet, critic and more recently,
political writer, David Solway. We first discuss what constitutes a
great poem in the context of ‘political’ and other agendas that some
poets incorporate into their work. According to Solway, great poems
consist of authentic, incontestable, memorable language, with vivid
power, lapidary quality and
prodigious rhetorical flow, which takes time, education, reflection and
maturity to work itself into themes of human importance; synoptic views
of the complexity of human life; a confluence of eloquent language and
major subject which has something important to say and which will
resonate with contemporary and future generations.
Great poems are like Switzerland, says
Solway: candidates must pass through a stringent, careful, fine-meshed
filter before they are granted citizenship.
It is posterity that decides what is
great. Aphoristic memorability and the wish to keep the words alive in
the mind, determines its greatness.
Sally Cooper’s second novel, Tell Everything,delves
into the darkest regions of the human soul, and lends credence to
Kipling’s line: "The female of the species is deadlier than the male."
During our conversation about Tell Everything we discuss topics including: the media and murder, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo,
…body parts in ponds, Rapunsil and crime plays,
three way sex, the blurred, complicated lines of consent, the fear of
self revelation, and love, self protection, shame and acceptance, boxes
and cameras, novel writing as catharsis, iguanas in snow drifts, crime
scene photographs, facing moral issues, true crime magazines, Michael Redhill’s short story The Victim, and women being every bit as predatory as men.
Sally Cooper grew up in Inglewood, Ontario,
population 400. She has an M.A. in English Literature from the
University of Guelph, and has published in such places as Shift, Blood & Aphorisms, Carousel, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and eye weekly. Her first novel, Love Object,
came out in 2002 to critical acclaim. She currently teaches creative
writing at Humber College and lives and writes in Hamilton, Ontario.
Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana.
He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. In 1988he
opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as a
"Book City." This store is arguably the largest single used bookstore
in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000
titles.
I interviewed him as part of a project I’m doing for the Canadian Booksellers Association. We talk about his latest book Untitled Fiction,
his life as a book rancher, having the right books, junk, the fun of
the hunt, book scouting, catalogues, bookstores and cultural vitality,
keeping stock fresh, burning out on fiction and movies, the declining
number of used book stores, and optimism for the future. For more interviews and book reviews www.nigelbeale.com
Poet and novelist John Burnside
was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and
European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A
former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since
1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000),
winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S.
Eliot Prize.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, of his love of Milton, Eliot and ice-hockey, about poetry being written mainly to impress girls (see here
for more on this hot topic), the Madonna-Whore complex, Charles Wright
as the best living poet in the world, and what metaphor does in our
lives
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Elias Khoury is author of eleven novels including Little Mountain and Gates of the City.
He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New
York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of
Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar. We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, about his latest novel in English Gate of the Sun,
of how great literature speaks to what is human and how religion
doesn’t; of how telling stories helps us to overcome death, and how
knowledge helps to overcome power; of keys, loss, hatred and love; of
how important the right to story, memory and language is to the
existence of a people; of the double tragedy of Palestine in 1948, the
real one and the fact that the telling of this catastrophe has not been
permitted; of how reading literature helps us discover ourselves and of
how literature attempts to give meaning to the meaninglessness of life.
Peter Behrens’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Saturday Night, and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, among other things about voice and poetry in his debut novel The Law of Dreams, Winner
of The 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It tells the
story of a young man’s struggle to survive the Great Famine in Ireland
of 1847. On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the
Atlantic to Canada Fergus O’brien encounters death, violence, sexual
heat, ‘boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful
girls – all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural
catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect. ‘
Think Dickens meets J.M. Coetzee.
The book has been hailed by many reputable media outlets including The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Lydia Davis is a contemporary American author and translator of French. From 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son. She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is not Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, but rather Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity, poetry, philosophy and humour. Many are only one or two sentences long.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival,
about the role of the translator, her Swann’s Way, measuring rooms
three inches at a time, becoming Proust as an actor might a character,
dialogue being more of a translation challenge than description because
speech is born of environment and times, and the goal of creating
living language that’s timeless.
C.S. Richardson is an accomplished book designer
who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple
recipient of the Alcuin Award
(Canada’s highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent
lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed,
he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet, and is
currently at work on his second.
