August 27, 2012 At Work On Cataloguing Flaubert By Charlotte Strick Joanna Neborsky is a book lover’s illustrator. She may be as passionate and romantic about books and bookmaking as anyone I’ve met. She also draws the kind of pictures I’ve always wanted to make. They are deceptively simple due to the naive charm of each wobbly line, and they owe a great deal to the inspiration of mid-twentieth-century illustration—an obsession she and I both share. A few years ago Joanna and I collaborated on the cover of John Bowe’s Americans Talk About Love. A recent art school grad, she was willing to endlessly modify caricatures of the people interviewed for the book. The final package made for a witty and accessible take on social history. I always urge the artists I work with to keep me apprised of new projects, and so a few weeks ago I was tickled to discover a jpeg of Joanna’s poster “A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects, As Catalogued by M. Lemoel on May 20, 1880, Twelve Days after the Writer’s Death” in my inbox. We had to share it with readers of The Paris Review, and now I wanted to share a little about how it came to be. Read More
August 9, 2012 At Work Larger Than Life: An Interview with Will Self By Jacques Testard Last August, I interviewed Will Self—whose latest novel Umbrella has just been long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize—in his London home. I had been given two weeks to prepare and I was quite terrified. My terror was warranted; I had spent the last ten days immersed in his hallucinatory fictional worlds, composed of seven novels, three novellas, and countless short stories. Through these parallel and often overlapping fictions, Self has constructed a relentless critique of our institutional failings, hypocritical cultural mores, and political inadequacies. My fears, notwithstanding being intellectually dwarfed, were largely to do with the sheer madness of many of his writings. Here was the writer who, over the years, had invented: 1. A man who wakes up with a vagina behind his left knee and has an affair with his (male) GP (Bull: A Farce); 2. A parallel Earth populated by nymphomaniacal and exhibitionist apes seen through the eyes of its most prominent experimental psychiatrists (Great Apes); 3. The afterlife taking place in the purgatorial London district of “Dulston,” a suburb populated uniquely by senseless, chain-smoking dead people, haunted by their aborted fetuses and old neuroses, and living out the rest of infinity in dire office jobs (How the Dead Live); 4. A postapocalyptic London governed by a religion based on a cab driver named Dave’s insane writings to his estranged son in the 2000s (The Book of Dave). And then there was the public figure—an acerbic satirist of towering intellect, a giant man of letters with a rhetorical bite strong enough to tear a lesser being apart. By the time I rang on the doorbell, Will Self had, to my mind, transmogrified into The Fat Controller—the Mephistophelian antihero in his My Idea of Fun—ready to shred me from limb to limb for my idiotic questions and inadequate readings. Read More
July 17, 2012 At Work Return Engagement: An Interview with Rebecca Gates By Peter Terzian Image by Dan Sharp Rebecca Gates’s former band, the Spinanes, released their first album, Manos, in 1993. Indie pop was in its halcyon days, and Manos reached number one on the college charts. Like Elliott Smith and Lois Maffeo—her friends and colleagues in the Pacific Northwest music scene—Gates sang opaque, suggestive lyrics in a gentle and ruminative voice. But her dense guitar and Scott Plouf’s propulsive drums (they were a duo, with no bassist) were also inspired by punk. Strand, their 1996 follow-up, expanded their musical palette with experimental sounds and more complex instrumentation. After Plouf left the band, Gates moved to Chicago, where she recorded a third and final Spinanes album, 1998’s Arches and Aisles, with help from members of such simpatico post-rock bands as Tortoise and the Sea and Cake. Read More
