Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Lauren Groff on Fates and Furies / ‘I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage’

Lauren Groff: ‘I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage
by presenting wildly divergent perspectives.’ Photograph: Leah Nash

Lauren Groff on Fates and Furies: ‘I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage’

The author on the years of scribbling ideas on her walls that eventually became this novel

Saturday 10 September 2021

began Fates and Furies during the long, hot Florida summer of 2008. I was in a strange liminal space between the spring publication of my first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, and the birth of my first son at the end of August. My study at the time had been carved out of our rickety, uninsulated, un-airconditioned garage, and writing out there in 37-degree heat while enormously pregnant was excruciating physical work.

Endre Penovác
CATS

Jonathan Safran Foer / "You have to waste a lot to have a little"

Jonathan Safran Foer
Photo by Emily Berl

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: “YOU HAVE TO WASTE A LOT TO HAVE A LITTLE”

by UWE-JENS SCHUMANN

SHORT PROFILE

Name: Jonathan Safran Foer
DOB: 21 February 1977
Place of birth: Washington, DC, United States
Occupation: Author

Mr. Foer, is it true that you used to ask your favorite authors to send you one empty page from their new manuscripts?

That was more than 10 years ago, I haven’t done it for quite a long time. I still have those pages, though, on my wall in my house but I just haven’t actually asked for a new one for quite a long time. I don’t think I’ve done it since I became a writer myself. Actually, it’s interesting because since I did that collection, a lot of those authors that sent me pages have died. Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, David Foster Wallace… Quite a few have passed away.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘I don’t have writer’s block, but am a chronic sufferer of “Jonathan block”’

This article is more than 7 years old

The author on canal boats, libraries and why he writes with a blanket on his lap

Jonathan Safran Foer

Saturday 29 August 2016

To mark the imminent end of summer, my boys and I recently went on a journey down the Erie Canal. Before being handed the key to our 12-ton narrowboat, the Oneida, we were given a shockingly brief and casual orientation. Much that was assumed obvious – “Obviously you tie your line around the cord in the lock, but don’t tie up, otherwise you’ll capsize” – was not only unobvious to us, but incomprehensible. When explaining the process of docking, the marina worker asked if we “knew knots”. Speaking on behalf of my kids, one of whom has Velcro shoes, while the other walks around with two snakes of laces trailing each foot, I told him we didn’t. He said, “Well, you know the saying.” I told him we didn’t even know that. He said, “If you don’t know knots, tie lots.”

Interview

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘There isn't a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot’

This article is more than 6 years old

The bestselling author, 40, on avoiding Twitter, the anxieties of parenthood and the memory of a childhood accident that’s shaped his life

Jonathan Safran Foer

NOVEMBER 10, 2016

BY ROSEMARY GORING

11 November, 2016

Following the election as US president of Donald J. Trump readers dumbfounded by the result may be interested in this interview with leading American novelist, Jonathan Safran Foer, which was conducted in August by Rosemary Goring during this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. It was first published in the Herald.

Jonathan Safran Foer in Brooklyn. Photograph: BEBETO MATTHEWS

Once upon a life: Jonathan Safran Foer

When he was just nine years old an explosion in the science lab at summer camp seriously injured him and almost killed his best friend. Jonathan Safran Foer returns to that terrible day in 1985 to examine the scars the blast left – and explain why the wounds are more than skin deep

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday March 7 2010

Jonathan Safran Foer
Sunday 28 February 2010

This article incorrectly reported a Nasa statement on the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Nasa eventually released transcripts of the voice recordings and there was no mention of an astronaut saying: "Please, hold my hand."

Trump’s hush-money trial: prosecutors’ key arguments in criminal case

Starting Monday, Trump becomes the first ex-US president to face a criminal jury, over alleged payments to an adult film star

Victoria Bekiempis in New York

Monday 15 April 2024

On Monday, 15 April 2024, Donald Trump will go on trial in Manhattan, making him the first former US president to face a criminal jury. More than 500 prospective jurors have been summoned to Manhattan supreme court in preparation for a selection process that could span days.

Bukowski by Zach Mendoza

QUOTES

by Charles Bukowski

Sunday kill more kill more people than bombs.

***

Find what you love and let it kill you.

***

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

***

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

***

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

***

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

***

Without literature, life is hell.

***

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

***

I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.

***

Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

***

Don’t fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice.

***

Love breaks my bones and I laugh.

***

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.

***

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

***

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

“I’ve Lived Very Freely” / Getting to know Mavis Gallant

A STILL FROM PARIS STORIES: THE WRITING OF MAVIS GALLANT.

