Interview Roundup: Steve Stern Is the New James Wilcox

• ...at least, that seems to be the gist of Peter Eiddin's recent NYT profile, which describes Stern as "a literary darling looking for dear readers." Harold Bloom and Gordon Lish both lavish praise on the writer--Bloom in particular is gaga for his latest novel, The Angel of Forgetfulness--but so far neither their praise nor that of reviewers across the country has translated into breakout sales. (Note: Of course, the slightest glance at Stern and Wilcox's books will tell you they aren't in the same camp at all; what I was referring to was James B. Stewart's 1994 portrait of Wilcox in the New Yorker.*)

• Speaking of NYT, John Strausburgh interviews Harry Mathews, who was seen by Parisians in the '70s as "the very model of the upper-crust, Ivy League-type the [CIA] often recruited... [so] he must be CIA." Thus the "autobigraphical novel" My Life in CIA, which I think it's safe to say will be the best book of its kind since Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. (I've got a copy, and I'm dying to get into it when I get a chance.)

• Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Ms. Shiono? Japan's Daily Yomiuri interviews Nanami Shiono, a Japanese historian who's written ten volumes about the Roman Empire. One of them, The Fall of Constantinople, is coming out this summer from Vertical...quite a departure from their J-pulp foundations.

• Alicia Erian talks to David Mehegan (Boston Globe) about her debut novel, Towelhead, specifically about the difficulty of writing scenes involving sexual molestation of a teenager who, Mehegan reports, "narrates her experiences in excruciating, fine-grained detail, as a kid would relate them." She's excited about where an excerpt from her next novel has ended up: "I'm a girl and I'm going to be in Penthouse, with my clothes on. I want to play with the big boys, you know? I want to have a manly career, go the route that men go. I don't want it to be that women can't have intensity about sex and have these ideas. It's not just the territory of men."

• MobyLives has clung hard to the furor over Paul Maliszewski and his Bookforum article interpreting Michael Chabon's "Golems I Have Known" as a Holocaust fraud. Earlier this week, Dennis Loy Johnson interviewed Maliszewski, giving him a chance to tell his side of the story...while noting that listening to Chabon's lecture online "firmly establishes that Paul Maliszewski is not misreading anything, and in fact only having the same reaction any listener is likely to have."