We talk here about C.S. Lewis, the role of the book designer, the award winning Bedside Book of Birds, ‘thumbage,’ how the best book design is invisible, the best designers currently at work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, published by Chatto and Windus in England, and Knopf in the U.S. as one of the best designed books in recent memory.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Amanda Earl writes erotic fiction in Ottawa, Canada, as much for her own pleasure as anything else. Her stories have consistently been selected for publication in Carroll and Graf’s annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Amanda publishes and writes poetry, is managing editor of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and hosts Bywords.ca, a website invaluable to Ottawanians interested in local literary events.
We talk here about the definitions of erotica and pornography (a
common joke: “Erotica is when you use a feather. Pornography is when
you use the whole chicken.�), red wine versus white, connecting with
and arousing readers, giving pleasure, the act, golden showers, being
bad, the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, S&M, compelling characters and work as prostitution.
Ronald Cohen is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill 3 Volume Set(ISBN:0826472354) published in 2006: a ‘richly
annotated work’ containing thousands of entries, with detailed
descriptions of each work by Churchill, including information on
content, typography,paper, illustrations, maps, facsimiles, bindings,
dust jackets, publication and printing history, translations, and
library/collection locations, plus circumstances of publication.
We talk here generally about the art of bibliography, specifically
about binding and centriod colour charts, altruism, accessibility,
building road-maps, how many bibliographers start off as disgruntled
collectors, experiencing the thrill and joy of collecting without
having to lay out the dough, bibliography as storytelling, innovative
periodical entry descriptions, errata, when to stop, how Cohen always
got it wrong, surrendering, and uncharted works bolting from the
undergrowth.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Lindsey Davis was born and raised in
Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service,
which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour,
the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his
mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs,
the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1989.
Starting as a spoof using a Roman ‘informer’ as a classic, metropolitan
private eye, the series has developed into a set of adventures in
various styles which take place throughout the Roman world. The Silver Pigs
won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 1989; she has since won
the Crimewriters’ Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters
Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best
Comic Detective. She has been Chair of the UK Crimewriters’ Association
and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Her Official
Website is www.lindseydavis.co.uk.
We met recently at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talked, among other things, about the historical mystery genre, Ellis Peters, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
foreshadowing, the treatment of women, killing characters off, good
men, favourite plots and authors, and lessons that can be learned from
the Romans,
Rawi Hage
was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that
country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a
visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the
2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press
will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions,
New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the
absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism,
politics and the writer, canoing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic
poetry and the influence of fathers.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife,
which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother,
Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving
some of America’s most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century."
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talk here about his mother’s death, Camus, writing on the edge, suffering and distraction, luxury beds, Donald Barthelme, anger, sarcasm, loss of humour, collecting books, and the appeal of first editions. Donald also treats us to a reading from The Afterlife, and as part of this, the dedication in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Lindsey Davis was born and raised in
Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service,
which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour,
the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his
mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs,
the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1989.
Starting as a spoof using a Roman ‘informer’ as a classic, metropolitan
private eye, the series has developed into a set of adventures in
various styles which take place throughout the Roman world. The Silver Pigs
won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 1989; she has since won
the Crimewriters’ Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters
Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best
Comic Detective. She has been Chair of the UK Crimewriters’ Association
and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Her Official
Website is www.lindseydavis.co.uk.
We met recently at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talked, among other things, about the historical mystery genre, Ellis Peters, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
foreshadowing, the treatment of women, killing characters off, good
men, favourite plots and authors, and lessons that can be learned from
the Romans,
Rawi Hage
was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that
country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a
visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the
2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press
will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions,
New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the
absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism,
politics and the writer, canoing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic
poetry and the influence of fathers.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife,
which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother,
Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving
some of America’s most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century."
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talk here about his mother’s death, Camus, writing on the edge, suffering and distraction, luxury beds, Donald Barthelme, anger, sarcasm, loss of humour, collecting books, and the appeal of first editions. Donald also treats us to a reading from The Afterlife, and as part of this, the dedication in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. He is the author of seven novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in
Montreal to talk about reassessing the past, the development and urban
topography of his home town Belfast, cities versus nations, Disney,
Tolstoy’s theory of history, human complexity, his latest novelThe Third Party, apathy, public houses, the minor impact of books, and how happy he is with his oeuvre.
Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel, Be Near Me, has just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
It is the story of an English priest who takes over a small Scottish
parish in a post-industrial town by the sea; a story of art and
politics, love and faith, and the way we live now, which pretty well
summarizes the conversation we had this past weekend at The Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal.
More specifically we talked about tragedy, escape,
the determination not to be determined, fathers, the blurred boundaries
between fiction, memoir and journalism, the United States, the role of
writer in society, Martin Amis and Islamism, parents, writing ones own
life, and coloured doors in social housing projects.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
In honour of Poetry Month,
here is my interview with Canadian poet, critic and more recently,
political writer, David Solway. We first discuss what constitutes a
great poem in the context of ‘political’ and other agendas that some
poets incorporate into their work. According to Solway, great poems
consist of authentic, incontestable, memorable language, with vivid
power, lapidary quality and
prodigious rhetorical flow, which takes time, education, reflection and
maturity to work itself into themes of human importance; synoptic views
of the complexity of human life; a confluence of eloquent language and
major subject which has something important to say and which will
resonate with contemporary and future generations.
Great poems are like Switzerland, says
Solway: candidates must pass through a stringent, careful, fine-meshed
filter before they are granted citizenship.
It is posterity that decides what is
great. Aphoristic memorability and the wish to keep the words alive in
the mind, determines its greatness.
Sally Cooper’s second novel, Tell Everything,delves
into the darkest regions of the human soul, and lends credence to
Kipling’s line: "The female of the species is deadlier than the male."
During our conversation about Tell Everything we discuss topics including: the media and murder, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo,
…body parts in ponds, Rapunsil and crime plays,
three way sex, the blurred, complicated lines of consent, the fear of
self revelation, and love, self protection, shame and acceptance, boxes
and cameras, novel writing as catharsis, iguanas in snow drifts, crime
scene photographs, facing moral issues, true crime magazines, Michael Redhill’s short story The Victim, and women being every bit as predatory as men.
Sally Cooper grew up in Inglewood, Ontario,
population 400. She has an M.A. in English Literature from the
University of Guelph, and has published in such places as Shift, Blood & Aphorisms, Carousel, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and eye weekly. Her first novel, Love Object,
came out in 2002 to critical acclaim. She currently teaches creative
writing at Humber College and lives and writes in Hamilton, Ontario.
Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana.
He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. In 1988he
opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as a
"Book City." This store is arguably the largest single used bookstore
in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000
titles.
I interviewed him as part of a project I’m doing for the Canadian Booksellers Association. We talk about his latest book Untitled Fiction,
his life as a book rancher, having the right books, junk, the fun of
the hunt, book scouting, catalogues, bookstores and cultural vitality,
keeping stock fresh, burning out on fiction and movies, the declining
number of used book stores, and optimism for the future. For more interviews and book reviews www.nigelbeale.com
Poet and novelist John Burnside
was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and
European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A
former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since
1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000),
winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S.
Eliot Prize.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, of his love of Milton, Eliot and ice-hockey, about poetry being written mainly to impress girls (see here
for more on this hot topic), the Madonna-Whore complex, Charles Wright
as the best living poet in the world, and what metaphor does in our
lives
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Elias Khoury is author of eleven novels including Little Mountain and Gates of the City.
He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New
York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of
Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar. We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, about his latest novel in English Gate of the Sun,
of how great literature speaks to what is human and how religion
doesn’t; of how telling stories helps us to overcome death, and how
knowledge helps to overcome power; of keys, loss, hatred and love; of
how important the right to story, memory and language is to the
existence of a people; of the double tragedy of Palestine in 1948, the
real one and the fact that the telling of this catastrophe has not been
permitted; of how reading literature helps us discover ourselves and of
how literature attempts to give meaning to the meaninglessness of life.
Peter Behrens’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Saturday Night, and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, among other things about voice and poetry in his debut novel The Law of Dreams, Winner
of The 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It tells the
story of a young man’s struggle to survive the Great Famine in Ireland
of 1847. On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the
Atlantic to Canada Fergus O’brien encounters death, violence, sexual
heat, ‘boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful
girls – all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural
catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect. ‘
Think Dickens meets J.M. Coetzee.
