Saunders Interview
The inimitable Roy Kesey interviews the one and only George Saunders, over at Maudnewton.com. It’s too good to be excerpted. You just have to read the whole thing.
The inimitable Roy Kesey interviews the one and only George Saunders, over at Maudnewton.com. It’s too good to be excerpted. You just have to read the whole thing.
The latest issue of Boldtype is now available, and its theme is ‘fortune.’ It’s got reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost.
Michiko Kakutani isn’t quite as taken with Shalimar the Clown as others have been. A few snippets:
The main problem with this novel, however, is its title character, Shalimar – Boonyi’s cuckolded husband and Max’s assassin, who emerges as a thoroughly implausible, cartoonish figure: an ardent lover turned murderous avenger, a clownish performer transformed into a cold-eyed terrorist. Whereas the other characters’ motives are complex and conflicted, Shalimar is depicted in diagrammatic, black-and-white terms. (…) For that matter, when Mr. Rushdie is writing about Shalimar and his doomed marriage to Boonyi, his usually vigorous prose has a way of turning clotted and cliched. He writes: “It turned out that hatred and love were not so very far apart. The levels of intimacy were the same.” And he has Shalimar say things like: “I’ll never forgive you. I’ll have my revenge. I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children too.”
These are the sort of words spoken by mustache-twirling, snake-eyed villains in old cartoons – villains who are a lot less interesting and a lot less dangerous than the ones at large in the real world that Mr. Rushdie strives by indirection to address in this ambitious but ham-handed novel.
Ouch.
Tingle Alley and The Rake share their correspondence about Salvador Plascencia’s new book, The People of Paper. The conversation, they say, will include references to “James Wood’s realism essay in The New Republic, Zadie Smith’s interview of Ian McEwan in The Believer, Lunar Park and anything else that suggests itself.” They’re also giving away copies every day of the week, so get thee over there.
Go to Baghdad, start a newspaper, fail at it, get a book deal.
Link first seen at Bookslut.
Tom Kealy alerts us that his blog is a clearinghouse of information on all things MFA. His latest post is about U.S. News and World Report rankings of graduate creative writing programs.