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Category: Authors

Published August 30, 2013

Art Spiegelman: Mixing Words and Pictures

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman interviewed at NEA Arts Magazine:

It never occurred to me that comics were anything other than worthy. They were in fact among the most worthy endeavors I could imagine. They were how culture got introduced to me, more than through other media…. I always assumed they were a container big enough to hold whatever I could hold.   

Spiegelman’s somewhat delayed book Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps will finally be widely available in September. (Full disclosure: Co-Mix is published by Drawn + Quarterly and distributed in Canada by my employers Raincoast Books)

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Published August 15, 2013

Warren Ellis Has Arrived

“I’m a comic book writer. I still don’t think this is going to be run by The Paris Review.”


Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine and Dead Pig Collector, in conversation with Molly Crabapple for The Paris Review:

I try not to get involved in the business of prediction. It’s a quick way to look like an idiot. There’s an expectation around writers of science fiction, which I sometimes am, that we’re predictors of the future, that that is the business of science fiction. Which we’re not, and never were.

Science fiction is social fiction. That’s the line from Mary Shelley through H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the politically committed writers of the sixties and seventies. It’s about using speculation as a tool with which to examine the contemporary condition. The closest it comes to prediction is in the provision of long-range weather warnings.

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Published July 30, 2013

Janet Malcolm: The Devil in the Detail


Gaby Wood interviews journalist Janet Malcolm for The Telegraph:

How Malcolm goes about her journalistic business is clear from her person. Her gaze is remarkably unflinching; unnervous, but not stern. She concentrates on looking at all times. She is difficult to interview, but for reasons much more prosaic than the dramatic ones I had conjured. She simply finds herself uninteresting, and so gives away little. You feel there is much more to know, and that the failure must lie in your ability to ask about it. Because when you listen back to the recording you find that she has not been especially evasive, merely – politely – private. ‘Have a macaroon,’ she says.

Malcolm’s most recent collection of essays, Forty-One False Starts, has just been published in the UK by Granta.  The US edition is available from FSG, (and is, for sake of disclosure etc., distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

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Published July 24, 2013

St Franz of Prague


At the Financial Times, Ian Thomson, author of Primo Levi: A Life, reviews three new books about Franz Kafka:

In 1982, the Italian writer and Nazi concentration camp survivor Primo Levi embarked on a translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. At first he was enthusiastic, hoping to improve the German he had learnt so imperfectly at Auschwitz. Instead, Kafka involved him more terribly than he could have imagined. Levi found only bleakness in the hero Josef K, who is arrested and executed for a crime he probably did not commit.

The more Levi became immersed in Kafka, the more he began to see his own life mirrored in that of “St Franz of Prague”, as he called the Czech writer. Born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka lived a life of quite exemplary tedium as an insurance clerk, rarely travelling beyond his home or that of his parents. Levi saw similar constrictions in his own life as an assimilated Jew in bourgeois Turin. Moreover, Kafka’s three sisters had all perished in the Nazi gas chambers – victims of the grotesque bureaucracy foretold by their brother two decades earlier in The Trial. Kafka must have had a seer-like sensibility, Levi thought, to have looked so accurately into the future.

Pictured above: David Zane Mairowitz’s graphic novel adaptation of The Castle illustrated by Jaromír99, published by SelfMadeHero.

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Published July 10, 2013

Alan Moore: The Revolution Will Be Crowd-Funded


photo: Leo Williams

Alan Moore discusses his short films, crowd-funding, the Occupy movement, The Prisoner, and zombies (amongst other things) at Salon:

While the revolution will be certainly televised, it strikes me that there is a strong possibility that the revolution will also be crowd-funded. If Kickstarter and other enterprises are giving projects like Occupy Comics a chance, then it does suggest there are imaginative ideas out there with incredible use and application across the board. Not just in the arts, but in the sciences as well. It’s an exciting concept, and I look forward to seeing what emerges from it.

Moore talks more about his Lynchian short film Jimmy’s End — created with Mitch Jenkins — in this short ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary for Motherboard TV (worth watching just for the interior of the actual Jimmy’s End Working Men’s Club around the 10 minute mark):

He also discusses crowd-funding and ‘The Jimmy’s End Cycle’ of films — the last of which, Heavy Heart, you can still support on Kickstarter —  in an interview with Bleeding Cool from earlier this month.

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Published June 18, 2013

Ryu Murakami Cover Designs by David Pearson

I’ve already posted a couple of David Pearson‘s cover designs for the new Pushkin Press editions of Ryu Murakami’s novels, so I thought I might as well put them all in one place:


 Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami; design by David Pearson


 Sixty-Nine by Ryu Murakami; design by David Pearson


From the Fatherland, with Love by Ryu Murakami; design by David Pearson


Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami; design by David Pearson

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Published June 13, 2013

Ryu Murakami: Against the Mainstream


Pushkin Press have posted an interesting Q & A with author Ryu Murakami, whose new novel, From the Fatherland, with Love, was published last month:

For me, there’s nothing ordinary or routine about writing novels, though I’ve been doing it for thirty-seven years. When I write, even now, my brain is in a mode that’s different to everyday consciousness. So the words always come; I never find myself unable to write. Perhaps the fact that I consider myself a “cult novelist” helps. Though I’m famous in Japan and have achieved some status as an author, my works are by no means mainstream. They aren’t really accepted by the majority, and I don’t imagine that most people here understand them. And that motivates me to keep on writing.

The rather splendid cover is by David Pearson, I believe.

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Published June 11, 2013

Janet Malcolm: The Messiness of Truth

Zoë Heller reviews Janet Malcolm’s new book, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, for the New York Review of Books:

Mess has always inspired fervent emotions in Janet Malcolm. It agitates her. It depresses her. She considers it her enemy. The job of a writer, she likes to remind us, is to vanquish mess—to wade onto the seething porch of actuality, pick out a few elements with which to make a story, and consign the rest to the garbage dump. Images of clutter and panic-inducing domestic chaos crop up frequently in her work, not just as metaphors for the failure or absence of art, but as advertisements for her own narrative discipline. This is what real life looks like, they tell us. This is the tedium and confusion that Malcolm’s elegant rendering of things has spared you. 

But if literal messes appall Malcolm, they also fascinate and attract her… Malcolm has a secret, writerly sympathy for the hoarder. She understands the mad desire to hold on to every piece of accumulated material, the fear of throwing out something precious. Art, she is fretfully aware, can be too ruthless in its cleaning operations… There is something awe-inspiring and at the same time a little barren about an environment from which all trace of “disorderly actuality” has been removed.

New York Review of Books

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Published May 27, 2013

Writers & Company: John le Carré


CBC Radio’s Writers & Company have broadcast a brand new interview with John le Carré:

 CBC Writers and Company: John le Carre 2013 mp3

Writers & Company

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Published January 18, 2013

John Hodgman’s Advice for Writers

Author and former literary agent John Hodgman (That Is All) gives disarmingly sincere tips on how to make it as a writer:

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Published November 23, 2012

Teju Cole on Writers and Company

Author Teju Cole, author of Open City, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company:

CBC RADIO Writers and Company: Teju Cole Open City mp3

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Published September 18, 2012

Susan Sontag on Writers and Company

Eleanor Wachtel’s conversation with the late American writer and critic Susan Sontag, originally recorded in 2000, was recently rebroadcast by CBC Radio’s Writers and Company:

CBC Radio Writers and Company: Susan Sontag mp3

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