Conversations – Page 4 – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Books, Conversations, Featured, Interviews

Family Misfortunes and the Past’s Patterns: An Interview With Gabi Gleichmann

November 4, 2013 No Comments

“I think writers should kill someone and go to jail. Then they will have a real experience to write about,” jokes author Gabi Gleichmann over a glass of champagne. Gleichmann recently visited New York from Oslo, where he lives with his wife and sons. We shared a cheese plate, bottle of wine and Gleicmann chatted with me about his debut novel The Elixir of Immortality (Other Press). Focusing on a historical Jewish family full of shame and silence, the Spinozas, […]

Books, Conversations, Featured

The Impossible, The Parallel, The Intimate: A Conversation with Eugene Lim

October 23, 2013 No Comments

Eugene Lim’s novels tread the line between the hypnotically familiar and the surreptitiously terrifying. His latest novel, The Strangers, follows multiple sets of twins through landscapes alternately recognizable and surreal. Underground film scenes, stand-up comedy, shipborne communities, and totalitarian states all appear, and yet the entire work remains even-tempered and cohesive. As the publisher of Ellipsis Press, Lim has ushered books from the likes of Norman Lock and Eugene Marten into the world. As an admirer of both The Strangers and his earlier […]

Books, Conversations, Featured, Interviews, music

Stories from Spy Rock: An Interview With Larry Livermore

July 17, 2013 No Comments

If you’ve been paying attention to punk rock over the past few decades, chances are good that you’re familiar with Larry Livermore. He founded Lookout! Records, and his columns for Punk Planet took a satirical approach to challenging pretty much every punk orthodoxy you could think of. Earlier this year, Don Giovanni released Spy Rock Memories, Livermore’s account of his years living in a cabin in the California mountains, making music with The Lookouts, and starting the record label that would introduce thousands […]

Books, Conversations, Featured, Interviews

“That Mine Mine Mine Way”: An Interview With Lindsay Hunter

July 8, 2013 No Comments

When Lindsay Hunter’s first book, Daddy’s, came out, I found myself directing numerous readers to her story “Kid.” Foul-mouthed, alive with prose, and occasionally hilarious, it followed a teenage boy’s adventures on a trip to a local convenience store, growing progressively more surreal (and boundary-pushing) as it progressed towards its climax. Hunter’s command of language, setting, and character continue with her new collection, DON’T KISS ME. Here, the characters are often delusional: in “Our Man,” a hapless detective badly investigating a murder; […]

Books, Conversations, Featured, Interviews

Casual Deities and Upturned History: Talking “Tin God” With Terese Svoboda

June 26, 2013 No Comments

Terese Svoboda’s writing rarely goes where you’d expect. Her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent exposes a family secret and reveals ambiguous wartime horrors; the novel Pirate Talk or Mermalade seems to be a straightforward seafaring yarn (albeit one told entirely in dialogue), but gradually becomes more surreal, the relationships at its center shifting and evolving. Her newly reissued novel Tin God juxtaposes two narratives: a grimly comic crime story set in the prairie and an account of a conquistador centuries earlier. Bringing […]

Books, Conversations, Featured

Summer Camp Lit and Video Game Books: An Interview With “Fun Camp” Author and Boss Fight Books Publisher Gabe Durham

June 13, 2013 No Comments

It’s been a big June for Gabe Durham. His new book. Fun Camp, was released by Publishing Genius, after original publisher Mud Luscious Press called it a day. In its kaleidoscopic, collage-centric view of a week in the life of a summer camp, Durham achieves moments both terrifying and hilarious. This on its own would merit all sorts of accolades, but evidently Durham’s fond of staying busy; this month has also seen his announcement of the creation of Boss Fight […]

Books, Conversations, Featured, Interviews

The Same Vines Twice: An Interview with Donald Breckenridge, Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail

June 6, 2013 1 Comment

Donald Breckenridge has served as the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail since 2001. In addition he is the author of several novels, including You Are Here, 6/2/95, This Young Girl Passing, and Rockaway Wherein. His latest invention is the second volume of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology. This second helping of the Rail‘s fiction section is that rare collection that is joyfully archival: a work which genuinely spans the globe. It is a dusty-fingered, crypt-cracking dossier of stories that conjure laughter, […]

Between Books, Books, Conversations, Featured

Where Public Enemy, H.P. Lovecraft, and Sid Vicious Converge: A Between Books Interview With Gabriel Blackwell

May 28, 2013 No Comments

It started with a cover: a familiar detective-novel image slowly bleeding into the abstract. This was my first encounter with the work of Portland’s Gabriel Blackwell: picking up a copy of his Shadow Man after hearing good things about some then-recent readings he’d given in NYC. Subtitled “A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer,” Blackwell’s book creates a narrative out of the spaces in which noir‘s chroniclers and its characters overlap: a dense, thrilling work with hints of abused power and still-buried secrets. His […]