'Drama' is where things get sticky, where the choices become limited and uncomfortable. For every piece you choose to include, others, perhaps many others seemingly just as worthy, must be left out. Drama is inherently a longer form and far more challenging to present. In a book you can only put words, but drama is as much about performance as it is about text. The text though, is the literature.
When I talked to Alan Cheuse about 'Literature: Craft and Voice, Volume 3: Drama,' my questions were queued up from the moment I picked up the book. How do you choose the best oh, 600 pages of drama since time immemorial? How do you bring to life the words printed on a page, how to you instruct a student to read and analyze words that are meant to be heard, not read? The reading experience is wildly different from the play-going experience. How do you use a textbook to help us understand the cornerstones upon which the immersive media that now rule our lives are based? We live in an environment that Sophocles could not even have dreamed about. How do you put him at square one for student who probably spent five years watching cartoons before even thinking about reading? You can hear his answers to these questions by following the link to the MP3 audio file.
07-16-09: A 2009 Phone Interview with Warren Fahy
"Fun" and 'Fragment'
Warren Fahy told me he had a very simple mantra stickied to his monitor while writing 'Fragment' — "Fun." That was the word he kept in mind at all times when putting together his multi-layered, ultra-monsterific novel, 'Fragment.' The book itself is so much fun to read, it's hard to assimilate the level of horror and violence while doing so.
Occasionally books will catch me off-guard, and 'Fragment' was one such book, a novel that kept upping the ante even when I thought there was no longer any ante to up. I gave author Warren Fahy a call to ask about the origins, the research and the bad shrimp dinner that seemed to be at the heart of this rather remarkable thriller. Once you've read the book — not before, check out the website (http://warrenfahy.com/), where some "webisodes" show some of the critters.
Turned out it wasn't a bad shrimp dinner at all, but rather the Movile Cave in Romania, where 33 previously unknown species were discovered in an ecosystem that had been cut off from the rest of the world for five million years. Add a glimpse of the Mantis Shrimp, and more research than you can shake an ecosystem at, and you've got a novel that is a hoot to read even when you're swimming in blood. But let Warren Fahy tell you the details at this linked MP3 audio file.
07-15-09: A Conversation with Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books
The Independent Press and E-Books; Jay Lake's Latest; Remembering Charles Brown
William Faulkner put it best. "The past isn't dead. In fact, it's not even past." This morning I spoke with Jeremy Lassen about the past and future. 'Ti a sad day in the world of genre fiction with the passing of one of the greats, a man who single-handedly seem to hold up the genre on his shoulders, Charles N. Brown, the editor of Locus and in a sense, the overseer of the science fiction genre.
As readers knows, I'm rather prone to find myself the victim of bonnet bees. This morning, having seen yet another appreciation of even just the bare mention of one of them thar Kindle thingies (what, the folks at Amazon never read Fahrenheit 451?), I began to wonder what the independent press was making of these things. Sure, I'm looking at Chris Anderson's Free as well, in the non-free, but ever-so-readable hardcover edition. If ever irony were to be crystallized, it might look like this. So I challenged Lassen to tell me what was up with Night Shade and e-books and free books, which led to a very nice discussion about the publishing business strategy.
We also talked about the upcoming release of the much-awaited sequel to Jay Lake's 'Trial of Flowers,' the soon-to-arrive 'Madness of Flowers.' Lake's a phenomenal talent with a spectacularly wide range of work, from the clockwork steampunk of 'Mainspring' and 'Escapement' to the baroque fantasy of the Flowers novels.
And finally, Jeremy and I talked about the sad passing of a genre giant, Charles N. Brown, the publisher and editor of Locus Magazine. To both of us, it's apparent that Brown was responsible not just for Locus, but in a sense, for the speculative/science fiction genre at large. Here's a link to our conversation.
07-14-09: A 2009 Interview with Novella Carpenter
"Part of farming is having the crop go to somebody else besides you" — Novella Carpenter
The back office at Capitola must be getting some sort of good vibe from all the great conversations I've had there. Novella Carpenter was no exception, but I must allow that I was glad she didn't bring any living poultry with her. Meat birds, as she calls 'em.
