ThreeGuys1Book has 1737 followers | By Jonathan Evison   JE: Independent publicist Lauren Cerand, who we’ve mentioned before here at Three Guys for her ability to help generate and foster the ineffable buzz, is one of the coolest people I’ve met in the business. When LC is trumpeting a project, I listen. I follow her tweets. I like her style, her approach, and her enthusiasm for her work. And she’s got a great smile to boot, which is imperative in the world of publicity! This weekend, Lauren let me throw some questions at her for the benefit of the writers among us. Listen. Learn it. Live it. Lauren, can you give
Continue reading Picking Lauren Cerand’s Brain By Jason Chambers   Nick Laird is a wonderful writer. I reviewed this great book a while back…go here for the review. I’m pleased to present this interview.
Jason Rice: Before you wrote your first book, Utterly Monkey, you were well known for your poetry. What was the jump like from writing in that form to a large canvas like a novel? Nick Laird: Well, the first two books only came out a few months apart in Britain and Ireland, but yes, the poetry came first. They’re very different beasts. The baggage restrictions are different, and I can’t really write them close together, in the same Continue reading Nick Laird Interview, Glover's Mistake By Jason Chambers   Ron Carlson’s The Signal is on-sale on June 1st. I had a chance to talk to Ron about the book. RC is awesome:
Dennis Haritou: Ron, you have written a novel without a roof. Your characters are almost always outdoors. Why make that creative choice? Ron Carlson: I never ever thought of it that way – no roof! And I didn’t think of it when I was writing as an artistic choice. I worked to keep the story simple and each scene led me to the next – even if the next was in the past – and most of Continue reading The Ron Carlson Interview By Dennis Haritou  When my own parents were divorced it came as a total shock to me because I never saw them angry, or sad, or anything less than (what I thought was) content. For a long time afterward, because I wanted to understand better, I devoted a lot of energy into creating my own versions of how their marriage failed. Because how? How did this nice pretty marriage between two nice loving people fall apart? If they couldn’t endure, who possibly could? Continue reading Kyle Beachy Interview Part 2 By Dennis Haritou  I think the ineffable “something” of baseball has do with the balance between isolation and teamwork, and the division of labor. Stand roughly here in the grass or dirt and be ready because the ball might come to you. Chew what you like. Spit. When the ball comes, run after it and throw it to the right place. And now step to the plate and take your cuts. Reach base and run fast and score the run, celebrate, and take the field all over again to protect that run. Offense and defense. Hit, run, catch, throw — everyone (the designated hitter is an insult to the game). Baseball is physical poetry amidst an ongoing war between numbers and intangibles, the novelistic pace of a 162-game season dense with intertwined narratives, rookies and veterans, middle-relief specialists and franchise superstars, all playing beneath the strategic aegis of the old, grizzled manager who, god bless him, is wearing the same uniform. Continue reading Kyle Beachy Interview Part 1 By Dennis Haritou  His social trajectory seems to go relentlessly downhill until we come to the Theater of Oklahoma, or Oklahama, as Kafka tellingly mis-spells it. Opinions about the degree of pessimism versus optimism in this enigmatic theater chapter have long been divided. Before working on the translation, I was inclined to side with those who believe that the Theater is a bogus and possibly sinister outfit. However, as I honed my version of this chapter, which I regard as one of the literary high-points of the book, and as I read it out loud to a group of writers and artists at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire, I thought I could sense through the mixture of promising and skeptical nuances that until he laid down his pen Kafka kept on toying with the possibility of a farcical happy end. Continue reading Blogging Amerika: Mark Harman Interview Part 2 By Dennis Haritou  Amerika consists of an early set of finished chapters, only the first of which Kafka revised, followed by a grouping of glittering fragments that conclude the work. At least they glitter thanks to Professor Harman’s pen which provides a restoring clarity to the work’s overall structure…revealing it with great distinctness for what it is and not trying to parse over the holes and gashes that remained when Kafka left off the text. Continue reading Blogging Amerika: Mark Harman Interview Part 1 By Jason Rice  Without getting too grand – but I will – the novel’s really about greed and ambition, particularly about the awful cost when a culture allows the primacy of ambition over talent. That