In 2009, Jeannette Seaver faced two life-altering problems. Her husband of over half a century, publishing giant Richard Seaver—known for legal triumphs over censorship and for helping to introduce Beckett, Duras, Robbe-Grillet and a number of other literary heavyweights to the American market—suffered a fatal heart attack. His company, Arcade Publishing, was in a state of financial irresolution, and Jeannette was forced to file for Chapter 11. But just as confounding were the nine hundred pages of an uncompleted autobiography that Richard left behind. Both problems, however, were eventually resolved: Arcade became an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, and Jeannette
- interviews • February 3, 2012
- interviews • January 4, 2012
Greil Marcus, by Thierry Arditti In the introduction to his 1975 book Mystery Train, Greil Marcus set forth a challenge: to start taking rock and roll music seriously, to approach pop music “not as youth culture, or counterculture, but simply as American culture.” For the past forty years, he has done just that, looking at rock music not just as entertainment but as part of American mythology. Reading Marcus is to witness a stray musical note become the spine of an essay, or a growl connect Billboard hits to civil war customs. In his latest book, The Doors: A
- interviews • December 23, 2011
I first encountered Alexander Theroux’s writing—the style of which is grandiloquently lyrical, dizzyingly erudite, and often acerbic—through his books on colors: taxonomies of the spectrum we think we’ve seen but that Theroux, attentive observer that he is, suggests we haven’t really seen at all. I followed up these readings with savoring every word of three of his novels, beginning with Darconville’s Cat, his second novel, a book that satisfies syntactically, texturally, and structurally, reminding me at once of Henry James (because of the novel’s sentential convolutions and its paragraphic architectonics, and also because of the way it limns various
- interviews • December 15, 2011
Ha Jin’s writing shares something of his biography. Born in 1956 in northeast China, Jin volunteered in the People’s Liberation Army before venturing stateside in 1985 to study American literature at Brandeis University. Spanning four short story collections and six novels, his oeuvre confronts events in China’s recent past—the Korean War, the Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen Square—head-on, with a bluntness that verges on deadpan. His prose has a similar effect to that of poetry: spare and unadorned, it traces, evokes, but refuses to spell out. This style befits the worlds that Jin renders: his historical vignettes are almost always
- interviews • November 10, 2011
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
- interviews • October 17, 2011
Colson Whitehead Colson Whitehead is not a difficult writer in the way that a Thomas Pynchon is. His syntax is standard, and his sentences make sense on first inspection. Nonetheless, beginning with his brilliant first book, The Intuitionist, which followed the travails of an elevator repairwoman, Whitehead has consistently invoked complex alternative realities, infusing his settings with a subtle, Buñuel-like surrealism. The main character of his latest novel, Zone One, is named Mark Spitz, a mediocre young man who has always pulled a B at best. In the book, Spitz is assigned to a cleanup detail in lower Manhattan,
- interviews • October 3, 2011
Grant Gee, director of Patience (After Sebald) In Patience (After Sebald), a former publisher of the late author W.G. Sebald shares an anecdote about the difficulty he had assigning a genre to The Rings of Saturn. Is it fiction, non-fiction, travel, or history? The work, ultimately, is unclassifiable. The same can be said of the film, a meditation on Sebald’s walking tour of the Suffolk coast. Directed by Grant Gee, best known for his documentary Joy Division, the film explores Sebald’s work through landscape, image, and atmosphere. A few days before Patience’s premiere at the New York Film Festival,
- interviews • September 22, 2011
Helen DeWitt One of the most exciting literary events this fall is the publication of Helen DeWitt’s long-anticipated second novel, Lightning Rods. DeWitt, a Maryland-born polymath, is best known as the author of The Last Samurai, the story of a boy genius who sets off in search of his missing father. Sam Anderson called that book “the most exciting debut novel of the decade.” Lightning Rods promises to generate even more emphatic responses: It is, among other things, a satire in which a businessman develops a service that will end sexual harassment. BOOKFORUM: Lightning Rods, your new novel, is
- interviews • September 15, 2011
Ben Lerner Two pages into Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, his protagonist, a choleric young poet on a year-long fellowship to Madrid, confesses, “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew.” This concern animates Lerner’s debut novel, a wry take on the challenges of producing art in the age of technological mediation. Set shortly before the 2004 terror attacks, Leaving the Atocha Station—named after a John Ashbery poem—follows Adam Gordon as he obsesses over feelings of fraudulence, indulges
- interviews • September 8, 2011
Four years ago, Amy Waldman decided to take a break from her life as a reporter. She had just returned from a stint as the New York Times’s South Asia bureau chief and, along with her luggage, schlepped an idea home from abroad. This idea grew into her novel, The Submission, which was just published. The book follows a competition to choose a memorial for the site of a 9/11-style attack in New York City. When a committee of artists, politicians, and family members choose “The Garden,” a design by Muslim-American architect Mohammad Khan, the media latches onto the
- interviews • June 28, 2011
Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti, photo by Lee Towndrow. Misha and I have been good friends for ten years. At the beginning of our friendship, we ran a barroom lecture series together called Trampoline Hall. Now, we are publishing a book called The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Initially I wanted to write a novel called The Moral Development of Misha, but after writing sixty pages, I threw it out. I had hoped to capture Misha’s way of being in the world and his opinions and point of view, but it wasn’t working as fiction. I realized that
- interviews • June 15, 2011
Matthew Stadler The future of publishing has been the subject of many debates and panels for the past five or so years, but until recently, not a lot was being done about it. That’s beginning to change, thanks to newcomers such as OR Books and Cursor, Inc. Perhaps the most innovative and philosophical new independent press is Publication Studio, the brainchild of Portland-based publishers Matthew Stadler and Patricia No. In 2009, Stadler purchased a printer and an unusual perfect binder (christened “Ol Gluey”) and launched Publication Studio as a print-on-demand publisher. Since then, the independent press has honed its
- interviews • June 11, 2011
Patrick Dewitt, photo by Danny Palmerlee. In 2009, Ablutions: Notes for a Novel introduced author Patrick DeWitt as a master of corrosive comedy. That book follows a barback at an L.A. watering hole who, with alarming (and somehow hilarious) alacrity, ruins his marriage, robs his employers, and calls in a bomb threat during a shift. For all of its chaotic scenes and drunken antics, DeWitt’s debut proceeded with a raconteur’s wit and surprising control, qualities that also distinguish his follow-up, The Sisters Brothers, released this week. The new book is a Western, but it, too, is about a job
- interviews • June 1, 2011
Hervé Le Tellier Since joining the French literary society of the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) in 1992, Hervé Le Tellier, a former mathematician, food critic, and scientific journalist, has taken up the task of investigating what the influential novelist Georges Perec once termed the l’infra-ordinaire (the extremely mundane). A relative late-comer to the group (founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960), Le Tellier has, nonetheless, produced a copious catalog of work—novels, poems, and what some Oulipians cryptically refer to as “exercises”—all the while maintaining an avuncular public persona on France Culture’s successful radio show Papous
- interviews • April 1, 2011
Stanley Cavell grew up in Atlanta and Sacramento, California. He was a student in music at UC Berkeley and Juilliard before studying philosophy at UCLA and completing a Ph.D. at Harvard University. His eighteen books range from treatments of individual writers (Wittgenstein, Emerson, Shakespeare) to studies in aesthetics, film, and religion. Through his writing and almost half century of teaching—six years at Berkeley, thirty-five at Harvard—Cavell has become “one of the great philosophers,” as Jay Parini wrote in the Hudson Review in 1988. Cavell served for many years as president of the American Philosophical Association, and among his numerous
- interviews • February 1, 2011
Chris Lehmann is a conspicuously over-employed editor and cultural critic. He’s a co-editor of Bookforum, an editor at Yahoo news, a columnist for the Awl, a contributing editor for The Baffler, and a guitarist and singer for the band The Charm Offensive. He’s also penned a book, Rich People Things, published by OR books. We recently caught up with Mr. Lehmann via email to discuss the how his blog column became a book, why he considers himself an economic populist, and what we talk about when we talk about class in America. Q: Mr. Lehmann, I can’t help notice
- interviews • January 1, 2011
Sara Marcus Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front, an engaging chronicle of the early-’90s punk feminist movement known as Riot Grrrl, is being published today by Harper Perennial. Writing in Bookforum’s music issue, musician and author Johanna Fateman called the book an “ambitious and convincing book that makes narrative sense out of events that had so far been recorded only in mythic, unverified, and fragmentary form.” We recently sat down with Marcus, who is a freelancer at our sister publication Artforum, to discuss her writing process, feminism’s fate in mainstream culture, gender bias in book criticism, and the feminist
- interviews • January 1, 2011
Frederich Tuten Since dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen with dreams of becoming a painter, Frederic Tuten has lived in Paris; traveled through Mexico and South America; earned a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century American literature; acted in a short film by Alain Resnais; conducted summer writing workshops in Tangiers with Paul Bowles; and written fictions and essays for the artist’s catalogues of Eric Fischl, David Salle, John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. He has also written some of the slyest and most beguiling fiction ever to be described as experimental. His five novels include The
- interviews • November 1, 2010
Eileen Myles, photo by Leopoldine Core. “If you’re interested in poetry, I’ll give you lesbianism, and if you’re interested in lesbianism, I’ll give you poetry.” Inferno is the latest book by poet, novelist, essayist, performer, and one-time presidential hopeful Eileen Myles. (It’s true, she ran as a write-in candidate in 1992.) Eileen did not call Inferno a memoir, even though it sort of is. Maybe one could call it a remembrance. Eileen calls it a novel. In the process of remembering, she lets go a frantic and enlightened rush of recall, impressions, and wit. Loosely modeled on Dante, the
- interviews • January 1, 2010
John Irving always starts his stories at the end, which is why it has taken him nearly twenty years to write his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River (Random House, $28). “The ending just eluded me,” he said in late September, when he spoke to me by phone from his Vermont home. “I knew only that there was a cook and his son, in a rough kind of place, and something happens to make them fugitives.” The protagonists in this exquisitely crafted, elliptically structured novel—a gripping story that spans five decades and extends across northern New England and