In 12 boRead the with Deep Economy author Bill McKibben:
(This interview originally appeared in the )
In 12 books and countless magazine articles written over the last quarter century, Bill McKibben has tracked and suggested a way to alleviate the impact of human life on the natural world. In doing so, he has emerged as one of our most trenchant environmental writers and campaigners: Over the past few years, he has organized the largest demonstrations against global warming in the country’s history, and in March, Holt Paperbacks published a collection of his essays titled The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life. McKibben is also the editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, a compendium spanning more than 150 years, which was published in April as part of the Library of America series.
A writer does not need to have experienced great suffering at an early age in order to write a Read the of The Two Kinds of Decay:
A writer does not need to have experienced great suffering at an early age in order to write a good memoir while still young, but it doesn’t hurt. In 1995, then-21-year-old Harvard undergrad Sarah Manguso contracted a rare, devastating disease � her immune system began to produce antibodies that attacked her nervous system, which induced paralysis that began at her extremities and encroached toward her vital organs. The Two Kinds of Decay documents the nine years of illness that followed the disease’s inception. It is an impressive display of inquisitive memory, a treatise on being young and sick and a testament to the importance of truly paying attention.
Like Death, the Hangover has regretfully confounded the scientific community in its efforts to develRead the of Everyday Drinking:
Like Death, the Hangover has regretfully confounded the scientific community in its efforts to develop a satisfactory cure. This fact has not stopped thousands of amateurs from prescribing imaginative remedies, suggesting that hangovers remain less an evil to be vanquished than a fruitful topic of conversation among quaffers, given that they can in fact be avoided simply by not drinking too much.
The subject has likely never received as detailed and philosophical a consideration as in Kingsley Amis� 1972 text On Drink. It has recently been republished by Bloomsbury, alongside his other musings on drinking, as a single, neat and very dry volume entitled Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. A prodigiously talented writer and legendary drinker in his own right, Amis could conveniently draw on a well of personal experience. Hilary Rubinstein, the literary agent who commissioned Amis� best-known novel, Lucky Jim, later wrote, “I queried Kingsley about the plausibility of his central character, Jim Dixon, consuming 10 pints at the local on the Welch weekend, knowing that two was about my limit. Kingsley gave me a pitying look: I was never going to be much of a drinking companion for him.�
Read the with Hats & Eyeglasses author Martha Frankel:
(This interview originally appeared in the )
MaRead the with Hats & Eyeglasses author Martha Frankel:
(This interview originally appeared in the )
Martha Frankel knew, when interviewing a very young Leonardo DiCaprio, that the way to get him to open up would be to challenge him to a spitting contest. Frankel won � and got a great interview � because she has game.
She was raised on the laps of gamblers, chin-high to her mother’s smoky mahjongg board and her father’s wisecracking poker table. They ate “the usual� (bagel with a schmear), read the Yiddish papers and played. Her father, good with numbers, was “The Pencil,� and his idea of a bedtime lullaby was to have his little girl count backward by sevens. Frankel learned to read with the Daily Racing Forum, and her first kiss was at the Belmont Racetrack.
Read the of the British edition of On the Road: The Original Scroll:
We’ve been waiting a long time for a definitive (textual) editRead the of the British edition of On the Road: The Original Scroll:
We’ve been waiting a long time for a definitive (textual) edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But, alas, On the Road: The Original Scroll (Howard Cunnell, editor: Viking-Penguin, 2007) isn’t it. Yes, we have the original unexpurgated transcript with the real names reinstated and an informative if at times ill-organized introduction on the writing of the novel by Cunnell that corrects some misconceptions on how and when it was written. But that’s all.
What I was hoping for was an edition of On the Road comparable with, say, a Norton Critical Edition or a Melville novel from Hershel Parker. Something like that. You know, fully annotated with fulsome notes, variant readings, contemporary responses and all the critical apparatus one associates with literary scholarship. You'll find none of that here. Not even a Kerouac chronology. Is this too much to ask for when the volume sells at £20.00, about $40.00?
