Interviews that range from sparklers to Roman candles to skyrockets and beyond.
A co-founder and editor in chief of Bomb, the quarterly devoted to artists and writers, offers a wide-ranging selection of interviews—author on author—that spans the history of the journal.
There are some celebrated names in this unusual and very engaging collection, among them Martin Amis, Francine Prose, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Steven Millhauser, Paula Fox, Tobias Wolff and Charles Simic. But there are many more names probably unfamiliar to casual readers. The format is generally uniform: One writer asks questions; another answers; a colloquy ensues—though the focus remains on the work, usually the recent work, of the interviewee. In some cases, there is the delight in hearing from writers before they became household names. Franzen, for example, talked with Donald Antrim in 2001, the year The Corrections appeared—but before the novel took off, before the Oprah kerfuffle—and they discussed Franzen’s two earlier novels. Sometimes the writers are loquacious (both Rachel Kushner and Hari Kunzru have plenty to say), but this is occasionally due to the format of the exchange. Some are via email; others, edited versions of live conversations. The media affect the messages. We learn about writers’ habits (Kimiko Hahn once wrote a lot in coffee shops; Ben Marcus had to adjust to a new baby in the house; John Edgar Wideman confesses that revision sometimes comes easily). The diction ranges from nearly pretentious to appealingly humble. In the latter category, Justin Taylor and Ben Mirov end their interview with a playful word-association game. But at the center of virtually every exchange are significant discussions of writing and art in general. Lydia Davis learned early from Dick and Jane the rhythms of sentences, and Junot Díaz says, “I don’t write with any regularity or joy. I fear that it might take me another 11 years to write another book.”
Interviews that range from sparklers to Roman candles to skyrockets and beyond.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1616953799
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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