Neil Gaiman: By the Book

What book is on your night stand now?

There are a few. My current audiobook (Yes, they count; of course they count; why wouldn’t they?) is “The Sisters Brothers,” by Patrick deWitt. It was recommended by Lemony Snicket (through his representative, Daniel Handler), and I trust Mr. Snicket implicitly. (Or anyway, as implicitly as one can trust someone you have never met, and who may simply be a pen name of the man who played accordion at your wedding.) I’m enjoying it — such a sad, funny book about family, framed in a Wild West of prospectors and casual murder.

My “make this last as long as you can” book is “Just My Type: A Book About Fonts.” It’s illuminated a subject I thought I understood, but I didn’t, and its chapter on the wrongnesses of Comic Sans came alive for me recently visiting a friend at a Florida retirement community, in which every name on every door was printed in Comic Sans. The elderly deserve more respect than that. Except for the lady I was visiting, widow of a comics artist. For her, it might have been appropriate. On the iPad there are several books on the go, but they are all by friends, and none of them is actually published yet, so I will not name them.

When and where do you like to read?

When I can. I read less fiction these days, and it worries me, although my recent discovery that wearing reading glasses makes the action of reading more pleasurable is, I think, up there with discovering how to split the atom or America. Neither of which I did. (I clarify this for readers in a hurry.)

What was the last truly great book you read?

 

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The right cover for “Lolita”

Design by Peter Mendelsund

After years of soft-core designs, a book collects 60 new versions that do justice to the novel’s dark complexities

By Michael Silverberg,

Among the problems Nabokov’s “Lolita” poses for the book designer, probably the thorniest is the popular misconception of the title character. She’s chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot ― just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years. “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,” says John Bertram, an architect and blogger who, three years ago, sponsored a “Lolita” cover competition asking designers to do better.

Now the contest is being turned into a book, due out in June and coedited by Yuri Leving, with essays on historical cover treatments along with new versions by 60 well-known designers, two-thirds of them women: Barbara deWilde, Jessica Helfand, Peter Mendelsund and Jennifer Daniel, to name a few. They don’t shy away from frank sexuality, but they add layers of darkness and complication. And like Jamie Keenan’s cover ― a claustrophobic room that morphs into a girl in her underwear ― they provoke without asking readers to abdicate their responsibility.

I talked to Bertram about contending with “Lolita’s” complexity and ethical baggage, and why the novel is cited by so many female designers as their favorite book.

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Zakes Mda On Why Storytelling Will Survive (even if books don’t)

Zakes Mda (photo: Sal Idriss)

By Daniel Musiitwa

Regarded as one of South Africa’s leading authors, Zakes Mda (real name: Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda) is a multi-talented writer, whose work has received local and international recognition. Mda first rose to prominence in 1978, when he received the Amstel Merit Award for his play, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland. A year later, he won the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award for another his plays, The Hill. His first two novels, She Plays with the Darkness and Ways of Dying, both released in 1995, were literary successes in his native South Africa. The former won the Sanlam Literary Award, while the latter went on to win the 1997 M-Net Literary Award.

In 2001, Mda’s book, The Heart of Redness, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book- Africa, and also received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The Madonna of Excelsior, published in 2002, was selected as one of the Top Ten South African Books Published in the Decade of Democracy. Mda’s autobiography, Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider, released earlier this year, was published in South Africa by Penguin, and is due to be released this week in the US by FSG. It was picked by the Guardian’s Alexandra Fuller, as one of her top ten African memoirs.

In this interview, Zakes Mda talks about his writing, and his latest book, Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider.

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Interview: Novelist Gillian Slovo

Gillian Slovo: 'I might never have written my first novel if it hadn’t been for my mother’s murder'Portraits © Jillian Edelstein

The South African novelist who wrote of The Riots tells of the forces which shaped her career

by Jasper Rees

“To my friend Craig.” As all writers must, Gillian Slovo will put her signature to copies of her 2008 novel, Black Orchids, for queues of readers. No other writer will have performed this promotional ritual, only subsequently to discover, as Slovo did, that she had signed a book to the man who murdered her mother.

Slovo’s latest play, The Riots, which has won wide acclaim, followed on from her previous commission for the Tricycle Theatre in north London, Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, which she wrote with Victoria Brittan. But she is principally a novelist for our times whose abiding subjects are displacement and the presence of the past. Her formative years were spent in Johannesburg where her communist parents – Joe Slovo and Ruth First – were among the very few whites to take up the struggle against apartheid. The year the ANC leadership was rounded up and imprisoned, Slovo was wrenched into exile. For the past 48 years she has lived in London. Not that you’d necessarily know it from her fiction. The novel she signed to Craig Williamson, a former henchman of the South African security apparatus, was like many of her books fixated on the place she came from. The twisted probability is that she has Williamson’s deed to thank for the burgeoning of her fiction.

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Interview with Erin Morgenstern

Erin Morgenstern

You’re never too old to run away and join the circus, at least not in the imagination of debut author Erin Morgenstern. The writer and multimedia artist began crafting a fantasy-laced story in 2005 about a Victorian-era black-and-white-striped circus. Now her 2011 novel, The Night Circus, is one of the most-read books on Goodreads. Two magicians, Celia and Marco, are groomed from childhood to compete in a decades-long duel orchestrated by Celia’s father and a nameless man. The adult rivals neglect to tell their young pawns the rules, or the stakes, of their game. Against the background of a nocturnal circus—complete with a tattooed contortionist, acrobatic kittens, and an eclectic and ever-growing collection of phantasmagoric attractions—Celia and Marco test the limits of their power. The Boston-based writer chatted with Goodreads about love at first sight, tarot readings, and her favorite fictional circus tent.

