Early on in this conversation there's a dead patch. The mic
didn't pick up the glorious seagull call that comes reverberating
down the chimney into the room John Banville and I were sitting
in.
John Banville is an Irish novelist, short-story writer, and
screenwriter who hates his own work. He's won a ton of...
Nov 15, 2023
Here’s how the Carcanet Press website describes him: Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about...
Aug 18, 2023
I was in Ireland recently to interview two of the best novelists
on the face of the planet. John Banville, in Dublin, and David Mitchell, in Cork.
As a cost-cutting measure I decided to ask them both the same
questions:
What do you do?
How do you do it?
Why do you do it? And:
Why does it matter?
I got diametrically...
Aug 12, 2023
Mar 7, 2023
About a month ago I watched a
documentary entitled Capital in the 21st Century. It
was pretty riveting, describing much of what, and how, I've been
thinking over the past few years about the American take-over
of Canada, and the belief that the country "developed" largely
because the very rich were too lazy,...
Feb 19, 2023
Is failure an inherent part of the
writing "enterprise"? Yes, I'd say, this is undoubtedly true. If
seen, however, solely as an "exercise" in itself, does this still
hold true? I'm not quite so sure.
These are the axes along which I tread
during my conversation with Stephen Marche about
his valuable new book On...