Vanity Fair has an interview with A Million Little Pieces author James Frey – his first major one since his notorious appearance on Oprah’s show in 2006, and his last for a while, at least according to Vanity Fair. The magazine – as is its right – pumps up the “butterfly broken on the wheel” aspect of the story and comes on like a 1930s noir tell-all:

The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit.

A dapper-looking Douglas Coupland is interviewed on The New York Times’ book blog about his next book (“a new novel set in the near future when bees are extinct”), his thoughts on the web and reference librarians, and the authors shelved next to him on bookstore shelves.

(Read the comments to be reminded that hell hath no fury like a reference librarian scorned.)

Ian McEwan is the subject of a Q&A in The New Republic that ranges from the perils of movie adaptations, the worth of literary realism, and McEwan’s rarely concealed view on religion.

McEwan also offers his thoughts on book blogs:

I don’t read the blogs much. I don’t like the tone – the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don’t like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can’t be held accountable, when they don’t have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn’t belong in the world of book reviewing.

Thanks for that, you weedy, four-eyed, knee-jerk atheistic, Booker Prize recidivist.

It’s an interesting read, but we have to note – from way up on our high blog-horses – the fact that the occasion for the interview was not the recent publication of McEwan’s latest novel On Chesil Beach, but rather the fact that the film adaptation of Atonement was up for a bunch of Golden Globe awards.

There’s a great interview in the Dec/Nov issue of The Believer with notorious author and art critic Dave Hickey conducted by Toronto’s Sheila Heti.

The conversation ranges from the true nature of art, the role of criticism, Hickey’s current place in the art world, etc. – not the most thrilling-sounding stuff, but as James Wolcott writes on his blog, the interview is fun to read because Hickey “sounds like an actual human being talking, not a filtration device preening with little soundbites.”

For example, Hickey characterizes the whole notion of Fine Arts degrees as “training sissies for teaching jobs” and an efffort “to create an intellectual and pedagogical justification for the most frivolous activity in Western culture.”

Here are Hickey’s thoughts on arts in academia and government arts funding, a contentious topic this side of the border:

DH: I don’t think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some good artists in their maturity – like me – will take a job at a university and continue to produce because they have trained themselves to produce. But the university environment is not a productive environment. It’s oppressive.

SH: It’s what?

DH: It’s not free. You cannot say what you want to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we’re quits. I can take that money and spend it on heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get the money I make from the university every year, that comes with a requirement that I not be a pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I not tell the truth, that I not say what I think about the president of the university. That’s what that money is. And if I take a job at a university and I’m a young person, I have six years in which I can’t express my opinion until I get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere–

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art – the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

How’s that for a Monday morning wake up call? Hickey also has some thoughts for those young or avant-garde writers and artists who feel they are not being given their due mainstream recognition:

The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn’t sit around saying, “There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!” You know what I’m saying?

Though Heti’s role in the interview is mostly to play straight (wo)man to Hickey, she does drop some hints about her own artistic future:

Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just – I can’t do it.

Uh, tiresome? As Hickey himself says, right at the beginning of the interview, about the creation of art: “if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Cormac McCarthy is that rare thing in American letters: a writer who manages to balance literary acclaim with a large popular readership. (All of his books since 1992’s All the Pretty Horses, for which he won the National Book Award, have been bestsellers.) He’s also still consistently described as a recluse, despite a recent Oprah appearance and open collaboration with Hollywood. In a conversation with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, he lets slip his admiration of director Terrence Mallick, his distaste for magic realism, and his unlikely friendship with Richard Gere. Here’s McCarthy on appreciating the Bard:

Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.”

Holy s—, indeed.

A for-kids-only reading by J.K. Rowling at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre went off without a hitch, according to Quillblog’s two exclusive sources, both of whom are nine years old. Rowling reportedly read her favourite passage from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before answering pre-arranged questions – none of them having to do with Dumbledore – from the 950-strong audience.

In an interview with Quilblog after the media-free event, our sources agreed to dish some of the details.

Q: What was it like when Rowling walked up on stage?

A: There was clapping for at least 30 seconds.

Q: What’s she like?

A: She’s pretty and nice.

Q: What did she talk about?

A: She said she had a fight with her ex-boyfriend and she wanted to throw a ball at him so then she came up with Quidditch.

Q: Did she sign a book for you?

A: Yes.

Q: How was that?

A: Weird.

Q: What are you going to do with the book?

A: Put it on my bookshelf.

Q: You’re not going to sell it?

A: No … maybe.

Besides articulating the origins of Quidditch, Rowling also revealed that she hasn’t ruled out writing a Potter encyclopedia. In parting, she signed free copies of Hallows for each of her fans in attendance – a generous, writer’s cramp-provoking gesture that might explain why this was the only Canadian stop on Rowling’s fan-friendly tour.

