Books
Martin Amis
In a corner of Martin Amis’s living room in London, watched over by elegantly sombre paintings, stands a bright-orange pinball machine called Eye of the Tiger. “It’s a really good one,” says the renowned novelist. “I’m getting worse and worse at it. All that flow of youth is gone.”
John Banville and The Infinities
“I say the most outrageous things in interviews,” declares John Banville. Like Hermes, the Greek god who narrates his new novel, The Infinities, the celebrated Irish author has quite a mischievous streak.
Neil Smith
It’s always heart-warming to read about writers who toil to achieve their dream for years, persevere despite rejections, and subsist on scraps and minuscule fees, before finally breaking through to a wider public. Then there’s Neil Smith, who is achieving literary stardom through decidedly unorthodox means.
J.G. Ballard
Literary trends and cults come and go, but for 50 years now, James Graham Ballard has been one of the coolest authors on the planet. The artists he has influenced show the wide reach of his bizarre, provocative and unsettling work. They include fellow transgressive authors like Martin Amis and Will Self, as well as disparate directors David Cronenberg (who adapted Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash) and Steven Spielberg (who filmed the author’s 1987 book Empire of the Sun). Perhaps most fascinating, however, has been Ballard’s influence on modern music.
Colson Whitehead
Scoffing at the Band-Aid Solutions
When young rock stars start writing songs about the drudgery of life on the road, their music almost always suffers. So when a leading young novelist who’s been on a few reading tours starts to write about drinking in hotel bars, should readers be wary? Thankfully, Colson Whitehead has a [...]
John Banville
When John Banville won the Booker Prize last month for The Sea, the occasion brought out the worst in his critics. In and of itself, the novel should hardly be controversial — it’s a 65,000-word meditation on aging and mortality, beautifully narrated by a man who reflects on his childhood and the recent death of his wife. But in a year when luminaries like Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and Zadie Smith also published novels, an underrated and unfashionable Irish writer was bound to encounter invective.
Craig Davidson
When critics and reviewers try to define our country’s literary and cultural identity, there are a few adjectives that never spring up. To wit: “shocking,” “lurid,” “bizarre,” “sensational,” and “visceral.” While Craig Davidson’s fiction tends to be set in places such as St. Catharines or Welland, Ontario, all of these adjectives can be favourably applied to his work. Like a gleeful bull in the china shop of staid and worthy Can Lit, Davidson is defining his own literary identity by shattering conventions.
Neil Gaiman
The world is strewn with self-pitying accounts of the dreadful slogs of rock bands on tour, but when Neil Gaiman gave up performing music at an early age, he didn’t envision that the life of a travelling author could be even less enviable. Signing books till 1 a.m., leaving the hotel at 6 for the next city, giving media interviews in the morning, and reading and signing sometimes twice per day, with nary a day off …
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