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Tag: eleanor wachtel

Robert Hughes on Writers and Company

Earlier today, CBC Writers and Company repeated Eleanor Wachtel’s 2006  conversation with Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic and historian. He spoke with Wachtel about his memoir, Things I Didn’t Know. Hughes died in August 2012, age 74:

 

CBC Radio Writers and Company: Robert Hughes mp3

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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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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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Jane Jacobs on Writers & Company

In an archive interview from 2002 (rebroadcast this weekend), CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel talks to the late Jane Jacobs, author of Death and Life of Great American Cities, at her home in Toronto:

CBC RADIO WRITERS & CO: Jane Jacobs mp3

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Midweek Miscellany

The excellent Art of the Title looks at the opening sequences to Anatomy of a Murder and Bunny Lake is Missing by Saul Bass.

Just Getting Started — Bill Moran on the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, for Design Observer:

When you hold a piece of wood type in your hands this deceptively simple piece of mass communication rewards you with its grace but also surprises with its weight. End grain maple is cut from the cross section of a tree yielding a harder and heavier piece of wood. Using the end grain of the wood improves durability with most wood type that was made in the nineteenth century still fully functional a century after its date of manufacture.

Leading the Blind — Nick Harkaway, author of The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World, on book publishers and technology at The Guardian:

There’s a willingness to think: we’ll let everyone else figure out how the market should work, and then we’ll just supply books in the same way that we did to bookshops to electronic sellers like Amazon, Apple and Google. But booksellers are tied to publishing – they need conventional publishing models to continue – but for those companies that’s not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can’t afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.

Creative Paralysis — Michelle Dean on the future of ‘serious’ publishing at The Rumpus:

I don’t think there is anyone out there who has recently looked at the state of book publishing, I mean really looked, and not tightened her grip on her wineglass… I don’t work inside or report on publishing, but what limited exposure I do have suggests that there is indeed a crisis on the horizon. Anyone who’s ever wanted to see their name in print on the cover of a book — biography or novel, chapbook or memoir — ought to be thinking about that, about how to sustain the world of books. But the focus on the internet as the death of culture, which drones on in tired refrain on certain book sites, strikes me as bizarre, and overstated, not to mention creatively paralyzing.

And finally…

Eleanor Wachtel interviews composer Philip Glass for CBC Radio:

CBC Radio Ideas: Wachtel on the Arts with Philip Glass mp3

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Edward St. Aubyn on Writers & Company and Bookworm

In a fascinating conversation, Eleanor Wachtel talks to Edward St. Aubyn about his Patrick Melrose novels on CBC Radio’s Writers and Company:

CBC Radio Writers & Company: Edward St. Aubyn mp3 

KCRW’s Bookworm also recently broadcast a two-part interview with St. Aubyn about the books.

Part One:

KCRW Bookworm: Edward St. Aubyn Part One mp3

Part Two:

KCRW Bookworm: Edward St. Aubyn Part Two mp3

Full disclosure: The collected edition of the first four Patrick Melrose novels has just been published in the US by Picador Books who are distributed  in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books. At Last, the latest Patrick Melrose novel is published separately by Farrah, Strauss & Giroux who are distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre (not my employer).

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Marjane Satrapi | Ideas

Iranian cartoonist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, best known for her memoir Persepolis, talks to CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel about her life, her work and a new film adaptation of her book Chicken with Plums:

CBC Radio Ideas: Wachtel on the Arts with Marjane Satrapi

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Muriel Spark | Writers & Company

The late Dame Muriel Spark, author of Memento MoriThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Ballad of Peckham Rye among others, talks to Eleanor Wachtel about her life and work in this archive interview for Writers & Company from 1999:

CBC RADIO WRITERS AND CO: Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark died in 2006 at the age of 88. The cover art in the image above is by Terence Greer.

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David Lodge | Writers & Company

In another great archive interview for Writers & Company, author David Lodge talks to Eleanor Wachtel about artificial intelligence, consciousness and his 2002 novel Thinks:

CBC RADIO WRITERS & COMPANY: David Lodge, Think

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Paula Fox | Writers & Company

Paula Fox, storied author of Desperate Characters, talks about writing and her memoir Borrowed Finery with Eleanor Wachtel in this archive interview for Writers & Company from 2002:

CBC RADIO WRITERS & COMPANY: Paula Fox Interview 2002

The cover above, from Fox’s collection of stories and essays News From the World published earlier this year by W. W. Norton, was designed by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich.

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Jennifer Egan | Writers & Co.

Author Jennifer Egan discusses music, Proust and, of course, her Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad with Eleanor Wachtel for CBC Radio’s Writers & C0mpany:

CBC RADIO WRITERS & Co. – Jennifer Egan

The paperback cover for the US edition of A Visit From the Goon Squad (pictured above), was designed by the talented Jamie Keenan.

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Richard Serra | On the Arts

A little digression from books/design for a Monday:

Eleanor Wachtel, host of Writers and Company, talks to American artist Richard Serra for her other CBC Radio show, Wachtel on the Arts:

CBC RADIO WACHTEL ON THE ARTS: RICHARD SERRA

(Image above: Schunnemunk Fork by Richard Serra, 1990-91. Photograph by Ken McCown, used under a Creative Commons License, from the Richard Serra Flickr Pool)

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