Novella Carpenter has a great story to tell you, and you should hear it as well as read it. She's just an enthusiast of the first order, and it comes across she speaks. But there's a great just-business-like edge when she talks. Sure, she loves what she's doing, but she makes sure that she and you don't forget why she's doing it. She's raising food, for herself and for her neighborhood. We talked about her animals, her neighbors and neighborhood and what each thought of the other. You can hear our conversation by following this like to the MP3 audio file.
07-13-09: A 2009 Interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafón
"I just write for people who like to read" — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I tried to resist. 'The Shadow of the Wind' got so many reviews that were so good, and made the book sound good to me, that I let it pass on the first release. But when they sent me an ARC of 'The Angle's Game' and I laid eyes on the Subterranean Press edition of 'The Shadow of the Wind,' I caved, and damn I'm glad I did.
When I heard that Zafón was going to be in town, I found myself in the wonderful position of getting to read his novels back-to-back, to immerse myself in his wonderful prose, his delightful cityscapes and his insidious, inventive narrative style. Zafon writes the sort of books that you just don't want to end.
I managed to catch up with him in his hotel in San Francisco. While I was setting up, I mentioned that I used to work at E-mu Systems, and then, for the next ten minutes we geeked out about the joys of the Proteus Modules (which he and I both still used) and the virtues of hardware with knobs and switches and instant sounds coming out of nice, neat one-rack space modules. It was only the beginning.
Zafón has a firm grasp on what he's doing with literature and why he's doing what he's doing. If you think his books are entertaining (that is, if you've read them, in which case you almost certain do!), then let me confirm that the man speaking about his novels is just as entertaining as are the novels themselves. You can hear our conversation, sans geek-out, by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
New to the Agony Column
02-01-12: Commentary : Stan Lee Splashes 'Stan Lee's How to Write Comics' and 'Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics' : Lessons in the Form, From the Master
01-23-12: Commentary : Sara Paretsky Nails 'Breakdown' : The Machine Stops
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Interview with Sara Paretsky : "Everything in a courtroom is a story; it's not justice, it's combating narratives."
01-18-12: Commentary : Téa Obreht Conjures 'The Tiger's Wife' : The Grammar of Vision
01-13-12: Commentary : Hard Case Subterranean Block : Not from Bob's Basement Tapes
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Phone Interview with Lisa Randall : "...there seems to be some evidence, especially from one of the experiments."
01-10-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Terry D'Auray Catches Lawrence Block and 'The Burglar on the Prowl' : "A show well worth the price of a ticket."
12-29-11: Commentary : My Life in the Bush of Books : Island of Vice by Richard Zacks, Iago by David Snodin, The Coincidence Engine by Sam Leith and The Dipatcher by Ryan David Jahn
12-21-11: Commentary : Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman : From the Seedy to the Sublime
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : 'Kill Bin Laden' ; Ryu Mitsuse, '10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights' ; Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, 'Micro'
12-20-11: Commentary : David Blackbourn Visits 'Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village' : Externalizing a Culture Clash
12-15-11: Commentary : Ayize Jama-Everett Reveals 'The Liminal People' : The Powers That Be
Agony Column Podcast News Report : The Agony Column Live with Lisa Goldstein and Ayize Jama-Everett, and music by Fenyang Smith, December 10, 2011 : "... let's look at what happens if people have abilities that other people don't have ..."
11-28-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Scott Wallace : "Within months of first contact, these groups experience a huge die-off."
11-22-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier, Part Two : "It's not me telling you, there's this storyteller voice."
11-21-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier : "If we're going in the wrong direction, we could turn around and go back."
11-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Gianni Mola : "The only way you can learn, I told them, is to watch me cook it."
11-11-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Karl Marlantes : "...the way I "think" about things, with quotes around think, is I tend to write them down..."
10-31-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Colson Whitehead : "In the Apocalypse, somebody's gonna have to do the grunt work..."
10-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Russell Banks : "They are in a sense, permanently marked and thrown into this darkness..."