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AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Crime writer gets better with each book

WHY WRITE?: Deon Meyer says the greatest part about being a writer is being read. Picture: MARTIN RHODES

Deon Meyer is passionate about SA and its people and says it’s a fantastic setting for his crime fiction, writes Lauren de Beer.

FOR an international publisher, the decision to take on any author, let alone a South African, is a risk, a leap of faith. In the case of Cape Town-based crime novelist Deon Meyer, the gamble to publish a “totally unknown guy from the bottom end of the Dark Continent” is one that has more than paid dividends for both parties, with the awards his writing has garnered marginally outnumbered only by his sales figures around the world.

The news that his book Thirteen Hours was the top download on Kindle for a week was just reward for an author who gets better with every outing. Trackers (Hodder & Stoughton) is Meyer’s seventh novel and uses, as with his previous works , a South African landscape alive with colour and contrast as its setting. And, as usual, the original was written in Afrikaans (titled Spoor) and translated by Laura Seegers.

“Laura is brilliant and I don’t think she gets enough credit for what she does,” says Meyer. “What she manages to do so well is not to lose the South African flavour, and I think that’s a real art.”

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Alice Walker: “Going through Israeli checkpoints is like going back in time to American Civil Rights struggle” .

 

I am a big supporter of BDS. I frankly think that it is the best, absolutely the best way

By Dr. Hanan Chehata

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

American Pulitzer Prize winning author, Alice Walker, was a juror with the Russell Tribunal on Palestine which took place in South Africa this year. A prolific writer of novels, poetry and short stories her books, fiction and non-fiction, have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. While she is most well-known for “The Colour Purple” she is also a dedicated political activist and campaigner. MEMO’s Dr. Hanan Chehata caught up with Ms Walker in Cape Town to ask her why she has been so drawn to the Palestinian cause. During the course of the interview the similarities between the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the African-American struggle during the Civil Rights era is evident. She expresses her belief that “Americans have a duty to be active in the defence of Palestinian people” and further proposes that the illegal settlements paid for unwittingly by American tax payers should be lived in by the Palestinians to whom the land belongs and who should all “come home”.

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Tom McCarthy: My desktop

A life 'laced with code' … Tom McCarthy's desktop

In the first of a new series where writers show us around their working lives by revealing what’s on their computer desktops, Tom McCarthy explains how technology is woven into his creative life.

Interview by Ben Johncock

I don’t have a desktop image. It’s best to write against nothing, rather than something. Just having white, pure white, is seductive. Anyone who’s ever pissed on snow will understand this.

I must belong to the only generation of writers who’ve written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka’s obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw your fingers at and the keys would smash into the roller. It felt like a machine-gun or something. I do everything on the laptop now, although I print notes out and mark them up.

“Satin Island” is the provisional title of the next novel – hence “Research for SI” and “si world stuff”. It’s all about pollution and mutation. It’s going to have a leitmotif of a parachutist falling to earth, having realised that his parachute has been sabotaged: his relation to the landscape, death, technology. It’s only half-formed at the moment – less than half – that’s the ‘Parachutist stuff’ document.

The “Columbia talk” folder and presentation is a talk I gave to the students and faculty at Columbia University in New York. It’s called “Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works”. I trace the figure of Orpheus from Ovid through Rilke to Cocteau, looking in particular at the roles of transmission and reception. Rilke’s Orpheus is associated with a giant ear; Cocteau’s spends half his time listening to the radio. I think this has something vital to tell us about what the writer – any writer – is essentially doing.

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A Conversation with Outlier Malcolm Gladwell

While millions of people have read Malcolm Gladwell’s books, his ideas have had particular resonance with today’s business leaders. As Fast Company magazine said of The New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author, “Gladwell and his ideas have reached a tipping point of their own. “This month, Malcolm Gladwell Collected was published as a boxed set offering three iconic books that have deeply influenced managers over the past decade: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers.

In October, Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and Gladwell were named to HR Magazine’s Top 20 Most Influential International Thinkers of 2011. Cappelli recently spoke with Gladwell by phone about why Gladwell is an “academic groupie,” the inconvenient truths that can spring from scholarly research, and his book in progress. Gladwell also reflected on how important decisions — like going to war or dealing with today’s economy — might be dealt with differently if we were to draw on the “extraordinary wisdom” of universities.

An edited transcript of the interview follows:

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Errol Morris Interviews Stephen King

11/22/63

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

In the Nov. 13 issue of the Book Review, the documentarian Errol Morris reviews Stephen King’s new novel, “11/22/63.” The book, like the film Morris is currently completing, is about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Because of their overlapping interests, and because Mr. Morris’s technique as a filmmaker is to chase down every clue, he requested an interview with Mr. King after finishing his review. The resulting Q. and A. is below, with Mr. Morris’s introduction. — The Editors

 

Stephen King’s new novel inhabits a gray area between fact and fiction. It tells the story of Lee and Marina Oswald in the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination. But this isn‘t just historical fiction; it’s a fictional vision of a historical event that has never been satisfactorily explained. To write the true history of the Kennedy assassination, we need to know it. But how much do we know of what really happened?

King believes that Oswald is guilty, and argues in terms of the stories we tell about that day: “Early in the novel,” he writes in an afterword, “Jake Epping’s friend Al puts the probability that Oswald was the lone gunman at 95 percent. After reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I’d put the probability at 98 percent, maybe even 99. Because all of the accounts, including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame junkie who found himself in the right place to get lucky.”

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