IN MEMORIAM

“I’ve Lived Very Freely”

Getting to know Mavis Gallant

By Livia Manera Sambuy
March 14, 2014

The first of a few unforgettable times I saw Mavis Gallant was in 2004 in Paris. She was eighty-two and had agreed to meet me for an interview at the Café Dome in the Boulevard Montparnasse, around the corner from the apartment where she had been living for decades. When I arrived at the old fashion “terrasse” of the Dome, framed by heavy red curtains, I found Gallant already sitting at the small table where we were to order our tea. I later discovered she must have arrived early on purpose so that I wouldn’t see her walk in—her spine was bent by osteoporosis, and the condition was most evident when she was walking. She was small and smartly dressed in a purple sweater and a checkered skirt, her hair dark red, her eyes lively with multiple shades of green. The first thing she said was: “Don’t ask me how I write. I wrote an introduction to this volume to avoid discussing such nonsense.” The volume was an Italian edition of her work that included some of her most memorable short stories, such as “The Moslem Wife” and “The Remission.”

Andrew Myers

Interview | Andrew Myers

Andrew Myers is an artist you hardly can find in the twenty-first century. In a time where nearly everything has been done and where artists’ only way of innovating oftentimes seems to be the use of modern technology or evermore shocking themes, Myers has created a style that never has been seen before. By using screws as his canvas he not only produces paintings but much more amazing 3D artworks. Though mostly known by it, Andrew Myers is more than the „screw-artist“ as he uses all kinds of mediums to express himself through art. Ηaving recently exhibited in the prestigious Art Basel in Miami, Andrew Myers talks to The Forest.

Interview by Andy Sturm

Describe yourself in three words.
Intense, critical, hopeful.

Though your art, especially your screw-art, is highly popular and very well known, it’s hard to find information about you. Could you tell us something about your upbringing?
Yes, I moved to Spain when I was six months old and lived there as a missionary kid until I was 16. I then moved to the US and ended up in California.

Stunning Images

by Caras Ionut

The world through the eyes of Photoshop: Artist creates twisted version of reality where children swing from the clouds and animals do the impossible, an elephant balances perilously on a tiny cartwheel and a young girl dangles her legs from a swing thousands of feet in the air. These surreal images may make you want to look twice as the everyday is blended with the unusual using Photoshop.

New artworks set to brighten up prison visiting halls

Friday 5th April 2024

In an exciting new project, Quentin has produced a series of 5 illustrations about family relationships, for display in prison visiting halls across England and Wales.

The rooms, where children meet their incarcerated parents, were perceived by HM Prisons service workers as stressful and unwelcoming for young visitors. Appoximately 200,000 children in England and Wales have a parent currently in custody.

PAUL HARDING: TINKERS

John Self

July 15, 2010

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of those awards that I follow but don’t often take heed of. For most of the Pulitzer winners I’ve read (such as Updike’s last two Rabbits, Eugenides’ Middlesex, Ford’s Independence Day), they’re books I would have read anyway. Those examples make me forever think that the Pulitzer is an award favouring big books, so this year’s winner is a double surprise: not just a debut novel, but a 185-page debut. (It won against Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, one of the best books I’ve read this year, so expectations were high.) I bought the US edition, but it was picked up in an expensive bidding round by Heinemann in the UK, and has just been published here.

Difficult task … Neil Griffiths

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

As a God Might Be by Neil Griffiths review – midlife crisis or the voice of God?

A man turns his life upside down in an ambitious, generous novel about the limits of faith and love

Lara Feigel
Saturday 25 November 2017

n an insistently rational, middle-class world, how do you respond if God appears unexpectedly in your life? Proctor McCullough is a successful professional, albeit in an unusual field – an “atrociologist”, he advises the government on probable mass behaviour amid disaster. He is unusually happy with his partner, Holly, and is a devoted father to their six-year-old twins. He has never been interested in religion before, preferring to channel his spirituality into the appreciation of art: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wallace Stevens, Mark Rothko, JS Bach. But suddenly he experiences an unmistakable call to ready himself for God. “He was being presented with a rent in the world’s fabric and needed to make himself available for a gift that might be passed through.”

Inhabiting another reality … Kate Bush performing in 1986.

Inhabiting another reality … Kate Bush in 1986.

My hero: Kate Bush by Jeanette Winterson

Kate Bush gave my 19-year-old self a strategy for both life and art – that's why I'll be there next week to watch her again

Idrove from Oxford in my hand-painted yellow Morris 1000 van to see Kate Bush at the Hammersmith Apollo in 1979. I was 19. It was my first visit to London and my first live event, not counting a lifetime of Gospel Tents. But this was salvation of a different kind.

Wednesday, April 17, 2024