interviews January 01, 2010

Bookforum talks with John Irving

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. “The ending just eluded me,” he said when he spoke to me by phone from his Vermont home.

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 Ontario—are Dominic Baciagalupo,

culture Dec/Jan 2010

Guns, Plot, and Vonnegut

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 Ontario—are Dominic Baciagalupo,

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

Eminent Edwardians

The prolific A. S. Byatt has been publishing novels since the mid-’60s (her first, The Shadow of the Sun, came out in 1964), but it wasn’t until 1990, when she won the Booker Prize for Possession—the story of a pair of contemporary scholars whose research on two Victorian poets reveals an extramarital affair between them—that she became an international (literary) household name. But Dame Byatt, who was awarded the DBE ten years ago (and the CBE nine years earlier), credits not the Booker Prize but the Web with her considerably raised profile: “Everything I say or write is now perpetuated and

interviews September 01, 2009

Bookforum talks with A.S. Byatt

The prolific A. S. Byatt has been publishing novels since the mid-'60s (her first, The Shadow of the Sun, came out in 1964), but it wasn't until 1990, when she won the Booker Prize for Possession—the story of a pair of contemporary scholars whose research on two Victorian poets reveals an extramarital affair between them—that she became an international (literary) household name.

The prolific A. S. Byatt has been publishing novels since the mid-'60s (her first, The Shadow of the Sun, came out in 1964), but it wasn't until 1990, when she won the Booker Prize for Possession—the story of a pair of contemporary scholars whose research on two Victorian poets reveals an extramarital affair between them—that she became an international (literary) household name. But Dame Byatt, who was awarded the DBE ten years ago (and the CBE nine years earlier), credits not the Booker Prize but the Web with her considerably raised profile: "Everything I say or write is now perpetuated and

culture June/July/Aug 2009

Toxic Assets and English Syntax

Aleksandar Hemon does not write for, in his words, “therapeutic reasons.” But as the virtuosic author told me over a southern-fried lunch in Chicago one cold, damp March afternoon, writing has unexpectedly helped him fuse his two lives: At twenty-eight, in the spring of 1992, he became stranded in Chicago during a month-long journalism program, when his home, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, fell under siege and was ravaged by civil war. In just a few years, Hemon was publishing stories written in English, which he perfected by reading Nabokov and canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace. Hemon,

culture Apr/May 2009

Genres, Ganges, and the Grand Canal

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night served as a muse for Geoff Dyer’s last work of fiction, Paris, Trance (1998), but the author admits that Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the inspiration for his latest effort, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Pantheon, $24), never held much meaning for him. “It’s one of those books that’s part of the mythic template,” the award-winning essayist and consummate enthusiast, who has written on such wide-ranging subjects as photography, D. H. Lawrence, and World War I, explained to me on the phone while he was snowbound in London one February morning. Dyer

culture Feb/Mar 2009

Faces and Forgiveness

Mary Gaitskill defies definition. In fact, during our conversations about her extraordinary story collection Don’t Cry (Pantheon, $24)—her fifth book, following her multi-award-nominated 2005 novel, Veronica—she told me so. Gaitskill’s candor is just one of the virtues I find beguiling about her and her fiction. How else but with honesty and an unflinching eye could she portray the often-disturbing interior and exterior lives of the people who appear in her pages, like the grief-stricken Texas nurse haunted by a dream of two men locked in murderous battle following a game of pickup basketball,

culture Dec/Jan 2009

The Unknowability of Others

David Rhodes was still a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971 when Atlantic–Little, Brown editor Joseph Kanon bought his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, a fantastical, dark tale of two Iowa cities, launching a prolific literary career. Two more novels appeared in quick succession: The Easter House (1974), which earned Rhodes comparisons to Sherwood Anderson, and Rock Island Line (1975), which John Gardner cited as an exemplar of the form in On Becoming a Novelist. In 1972, the writer settled into a quiet life in a century-old farmhouse in the southern Wisconsin town of

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

Writing Sex and Gallows Humor

Irish writer Anne Enright has won literary awards for nearly every book she’s published since her debut in 1991, the short-story collection The Portable Virgin (which earned her the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature). But for over a decade, the onetime television producer, who studied creative writing with Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, lurked under readers’ radars. She prolifically published fiction that sometimes veers into the fantastic realm of her mentors—The Wig My Father Wore (2001), for example, features the angel of a man who killed himself many years earlier. Then, last year,

culture June/July/Aug 2008

Jesuits and Jesse James

Ron Hansen is an outlaw among outlaws—and not just because his first two novels, Desperadoes (1979), about the Dalton Gang, and the pen/Faulkner-nominated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), reimagined the Wild West. As a practicing Jesuit (he serves as deacon in his San Jose congregation) who embraces his faith, he is a lone rider in a largely secular literary world, integrating themes of morality, grace, suffering, redemption, and resurrection into his work while respecting the fiction writer’s oath of withholding judgment. In fact, not until the best-selling

culture Feb/Mar 2008

The Bronx—much thonks

"I am frightened of everything except for writing,” Jerome Charyn admits during our afternoon kaffeeklatsch in his West Village apartment in December. He’s just returned from a semester in Paris, where he spends half the year teaching film theory at the American University. At seventy, his elegant one-bedroom is furnished with piles of books, which makes sense for an award-winning, prolific author of fiction and nonfiction, as well as of film scripts and plays. But Charyn, born and raised in working-class neighborhoods in the Bronx during the ’40s, owned only a stack of comic books and a single

culture Dec/Jan 2008

Memory, Witness, and War

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie never expected to reach a US audience with her second novel, the 2007 Orange Prize–winning Half of a Yellow Sun (just released in paperback by Anchor). The novel depicts the lives of a thirteen-year-old houseboy who serves and is educated by a revolutionary university professor; the professor’s girlfriend, a sociology instructor from an elite family; and an aspiring Biafran—an Igbo-speaking Englishman—during the Biafran War (in which the Igbo people, who reside in southeastern Nigeria, attempted to secede). She wondered, “Why would Americans be interested

culture Spring 2001