Cultural anxieties are currently running high about the future of the book as a physical object, and about the immediate prospects for survival of actual brick and mortar booksellers. When most people think about the (by now very real) possibility of the retail side of the book business disappearing entirely into the online ether, they mostly tend to focus on the idea of their favorite bookshops shutting their doors for the last time. Sub-Borgesian bibliomaniac that I am (or, if you prefer, pathetic nerd), I have a mental image of the perfect bookshop that I hold in my mind. It’s a sort of Platonic ideal of the retail environment, a perfect confluence of impeccable curation and expansive selection, artfully cluttered and with the kind of quietly hospitable ambiance that makes the passage of time seem irrelevant once you start in on browsing the shelves.

Read the rest at The Millions

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the death of one of contemporary literature’s most transformative figures. On December 14, 2001, the German writer W. G. Sebald suffered a heart attack while driving and was killed instantly in a head-on collision with a truck. He was fifty-seven years old, having lived and worked as a university lecturer in England since his mid-twenties, and had only in the previous five years come to be widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature. Earlier that year, his book “Austerlitz” (about a Jewish man sent to England as a child through the Kindertransporte in 1939, the memory of whose past has been lost) was published to universal acclaim, and the prospect of a Nobel prize was already beginning to seem inevitable.

Read the rest at The New Yorker

It won’t reach American screens until December, but Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” opened this week in the U.K., where its dramatically quiffed protagonist is a more iconic figure. For a children’s adventure film, it has provoked some startlingly intense reactions in the British press. Writing in the Guardianlast week, the literary critic Nicholas Lezard made plain his distaste with Spielberg’s 3-D motion capture adaptation of Hergé’s classic comic-book series. Walking out of the screening, he writes, “I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape.”

Read the rest at The New Yorker

Empathy in fiction is a strange thing. It is possible to experience an imaginative connection with a character in a novel that would almost certainly be beyond us were that character a real human being in the world. A character’s actions, no matter how terrible, are often secondary to the way in which he or she is presented, particularly when that character is a first-person narrator. Lolita’s Humbert Humbert is an extremely obvious — and an obviously extreme — example of this. He’s a murderer, a kidnapper, a pedophile and, in a way that manages to seem somehow independent of these attributes, a fundamentally distasteful person. And yet we want to spend time with him. We want to hear what he has to say, and not just because it’s so horrible, or because of the famously fancy prose style in which he says it. There’s a part of us that connects with him, even as we recognize that we would never, or could never, do the ugly things he does. He is, as a fictional creature, more human to us than any of his countless real-world counterparts.

Read the rest at The Millions

October 5th will mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of the great comic geniuses, and one of the most inspired literary minds, of the twentieth century. He was born Brian O’Nolan in 1911, but is now most widely remembered as Flann O’Brien, the pseudonym under which he published “At Swim-Two-Birds” and “The Third Policeman,” two uniquely strange and formally inventive novels. Edna O’Brien (no relation, obviously) once wrote that “along with Joyce and Beckett, Flann O’Brien constitutes our trinity of great Irish writers,” and even if there’s something glib about that notion, there’s something attractive about it too. It’s tempting to picture Joyce as the inscrutable and dominant Father of Irish authors, Beckett as the suffering, ascetic, visionary Son, and Flann O’Brien as the shape-shifting Holy Comic Spirit.

Read the rest at The New Yorker

The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog

Last week, Amazon announced the launch of @Author, a new feature for the Kindle that will enable readers to highlight a particular passage of an e-book in order to ask its author a question about it. As yet, it’s operating only in a limited beta version, but a number of high-profile writers—among them Susan Orlean, Steven Johnson, and Timothy Ferriss—have already signed up. (There’s been no announcement thus far on whether Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy plan to get on board). It’s a development of which Holden Caulfield might have approved. “What really knocks me out,” as he put it, “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Holden’s creator, it should be said, was not himself noted for his openness to such overtures from readers.

Read the rest at newyorker.com

The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog

A few months ago, I went through a major Flannery O’Connor phase. I read her novels for the first time, and re-read the short stories, none of which I had looked at in years. In the middle of this surge of renewed enthusiasm for her work, I stumbled across this fantastic 1959 recording of O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” at Vanderbilt University. The most striking thing about it is the way in which O’Connor’s bone-dry Georgia drawl seems not merely to suit her writing perfectly, but also somehow to embody it. There’s a kind of bleak drollery inbuilt in her speech that seems to me to be the very voice of her fiction. The most remarkable thing about listening to this recording, though, was not getting to hear O’Connor herself talk, but rather the fact that when I when I went back to read her work, I would hear this voice echoing along in my head as I read the printed words. It brought a phantasmal new dimension to my experience of her writing.

Read the rest at newyorker.com

The Millions

For a writer whose own life has been so central to his work, David Vann is nothing like what you might expect from reading his books. His writing is thrillingly dark, haunted by personal trauma and utterly ruthless in its exposure of human perversity and frailty. In person, however, he is among the warmest, most open and good-humored people I have ever interviewed. He is quick to break into laughter even when discussing the blackest of topics.

Read the rest at The Millions

The Millions

“I can show you a sacred book that might interest a man such as yourself” – Jorge Luis Borges, “The Book of Sand”

Like many people who love to read, I exist in a paradoxical state of having both far too many books and far too few. I probably don’t have many more than the average literature lover of my age, but I live in a smallish apartment, and it often feels hazardously, almost maniacally overcrowded with books. A precarious obelisk of partially read paperbacks rises from my bedside table, coated in a thin film of dust. My shelves are all two rows deep, stuffed with a Tetris-like emphasis on space-optimization, and pretty much every horizontal surface holds some or other type of reading material. I haven’t read nearly all of these books (many of them I haven’t even made a serious attempt to get started on) but that doesn’t stop me from accumulating more at a rate that neither my income nor my living space can reasonably be expected to sustain.

Read the rest at The Millions

Mongrel Magazine, November 2004

Generally regarded as rap’s arch-intellectual in residence, Mike Ladd is the rapper/producer behind the high concept supergroups The Infesticons and The Majesticons. With these, he created a hypothetical universe where two clans are engaged in an epic battle for the soul of hip-hop culture – a struggle of substance against form, of grit versus bling. This interview took place outside on a bitterly cold night in November because of two things: Mike’s rather extreme nicotine habit and this country’s rather smoking ban, neither of which he is particularly happy with – he is one of the few people out there who smokes cigarettes and chews nicotine gum simultaneously. Mike speaks with the slow and measured restraint of a man who knows the importance of words.

 There’s a song on the new album called ‘Off to Mars’ which is unlike anything of yours I’ve heard before in that it presents this one really clear idea. It’s obviously about George Bush, but there doesn’t seem to be any anger in it. There’s the line ‘Please, just leave/ We’ll clean up the mess.’ It reminds me of someone talking about a relationship that has just gone really sour. Like the person is saying, ‘I’ve had enough of you, just get lost because I don’t want to know you any more.’ Is that how you felt about Bush when you wrote that?

Yeah, partially. I’m talking about disgust. A person like that, he’s not really worthy of getting angry about. He’s just disgusting. He’s foul. He’s a base human being. But if you get angry, if you blow yourself up against him, that plays into what he wants. He’s not worth getting angry at. He’s worth trying to defeat. It’s the Star Wars type of shit: if you defeat him with anger, you’re going to fuck yourself up. You gotta figure out how to use the force. Read the rest of this entry »