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     |  I’d say I shopliftabout 75% of the books I read. I can run surprisingly fast for a tall person. But, when I actually do buy a book, I try to hit The Ivy Bookstore—which, for those who don’t know, is a great indie bookstore in Baltimore. My two year old single-handedly destroys their children’s book department every time she’s there. Continue reading Interview with Matthew Norman  Both artist and bookseller stand at the vanguard of culture. Both struggle for something essentially impractical, unlucrative, and yet unspeakably necessary. Both have labored to build a life in accordance with a passionate vision. Both accumulate intangible rewards, usually in the absence of lower gratifications (prestige, affluence, vacations). Both are cursed and blessed to live in the conviction that what they do has relevance and worth in this world — to spend their days in service to something they love unreasonably and irredeemably. Continue reading Interview with M. Allen Cunningham  Obviously, the book itself is fairly pessimistic, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily feel the same way. The book is meant to be a nightmare. Maybe we would find a way to manage a population that doesn’t age, but that wasn’t where the idea took me. The idea took me right to the shitter. FUN! Continue reading Interview with Drew Magary  The little terrors of the everyday, they shock people. Casey Anthony trial is shocking in the terms of the details that keep coming out. They bother and disturb me. I turn CNN off if I hear chloroform, or mouth taped over. She partied after she murdered her little girl. There is still stuff, as a culture, what are we shocked by, or are we even interested in being shocked anymore. That’s interesting to me. Continue reading The Bret Easton Ellis Interview Part 2  The power from any of the great American writers comes from their style. Not their storytelling. That’s my overly strident opinion on why literary novels should never be filmed. I didn’t create American Psycho to be a movie. I created it to be a literary experience. I thought it was interesting that it had no plot, and had nothing in it that would interest Hollywood. There are a lot of murders in it. Continue reading The Bret Easton Ellis Interview Part 1  …friendship is a peculiar animal – like marriages, no two are alike. Sometimes a friendship runs its course, and its end comes as a relief. But the end can also be as heartbreaking and devastating as a romantic breakup. Friendships can be as intensely passionate, turbulent, and complicated as love affairs, and the sense of shared history, trust, and love in a lifelong friendship is as sustaining and important as marriage. And two friends’ mutual delight in each other’s company can sometimes even surpass the feelings between spouses, which can become muddy and dulled over time, with the familiarity of daily life, the boredom and tension of monogamy and cohabitation. Continue reading An Interview with Kate Christensen  She was indeed a nasty woman, by all accounts, and to what seems an astonishing extent. But let’s also keep in mind that she wrote the first successful, positive story of lesbian love (under her pen name Carol Morgan), which was a very brave thing to do in the mid-twentieth century. She did not attempt to pathologize the relationship portrayed in the novel. People wrote her letters to say how grateful they were to have found this book. So perhaps she wasn’t all bad. And in some ways, one could admire her. Continue reading Interview with Carmela Ciuraru  When I was in grad school they jokingly started calling me the “Edith Wharton of the O.C.” and one of my professors idly commented that I should write a House of Mirth for Newport Beach. He may or may not have been kidding, but the idea struck me and I ran with it. Continue reading Anti-Heroines of Those Vacant Ages  I think the books that mean a lot to us are intensely personal, and when they are associated with moments of change or enormous importance, they become relics of our lives. I remember, for instance, exactly where I was while I was reading Jane Eyre, my first grown-up novel, and to me it will always mean sitting alone at lunchtime in the garden of the British school in Cairo, and finding out that we were moving to America. Continue reading Interview with Tea Obreht  But that box of unease and anxiety has also become smaller since I’ve grown a little older. Jack says women hit their Fuck You Period at around 50 or so—what a relief to realize you honestly no longer care whether you’re voted Miss Congeniality. Continue reading Victoria Patterson: Jane Vandenburgh and the Hypothetical Fifteen-Year-Old Girl I don’t think I could presume to answer that question given that American society is so extraordinarily complicated today and growing increasingly so by the day. It’s very difficult to follow a dream nowadays, but maybe that’s always been the case. Certainly the economics militate against it. It seems to me that there are more people than ever attempting to escape a straitjacket and yet because of the economy we’re more tied than ever to the great economic monsters for survival. Continue reading Interview with Mark Safranko  So many people have asked me about what really happened? Which is funny. What happened is what’s on the page. The point is, what actually happened doesn’t matter because what matters is the boys and what the boys believe happened. What matters is that this group of boys focused their entire lives on someone else rather than on themselves… Continue reading Interview with Hannah Pittard  Two years ago, 3G1B reviewed Jonathan Evison’s All About Lulu, and a year later, he was the proud recipient of the Washington State Book Award. Last year, 3G1B’s DH interviewed Jim Lynch about Border Songs. This year? You guessed it – Washington State Book Award. . . again. I don’t want to start an argument about correlation and causation, but I’m just sayin’. Continue reading Washington State Book Award – Jim Lynch’s Border Songs  My favorite part of the show is watching Don Draper try to navigate through all the moral morass. The self-indulgence and consequent emotional wreckage he creates for himself and the people close to him. I think the compulsion to assert individuality against history, family, work is compelling. My least favorite part is that I know that the writers are pulling all the right levers and presenting us with this very attractive package called Don Draper but that he has a rotted core. Continue reading Interview with Natasha Vargas-Cooper  I don’t write with an outline or any kind of plan; I like the reckless discovery of surprising myself with each plot point. Of course, this leads to lots of wrong turns–maybe why I have to revise so much–but I dig that wanton, blind strategy of building story without any scaffolding around it. Continue reading An Interview with Joshua Mohr | |||
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