Archive
Why do you write?
It seems to be the only way I can make sense of things. I am often surprised that everybody doesn’t feel like this. It is such a profound thrill to work with fiction and to see the patterns emerge, to feel the rhythm of the story as it develops.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
There’s a thing that happens – I am asleep, but I seem to be awake watching a full colour dramatisation on a kind of screen. If I shut my eyes the scene disappears, but when I open them, it resumes and does not stop.
... (read more)Views of the Hudson: A New York Book of Psalms by Angela Gardner
My heart sank when I heard that John Hillcoat was to direct a film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006), one of the more terminally grim performances in recent modern fiction. It is the story of a little boy who roams the post-nuclear devastated earth in the company of his father, while the world draws to an end amid murder, rape, cannibalism, and abysses of corruption – an inferno of a world, one of the war of all against all.
... (read more)Robert Helpmann: A rare sense of the theatre by Kathrine Sorley Walker
Brian Castro's Fiction: The seductive play of language by Bernadette Brennan
Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne
Cultural Seeds: Essays on the work of Nick Cave edited by Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell
How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, hoaxes, graffiti & political mischief-making by Iain McIntyre
Holden Caulfield is a garrulous bore. Seymour Glass is a phoney. Franny and Zooey are spoiled brats. And J.D. Salinger is a media tart. All these things are partly true. To take the last first: there is surely a ring of truth about Imre Salusinzsky’s recent spoof obituary in which Jay Leno and David Letterman are quoted expressing their sadness at the loss of a favourite regular guest who was always ready to front up and sparkle as he promoted an endless succession of Catcher in the Rye merchandise. Salinger, who died on January 27, aged ninety-one, may not have done such things, but at least one of his alter egos might.
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