The book has been hailed by many reputable media outlets including The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Lydia Davis is a contemporary American author and translator of French. From 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son. She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is not Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, but rather Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity, poetry, philosophy and humour. Many are only one or two sentences long.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival,
about the role of the translator, her Swann’s Way, measuring rooms
three inches at a time, becoming Proust as an actor might a character,
dialogue being more of a translation challenge than description because
speech is born of environment and times, and the goal of creating
living language that’s timeless.
C.S. Richardson is an accomplished book designer
who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple
recipient of the Alcuin Award
(Canada’s highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent
lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed,
he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet, and is
currently at work on his second.
We talk here about C.S. Lewis, the role of the book designer, the award winning Bedside Book of Birds, ‘thumbage,’ how the best book design is invisible, the best designers currently at work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, published by Chatto and Windus in England, and Knopf in the U.S. as one of the best designed books in recent memory.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Amanda Earl writes erotic fiction in Ottawa, Canada, as much for her own pleasure as anything else. Her stories have consistently been selected for publication in Carroll and Graf’s annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Amanda publishes and writes poetry, is managing editor of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and hosts Bywords.ca, a website invaluable to Ottawanians interested in local literary events.
We talk here about the definitions of erotica and pornography (a
common joke: “Erotica is when you use a feather. Pornography is when
you use the whole chicken.�), red wine versus white, connecting with
and arousing readers, giving pleasure, the act, golden showers, being
bad, the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, S&M, compelling characters and work as prostitution.
Ronald Cohen is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill 3 Volume Set(ISBN:0826472354) published in 2006: a ‘richly
annotated work’ containing thousands of entries, with detailed
descriptions of each work by Churchill, including information on
content, typography,paper, illustrations, maps, facsimiles, bindings,
dust jackets, publication and printing history, translations, and
library/collection locations, plus circumstances of publication.
We talk here generally about the art of bibliography, specifically
about binding and centriod colour charts, altruism, accessibility,
building road-maps, how many bibliographers start off as disgruntled
collectors, experiencing the thrill and joy of collecting without
having to lay out the dough, bibliography as storytelling, innovative
periodical entry descriptions, errata, when to stop, how Cohen always
got it wrong, surrendering, and uncharted works bolting from the
undergrowth.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Lindsey Davis was born and raised in
Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service,
which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour,
the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his
mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs,
the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1989.
Starting as a spoof using a Roman ‘informer’ as a classic, metropolitan
private eye, the series has developed into a set of adventures in
various styles which take place throughout the Roman world. The Silver Pigs
won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 1989; she has since won
the Crimewriters’ Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters
Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best
Comic Detective. She has been Chair of the UK Crimewriters’ Association
and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Her Official
Website is www.lindseydavis.co.uk.
We met recently at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talked, among other things, about the historical mystery genre, Ellis Peters, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
foreshadowing, the treatment of women, killing characters off, good
men, favourite plots and authors, and lessons that can be learned from
the Romans,
Rawi Hage
was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that
country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a
visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the
2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press
will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions,
New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the
absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism,
politics and the writer, canoing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic
poetry and the influence of fathers.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife,
which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother,
Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving
some of America’s most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century."
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talk here about his mother’s death, Camus, writing on the edge, suffering and distraction, luxury beds, Donald Barthelme, anger, sarcasm, loss of humour, collecting books, and the appeal of first editions. Donald also treats us to a reading from The Afterlife, and as part of this, the dedication in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. He is the author of seven novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in
Montreal to talk about reassessing the past, the development and urban
topography of his home town Belfast, cities versus nations, Disney,
Tolstoy’s theory of history, human complexity, his latest novelThe Third Party, apathy, public houses, the minor impact of books, and how happy he is with his oeuvre.
Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel, Be Near Me, has just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
It is the story of an English priest who takes over a small Scottish
parish in a post-industrial town by the sea; a story of art and
politics, love and faith, and the way we live now, which pretty well
summarizes the conversation we had this past weekend at The Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal.
