Morten Høi Jensen
Who can begrudge us foreigners our attraction to Los Angeles—its sprawling circuitry of wealth and poverty, beauty and damnation, innocence and experience? With its palm-screened boulevards, model-thronged beaches, and movie-star aura, LA seems faintly make-believe, yet we know that it is also a place of real crime, cults, and carbon emissions. In The Burning Ground, Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection of stories, the city is primarily a place of loneliness, ennui, and drift. An aging British painter escapes to California following the disintegration of a love affair; a divorced father drags his teenage son on an ill-advised hunting trip; a widower Nothing can prepare you for the scope and ambition of Blinding, the first volume of Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu’s acclaimed trilogy. A phantasmagorical blend of fiction, memoir, surrealism, entomology, war, sex, death and destruction, the novel is, to use its own words, on a “a continuum of reality-hallucination-dream.” It’s author, by contrast, is a collected, unassuming man who looks, at moments, like the actor Daniel Day Lewis. At least that was my impression when we met on a recent Saturday night, in a book-lined Brooklyn apartment where Cărtărescu was staying for the New York leg of his American tour. On an unseasonably cool day last month I met with Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. at a wine bar in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood—not far from the preferred stomping grounds of her novel’s main character, Nathaniel “Nate” Piven, an ambitious young writer whose romantic misadventures Waldman probes with astute psychological insight. Over gin-and-tonics we discussed the solemnity of youthful reading, the “moral lives” of nineteenth-century literary characters, and the different reactions people have had to Waldman’s Nate. Bookforum: I just read your essay in The Millions in which you describe a very interesting shift 
Lydia Millet Writing in Bookforum last year, Minna Proctor said of Lydia Millet’s fiction that it “takes aim at the metaphysical jugular.” Over the course of eleven books (including two for young adults) Millet has won the respect of readers and critics for creating “exquisitely flawed characters” and pushing them “beyond themselves, their experience, their expectations” towards powerful transformations. Though she’s been shortlisted for a Pulitzer and awarded a PEN prize, Millet is not just an acclaimed novelist and short story writer; she is also a passionate environmentalist. The five years she spent completing her recent trilogy of novels—How Avatar and Aeschylus; Mad Men and memoirs; Sontag and Spider-Man: The Musical—nothing is too high or too low for the critic Daniel Mendelsohn to analyze and engage with. Waiting for the Barbarians (New York Review Books, $25), his new collection of essays, moves untrammeled across history, culture, and the arts to find us preoccupied with many of the same ideas and narratives of the Greek and Latin classics. For this “meeting of the ancient and the contemporary worlds,” as the author puts it, there is no better guide than Mendelsohn. Written mostly for the New York Review of Books 
Zadie Smith was just twenty-four years old when she published White Teeth (2000), her best-selling, widely-acclaimed debut novel. Now thirty-six, she has written four novels and a collection of essays, was a columnist for Harper’s Magazine, is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and The Guardian, and is a professor of creative writing. Oh yeah: and she’s a mother. I spoke to Smith on the phone early one recent morning about NW, her tragicomic new book about a northwest London neighborhood and its people; its corners and projects, friends and lovers, mothers and In his new novel Lionel Asbo Martin Amis returns to London’s mean streets, where a petty criminal, Lionel Pepperdine (renamed Asbo in honor of the UK’s notorious Anti-Social Behavior Order), wins a £140 million on the lottery. Lionel is a great comic-villain in the tradition of London Fields’ Keith Talent and The Information’s Steve “Scozzy” Cousins. Skyrocketed into society’s highest socio-economic echelons, Lionel struggles to reconcile front-page stardom with his modest, inner-city roots (he is from a fictional part of London where everything hates everything else: “the caff hates the van! the bike hates the shop! the pub hates Tom Bissell We’re fortunate to live in a time where a handful of enormously gifted writers are revitalizing the essay form. One example is Tom Bissell, whose new collection, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, adds up to a kind of narrative of contemporary culture, weighing in on video games, underground literary movements, bad movies and the fates of great writers. Before his recent reading with his friend and fellow writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus at KGB Bar in New York, I spent an hour with Tom Bissell at his cousin’s apartment in Manhattan, where he and his girlfriend were A couple of weeks ago I spoke with Geoff Dyer on the phone about—well, what, exactly? The idea was to discuss his new book, Zona, but we ended up drifting over so many other topics that I never even bothered to ask him why he wanted to write about Tarkovsky’s The Stalker in the first place. Before the actual interview began we chatted about his review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: the Biography, and by the end he was giving me advice about which David Markson book I should read first. Our interview, in other words, assumed the shape Susan Bernofsky Chances are you’ve read Susan Bernofsky. If, like John Ashbery, Benjamin Kunkel, J.M. Coetzee, or a number of other writers and readers, you’ve been delighted by the renaissance of Robert Walser’s writing in English, then you’ve most certainly read Susan Bernofsky. Bernofsky’s celebrated translations of the elusive Swiss writer have, like Peter Constantine’s comprehensive translations of Isaac Babel, revived and boosted the reputation of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and original writers. Bernofsky has brought The Robber (2000), The Assistant (2007), The Tanners (2009) and Microscripts (2010) to English-speaking audiences, as well as novels by