06-17-10:Seanan McGuire Reads at SF in SF on June 12, 2010
"The Alchemy of Alcohol"
She had a choice. Seanan McGuire offered to read one of two stories; One funny and light, the other dark and depressing. There was no competition when she put it that way. The overwhelming response was that she should read "the funny one." Brave soul. Funny is relative. But McGuire succeeded in every respect when she read "The Alchemy of Alcohol."
Because there are clearly not enough "bar stories" in the SF&F genre, somebody over at DAW decided to commission 'After Hours: Tales from the Ur Bar,' and the rest is now recorded-on-digital-audio history. Seanan McGuire read her contribution to this anthology, "The Alchemy of Alcohol" at SF in SF, and I'm guessing sold a few copies of the book right then and there. McGuire's story starts with a body in the bar, and works the absurd angles of fantasy fiction for some extremely satisfying laughs.
McGuire is up for a Campbell Award this year at the Aussie Worldcon. She's the author of the October Daye novels, which are detective novels with a fae spin to them. Thus far she has 'Rosemary and Rue' and 'A Local Habitation.' Coming up are 'An Artifical Night', 'Late Eclipses' and 'The Brightest Fell.' That takes us into 2011. Hopefully the rest of us will make it there as well!
McGuire is a great reader of her own work. And to my mind, as well as others in the audience, this setup is good enough to warrant a return trip. Alas, the podcast is at least postponed and has at this time been removed at the author's request.
06-16-10:Deborah Grabien Reads at SF in SF on June 12, 2010
'Dark's Tale' and 'London Calling'
Deborah Grabien at read from two very different new books at SF in SF on June 12; 'Dark's Tale' (Egmont / Random House ; March 23, 2010 ; $15.99), a "tweener" book for ages 9-12 and 'London Calling,' the latest J.P. Kinkaid mystery. Truth to tell, I'd have been hard put to say that 'Dark' Tale' was a tweener book. It seemed pretty gritty and grim to me. But perhaps that's just what the kids want — or are.
Grabien comes from a performance world, so there's no doubt that she knows how to read in a manner that makes her words seem immediate and hard hitting. As part of the panel discussion, she spoke quite a bit about what she can and cannot include in a "tweener" book like 'Dark's Tale.'
But I can see why she wrote and how she sold it. It's the perfect book for cat lovers, and based on Grabien's work with the feral cat population in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
Lucyby Laurence Gonzalez, Spies of the Balkansby Alan Furst, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I don't think we could pick more different books than the three that Alan Cheuse and I discussed this week. We start with a page-turning beach read, follow up with a well-crafted historical spy novel, and finish with punk rock experimental literature. There's certainly no danger of either Cheuse and I or readers getting in a rut!
Surprisingly, to me at least, I think Alan was more enamored of 'Lucy' than I was. 'Lucy' is the sort of science fiction novel that looks like and feels like a mainstream thriller. It's a case of be-careful-what-you-pretend-to-be; to my mind science fiction might find it lacking, while more mainstream readers will enjoy the speculative elements.
Both Cheuse and I quite liked 'Spies of the Balkans,' which is a finely-written historical spy novel of the sort that Furst has become the leading exponent of. Set in Greece in the run-up to World War II, we meet Costa Zanna, a cop in Salonika, a port city in Greece, as he becomes embroiled in the coming war and involved with a woman who is quite likely not who she seems to be. Furst gets all the details right, knows how to plot, and writes engaging characters whom we enjoy see coming closer. It leaves the reader wanting more; what more could we ask?
And finally, Jennifer Egan is back with 'A Visit from the Goon Squad,' a brilliant and brilliantly enjoyable novel that manages to use the tropes of experimental fiction in a manner that make the book grippingly intense, funny, and endlessly enjoyable to read. You'll be hearing a lot more about this book here, so stay tuned. In the interim, here's a link to the MP3 file of my conversation with Alan Cheuse about these three books.
06-14-10:A 2009 Interview with Juliet Schor
"...We need to move to much more open, collaborative, sharing knowledge systems."
— Juliet Schor
What she says! Sometimes, I feel like I'm running a sort of subterranean college course with a very nebulous throughline, and as I edited this interview with Juliet Schor, I couldn't help but think that this would be the class I'd have right after the Cory Doctorow interview. These two writers have so much simpatico, and are speaking so much to opposite sides of the same coin that it's almost eerie.
Juliet Schor's book is 'Plenitude,' and it is a fascinating look at how we can effect global change at an individual level with a change of perspective. In a sense, Schor is working the territory of fiction, trying to change our outlook, using the literary device of non-fiction. She's a smart writer, with a lot to say that has never quite been heard in this manner.
Regular readers and listeners probably know that to prepare I generally, though not always, read the book and plaster it full of yellow stickies. There's a reason for this; it makes it a lot easier for me to put together a précis for my interviews. I take that single typed piece of paper with me to interviews and it makes it easy for me to remember what interested me about the book and what I wanted to chat with the author about.
