06-17-10:Seanan McGuire Reads at SF in SF on June 12, 2010
"The Alchemy of Alcohol"
She had a choice. Seanan McGuire offered to read one of two stories; One funny and light, the other dark and depressing. There was no competition when she put it that way. The overwhelming response was that she should read "the funny one." Brave soul. Funny is relative. But McGuire succeeded in every respect when she read "The Alchemy of Alcohol."
Because there are clearly not enough "bar stories" in the SF&F genre, somebody over at DAW decided to commission 'After Hours: Tales from the Ur Bar,' and the rest is now recorded-on-digital-audio history. Seanan McGuire read her contribution to this anthology, "The Alchemy of Alcohol" at SF in SF, and I'm guessing sold a few copies of the book right then and there. McGuire's story starts with a body in the bar, and works the absurd angles of fantasy fiction for some extremely satisfying laughs.
McGuire is up for a Campbell Award this year at the Aussie Worldcon. She's the author of the October Daye novels, which are detective novels with a fae spin to them. Thus far she has 'Rosemary and Rue' and 'A Local Habitation.' Coming up are 'An Artifical Night', 'Late Eclipses' and 'The Brightest Fell.' That takes us into 2011. Hopefully the rest of us will make it there as well!
McGuire is a great reader of her own work. And to my mind, as well as others in the audience, this setup is good enough to warrant a return trip. Alas, the podcast is at least postponed and has at this time been removed at the author's request.
06-16-10:Deborah Grabien Reads at SF in SF on June 12, 2010
'Dark's Tale' and 'London Calling'
Deborah Grabien at read from two very different new books at SF in SF on June 12; 'Dark's Tale' (Egmont / Random House ; March 23, 2010 ; $15.99), a "tweener" book for ages 9-12 and 'London Calling,' the latest J.P. Kinkaid mystery. Truth to tell, I'd have been hard put to say that 'Dark' Tale' was a tweener book. It seemed pretty gritty and grim to me. But perhaps that's just what the kids want — or are.
Grabien comes from a performance world, so there's no doubt that she knows how to read in a manner that makes her words seem immediate and hard hitting. As part of the panel discussion, she spoke quite a bit about what she can and cannot include in a "tweener" book like 'Dark's Tale.'
But I can see why she wrote and how she sold it. It's the perfect book for cat lovers, and based on Grabien's work with the feral cat population in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
Lucyby Laurence Gonzalez, Spies of the Balkansby Alan Furst, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I don't think we could pick more different books than the three that Alan Cheuse and I discussed this week. We start with a page-turning beach read, follow up with a well-crafted historical spy novel, and finish with punk rock experimental literature. There's certainly no danger of either Cheuse and I or readers getting in a rut!
Surprisingly, to me at least, I think Alan was more enamored of 'Lucy' than I was. 'Lucy' is the sort of science fiction novel that looks like and feels like a mainstream thriller. It's a case of be-careful-what-you-pretend-to-be; to my mind science fiction might find it lacking, while more mainstream readers will enjoy the speculative elements.
Both Cheuse and I quite liked 'Spies of the Balkans,' which is a finely-written historical spy novel of the sort that Furst has become the leading exponent of. Set in Greece in the run-up to World War II, we meet Costa Zanna, a cop in Salonika, a port city in Greece, as he becomes embroiled in the coming war and involved with a woman who is quite likely not who she seems to be. Furst gets all the details right, knows how to plot, and writes engaging characters whom we enjoy see coming closer. It leaves the reader wanting more; what more could we ask?
And finally, Jennifer Egan is back with 'A Visit from the Goon Squad,' a brilliant and brilliantly enjoyable novel that manages to use the tropes of experimental fiction in a manner that make the book grippingly intense, funny, and endlessly enjoyable to read. You'll be hearing a lot more about this book here, so stay tuned. In the interim, here's a link to the MP3 file of my conversation with Alan Cheuse about these three books.
06-14-10:A 2009 Interview with Juliet Schor
"...We need to move to much more open, collaborative, sharing knowledge systems."
— Juliet Schor
What she says! Sometimes, I feel like I'm running a sort of subterranean college course with a very nebulous throughline, and as I edited this interview with Juliet Schor, I couldn't help but think that this would be the class I'd have right after the Cory Doctorow interview. These two writers have so much simpatico, and are speaking so much to opposite sides of the same coin that it's almost eerie.
Juliet Schor's book is 'Plenitude,' and it is a fascinating look at how we can effect global change at an individual level with a change of perspective. In a sense, Schor is working the territory of fiction, trying to change our outlook, using the literary device of non-fiction. She's a smart writer, with a lot to say that has never quite been heard in this manner.
Regular readers and listeners probably know that to prepare I generally, though not always, read the book and plaster it full of yellow stickies. There's a reason for this; it makes it a lot easier for me to put together a précis for my interviews. I take that single typed piece of paper with me to interviews and it makes it easy for me to remember what interested me about the book and what I wanted to chat with the author about.
Assuming that I'm not doing two interviews on the same day.
When I spoke with Juliet Schor, I went from that interview to Dan Dion and Paul Provenza. So I printed out both interviews, a map of where I was going, took the paper from my printer and left — only to discover that Schor's interview page had not printed out. Fortunately, I had the book with me as well, and that forest of yellow stickies came in quite handily. I was able to pull my interview outline directly from the book as I spoke with Schor.
'Plenitude' strikes me as something of a game-changing book. It begins with a data-driven, clear-headed vision of the present. Schor musters a lot of numbers that have been out there, but not examined from her fresh and fascinating perspective. As she does, she builds a case for her arguments that change must and can be effected, not via some magical technological fix, but by a groundswell of new understanding. We do not need more wealth. We need to understand the wealth we have now — time and knowledge. Schor believes that we already have the solutions to many of our problems available. You can hear her solutions 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..."