conceit kind of goes back to Euripides and it seemed to me like it might have a little more mileage left in it beyond whatever format people choose to consume music in. As for the future of the music industry – I wouldn’t be giving the last rights just yet. The old business model is finished and everyone’s scrambling around to try and find a new one. But they will. Or maybe not. Maybe the music industry will be one of the features of late period capitalism that the world finds it can get along without… Continue reading John Niven Interview By Jason Rice The Amnesiac is the most autobiographical novel I’ve written – or will ever write. It was a novel I had to write, and I have very mixed feelings about it now. In terms of the basic idea that James had forgotten three years of his life… that has an autobiographical seed. I too suffered a kind of amnesia when I was a student – there are six months of my life (aged 18) of which I can recall almost nothing. And yet I don’t think I realised this till I was in my late twenties. Or if I did realise it before, I forgot it – consciously or unconsciously. Continue reading Sam Taylor Interview Part 2. By 3G1B  Receiving praise is nice, in the same way that being slagged off is not nice. I was ultra-sensitive to both when I started out, but I’ve gradually come to adopt Keating’s attitude to the ‘twin impostors’ and I tend to regard both fairly coolly and distantly now. However, I have to say that the reception for The Amnesiac in the States – particularly among the lit-blog community – was something I enjoyed and took heart from. That book had not done especially well in Britain, certainly less well than my first novel, and I was beginning to despair of anyone really ‘getting it’, so it was heartening to read people describing it in more or less the terms I’d thought of it when I was writing it. Continue reading Sam Taylor Interview Part 1. By Jason Rice  The problem was making readers believe it. To say the least, it’s an unusual situation, particularly since I didn’t want to use religiosity or fraud as a Pietro’s motivation for becoming a doctor. (These seemed too easy and familiar, for me if not for the character.) Also, I needed the back story to be not only plausible but also capable of generating sympathy for a character who has been a cold-blooded killer. So I clearly had to do some explaining. Continue reading Interview with Josh Bazell By Dennis Haritou As for Pharaonic civilization I will not talk of the conquests and the building of empires. This has become a worn out pride the mention of which modern conscience, thank God, feels uneasy about. Nor will I talk about how it was guided for the first time to the existence of God and its ushering in the dawn of human conscience. This is a long history and there is not one of you who is not acquainted with the prophet-king Akhenaton. I will not even speak of this civilization’s achievements in art and literature, and its renowned miracles: the Pyramids and the Sphinx and Karnak. For he who has not had the chance to see these monuments has read about them and pondered over their forms. Continue reading An Interview with the Mummy of Naguib Mahfouz By Dennis Haritou  I think it’s great when other people see themes that you didn’t necessarily intend when you set out to write a story. When some of your characters are from other countries, themes of migration come through; though I think my stories are less about migration itself, and more about life in a post-migration world. What I mean is, they aren’t immigrants in the traditional sense, in that they’ve arrived in a new county to start a new life. Continue reading Sana Krasikov Interview By Dennis Haritou  I’d like to say I was disturbed by the material, but the truth, as far as I remember, is my overriding emotion while writing God is Dead was amusement. Which obviously says more about me than about the content of the book. My sense of humor tends toward both the dark and the absurd–two great tastes that, in my opinion, taste great together. I will say, though, that a lot of the themes in God is Dead were inspired by what I perceive in the world around me, much of which I find increasingly disturbing, upsetting, and infuriating. As most thoughtful people do. So in a way, turning these real-life horrors on their ear and laughing at them can be curative. Continue reading Ron Currie Jr. Interview By Dennis Haritou  While I’m very cognizant and familiar with the process of a willful protagonist wresting control of a narrative (this happened to me with an earlier unpublished coming-of-age novel I wrote (among my five other unpublished novels) when I was in my 20s. Believe it or not, I really had somewhat of a handle on Will from the start, though Will didn’t have a handle on himself from the start, and I guess that was sort of the point. Continue reading Jonathan Evison Interview | |
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