Category: Author Interviews
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Beckett Without Beckett
Here’s another double-take. Earlier this week, at Splice, I reviewed Sam Thompson’s new novel, Jott, which depicts a lightly fictionalised version of Samuel Beckett and even includes fragments of pastiche representing the fictionalised Beckett’s outpourings: [But] Jott… is really a novel whose various elements — the characters and their situations, as well as styles of thought and […]
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Only Language
Marc Nash’s Three Dreams in the Key of G is a difficult, demanding novel of absolutely virtuosic language. After David Hebblethwaite reviewed the novel for Splice, I put some questions to Nash about his creative ambitions and his process: Let’s kick off with something notable about the title: the assonance, four rounds of “/e/”. This […]
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Flash!
This week, on Splice, I published a double-take, so to speak, on the flash fiction of Helen McClory. First up, I reviewed McClory’s two collections of short short stories, On the Edges of Vision and Mayhem & Death: It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a short story by Helen McClory so distinctive, but without fail you’ll […]
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Obsession and Repetition
At Splice, I’ve got a brief Q&A with the poet Katharine Kilalea, whose début novel OK, Mr Field is published this month by Faber: You’ve written a novel that has all the basic ingredients for tension, suspense, mystery — a plot to be complicated and resolved — but the tone, and the things you focus on […]
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Zambra’s Intimacy
Following on from Jason DeYoung’s review of Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read, published this week on Splice, I spoke to Zambra’s translator, Megan McDowell, about Zambra’s profile as a critic: In your introduction [to Not to Read], you also say that by the time Alejandro Zambra “stopped contributing criticism to the Chilean press”, circa 2009, he had […]
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Two Q&As
Following on from Anna MacDonald’s review of Southerly by Jorge Consiglio, published earlier this month at Splice, I spoke to Consiglio’s translator, Cherilyn Elston, about the pleasures and challenges of bringing his work into English: What challenges did you face as a translator in retaining this quality of the stories, rendering so much of their power […]
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Treasures in the Digital Aether
I’m not interested in reading books that tell me what I already know. I don’t want to read a novel that makes me ‘care about’ a fictional character; I want to read a novel that teaches me a new way to think or a new way to read, or else intentionally frustrates my desires for […]
Daniel Davis Wood
Infinite Patience 