This Will Keep You Busy for a While

The Loggernaut reading series website features six interviews, including a conversation with Daniel Alarcón, whose short story “City of Clowns” includes “one of the most compelling instances in recent literature of a man performing cunnilingus on a woman who is wearing stilts,” at least according to his interviewer.

“In Lima I briefly dated a girl who owned a pair of stilts. I can’t really say much more about it, except to add that I write fiction and have an active imagination.”

The conversations with folks like David Means and Paula Fox are a bit less salacious, by comparison. But just as lengthy–heck, this crew is going to pose a serious West Coast challenge to Robert Birnbaum if they keep at it. Speaking of which, the interviewer so prolific he has to spread his work out on two different web sites chimed in last week with the transcript of a long talk with James Howard Kunstler.

30 August 2005 | interviews |

That’s Me in the Spotlight…

Next month, I’ll be appearing at Fall for the Book and James River Writers to speak about bookblogging on panels with Happy Booker, Reb Livingston, and Caroline Kettlewell. The Richmond Times-Dispatch generates a little advance buzz for the James River Writers festival by emailing me some questions, including one that allowed me to muse about the impact of blogs on newspaper book reviewing:

“Before blogs, if you hated your local paper’s book section, you might write the editor a letter, where your complaint was probably seen by one person, maybe two, and then disposed of. Now, the complaints—and the praise—are out there for the entire world to see. Every book review editor can, if they want to, find out what readers think not just of their performance, but that of every other major review department. How seriously they take that, though, remains to be seen.”

29 August 2005 | events |