B o o k l y f e :: Stretch Edition
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Appropriate.
Jeff Vandermeer, friend to all, shares the journey of his book Finch, from inception to interior layout. I think Jeff is remarkable; he’s prolific AND he spends a lot of time on the internet.
I really look forward to this: The Interview Project, from David Lynch.
A profile of the man who created the much-emulated cliché ‘Hollywood Agent Type’, Irving Lazar.
An interview with William Gass. This one’s so full of good. An excerpt:
As for youthfulness: I value experimentation. In that area I am one of the youngest writers now writing. I smile when I see all these old young people still treating a sentence as if it had been a child of Dick and Jane. A sermon of Donne’s often has more ideas, more energy, certainly more art, than these writer’s entire books. And the meters of Sir Thomas Browne are confounding and should astonish everyone. Age is not a function of time but of mind, the old old old saying goes. Try a novel by the great Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo. He’ll measure how young you are, not the New Yorker. I recently had to do a retrospective piece. It was a horrible experience. Don’t look back; complete immobility may be gaining on you.
More stuff after the jump.
BookLyfe, or Compendium #1
Millions crushed underneath.
Hello everyone. Pappy Blake Butler has allowed me to talk out loud a bit, and for that I am grateful. I hope to not bug the hell out of everyone here at HTMLG.
I’ve gleaned a lot of booktalk from the internet in the past week or so, and I’ll present it here, all at once. To start: Over at the Vroman’s Bookstore blog, Patrick Brown discusses the National Book Critics Circle’s recommended reading list. Patrick says:
…their recommended list leaves a bit to be desired. It’s not that the books on the list aren’t good — they are — it’s that they’re, well, a little obvious. My friend Cory, blogger at Skylight Books in LA, pointed out that Philip Roth made the list. Looking at the fiction list, I feel a little like Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity, “Philip Roth? Not obvious. No, not obvious at all. Come on, NBCC, couldn’t you make it easier? What about Hemingway? How about William Shakespeare? Why not recommend Hamlet?” I don’t mean to hammer on Philip Roth, who I love, but come on. Does he really need the readers?