In the eight short stories included in Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri continues to refine the taRead the of Unaccustomed Earth:
In the eight short stories included in Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri continues to refine the talents she displayed in Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. Foremost among these is her expert touch when rendering the dull, aching misery of mourning and loss. Again and again, her characters brace themselves for the myriad shocks that make up a life, handling disappointment and disaster with equal poise. Throughout these tales, there is the sense that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.
Read the of I Am A Beautiful Monster (along with Vladimir Mayakovsky's Night Wraps the Sky).
...Another of modernism’s great egoistRead the of I Am A Beautiful Monster (along with Vladimir Mayakovsky's Night Wraps the Sky).
...Another of modernism’s great egoists made a comeback late last year in an exhaustive edition, handsomely designed. Francis Picabia was the self proclaimed “genius, idiot, funny guy� � add to that autodidact, reactionary, nihilist � of French Dadaism. As a painter, he considered himself a rival to Picasso, and when he couldn’t paint, he wrote poems, aphorisms, manifestos and diatribes, all collected in I Am A Beautiful Monster.
Picabia, who flourished in the first three decades of the 20th century, seemed to demand from his contemporaries the respect of a 19th century bourgeois painter of the Ernest Messonier type (with all the roast beef that implies), all the while presenting a public face more or less like Popeye. “My head swells / enough to drive one mad,� he wrote. That swollen head of his got him in trouble with his contemporaries every step of the way.
Read the of Night Wraps the Sky (along with Francis Picabia's I Am A Beautiful Monster):
Every generation for which poetry isn’t a Read the of Night Wraps the Sky (along with Francis Picabia's I Am A Beautiful Monster):
Every generation for which poetry isn’t a matter of mere diligence and hard work eventually comes around to Vladimir Mayakovsky. Brash, violent, mercurial � the greatest exponent, avant la lettre, of slam poetry (if poetry could ever be said to “slam,� Mayakovsky’s could), Mayakovsky herded his audience before many a public performance with a hush (“Quiet, my kittens...�) and then, while reciting poems of violent passion, theocide and weird bodily transformations, stepped aside every so often to outholler any and all of his numerous hecklers. And they were numerous. In his lifetime Mayakovsky acted as representative for the literate violence of the movement called futurism. As he matured, he lent his voice to the contentious rule of Vladimir Lenin. Yet he was loved more than any English-speaking poet could dream. When he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart in 1934, upwards of 30,000 people attended his funeral.
STOP SMILING Issue 38, , can be purchased from the with a supplemental DVD documentary about Lawrence FerlinghettiSTOP SMILING Issue 38, , can be purchased from the with a supplemental DVD documentary about Lawrence Ferlinghetti, directed by Chris Felver. ...more
STOP SMILING Issue 38, , can be purchased from the with a supplemental DVD documentary about Lawrence FerlinghettiSTOP SMILING Issue 38, , can be purchased from the with a supplemental DVD documentary about Lawrence Ferlinghetti, directed by Chris Felver. ...more
STOP SMILING Issue 38, , features the last interview Roberto Bolaño ever gave, translated into English for the first time, as well asSTOP SMILING Issue 38, , features the last interview Roberto Bolaño ever gave, translated into English for the first time, as well as an interview with 2666 translator Natasha Wimmer. ...more
In white heels and a blue dress embroidered with the words “I like rum,� the petite, livewire comediaRead the with Amy Sedaris:
In white heels and a blue dress embroidered with the words “I like rum,� the petite, livewire comedian and actress Amy Sedaris stands on a white platform in front of a large square wired to spin as she shifts her position. “I feel like I’m gaining weight,� she mutters. During a visit to the 86collective gallery of digital arts in Chicago, Amy returned to the town where she cut her teeth as a member of the Second City improv troupe. Sedaris has since starred in Comedy Central’s Strangers With Candy as the endearing, ex-junkie/prostitute-turned-high school-newbie Jerri Blank and written the homemaker classic I Like You, among hundreds of other collaborations.
Sedaris spoke to STOP SMILING about her love for little projects, envisioned Jerri Blank’s raucous birthday party and broke the news of her imaginary boyfriend Ricky’s new lease on life...