This week’s Maclean’s has an interview with Latin American author Mario Vargas Llosa, who has a new novel (The Bad Girl) out this fall. The article is an entertaining read, mostly because interviewer Isabel Vincent expends a considerable amount of effort trying (and failing) to get the author to call Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez the worst thing that ever happened to the region.

Llosa is reasonably chatty and forthcoming throughout, sharing his opinions on authoritarianism, Latin American politics, and the writing life, at least until Vincent’s final question:

What about Gabriel García Márquez, who is, like you, a literary giant in Latin America? You used to be good friends until you punched him out in a Mexican theatre in 1976. Neither you nor he have ever spoken about the feud, which has become one of the legendary battles of contemporary literature. Although you haven’t spoken for more than 30 years, you share the same agent [the legendary Carmen Balcells in Barcelona], and you recently agreed to allow part of your own book on García Márquez to be used as the introduction to a new edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America. Does this mean that there is a rapprochement with García Márquez on the horizon?

I don’t answer questions about that.

(Photo courtesy of the author’s official website, http://www.mvargasllosa.com/)

On Tuesday, May 22, the Toronto District School Board held its annual “Read to Succeed” Boys Literacy Conference at the Double Tree Hotel in Toronto. Guest speakers and performers included storytellers Dan Yashinsky and George Blake, authors Eric Walters and Aubrey Davis, rapper QTMC, and basketball-trick artist Quincy Mack. The following is a Q&A with Iago McEvenue, a grade three student at Toronto’s Dewson P.S. and one of the boys selected to attend the all-day conference. (He is also the son of a Quillblogger.)

Q&Q: So how many boys from your school attended the conference, and how were you picked?

Iago: Ten. My librarian – Ms. Bunting – picked me.

Q&Q: Why were you all picked?

Iago: Because we’re book freaks.

Q&Q: Had you ever heard of this conference before?

Iago: Not at all.

Q&Q: Did you know the other nine boys? Were they all the same age as you?

Iago: No, I only knew some of the boys. They were all different ages.

Q&Q: Where was this thing held?

Iago: We were in a big hallish, square room.

Q&Q: How many other kids were there?

Iago: The hall was full of kids; you could barely move.

Q&Q: So what was the first thing you did there?

Iago: We had to wait a little while and look at books for our library when we got to the hotel.

Q&Q: How did that work?

Iago: Our librarian was asking us questions about the books.

Q&Q: Like?

Iago: “Do you like these books?” “Do you think we should get them for the library?”

Q&Q: Got it. Then what?

Iago: We heard two folk stories and a ghost story.

Q&Q: Who was telling the stories?

Iago: It says on the paper. Some … guy. Wait, let me get his autograph…. [Digs out a piece of paper.]

Q&Q: Dan Yashinsky? What did you think of all that?

Iago: He told us a story about his grandfather. It was really funny: there was this bully, in Romania, and he told his grandfather to go and say this bad word in Romanian to his mum…. [Tells story.]

Q&Q: Dramatic stuff. So after the stories, what happened?

Iago: We went to have lunch.

Q&Q: It says here there were books for sale during the lunch. Is that true?

Iago: Yeah.

Q&Q: Who was buying them?

Iago: A bunch of other kids from other schools.

Q&Q: OK, skipping ahead. Who spoke to you in the afternoon?

Iago: This old guy … I think his name was George Blake. He did a story called “Death” that was really good.

Q&Q: What else happened?

Iago: We saw QTMC, and a famous basketball trickster. [Lists the numerous tricks performed. This takes a while.]

Q&Q: What did that have to do with literacy or reading?

Iago: It was just entertainment.

Q&Q: So did other librarians talk to you? Did any booksellers talk to you?

Iago: No.

Q&Q: So you heard stories, and saw basketball tricks, etc., then what?

Iago: We each got to pick one book for the library, but then Ms. Bunting tricked us and gave them to us.

Q&Q: Then what?

Iago: We went home.

Q&Q: Did your librarian talk to you after?

Iago: Yeah: “How was it? Did you like it?” And we all said, “Yes.”

Q&Q: And did you like it?

Iago: Yes.

Toronto illustrator Patricia Storms, who maintains the blog BookLust, has posted a lengthy account of her experience last night at the Bay & Bloor Indigo in Toronto, where she went to hear Ralph Nader speak. Nader was being interviewed by Indigo CEO Heather Reisman, but when Reisman opened the floor to questions from the audience, a bunch of people from the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid launched a noisy protest, accusing her of supporting Israel’s military effort.

As the protesters bellowed their accusations against Heather, she stood up, gripping her microphone in her hand, her face clenched into this bizarre tight smile, her eyes shiny and seething. She said that she would not engage with these people, and that their accusations were not true, and that unfortunately the question/answer period had to come to an end. Then the protestors starting ranting at Nader, trying to shame him for associating with Heather and Indigo.