More specifically we talked about tragedy, escape,
the determination not to be determined, fathers, the blurred boundaries
between fiction, memoir and journalism, the United States, the role of
writer in society, Martin Amis and Islamism, parents, writing ones own
life, and coloured doors in social housing projects.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
In honour of Poetry Month,
here is my interview with Canadian poet, critic and more recently,
political writer, David Solway. We first discuss what constitutes a
great poem in the context of ‘political’ and other agendas that some
poets incorporate into their work. According to Solway, great poems
consist of authentic, incontestable, memorable language, with vivid
power, lapidary quality and
prodigious rhetorical flow, which takes time, education, reflection and
maturity to work itself into themes of human importance; synoptic views
of the complexity of human life; a confluence of eloquent language and
major subject which has something important to say and which will
resonate with contemporary and future generations.
Great poems are like Switzerland, says
Solway: candidates must pass through a stringent, careful, fine-meshed
filter before they are granted citizenship.
It is posterity that decides what is
great. Aphoristic memorability and the wish to keep the words alive in
the mind, determines its greatness.
Sally Cooper’s second novel, Tell Everything,delves
into the darkest regions of the human soul, and lends credence to
Kipling’s line: "The female of the species is deadlier than the male."
During our conversation about Tell Everything we discuss topics including: the media and murder, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo,
…body parts in ponds, Rapunsil and crime plays,
three way sex, the blurred, complicated lines of consent, the fear of
self revelation, and love, self protection, shame and acceptance, boxes
and cameras, novel writing as catharsis, iguanas in snow drifts, crime
scene photographs, facing moral issues, true crime magazines, Michael Redhill’s short story The Victim, and women being every bit as predatory as men.
Sally Cooper grew up in Inglewood, Ontario,
population 400. She has an M.A. in English Literature from the
University of Guelph, and has published in such places as Shift, Blood & Aphorisms, Carousel, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and eye weekly. Her first novel, Love Object,
came out in 2002 to critical acclaim. She currently teaches creative
writing at Humber College and lives and writes in Hamilton, Ontario.
Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana.
He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. In 1988he
opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as a
"Book City." This store is arguably the largest single used bookstore
in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000
titles.
I interviewed him as part of a project I’m doing for the Canadian Booksellers Association. We talk about his latest book Untitled Fiction,
his life as a book rancher, having the right books, junk, the fun of
the hunt, book scouting, catalogues, bookstores and cultural vitality,
keeping stock fresh, burning out on fiction and movies, the declining
number of used book stores, and optimism for the future. For more interviews and book reviews www.nigelbeale.com
Poet and novelist John Burnside
was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and
European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A
former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since
1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000),
winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S.
Eliot Prize.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, of his love of Milton, Eliot and ice-hockey, about poetry being written mainly to impress girls (see here
for more on this hot topic), the Madonna-Whore complex, Charles Wright
as the best living poet in the world, and what metaphor does in our
lives
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Elias Khoury is author of eleven novels including Little Mountain and Gates of the City.
He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New
York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of
Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar. We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, about his latest novel in English Gate of the Sun,
of how great literature speaks to what is human and how religion
doesn’t; of how telling stories helps us to overcome death, and how
knowledge helps to overcome power; of keys, loss, hatred and love; of
how important the right to story, memory and language is to the
existence of a people; of the double tragedy of Palestine in 1948, the
real one and the fact that the telling of this catastrophe has not been
permitted; of how reading literature helps us discover ourselves and of
how literature attempts to give meaning to the meaninglessness of life.
Peter Behrens’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Saturday Night, and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, among other things about voice and poetry in his debut novel The Law of Dreams, Winner
of The 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It tells the
story of a young man’s struggle to survive the Great Famine in Ireland
of 1847. On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the
Atlantic to Canada Fergus O’brien encounters death, violence, sexual
heat, ‘boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful
girls – all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural
catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect. ‘
Think Dickens meets J.M. Coetzee.
The book has been hailed by many reputable media outlets including The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Lydia Davis is a contemporary American author and translator of French. From 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son. She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is not Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, but rather Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity, poetry, philosophy and humour. Many are only one or two sentences long.
We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival,
about the role of the translator, her Swann’s Way, measuring rooms
three inches at a time, becoming Proust as an actor might a character,
dialogue being more of a translation challenge than description because
speech is born of environment and times, and the goal of creating
living language that’s timeless.
