I’m going to twist the lid off a well-kept secret: Great new American writing isn’t dead, it’s just hiding. While mainstream publishers piss and moan about literary (it used to be called quality) fiction’s flagging audience, their independent counterparts are experiencing an explosive rebirth, where thrilling new writing is being published practically every week. It’s a renaissance1 of extraordinary proportions. But what’s that? You haven’t heard? Of course you haven’t, because practically no one is writing about it.
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KCRW’s Bookworm Podcast by Michael Silverblatt includes an excellent series of interviews with established as well as promising talents in literature and poetry.
There are a total of ten interviews, including ones with Umberto Eco, Nicole Krauss and Bret Easton Ellis. While Eco discusses his conception of memory in his book ‘The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana’, Krauss ponders upon the transmission of memory. Other interesting interviews deal with the topic of identity- racial as well as cultural.
The audio quality is good and Silverblatt incise in his questioning. I give this podcast four stars and recommend it to all serious book lovers.
To try to explain how Michael interacts with writers is, invariably, to fall short. But here are a few of my favorite moments: He said to poet Matthea Harvey that her mind was “like popcorn—there’s no stopping it.” He told Junot Díaz, “Oscar Wao is someone very much like me.” He asked Brad Gooch about gay spirituality as it related to Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor. He told Walter Mosley, “The amount of death without mourning in these books is difficult for someone like me, because a mystery writer isn’t going to take you to the funeral of each and every corpse.” (And Walter Mosley replied, “Right, right, right, you couldn’t do that.”) To John Wray, the author of Lowboy, Michael said, “I love the language of schizophrenia.” In a tribute to Walt Whitman, Michael remembered his own discovery of Leaves of Grass : “I started to read out loud. And when I started to read out loud, I started to like it and walked out into the hallway and walked across the campus Pied Piper style, reading mostly not to students but to the runaway kids who used to crowd around the ground floors of the dormitories. And then eventually we all sat on an elevator going up and down reading all of ‘Song of Myself.’”
From his book-lined apartment (no kidding, even in the kitchen cupboards—and all alphabetized), Michael tells me: “I believe in the elaborate taking care of others.
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MS on Bookworm:
I came here as a reading geek. I wanted to talk week after week to writers who most spoke to me. But I realized very quickly that if I wanted listeners to try my books, I’d have to try theirs. It had to be a two-way street. And that’s what an interview is, too. An interview on the air is so much more than what gets said. You hear the laughter, the emotional flow. And it’s only then that the listener starts to feel comfortable and really listen. That’s the point at which they say, “I might read that book.” And I want to get the reader to that point. And it really involves a lot of give and take, a lot of emotional sharing.
I generally read about six to eight hours a day, and try to read the author’s complete work before I interview them. And you’d be surprised at how few authors have ever met someone who’s read everything they’ve written. I’m like a mirror to them. Then they start trying to see themselves in the mirror, and then we’re really in something like the equivalent of a psychoanalytic transaction between a person and their image. That’s when you get the things that are generally interesting.
I think we have a spiritual and imaginal dimension that I never hear referred to, so I wanted my half-hour to be a place where every kind of seriousness about the value of life — its preciousness or its wastefulness, its insanity, its possibility — could be a valued subject for conversation. And I wanted listeners to say, “God, I never hear people talking about this.”
Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive)
This new anthology makes clear that magical realism is only a tiny segment of what’s been happening in Mexican fiction over the last half-century. In this conversation with its editor, Álvaro Uribe, and Cristina Rivera-Garza, one of the writers whose work appears in the book, we uncover a cavalcade of styles and influences, as well as a host of writers whose names will be new to American readers.
Read an excerpt from Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction
Road Show, a recording of the musical (Nonesuch, PS Classics)
Stephen Sondheim is right — his new musical, Roadshow, is not gloomy. Instead, it’s cheerful and bleak. But the road to cheerful bleakness was twisted and long. Sondheim and his collaborator, playwright John Weidman, discuss the many revisions of Roadshow, a musical that has evolved in an extraordinary way, and may yet become an American classic.
Note: It’s a well known fact that Sondheim rarely gives interviews — which makes this appearance especially notable. And Silverblatt, lauded as the one most sought-after literary author interviewers in America, discovered his passion for musical theatre as a child. In this unusual pairing of interviewer and interviewees, lyrics and literature come together.
