July 6, 2010 At Work Sloane Crosley By Thessaly La Force By day, Sloane Crosley is the Deputy Director of Publicity at Vintage/Anchor Books. But by—well, on every day, she’s a New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book is How Did You Get This Number, which came out last month. It’s a sparkling collection of essays detailing Crosley’s musings on life in the big city. Recently, she took the time to answer some of my questions while in Denver on book tour. How do you find life on the road? It’s not really life. You’re yanked before you settle. I will say I lost my dental floss between Portland and Seattle, so that’s pretty gross if you do the math. But that doesn’t mean it’s not supremely fun. How do you turn the unremarkable or the everyday into a good story? Well, there’s a nice compliment imbedded in this question because you’re implying that I have succeeded. If not in weaving straw into gold than at least into weaving straw into a perfectly functional basket. I hope I have. I think the trick—or my trick—is to work backwards. Try to use the format as you used to use it when you were a kid. Topic first, then examples. Okay, so not that structured. But put it this way: if you’re constantly trying to draw out larger meaning or pathos or even just base humor from a single experience merely because you find it amusing, you’re going to get a lot of essays structured like this: “One day I saw a bunch of mice. Then I went on with my day and events happened with people and I never thought about the mice. Then one of the people said something seemingly meaningless but, in fact, reminded me that we are all just like mice.” See what I mean? Are you ever tempted to write fiction? Read More
June 29, 2010 At Work Shawn Feeney and The BFF Project By Jascha Hoffman By day, the Oakland artist Shawn Feeney works in the art department of Industrial Light and Magic, the visual effects division of Lucasfilm. By night, he uses his training in forensic art to draw charcoal portraits that combine the features of strangers who submitted their photos to him on the Internet. How did you get into forensic art? I’ve been drawing as long as I remember. My dad is a cop on Long Island, and whenever I would visit him at the police station, I would visit the forensic artists. They would critique my drawings of X-Men. In 2006, my dad told me that his police department was hiring a civilian forensic artist. I took a three-week course in forensic facial imaging at the FBI academy in Quantico. It covered the interview process, facial anatomy, age progressions and postmortem drawings. I tend to be obsessive, meticulous, but it helped me loosen up. You can’t expect a witness to sit there for five hours while you draw every little pore on the face. Read More
June 25, 2010 At Work Jennifer Egan By Christopher Cox Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, covers a lot of ground, from San Francisco to Kenya and beyond, and a wide span of time, from the seventies punk scene to a near future where even the most intimate conversations (“Nvr met my dad. Dyd b4 I ws brn”) are conducted via text. We caught up with her, appropriately enough, over e-mail. Photograph by Pieter Van Hattem/VistaluxSeveral chapters of the book started out as short stories. When did you first know that they would come together to form a novel? I’m not sure there was a moment when I exactly knew, but the whole writing process seemed to be about thinking I would write just one more piece about this constellation of people. But then my curiosity would hook onto someone else, and I’d find myself following them along a byway to a different place. The critical moment came when I realized that four older stories, which I’d written and published some years before, were also entangled with this new material. I felt the whole thing weaving itself around me at that point, and realized it was time to admit I was writing a book, figure out what kind of book it was, and how the hell to make it work. Read More
June 22, 2010 At Work Why David Means Is Not a Novelist By David Wallace-Wells Photograph by Max MeansSince his 1991 debut “A Quick Kiss of Redemption,” David Means has established himself among the finest and most incisive American writers of contemporary short fiction—and as the member of his generation perhaps most invested in the short form itself. In his three previous books—each curated with remarkable care and enviable devotion—Means has delivered exquisite local portraits of the destitute, desolate, and disconsolate in postindustrial America. In the course of discussing “The Spot,” his marvelous new collection of razor-sharp shorts, we wondered, is he tempted at all to go longer—to essay the novel? Yeah, I’m tempted by the novel. Tempted is the correct word because compared to the demands of the story it would seem that the novel, all that wide-open space, would be enticing after four story collections. But what’s not enticing to me is the idea of simply going big and wide for the sake of giving into the possibility of going big. I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they’re highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary. Big and wide can mean expansive and comprehensive, but it can also mean bloat. Novels often thin themselves out to a watery hue—some even start that way—and at times seem to only ride along the surface of things, giving us what we already know, reporting the news that is just news. Ezra Pound said that literature is news that stays news. I keep reading novels that feel, even if they’re trying new tricks, like old news, and often resort to cliché to keep moving: out of the corner of his eyes, his heart was pounding in his chest, that kind of thing. Those books are just surfing along on a very small waves—reading them is like watching surfers on Cape Cod trying to catch whatever’s coming in on a lame day. Read More
June 14, 2010 At Work Katherine Dunn By Caitlin Roper It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, Truck, to my third, Geek Love. Katherine Dunn’s novel, Geek Love, is the most singular, evocative, twisted, hilarious book I have ever read. Every sentence contains a surprise. There is nothing else like it. I’ve given a copy of Geek Love as a gift at least once a year for the last decade. A while ago, I wrote Katherine Dunn a fan letter. In reaction to my heaps of heartfelt praise, she said simply, “I’m so grateful that you found it funny. Not everyone gets the jokes.” Our correspondence ranged from marriage to Mike Tyson’s pigeons, but there was one steady thread—my repeated nagging for a short story or piece of fiction to read and consider for the magazine. I learned from Katherine that I was not her only fan among Paris Review editors. “Shortly before George Plimpton died, he phoned me out of the blue—he was a legendary figure for my generation so this blew my pulse rate to ecstatic shreds—asking to include one of my pieces in a volume of boxing stories he was planning to edit. It would have been a great honor.” A new Katherine Dunn story in The Paris Review, the issue’s printed, and my pulse has not yet returned to normal. Since Geek Love was published in 1989, you’ve published many articles, essays, even poetry, but not much fiction. Does fiction take longer to simmer? Yes, I’ve only published a few short stories in anthologies. Some projects do take longer to gel. But nonfiction is done on a deadline so somebody snatches it away and prints it. Twenty years is a long time for something to gel, what has happened? I don’t want to be glib here, but twenty years worth of life and work happened. Some might say I’m right on schedule by my lights. It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, Truck, to my third, Geek Love. And Cut Man is still in progress but it’s a longer book. Fortunately there’s no shortage of wonderful novelists to keep us all engaged. And, lucky for me, the Magi at Alfred A. Knopf are possessed of patience. Read More
June 4, 2010 At Work Jane Mount and the Ideal Bookshelf By Thessaly La Force What is on an ideal bookshelf? The books that made people who they are, that changed their lives. How long have you been painting bookshelves? Three years. Do you ever spot repeats? There’s a cookbook called The Silver Spoon—I’ve painted that silver spoon so many times! A Confederacy of Dunces, Catcher in the Rye, The Little Prince, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, A Wrinkle in Time, Bird by Bird. Do you ever find new reading while on the job? Totally. I just bought I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson. A friend had an early edition on his bookshelf, and it had this really cool black-and-white tiger-striped spine. I looked it up, and Johnson sounded fascinating. I don’t know if I would have picked it up if the spine hadn’t had the stripes! Pause Play Play Prev | Next Jane Mount is an artist and entrepreneur. An exhibit of her Ideal Bookshelf project is on display at the Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco until June 13.