Storms goes on to recount how Reisman and Nader each dealt with the situation, and it’s an interesting study in contrasts. You can read the rest here.

Michael Chabon’s long-awaited new novel – his first for adults since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in 2001 – is garnering excellent reviews, and Salon has posted a lengthy interview with the author about it. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a detective story set in the fictitious town of Sitka, Alaska, a modern-day hamlet populated entirely by displaced Yiddish-speaking Jews. And according to Salon, this “fiction set in a fantastical place, told in a dying language, poses some of the most poignant, difficult questions about the Jewish homeland.” At one point in the interview, Chabon describes the genesis of the book as follows:

Some moment around the time that I was conceiving of this book I reread Isaac Babel’s short stories and I just felt like there was a stylistic link there between Babel and [Raymond] Chandler. Isaac Babel was a hard-boiled writer; he was tough and deliberately so. He almost wore his hardness as a badge of honor in a way that I felt like I recognized also from Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett. And he was writing around the same time as Hammett and Hemingway; it just didn’t feel like a totally ridiculous comparison to make.

The interview roves all over the place, and includes discussions of Israel, Chabon’s own married life (to a fellow writer), The Lord of the Rings, Barack Obama, and the yet-to-materialize film adaptation of Kavalier & Clay. Unfortunately, Salon does not ask Chabon why his editors failed to deep-six a completely terrible title like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union…

Bookninja has posted a lengthy conversation between authors (and good friends) Lynn Coady and Christy Ann Conlin, in which they debate the pros and cons of writing about a place you’ve never lived in yourself. Because they’re both from Nova Scotia, they talk a lot about Maritime-set novels by non-Maritime authors, like Scotch River by Linda Little and The Wind Seller by Rachael Preston.

CONLIN: I opened [Little’s] book with that bristling sense of territorialism we’re talking about. But her book was great. It transcends place and culture. It’s bigger than that. She does nail contemporary Nova Scotian culture as though she’s from here. […] It makes me think of Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski who we know as Joseph Conrad. He didn’t even speak English until he was sixteen and then he didn’t even publish a novel, god bless him, until he was in his mid thirties. And he is considered to be a fine English novelist. He adopted English culture and I think he was able to see into the heart of it, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, in a way few from England could.

Then Coady turns the conversation around and begins to wonder if it isn’t harder to write about a place that you lived in.

COADY: This is a whole other problem: the feeling that, as a local writer you are somehow complicit in the construction of a twee, fakey stereotype simply by having written what you know best. Then the meanies in Toronto make fun of books set on the east coast for being full of caricatured, kilt-wearing alcoholic fisherman and you remember your last novel and think, Oh shit. Then the phone rings and it’s your drunk uncle Pete slurring something about how he dropped his sporrin over the side of the lobster boat.

The conversation starts off kind of draggy but gets a lot more interesting and lively in the second half, so Quillblog recommends skimming their lengthy opening exchanges and reading from there.

Bookforum has posted an enjoyable interview with U.S. literary agent Ira Silverberg, in which he and the reporter simply sit and sift though Silverberg’s book collection. Some of the most interesting and/or amusing titles are the long-forgotten ones by various minor-league celebrities and future literary stars. But the one Silverberg takes the most relish in displaying is a youthful work of poetry by fellow agent Andrew Wylie.

Students of publishing lore know that Andrew Wylie used to be a poet, but few have had the chance to peruse Yellow Flowers, a 1972 chapbook that collects some of the vaguely Mephistophelian superagent’s youthful versifications. “There’s a rumor that he has tried to buy up all of the copies,” says literary agent Ira Silverberg. It’s easy to see why: Thumbing through Silverberg’s copy of Yellow Flowers, one can only imagine what a Wylie client like, say, Benazir Bhutto would make of such poems as “Hands up Your Skirt,” “Warm, Wet Pants,” and the determinedly unlyric “I Fuck Your Ass, You Suck My Cock.”

Hearing of Wylie’s rhapsodic exertions, Quillblog was reminded of another agent, one closer to home, who attempted the art of poesy in her past: Denise Bukowski, who published a collection with Beach Holme in 1992 called Road Works. Only one alleged sample is available for perusal on the web, and it indicates that Bukowski’s no stranger to literary licentiousness herself. For her ode to “A Mexican Conquistador,” click here.

And if you’re interested in reading more of Wylie’s work, Gawker has a few excerpts up.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin, the first in Rankin’s hugely successful series of mysteries featuring Edinburgh detective John Rebus.

In an interview with The Scotsman, which published Rankin’s very first short story (and which rewarded him with enough money to buy the typewriter on which Knots and Crosses was written), Rankin recalls that his “launch party” for his debut consisted of a solitary meal of steak and wine bought from a local grocery store. He also reveals that his original intention was to kill off Rebus in the first book.