C.S. Richardson is an accomplished book designer
who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple
recipient of the Alcuin Award
(Canada’s highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent
lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed,
he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet, and is
currently at work on his second.
We talk here about C.S. Lewis, the role of the book designer, the award winning Bedside Book of Birds, ‘thumbage,’ how the best book design is invisible, the best designers currently at work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, published by Chatto and Windus in England, and Knopf in the U.S. as one of the best designed books in recent memory.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Amanda Earl writes erotic fiction in Ottawa, Canada, as much for her own pleasure as anything else. Her stories have consistently been selected for publication in Carroll and Graf’s annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Amanda publishes and writes poetry, is managing editor of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and hosts Bywords.ca, a website invaluable to Ottawanians interested in local literary events.
We talk here about the definitions of erotica and pornography (a
common joke: “Erotica is when you use a feather. Pornography is when
you use the whole chicken.�), red wine versus white, connecting with
and arousing readers, giving pleasure, the act, golden showers, being
bad, the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, S&M, compelling characters and work as prostitution.
Ronald Cohen is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill 3 Volume Set(ISBN:0826472354) published in 2006: a ‘richly
annotated work’ containing thousands of entries, with detailed
descriptions of each work by Churchill, including information on
content, typography,paper, illustrations, maps, facsimiles, bindings,
dust jackets, publication and printing history, translations, and
library/collection locations, plus circumstances of publication.
We talk here generally about the art of bibliography, specifically
about binding and centriod colour charts, altruism, accessibility,
building road-maps, how many bibliographers start off as disgruntled
collectors, experiencing the thrill and joy of collecting without
having to lay out the dough, bibliography as storytelling, innovative
periodical entry descriptions, errata, when to stop, how Cohen always
got it wrong, surrendering, and uncharted works bolting from the
undergrowth.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Lindsey Davis was born and raised in
Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service,
which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour,
the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his
mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs,
the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1989.
Starting as a spoof using a Roman ‘informer’ as a classic, metropolitan
private eye, the series has developed into a set of adventures in
various styles which take place throughout the Roman world. The Silver Pigs
won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel award in 1989; she has since won
the Crimewriters’ Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters
Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best
Comic Detective. She has been Chair of the UK Crimewriters’ Association
and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Her Official
Website is www.lindseydavis.co.uk.
We met recently at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talked, among other things, about the historical mystery genre, Ellis Peters, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
foreshadowing, the treatment of women, killing characters off, good
men, favourite plots and authors, and lessons that can be learned from
the Romans,
Rawi Hage
was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that
country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a
visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the
2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press
will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions,
New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the
absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism,
politics and the writer, canoing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic
poetry and the influence of fathers.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife,
which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother,
Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving
some of America’s most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century."
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal, and talk here about his mother’s death, Camus, writing on the edge, suffering and distraction, luxury beds, Donald Barthelme, anger, sarcasm, loss of humour, collecting books, and the appeal of first editions. Donald also treats us to a reading from The Afterlife, and as part of this, the dedication in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. He is the author of seven novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in
Montreal to talk about reassessing the past, the development and urban
topography of his home town Belfast, cities versus nations, Disney,
Tolstoy’s theory of history, human complexity, his latest novelThe Third Party, apathy, public houses, the minor impact of books, and how happy he is with his oeuvre.
Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel, Be Near Me, has just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
It is the story of an English priest who takes over a small Scottish
parish in a post-industrial town by the sea; a story of art and
politics, love and faith, and the way we live now, which pretty well
summarizes the conversation we had this past weekend at The Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal.
More specifically we talked about tragedy, escape,
the determination not to be determined, fathers, the blurred boundaries
between fiction, memoir and journalism, the United States, the role of
writer in society, Martin Amis and Islamism, parents, writing ones own
life, and coloured doors in social housing projects.
(For more of Nigel Beale's Musings on the Book,
Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the
Arts...please visit http://nigelbeale.com)
In honour of Poetry Month,
here is my interview with Canadian poet, critic and more recently,
political writer, David Solway. We first discuss what constitutes a
great poem in the context of ‘political’ and other agendas that some
poets incorporate into their work. According to Solway, grea
