'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
09-01-10: Commentary : Tim Pratt Finds 'Sympathy for the Devil' : "...Hell for the company..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Dan Basta at the Blue Ocean Film Festival : "Experiential learning is the way we learn best."
08-31-10: Commentary : Peter S. Beagle Reveals 'The Secret History of Fantasy' : : Telling Lies for a Living
08-30-10: Commentary : David Doubilet Captures 'Water Time Light' : Painting with Pixels
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview With David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes : "Everything people have always feared about photography comes true underwater."
08-25-10: Commentary : Vendela Vida 'The Lovers' : Reading and Revelation
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Live Reading and Interview with Vendela Vida At Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...there was an owl that came into this place we were renting one day..."
08-24-10: Commentary : Jeff VanderMeer and 'The Third Bear' : Absurd Is as Absurd Does
08-20-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes 'Deadman's Road' : Deader Than Thou
Agony Column Podcast News Report : On the Phone with Vendela Vida : "You do all this background information, most of which never makes it into the book."
08-19-10: Commentary : Gary Shteyngart Tells a 'Super Sad True Love Story' : Retro-Prescience
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Gary Shteyngart Live Reading and Interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...please like me, this will make up for Hebrew school if all of you like me.."
08-18-10: Commentary : Mark Pilkington Unleashes Weapons of Mass Deception : "ECM+CIA=UFO"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett and Barry Eisler for The Agony Column Live at Capitola Book Café, August 7, 2010 Q and A : "This is NewSpeak."
08-16-10: Commentary : Howard Norman Asks 'What is Left the Daughter' : The Past Always Rises
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Howard Norman : "I'd wanted to write from the beginning an epistolary novel; this is just an epistolary novel that's consisting of one letter."
08-12-10: Commentary : James O'Neal Copies 'The Double Human' : Proceeding into the Future
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler and David Corbett Live at Capitola Book Café on August 7, 2010 : "If anyone thinks it's absurd that the government might assassinate the founder of WikiLeaks, it's quite a bit less absurd than I wish it were".... — Barry Eisler
08-11-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes Huck Finn to 'Dread Island' : "Classics Mutilated"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "...they'll pick up that angle and run interference for us..."
08-10-10: Commentary : David Corbett Asks 'Do They Know I'm Running?' : Crossing Borders
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "These Families are making incredible sacrifices..."
08-09-10: Commentary : David Mitchell and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet : The World is Ever the World
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with David Mitchell : "The periodic table of the human heart is still the same now as it was then."
08-06-10: Commentary : Tim Powers Sails 'On Stranger Tides' : History, Fantasy and the Reality of Reading
08-03-10: Commentary : Robert M. Price Spins 'The Tindalos Cycle' : Terrorize, Horrify, Repeat
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Short Chat with Gary Shteyngart : "...the technology is outpacing our ability to absorb what it is doing to us..."
08-02-10: Commentary : A Second Tour Through 'The Passage' : Sending Characters into Time
07-30-10: Commentary : Subterranean Press and Robert R. McCammon Wake at 'The Wolf's Hour' : The Time Before Cheese
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : Allegra Goodman, 'The Cookbook Collector,' Noam Shpancer's 'The Good Psychologist' and Elie Wiesel 'The Sonderberg Case'
07-28-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space 2 : En Route, RJ Frith and Peter F. Hamilton
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010: Q & A : "The people you deal with at the publishers ... if they last the end of the week, you're lucky."
07-27-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space : UK Space Opera Demonstrates Excess is Not Enough (Part one, the Arrived)
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010 : "Well, I thought if I do faeries then nobody's going to say that I've got it wrong."
07-26-10: Commentary : Brian and Wendy Froud Seek 'The Heart of Faerie Oracle' : Cards, Books and a New Perspective