Rankin also provides a list of books that have influenced him, including A Clockwork Orange, Catch-22, and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a Quillblog favourite, which, admittedly, Rankin cites as a kind of anti-influence:

“It seemed nobody was writing books about contemporary Edinburgh; it was as if Jean Brodie had summed up the city for a generation. Her Edinburgh is very prim and proper; it wasn’t really a city I recognized, living in student digs, drinking in rough pubs. It wasn’t Jean Brodie’s Edinburgh I lived in.”

The Walrus magazine’s website has an entire section devoted to podcasts. The latest is an interview author Austin Clarke conducted with Malcolm X in 1963 in New York. In his introduction to the podcast, Clarke recalls the the time he spent trying to track down the militant black leader, and his nervous reaction when he finally got the call.

I remember the tone and the nuance in his voice, when he asked me, “Can you come up to Harlem?” – obviously, in his diplomatic manner, wondering whether I was black or white. I assured him, with a fake black Harlem twang, that I “can come to Harlem, Brother ’ cause I be cool!”

Clarke apparently interviewed Malcolm X again, years later and shortly before his assassination, but forgot to turn on the tape recorder.

Listen to Clarke’s interview here.

Larry Stevenson is back in Toronto, and Globe and Mail business reporter Gordon Pitts has a Q&A with the Chapters founder. After losing Chapters to Indigo in a hostile takeover, Stevenson reportedly studied at the Sorbonne, and in 2003 he took over as CEO of Pep Boys, a Philadelphia-based auto parts firm. He left that post last summer, and now he’s joined Callisto Capital, a private equity firm.

The Globe piece touches on Stevenson’s reading habits: he’s been enjoying Wayne Johnston’s latest novel but has also been essaying some Roman history, since “Fiction is fun, but I feel it has to be combined with learning.”

Also explored is the difference between the U.S. and Canadian business climates. Stevenson notes that massive layoffs and store closures at Pep Boys were reported in cheerleading tones by the business press, while “when we closed individual stores up here in my former life, it was a big deal.” And asked about the difference between books and auto parts, he says, “the toughest decisions in business are determing what is the business, who do you compete with, what are the shared costs.”

Quillblog can sympathize – we’re still trying to figure out whom exactly Chapters was competing with.

And if you’re wondering how long it takes Pitts to remind readers that his interview subject is a former paratrooper – a statutory requirement for any story about Stevenson – the job is done in record time, a mere four words in.

Edinburgh author Stef Penney, who won the Costa First Novel Award this week for her Canada-set historical tome The Tenderness of Wolves (published here by Penguin Canada), is interviewed on Scotsman.com, and it doesn’t go well. Only a few paragraphs in, interviewer Jackie McGlone describes Penney as “a passive-aggressive clam.”

With some cause, perhaps: Penney is prickly about fairly innocuous personal questions, and she charmingly manages to see the downside of the Costa situation (“it means that people want bits of me now and I’m not prepared to give them”). She also throws out some mixed messages, touching on her agoraphobia and discussing her history of panic attacks in some detail, but also saying, “To be honest, I couldn’t care less about publicity and I’m certainly not going down that my-life’s-a-misery route.”

Still, isn’t it refreshing to see an author whose media interactions are a little more raw and a little less careful and polite?

(Oh, and the piece also touches on the Canuck connection. “When her novel was sold in Canada earlier this year, they refused to believe that she was not one of them, although the closest she has been to a frozen wilderness was on desolate holidays in the Highlands as a child, when she recalls miserably trudging through mud.”)

Jason Sullivan, who works at the Robson Street Chapters store in Vancouver, isn’t your typical chain employee: he helped organize a union at the store in 2005, bringing the employees into the service sector local of Canadian Auto Workers. Now Charles Demers has posted a fairly wide-ranging interview with Sullivan at The Tyee. Their Q&A touches on the vicious circle caused by low retail wages; the union’s main goals going into the first contract; big stores vs. small; and Indigo’s overall effect on Canadian writing and publishing. (Sullivan’s answer to that last one is a cautious “good.”)

Related links:
Click here for the Tyee interview

The Telegraph has an interview with Gore Vidal, who, at the age of 81, has a new memoir out entitled Point to Point Navigation. Vidal is always quotable, and he doesn’t disappoint here. Below are some gems.

On academia: “If you want to meet someone who really hates literature, then just talk to an academic.”

On the concept of the auteur: “I remember all these terrible hacks in Hollywood coming up and telling me, ‘I’m an auteur, you know.’ And I would say, ‘I always knew you were by the way you parted your hair.’”

On the decline of literary fame: “To speak of a famous writer is like speaking of a famous speedboat designer. The adjective is inappropriate to the noun.”

Of course, Vidal’s quotability comes at a price. The notoriously litigious author makes clear that “the only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.”

Related links:
Read the interview with Gore Vidal

It’s pretty rare for a publisher to be openly adversarial toward the author of one of her high-profile about-to-be-released titles. But hey, O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It is a special kind of book.

