By: Stephen Jarvis,
on 6/22/2015
1. Self-Portrait. My new novel, Death and Mr. Pickwick, tells the story of the origins of Charles Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Its main character is Dickens's tragic illustrator Robert Seymour, who shot himself while working on the pictures for Pickwick. Something of Seymour's troubled state of mind is surely conveyed in this self-portrait, [...]
By: Tom Rachman,
on 6/2/2014
Naming a novel is painstaking, agonizing, delicate. But does the title matter? It certainly feels consequential to the author. After several years' battle with your laptop keyboard, after 100,000 words placed so deliberately, you must distill everything into a phrase brief enough to run down the spine of a book. Should it be descriptive? Perhaps [...]
By: Anthony McCarten,
on 10/11/2013
My endless interrogation of myself continues... What keeps you awake at night? Everything that can wait until tomorrow. When were you happiest? When I realized that a congenial monotony is the best anyone can hope for. I'm not sure how old I was or what I was doing — perhaps I was 13 and hiking [...]
By: Richard Kadrey,
on 9/20/2012
I just tore my office apart. I bought a new filing cabinet and three new sets of bookshelves. In the past I've been a book hoarder, keeping every single research book I ever used, as well as novels I hadn't read in 10 years and probably wouldn't reread for another 10. So I'm trying an [...]
By: Jill Owens,
on 9/17/2012
J. Robert Lennon's first book, The Light of Falling Stars, got a glowing review from the New Yorker: "Lennon's impressive first novel — psychologically nuanced, richly detailed, unexpectedly comic — offers us an unsentimental examination of the ways in which we find and lose those we love, both before and after death." His novels and [...]
