Interview Roundup: Formal Gloves? Before Labor Day?

That's Lionel Shriver on the left, accepting her Orange Prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is now officially recognized as the best novel written by a woman and published in England last year. The Guardian reports on the surrounding hubbub, but Three Monkeys scored an interview recently, where the expatriated author discussed writing about American school shootings from halfway around the world: "One of the ironies of leaving a country behind is that it follows you; if anything, ex-pats are more actively engaged with their country of origin than the people who stay home. After all, US residents are much less aware of being 'American' than Yanks who live abroad, where you’re unremittingly 'American' to other people." (Thanks to Mark Sarvas for pointing me to these items...)

Blogger Marlow (Untouched by Work or Duty) Riley chats with Jonathan Coe about his musical influences, while Gothamist spoke to Carrie McLaren, the editor of the Brooklyn zine Stay Free--which has its own blog. And Kevin Holtsberry of Collected Miscellany starts up a conversation with Michelle Herman.

Catching up with the literary magazine AGNI, I spotted an interview with onetime Beatrice guest Thomas Sayers Ellis, who describes his poetry as "American, African-American, American-African, Black, genuine Negro, Afro Colored and Not for Sale, Sold or Souled Out." He adds, "My style is derived from a gathering of aesthetics, a purely democratic approach to form, to what can be contained, let a brother loose, Free TSE, and to creating my own containers. Intention, then, is tricky so I prefer surrender--there’s a weightlessness there that gives the body over to water, absolute form and formlessness, stress less, what both Bruce Lee and Fela Kuti spoke of." Hard not to like a guy who can namecheck Bruce and Fela back-to-back!