Judith Regan, who’s publishing the book under her ReganBooks imprint, defends herself in The New York Times today. Regan says she mainly wanted a public confession for the sake of closure. “I wanted him to confess for very personal reasons,” she tells the Times, referring to an abusive relationship in her own past. (She expands on that in a larger essay that was provided to the Times and can be viewed in full on The Drudge Report.)

Regan also tells the Times that she’s happy to help victims’ families recover money that’s still owed them from an outstanding civil judgment against Simpson. “If they want any information I’m happy to give it to them,” she says.

What remains to be seen, though, is how much of a “confession” the book really is. So far it sounds more like a dance of titillation, and as the Times notes, in a soon-to-be-aired TV interview, Simpson “spoke about the murders in the hypothetical sense, a stance that admits nothing and could be viewed as a denial.”

It should surprise none of us, in any case, that nobody involved in the project appears to see it as a resume-padder. Regan says she bought the book rights from a nameless “third party,” and the Times notes in passing that it “was written with an uncredited ghostwriter.”

Related links:
Click here for the New York Times article
Click here for Regan’s full essay

In case anyone missed it, James Frey has spoken in-depth to a reporter – Laura Barton, writing for The Guardian – for the first time since the massive controversy over his Oprah-anointed but exaggerated “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. The interview makes for a longish and frustrating and not very rewarding piece, so we’ll save you some time by highlighting the most salient points.

1. All that media attention sure has made for a rough few months.

2. People on the street understand, though. “Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew.”

3. Doubleday surely must have known from the start that Pieces was a “manipulated manuscript.”

4. Frey was a cultural scapegoat. “People feel frustrated by a lot of distortions by politicians, by members of the media, by movie stars, by tabloid journalists, and it was like a sorta confluence of events that I happened to be in the middle of.”

5. The Smoking Gun, the website that broke the news of the book’s falsehoods, was just doing its job – but really, it’s kind of a sleazy job, innit? “Their job is to get people to come to their website, to look at what they do. I just never thought that I was that big a target.”

6. He did have an anesthesia-free root canal – or at least, that’s what’s “true to my memory.”

7. North Americans can’t grasp the nuances of the dance between fiction and non- because they’re simply unsophisticated. “I think it has in certain ways to do with being a young culture, with being a culture that has less of an artistic and literary canon than some of the older European cultures.”

8. The publishers and agents who disowned Frey during the controversy are still making lots of money from his work.

Actually, he may have a point with that last one.

A couple of points that are intriguingly not explored in the article are: (a) How has Frey spent the money he’s made? Has he given any of it away? And (b) If the book was always meant to be a kind of postmodern freeplay of fact and fiction, why did he repeatedly insist that every word was true until it was proven otherwise?

Anyway, lest we think that the Frey fiasco has soured the market on confessional memoirs, writer Choire Sicha sets us straight with a feature in The New York Observer. And the story looks at the interesting question of where the policies of Alcoholics Anonymous — to which many such memoirists belong — fit in. “Members of A.A. have been struggling with the significance of that second ‘A’ for more than half a century. Within the group, members openly discuss their alcoholism; outside the group, they refrain from discussing their membership. That’s the theory.”

Related links:
Click here for the James Frey interview
Click here for the New York Observer feature

Francine Prose, whom Quillblog likes a lot, has a new book out called Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. There’s an online-only Q&A with Prose up over at the Atlantic website, and it includes some choice comments on the age-old (well, couple-decades-old) question of whether formalized creative-writing programs do more good or harm. Says Prose: “One of the things I do when I’m teaching a literature class to MFA students—and I much prefer teaching a literature class to a writing workshop—is make up a reading list based on masterpieces that would just wither and die in a workshop setting. Things like Beckett’s First Love or Metamorphosis. The list is endless.”

And on whether she’d recommend the workshop route for budding young writers: “I’ll tell you quite frankly what I would advise: if you’re getting money or some kind of scholarship, I would go without a question, because it gives you two years to write. That’s two years where you don’t have to wait tables; two years to take your work seriously. And if you’re really gifted, it’s pretty hard to lose that in the course of a workshop. On the other hand—and perhaps I shouldn’t say this because so many of my friends, and I myself at many points, have been so dependent on workshops for making a living—if you’re going to spend two years and come out the other end $80,000 in the hole, I’d think a million times before doing it.”

Related links:
Read the Francine Prose Q&A

Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett died last Friday (July 7) at his home in Cambridgeshire, England at the age of 60. Barrett, who was all but invisible in the three decades since abandoning his very brief (but very brilliant) post-Pink Floyd solo career and reverting back to his real first name, Roger, reportedly died of diabetes.

Barrett was a mythical figure in rock music, his strange and never fully explained disappearance from the public eye following a long, possibly LSD-fueled breakdown that got him kicked out of the Pink Floyd and made recording and performing music seemingly impossible.