Assuming that I'm not doing two interviews on the same day.
When I spoke with Juliet Schor, I went from that interview to Dan Dion and Paul Provenza. So I printed out both interviews, a map of where I was going, took the paper from my printer and left — only to discover that Schor's interview page had not printed out. Fortunately, I had the book with me as well, and that forest of yellow stickies came in quite handily. I was able to pull my interview outline directly from the book as I spoke with Schor.
'Plenitude' strikes me as something of a game-changing book. It begins with a data-driven, clear-headed vision of the present. Schor musters a lot of numbers that have been out there, but not examined from her fresh and fascinating perspective. As she does, she builds a case for her arguments that change must and can be effected, not via some magical technological fix, but by a groundswell of new understanding. We do not need more wealth. We need to understand the wealth we have now — time and knowledge. Schor believes that we already have the solutions to many of our problems available. You can hear her solutions by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
New to the Agony Column
09-06-10: Commentary : Brendan Connell Tells 'Unpleasant Tales' : Close-up and Too Close-up
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Guy Gavriel Kay : "I'm telling myself you bloody well better figure out where this is going because you have to start heading there sometime around now."
09-03-10: Commentary : The Eternal Youth of 'Madame Bovary' : "To be simple is no small matter."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Bruckner Chase at Blue Ocean Film Festival : "...a breath to your right and look at the moonset over the Pacific, and a breath to your left and see the sun rise over the mountains..."
09-02-10: Commentary : Collecting Philip K. Dick : The Books That Launched A Thousand Films
08-30-10: Commentary : David Doubilet Captures 'Water Time Light' : Painting with Pixels
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview With David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes : "Everything people have always feared about photography comes true underwater."
08-25-10: Commentary : Vendela Vida 'The Lovers' : Reading and Revelation
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Live Reading and Interview with Vendela Vida At Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...there was an owl that came into this place we were renting one day..."
08-24-10: Commentary : Jeff VanderMeer and 'The Third Bear' : Absurd Is as Absurd Does
08-20-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes 'Deadman's Road' : Deader Than Thou
Agony Column Podcast News Report : On the Phone with Vendela Vida : "You do all this background information, most of which never makes it into the book."
08-19-10: Commentary : Gary Shteyngart Tells a 'Super Sad True Love Story' : Retro-Prescience
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Gary Shteyngart Live Reading and Interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...please like me, this will make up for Hebrew school if all of you like me.."
08-18-10: Commentary : Mark Pilkington Unleashes Weapons of Mass Deception : "ECM+CIA=UFO"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett and Barry Eisler for The Agony Column Live at Capitola Book Café, August 7, 2010 Q and A : "This is NewSpeak."
08-16-10: Commentary : Howard Norman Asks 'What is Left the Daughter' : The Past Always Rises
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Howard Norman : "I'd wanted to write from the beginning an epistolary novel; this is just an epistolary novel that's consisting of one letter."
08-12-10: Commentary : James O'Neal Copies 'The Double Human' : Proceeding into the Future
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler and David Corbett Live at Capitola Book Café on August 7, 2010 : "If anyone thinks it's absurd that the government might assassinate the founder of WikiLeaks, it's quite a bit less absurd than I wish it were".... — Barry Eisler
08-11-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes Huck Finn to 'Dread Island' : "Classics Mutilated"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "...they'll pick up that angle and run interference for us..."
08-10-10: Commentary : David Corbett Asks 'Do They Know I'm Running?' : Crossing Borders
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "These Families are making incredible sacrifices..."
08-09-10: Commentary : David Mitchell and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet : The World is Ever the World
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with David Mitchell : "The periodic table of the human heart is still the same now as it was then."
08-06-10: Commentary : Tim Powers Sails 'On Stranger Tides' : History, Fantasy and the Reality of Reading
08-03-10: Commentary : Robert M. Price Spins 'The Tindalos Cycle' : Terrorize, Horrify, Repeat
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Short Chat with Gary Shteyngart : "...the technology is outpacing our ability to absorb what it is doing to us..."
08-02-10: Commentary : A Second Tour Through 'The Passage' : Sending Characters into Time
07-30-10: Commentary : Subterranean Press and Robert R. McCammon Wake at 'The Wolf's Hour' : The Time Before Cheese
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : Allegra Goodman, 'The Cookbook Collector,' Noam Shpancer's 'The Good Psychologist' and Elie Wiesel 'The Sonderberg Case'
07-28-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space 2 : En Route, RJ Frith and Peter F. Hamilton
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010: Q & A : "The people you deal with at the publishers ... if they last the end of the week, you're lucky."
07-27-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space : UK Space Opera Demonstrates Excess is Not Enough (Part one, the Arrived)
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010 : "Well, I thought if I do faeries then nobody's going to say that I've got it wrong."
07-26-10: Commentary : Brian and Wendy Froud Seek 'The Heart of Faerie Oracle' : Cards, Books and a New Perspective
