Do you like Gary Shteyngart? Who doesn’t? He’s hilarious. Devastatingly handsome. Almost always impeccably dressed. And he’s BFFs with James Franco. OK, sure, he’s also a pessimist, but a lovable one, as you’ll find out if you read the interview I did with him for The Rumpus: This generation is fucked. We can’t keep up with [...]
Listen to Faulkner lecture on writing, & read from “The Town.”
I interviewed Jennifer Egan for the great literary online magazine The Rumpus. You can read it in full here, but here’s a teaser: Look at a book like Tristram Shandy, which is so crazily experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such a desire not to just say: this happened and then this [...]
Njabulo Ndebele. J. M. Coetzee Zoe Wicomb Ceridwen Dovey Niq Mhlongo Nadine Gordimer Lisa Fugard K. Sello Duiker Deon Meyer Zakes Mda Phaswane Mpe Rozena Maart
One of my earliest sports-related memories, apart from being forcibly drowned by the summer camp bus driver/swim coach, was going to a Blackhawks game at the old Chicago Stadium, pre-MJ. I was maybe six, too lanky to play, didn’t know how to skate anyway. Plus I was already permanently embarrassed due to a bad stutter, [...]
A short short story I wrote, called “Her Hair,” was recently published by the great fiction Web site Monkeybicycle.
Once-waterboarded Christopher Hitchens writes in his memoir Hitch-22 of meeting Ian McEwan (through–who else?–Martin Amis). According to Hitch, McEwan “seemed at first to possess some of the same vaguely unsettling qualities as his tales. He never raised his voice, surveyed the world in a very level and almost affectless fashion through moon-shaped granny glasses [!!!], [...]
It might be my own childhood stammer–which, since these things never fully go away, creeps into my mid-adulthood–but I’ve always believed there is a deeply ingrained connection between writing and stammering. Not every stammerer grows up to become a writer, but certainly there has to be a link between the agonizing isolation of the stutterer [...]
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has been on a spending spree for years, purchasing the papers of literary titans like James Agee, Norman Mailer, and Don DeLillo (among innumerable others). Now, they’ve added David Foster Wallace’s sprawling scribblings to their collection, much of it available online. Highlights include a [...]
© 2009-2010 Alec Michod. All Rights Reserved.