His death had a special significance for mystery writer Peter Robinson. In Robinson’s most recent novel, Piece of My Heart, the plot turns on a series of murders possibly committed by a very Barrett-like figure. Robinson, whose love of music — especially canonical late-60’s rock — permeates many of his novels, says that the character in the novel is “99% pure imagination,” but that “there are certainly images of Syd as a young rock star.” Robinson, who admits that, as a young man, he “wouldn’t even listen to a lot of the stuff [Pink Floyd] did after Syd left,” never met Barrett in person, but, interestingly enough, only recently met someone in Cambridge who saw Barrett “around fairly regularly and knew him to say hello to, so it definitely [came as] a bit of a shock.”

Robinson says that he “has always been interested in those figures who didn’t quite survive the ’60s lifestyle – Nick Drake, Janis, Hendrix, Jim Morrison and others. Syd was especially interesting because he did survive but turned his back.”

Related links:
Read about Syd Barrett’s death at NME.com
Read Q&Q’s recent profile of Peter Robinson
Watch Pink Floyd lip-synch to ‘Jugband Blues’ in 1968

The CBC was trumpeting the news yesterday that two key characters are going to be offed come the newest installment of the bespectacled moppet’s adventures.

They reported that an interview broadcast on Monday on Britain’s Channel 4 saw author J.K. Rowling reveal that “one character [gets] a reprieve, but I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die.”

She refrained from letting us in on which characters get the ax because she doesn’t want “hate mail.” And, one would assume, because spoiling the surprises in your upcoming novel isn’t such a savvy business move. (Rowling’s nothing if not savvy: the story also reports that she is “considered one of the wealthiest people in the world…. Her personal fortune is estimated to be more than $1 billion.”)

While Harry seemed safe at the beginning of the interview – “I’ve never been tempted to kill him off before the end of book seven, because I always planned seven books and that’s where I want to go” – she then reflected that any characters left standing at the end of the series could be co-opted by another author, prompting her to say, “It will end with me and after [I’m] dead and gone they won’t be able to bring back the character.”

After all, “a price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here. They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters … well, I do. This is a world where some pretty nasty things can happen.”

Related links:
Read the CBC piece here

One of the most interesting book stories of the week started in the Edmonton Journal, when books editor Richard Helm wrote that Alice Munro was set to announce her retirement at Wednesday’s PEN Canada benefit and Writing Life launch in Toronto. It’s understandable that one would leap to this conclusion based on Munro’s contribution to Writing Life, an essay in which she writes about plans to give up, er, the writing life. We here at Q&Q were also alarmed, but a few weeks ago we contacted Munro’s editors at M&S, Douglas Gibson, and The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, who both reassured us that this was not to be taken seriously.

Munro, of course, did not announce her retirement on Wednesday, although the Journal item had already been picked up by the National Post and blogged by Bookslut, Bookninja, and The Elegant Variation (at least most of the bloggers used question marks to denote some amount of skepticism). Whoops! On Thursday, Helm had a follow-up describing how Munro “may not be through with books after all.” (Many thanks to our Alberta correspondent Gordon Morash for following this for us.)

In other Munro news, the apparently press-shy author (for example, there are no pictures of Munro in Q&Q’s photo gallery of the PEN event because she asked that her photo not be taken) is the subject of a lengthy Q & A in the forthcoming issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review (hat-tip to Bookslut).

Related links:
Click here for the Edmonton Journal story
Click here for The Elegant Variation item
Click here for the VQR interview

Douglas Coupland is out promoting jPod, and among the media coverage is this reader Q&A on Britain’s Telegraph site. The Vancouver author gets whimsical now and then: asked how he’d like to be remembered, he says, “He had the power to obliterate Earth with the push of a single button, and yet he chose to exercise mercy and decided not to.” But he’s also serious and thoughtful. When one reader asks about his monologue “September 10, 2001,” which posits a pill that could take people to a world where 9/11 never happened, he says, “I wonder what 2006 would be like if the hijackers had screwed up and nothing had come of the 9/11 flights. I think the world we’d be inhabiting would be a false paradise. That world might, in its own way, be far worse than the one we inhabit now. So, no, I wouldn’t take the pill.”

(Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for the Coupland Q&A
Click here for a Q&Q Coupland profile from January/February 2006

The Danforth Review has a brief interview with Sara Jamieson, an academic who’s currently studying Alice Munro’s work and who teaches a University of Calgary course called “The Short Story in Canada.” Interviewer Michael Bryson takes the chance to ask her about a few common knocks against our short-fiction purveyors: that they’re overinfluenced by Munro, fond of nostalgia, and leery of experimentation. “[I]t seems to me that, as you say, there are plenty of writers out there experimenting with short fiction. They just never seem to get included in those anthologies of Canadian short fiction that are not expressly devoted to experimental writing,” says Jamieson. “I’m not sure why this has to be the case, and it is an issue for me in the class I’m teaching. The students really liked P.K. Page’s ‘Ex Libris,’ one of a few non-realist inclusions in the anthology I’m using. (Incidentally, it’s interesting, in view of your association of the experimental with ‘younger Canadian writers’ that Page is the oldest living writer on my course!)”

