October 2009
3 posts
This is actually a pretty neat article. Written by... →
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...
bookworm podcasts! →
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...
nprnews The Super Rich Are Still Super Rich Only... →
(via rhivanz)
Oprah likes Michael Silverblatt, too. →
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...
September 2009
6 posts
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...
Oct. 1st edition of Bookworm. (tomorrow!) →
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...
Sept. 24th edition of Bookworm →
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...