09-29-11:A 2011 Phone Interview with Russell Banks
"I don't find plotting all that hard once I have the characters in place."
—Russell Banks
Russell Banks is one of our great fiction writers; he's been a finalist twice for both the Pulitzer and the Pen / Faulkner Prize. But prizes be damned, all you need to do is to pick up his latest novel, 'Memory of Lost Skin' (HarperCollins; September 27, 2011 ; $25.99) to see just how powerful his work is for readers.
He's currently on tour, and he'll be appearing here in Santa Cruz next Tuesday, October 5, at 7:30 PM, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. I managed to catch him in Florida via phone to talk to him about 'Memory of Lost Skin.' The novel was inspired by his news accounts of colony of homeless sex offenders who, because Florida law forbids them to live within half a mile of a school or any other place where children might be found, have created a sort of tent city under a causeway. Banks novel takes of the perspective of a resident of that tent city, and manages quite easily to engage the reader with an amazingly powerful characterization.
There are a lot of fine lines to trip over when you attempt such a work in prose, but to my mind, Banks is astonishingly successful. You can hear a brief discussion with Russell Banks about 'Lost Memory of Skin' by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
09-29-11:Three Books with Alan Cheuse
Joan Slonczewski The Highest Frontier ; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Apricot Jam ; Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
Yes, the date you'll find when you download the linked MP3 audio file of this edition of Three Books with Alan Cheuse is correct ... and you can tell we did the recording while he was still in Santa Cruz, since he's there in person. But the books are as fresh as ever, and indeed, some of the final hard covers have just arrived.
First and foremost in our conversation, and to be honest, for many readers, is Joan Slonczewski's 'The Highest Frontier,' an outstanding novel set in an orbiting college far enough in the future for many of our current chickens to have come home to roost (or be roasted). You can find my review here.
I first read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in high school, and his work was one of those that marked me as a reader, from the sparse power of his fiction in 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' to the literally world-changing non-fiction in 'The Gulag Archipelago.' Given the import of his oeuvre, it's all the more astonishing that it took so long for 'Apricot Jam' (Counterpoint ; August 30, 2011 ; 354 pages ; $28) to arrive, but it is no less welcome. It upholds your expectations every bit as much as does Joan Slonczewski's 'The Highest Frontier.'
And finally, Alan and I gave ourselves a break with Denis Johnson's sparse, spare 'Train Dreams,' one of those wonderful literary cabinets, a beautifully written novella that feels as if it were carved from the English language. There's the natural polish here that feels raw yet shiny and perfect.
Alan and I, as listeners are probably aware, tend to shun shininess and perfection as we discuss and dissect the books we read. We're more like literary archaeologists or vivisectionists, trying to peer at the heart of books yet leave them alive for the reader. You can hear our conversation by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
09-28-11:A 2011 Interview with Meg Wolitzer
"I really think you need to respect the antsyness of kids.""
And yes, I am surprised when she responds, telling me that she's has some non-fiction in the hopper, and that this article will help. But wait, of course, there's more. It turns out that while she was writing 'The Uncoupling,' she was also writing a book which is easily tagged YA, but is really for pre-YA as well. She'll be in San Francisco soon enough, and as it happens on the same day when I'll be in town to talk to Neal Stephenson. When I suggested we talk about her book, she agreed — and I was off and running.
I have to admit I was rather floored by the fact that she wrote one book in the morning and the other in the afternoon, and could have published them both at the same time. There are some great lessons in this conversation with regards to going back and forth from adult-oriented novels like 'The Uncoupling' to well, I can't really call it milder fare, since 'The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman' looks at the rather harsh results of a bad economy, but at least, a book without women on a sex strike. The latter is a concept that many adults might find discomfiting.
But once we plunged in, there was no stopping us, well, nothing other than the fact that my TV-parking place was going to expire after a mere hour, and the fact that Wolitzer had a gig at McSweeney's and a meeting with Vendela Vida. I managed to get us back to my precariously-parked-on-a-San-Francisco-hill car and get Meg to her meeting, and to record a very entertaining conversation about her latest novel, which you can hear by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
09-27-11 UPDATE:Podcast Update: Time to Read, Episode 11: Lev Grossman, 'The Magician King'
Here's the eleventh episode of my new series of podcasts, which I'm calling Time to Read. The podcasts/radio broadcasts will be of books worth your valuable reading time. I'll try to keep the reports under four minutes, for a radio-friendly format. If you want to run them on your show or podcast, let me know.
My hope is that in under four minutes I can offer readers a concise review and an opportunity to hear the author read from or speak about the work. I'm hoping to offer a new one every week.
09-26-11:A 2011 Interview with Neal Stephenson, Plus Live Reading and Q & A
Click image for audio link.
"Here you're asking me to engage into more self-examination than is my wont..."
—Neal Stephenson
I know it was a long day for Neal Stephenson; he'd just started his tour for 'REAMDE' and had flown down from Seattle that morning to end up in the studio at KQED at noon. It's a big book, and I imagine that they have big plans for his tour. I just hope that they don't drive him to exhaustion. I've heard a lot of authors talk about book tours, generally in terms of being one plane-ride after another. Stephenson's tour is like something one of his characters in 'REAMDE' might experience — sans gunfire.
Not that Stephenson doesn't have any guns. I asked him — he does. But they're only of minor interest. These days, he's much more interested in plot, and 'REAMDE' is ample evidence of how his interest pays off big-time for readers. Given that Stephenson was probably operating on half his normal sleep, he was really amazingly genial and fun to talk to. I really enjoyed our interview, but tried to keep on-topic and tried myself to avoid temptation to spend the time talking about his back-catalogue. But even he was impressed by the hardcover first of 'Snow Crash' I'd picked up at Capitola Book Café some 20 years ago.
Even more amazing then, was his performance at 7:30 PM, when he read, then answered questions from the audience (whom he thought to be particularly well-informed). Today's podcast consists of two files.
05-16-12: Commentary : Mark Sundeen Pays Out 'The Man Who Quit Money' : Over the Edges
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Interview with Mark Sundeen and Daniel Suelo : "What would happen if we actually practiced this stuff?"-Daniel Suelo
05-15-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Clive Barker 'Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War' : Impure Life
05-08-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Clive Barker 'Abarat' : Reading in Color
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Phone Interview with Mark Sundeen : "...over the years, I had heard through my friends that he had stopped using money and was living in a cave..."
04-30-12: Commentary : Christopher Moore Follows 'Sacré Bleu' : A Story in Color
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Christopher Moore : "...it often isn't efficient to tell a story in chronological order..."
04-27-12: Commentary : Lisa Lutz on 'Trail of the Spellmans' : Meta-Fiction is Fun
Agony Column Podcast News Report: SF in SF from February 11, 2012 : Panel Discussion Moderated by Terry Bisson and Interviews with Rudy Rucker, K. W. Jeter, and Jay Lake
04-26-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Emmanuel Carrere 'The Adversary' : The Enemy Within
04-23-12: Commentary : T. M. Luhrman Listens 'When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God' : Science and the Supernaturaly
04-18-12: Commentary : Gregg Jones Stirs Through 'Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dreams' : A Dream Of Today From Yesterday
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Gregg Jones : "The Philippinos would welcome us with open arms and greet us as liberators."
04-17-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Caleb Carr 'The Alienist' : Subterranean History
04-16-12: Commentary : Richard Zacks Visits 'Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York' :The Wild, Wild East
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Richard Zacks : "Roosevelt and Riis were out looking, and if they did find a cop, he was talking to a streetwalker."