Related links:
Click here for the Jamieson interview

After resisting for decades, author Beverly Cleary has finally agreed to allow Hollywood’s Babylonian whores to have their way with her most famous creation, Ramona Quimby. In an article published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Cleary — who turned 90 last month — explains why she was so anti-film for so long. “I was afraid that no one could really capture the spunky character of Ramona,” Cleary says. Cleary is even less enthusiastic about all the commercial offshoots that come with modern moviemaking — i.e., Ramona toys — and states that she is simply “not interested in making kids into consumers.” This feeling extends even into the realm of children’s publishing. “Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them,” Cleary says.

Can you hear her publicists screaming?

(thanks to the Arts Journal for the link)

Related links:
Read the article on Beverly Cleary in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Those who feel that their TVs are a little starved of bookish Canadian content will take comfort in two upcoming broadcasts. Tomorrow night, TVO’s interview program, Person 2 Person, will feature an hour-long interview with the media-shy first lady of the Canadian short story, Alice Munro, while Yours, Al, a made-for-TV biopic on the life of Al Purdy, will air next Thursday, April 13, on the CBC. Written by playwright Dave Carley and starring Gordon Pinsent as Purdy, Yours, Al is a drama set in an abandoned house, which comes to life as Purdy returns to read, write, and remember his favourite poems.

Related links:
Click here for the Alice Munro Person 2 Person show synopsis, complete with links to video clips featuring Munro from the TVO archives
Click here for Purdy clips from the CBC archives

In Other Media has done a good job of not posting about James Frey in recent weeks, but this one was too good to pass up. Author Peter Carey, who has a well-documented interest in literary hoaxes and a new novel coming out, weighed in on the whole mess in a recent interview in The Bookseller that Gawker linked to on Friday. Says Carey: “It’s trite to say it, but the U.S. is a country run by liars going to war on a fantasy, so it’s interesting to see people getting self-righteous about James Frey. And by the way, if you’re going to publish a memoir by an addict in rehab, everyone knows that one of the corollaries of addiction is lying. So I don’t see why everyone gets into such a fucking uproar because an addict is a liar! Oprah acted like a total bully: talk about about crushing a butterfly on a wheel — or a cockroach on a wheel — because that’s what she did on television to this little creep.”

Related links:
Click here for the Gawker item
Click here for the Carey interview in The Bookseller

In case you needed another reason to love (or hate) author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, he’s a big sports fan, despite the fact that, as he tells ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, he grew up without TV and most of what he learned about sports came from reading Sports Illustrated in the Elmira, Ontario library. He also points to writers Bill James, Thomas Boswell, and Roger Angell as his formative influences on baseball. And if you know the work of those men, it seems like they were pretty influential on his writing, too.

This two-part series is long and basketball-heavy, but totally enjoyable. Here’s the last part of the exchange:

Simmons: … [H]ave you ever pitched a ridiculous story idea with limited appeal to the New Yorker, just to see if you could get away with it? Do you walk into the offices and tell them, “You know what? I’m writing 20,000 words about [hapless New York Knicks centre] Eddy Curry this week and you guys are gonna LIKE IT!” And by the way, I don’t care what the answer is, as long as you don’t switch to writing about rocks for the next 20 years like John McPhee did.

Gladwell: Wait, is anyone still reading at this point? This has gone on longer than one of Rickey Henderson’s at-bats. All I can say is that if I asked David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, if I could do 20,000 words on Eddy Curry he’d probably say yes. But not because there’s anything special about me. David is a huge sports fan. For an intellectual, he’s got a great low-post game, serious length, and the kind of upside you just don’t see in fortyish Pulitzer Prize winners. How long do you think before [hapless New York Knicks general manager] Isiah Thomas signs him?

Related links:
Click here for part one of the ESPN.com interview with Malcolm Gladwell
Click here for part two of the ESPN.com interview with Malcolm Gladwell

New York Times reporter Dinitia Smith has turned in a nice profile of short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, whose latest collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, has just come out. It was a long time coming, though. Eisenberg says it took eight years for her to write the six stories in the collection. But Smith writes that “Eisenberg has reached the pinnacle of what has become a lonely genre.” For confirmation of that last point, the Times writer then turns to Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, who says, “’short story collections don’t generally sell well.’ Still, referring to Ms. Eisenberg’s collection, she said, ‘I’m not thinking this will recharge the form, but I’m hoping this will bring Deborah Eisenberg to a wider audience because I think she is a great writer.’”