Okay, that does sound boring, the way she tells it. Allow me, then: born in a car crash; mother isn’t sure where the little one has disappeared to until she starts reeling the cord back in; cigars and smiles all around. Learned rebbes declare the circumstances of her arrival a sign of future literary greatness. At age 3, Maazel saves a drunken John Cheever from drowning in his pool after he tries to prove that the central conceit of “The Swimmer,� his 1964 short story, actually does have validity...
Read the with New York Times Magazine columnist and Buying In author Rob Walker:
While many of us fancy ourselves modern-day HolRead the with New York Times Magazine columnist and Buying In author Rob Walker:
While many of us fancy ourselves modern-day Holden Caulfields as we call out the phonies in the world of advertising and marketing, few have articulated their positions with the degree of clarity as Rob Walker. Rather than simply bristling at Doves� “real beauty� ad campaign or railing on Nike’s purchase of Converse, the Savannah-based writer encourages us to consider how our behavior and attitude reflects our sense of identity.
After earning a degree in RTF at the University of Texas in Austin, Walker took a number of writing and editing gigs at business and financial magazines in the Nineties. During his time at Slate, he began reviewing advertising “as a kind of pop culture thing.� A few years later, after filing features on Pabst Blue Ribbon and iPods for the NYT Magazine, he received an offer from editor Gerald Marzorati to try his hand at a weekly column on advertising and consumer culture. By now, Walker says, he’s pretty much been branded as the “guy writing about brands.�
There are few today who would dispute James Wood’s preeminence as a literary critic. But such statusRead the of How Fiction Works:
There are few today who would dispute James Wood’s preeminence as a literary critic. But such status doesn’t attend without some conflict. To say the least, Wood is a critic with very particular standards. When an author â€� be it Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith â€� fails to live up to such standards â€� well, hold on to your hats. In his latest book, How Fiction Works, Wood, in his ever-eloquent fashion, attempts to lay out the principles behind the proper elements of literature and, in the process, provides the literary world with what Cynthia Ozick, in a recent ±á²¹°ù±è±ð°ù’s essay, says it needs: an academic who combines criticism with passion. (Wood, incidentally, teaches Literary Criticism at Harvard.)
On page 180 of his 336-page book about Mexico City, First Stop in the New World, David LidRead the of First Stop in the New World:
On page 180 of his 336-page book about Mexico City, First Stop in the New World, David Lida writes, “At one torta stand near my apartment, I can almost finish the newspaper between placing an order and being served.� It’s the first mention of where Lida has actually lived in his 18 years in Mexico City; even then, he doesn’t think to mention where in the metropolis his apartment is located. First Stop in the New World is written on the strength of Lida’s long residence in Mexico City as a journalist, and on his self-described “idiosyncratic gaze,� through which descriptions of the city are filtered. But the ghostly absence of the gazer himself makes the book curiously unsatisfying, despite its being larded with consistently interesting information.
Read the with Bury Me Standing author Isabel Fonseca:
NEGATIVE CAPABILITIES
(This interview originally appeared in the Read the with Bury Me Standing author Isabel Fonseca:
NEGATIVE CAPABILITIES
(This interview originally appeared in the )
It’s 10 a.m. in Primrose Hill, London. Author Isabel Fonseca sits in her kitchen, “tanking up on coffee.� An American by birth and a New Yorker at heart, she remains in disbelief that she’s lived in England for over 25 years. “It’s payment for my sins,� she says. “Or maybe I just forgot to leave.�
Her tone has a throwaway flash to it. She’s just joking, right? Fonseca corrects me immediately. “I’m not, you know.�
Why such resentment toward her adopted home? After all, England made her, so to speak, from a PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) degree at Oxford to her role as an assistant editor at the Times Literary Supplement to the celebrated publication of Bury Me Standing in 1995, a nonfiction study of the gypsies of Eastern Europe.
But of course it’s not so simple � and with her first book in 13 years, the novel Attachment, Fonseca is once again in the British spotlight. As a portrait of a failing marriage, online sex and adulterous misadventures, Attachment has already attracted controversy. Many regard it as less of a work of fiction and more like a confession from Fonseca that her relationship with the author Martin Amis is in complete decay.
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