July 9, 2012 At Work Home to Darkness: An Interview with Playwright Tom Murphy By Belinda McKeon Sit in a theater for a Tom Murphy play and I can guarantee you one thing: you will come out of that theater rattled, and throttled, and staggered, in the best of all possible ways. It might take a long moment, afterwards, to catch your breath; use that moment to listen to the torrent of marvelous language that will still be surging through your head. That tussle of starkness and poetry. Murphy doesn’t give us lyricism the way that Irish writers, apparently, are meant to do; he gives us blunt and beautiful rhythm. He doesn’t give us laughter in that way either, though audiences will inevitably seek it out, and connect, in the sting of that laughter falling wrongly, with the defiantly dark intelligence of Murphy’s vision: guffaw at all the drinking scenes, if you will, but these are broken lives, and there’s no joking that away. Tom Murphy is Ireland’s greatest living dramatist. We say things like that in Ireland—Ireland’s greatest this, Ireland’s greatest that—as though it means anything in the greater scheme of things. Who cares what Ireland thinks is great? Tom Murphy doesn’t. But it’s true of him, that accolade, I promise you. Read More
June 18, 2012 At Work Sheila Heti on How Should a Person Be? By Thessaly La Force Photograph by Sylvia Plachy. If you’ve been loving Lena Dunham’s Girls, you should most certainly pick up a copy of Sheila Heti’s new novel, How Should a Person Be? In it, fictional Sheila struggles to answer the titular question through conversations with her friends (including Margaux, Misha, and Sholem), blowjobs, impulsive trips to Atlantic City and … a whole lot more. The novel is a blend of the real and the imaginary—and somehow, in the process of recording her life, real Sheila blends into fictional Sheila, creating a work of metafiction that is playful, funny, wretched, and absolutely true. Sheila and I Gchatted not long ago. Sheila is an impressive writer (see her full bio here) as well as the interviews editor at The Believer. Below is an edited version of our conversation. Let’s talk about your process. How did you take your conversations from your life and weave it into fiction? I don’t know. I did lots of different things. But the conversations were not meant for a book. I was just taping friends. I didn’t have a plan for where I was going. Did you think you were writing your play? I wasn’t sure. I’d spent the previous five years working on Ticknor, and I wanted to sort of shake that off me. So all the transcribing I was doing was kind of like drinking a glass of water—it was refreshing, like a palate cleanser—a way of getting out of my imagination. Taping and transcribing was part of looking around to see what things were really like in my environment. I’d been completely in my room, in my head, not looking at anything. That reminds me of something Tilda Swinton once said about filmmaking—it’s a social way of making art. What do you think happens when you’re working like this? Well, the writing becomes more like life in that you don’t know where you’re going to end up, and you don’t know what’s going to end up being important. It’s like how in life you can meet somebody and not think much of them, then a few years later you’re married and in love, but the person you were really drawn to and thought, This is it!—you forget about them six months later. When I began transcribing, I was certain that I wanted to write a book with no people in it, about the workings of a supermarket. That sounds so different than the book you ended up writing! Read More
June 7, 2012 At Work Adaptation: An Interview with Ramona Ausubel By Samantha Hunt My conversation with Ramona Ausubel took place in the ether between upstate New York and California, from a small desk in my bedroom to her home in Santa Barbara. I wore something slobbishly inappropriate and kept one eye on my three kids as I typed. A tired Ausubel was herself caring for her newborn infant. So I cannot tell you about her curly red hair, her slippers, or the tone of her voice. I cannot tell whether you can smell the Pacific from her house. You will have to imagine these details, an appropriate exercise for thinking about an author whose debut novel is so wholly original it climbs new heights of imaginary prowess. While the world might be sick with our busy-making and e-mail interviews, Ramona Ausubel’s debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, offers an antidote. Impossibly she has set her story in both a fabled land where magic is plentiful and in the brutish depths of World War II. Though the novel is concerned with identity and community, there is nothing quaint in Ausubel’s confluence of the domestic and the historic. History seeps through cracks in stories and prayers the characters tell as they reimagine the borders and rulebooks of a small town. The patterns of home replicate into the patterns of the planet, but a reader finds nothing small in these small acts. —Samantha Hunt Read More