Related links:
Click here for the New York Times article

Wall Street Journal media reporter Jeffrey Trachtenberg gives the Media Bistro site his take on a few of publishing’s recent hot topics, including technology, genre trends, and someone named James Frey. He also discusses the blog-to-book phenomenon, suggesting that while a blog may not be a guarantee of authorial success, it probably can’t hurt. Says Trachtenberg: “It is a significant advantage for authors to have what the industry calls a ‘platform,’ be it a show on radio or TV, a newspaper column, or, increasingly, a popular blog. Book publicists can only do so much.”

Related links:
Click here for the Media Bistro Q&A with Jeffrey Trachtenberg

The Queen’s Journal took an extended look at books in last week’s issue. Stories included an interview with Kingston author Steven Heighton, a look at CanLit stereotypes, and an examination of why so many writers move to Kingston and the surrounding area. Author and Queen’s University professor Carolyn Smart told features editor Megan Grittani-Livingston that she counts 65 professional writers living in the area. “I think [writers are drawn here] partly because it’s so central to Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, and because it’s cheaper to live here than in those cities,” she said. “It’s also a big draw with the lake, and the landscape. I live at the edge of the Canadian Shield, and it’s stunning, rugged and beautiful. I love it.”

Related links:
Click here for Grittani-Livingston’s story
Click here for the story on CanLit stereotypes
Click here for the interview with Steven Heighton

If you’ve just emerged from a month in your panic room — or, to borrow a Conan O’Brien line, a “spaz closet” for those of us in a lower tax bracket — New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is promoting a new book, Are Men Necessary? Dowd has been interviewed, it seems, by half of the daily newspapers in North America, and she’s been rehashing the same points. On the New York blog called The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, the blog’s author (who is not named on the site, but is journalist Alex Balk) compiles an illustrated compendium of her most commonly repeated quotes, such as, “[I]t’s like that quiz show where you try to put as many things in your supermarket basket as you can in 30 seconds.”

Related links:
Click here for the item from TMFTML

A recent article on the New York Times website affords readers a glimpse into the home of American book-design icon Chip Kidd. Bought on the cheap in what was once known as Hell’s Kitchen in New York, Kidd’s apartment is endowed with a panoramic view that could almost evoke Batman’s Gotham City. Nicknamed the Bat Cave, Kidd’s home is dubbed so not only for its view but also for its contents: walls lined with original comic book art and shelves housing some of the 500 pieces of Batman memorabilia owned by Kidd.

Kidd has been quoted as saying that collections are manifestations of identities. What happens, then, when a man who won’t grow up falls for a staunch classicist, a man who owns a harpsichord, copious numbers of books, and framed letters from Lincoln, Proust, and Verdi? The owner of the harp and Kidd’s longtime partner is Yale professor and poet J.D. McClatchey. “The trouble with falling in love when you are a certain age is … [that] you trail an accumulation of tastes and objects that, when they are different from your beloved’s, have to be accommodated,” he tells the Times “It’s like a third person in the marriage.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

The New York Times features a profile of best-selling and prolific author James Patterson. Focusing on his sound business investments and disciplined approach to writing, the piece gives a glimpse into the life of that rare beast, the phenomenally rich writer. Patterson speaks openly of his work with paid collaborators and his proactive approach to marketing his work, including paying half the salary of a brand manager to track the release of his own paperbacks and those of other top-selling competitors to avoid conflict with the release of the hardcover editions of his books.

Related links:
Read the New York Times article

An interview with British author A.L. Kennedy on the Huffington Post website lays to rest any illusions aspiring literary fiction writers may have about the life awaiting them should they ever get their work published. Kennedy is blunt and funny in her assessment of the writing life. On the state of publishing: “Fewer publishing houses concentrated in conglomerate hands trying to produce more books of less quality. No full time readers, no full time copy editors and therefore missed newcomers and piss-poor final presentation of texts on the shelves, silly covers, greedy and simple-minded bookshop chains, lunatic bidding wars designed to crush the spirit of unknown newcomers….”

And then there’s the glamorous life of the jet-setting novelist: “Endless community halls and libraries, immensely tiring tours of places that might be interesting if you ever got to see them, food you can’t eat, or never get, not enough sleep, crushing isolation, little or no chance of a cup of tea on the road, endless working to subsidise the writing.”

Related links:
Read the A.L. Kennedy interview

It takes guts, or at least a serious PR glitch, to admit to never having read a book in 31 years. But Posh Spice Victoria Beckham has done it. As The Guardian reports: “Despite penning a 528-page autobiography charting her rise to the top, Victoria Beckham has admitted that she has never read a book in her life.” (The most disturbing element here, perhaps, is that a publisher saw fit to print 500 plus pages of Beckham’s prose.) The comment reportedly came out in an interview with Spanish magazine Chic: “‘I haven’t read a book in my life,’ Beckham confesses. ‘I don’t have the time… I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines.’” The Guardian