06-19-09: Agony Column Exclusive — (Around) Three Books With Alan Cheuse 'Every Man Dies Alone'
by Hans Fallada
'The Sleepwalkers'
by Hermann Broch
Recently, we here at The Agony Column have taken to calling Friday Cheuseday, because, well, that's the day we dedicate our podcast to an ever-widening discussion of books and literature with Alan Cheuse. This week, we're going back in time and traveling to Germany, to look at society as an illness.
From "The Disintegration of Values" in Europe in general and Germany in particular, from 1888 through 1918, found in Broch's intense trilogy to the slim volume written in 24 days in 1947 by Ernst Fallada, about dissident Germans in Nazi Germany, today Alan Cheuse and I will talk about how the many affect the few and the few the many. It's always tempting to look at today in terms of "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," or to see America as an analogue of the post-sunset British Empire. But it's never quite so simple on a personal level. You can hear my conversation with Alan Cheuse about these two harrowing titles by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
06-18-09: Agony Column Podcast News Report — Jeff VanderMeer at Shared Worlds : Speculative Fiction Camp for Teens
"They kind of, without meaning too, learn stuff." So says Jeff VanderMeer, the Assistant director of Shared Worlds, a summer camp where kids learn to create speculative fiction in a variety of formats. This is clearly an idea whose time has come, and I suspect that this could take off like wildfire, or even the swine flu. With more beneficent results of course.
Jeff VanderMeer seems to do just about everything, and now he's working at Shared Worlds, a summer camp where teens (13-18) can spend two weeks creating new worlds then exploring them in prose, art or gaming. This really seems like a brilliant business strategy, because, frankly, I suspect that lots of the kids snapping up the Harry Potter and Eclipse novels would be very interested in spending a couple of weeks leasnring how to create such a beast. Add in the armies of adolescents (this in actual age, not maturity) who play video games based on speculative fiction, and you have enough purchasing power to buy the entire United States, while we're on sale, of course, at bargain prices. The curriculum is such that kids will find themselves enjoying the basics — reading, writing, history, economics, biology, ecology — as they are employed to create new worlds in the first week. In the second week, they explore those world in their chosen arena. You can hear the lowdown direct from aJeff himself by following this link to the audio podcast.
06-17-09: Agony Column Broadcast Radio Show, March 1, 2009: Deborah Grabien, Michael Boatman and Janis Bell
Into the breach once again, with a podcast version of my broadcast show from March 1, 2009; this time featuring some interviews from SF in SF and an edit of my interview with the Grammar Queen, Janis Bell.
We're back in the re-broadcast business for a moment, this time going back to my radio show from March 1st of this year. One of the fun parts of putting these shows together is slicing dicing and matching voices; so today you get to hear two working writers and a writer who will teach you how to write better. All you have to do is follow the link to this MP3 audio file.
06-16-09: A 2009 Interview with Jedediah Berry, Part 2: "It is those characters who are shown to have a real power to change things"
In the second part of my conversation with Jedediah Berry, we talk about nemeses — how they provide a convenient means for self-definition and of the evils ast the heart of his novel, to be found in the Travels-No-More Circus.
Berry has quite bit more up his sleeve than the complicated and cleverly-built world in which you'll find the fictional non-fiction work, 'The Manual of Detection.' It's tempting to think, given the hermetic and almost obsessive construction of the novel, that it might be the first of seventeen already completed works. But as the second part of the interview will reveal, well — I'll let the Talented Mr. Berry speak for himself.
06-15-09: A 2009 Interview with Jedediah Berry, Part 1: "It also has an interest that goes beyond solving mysteries"
Jedediah Berry studied his way into the world of noir. You can almost imagine him as the hero of his own novel, Charles Unwin, with a pile of Chandler and Hammet on this desk as the rain spatters on the windowsill through an open window. By the power of the new ISDN line at KUSP, and with the technical expertise of the fabulous staff at WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts, I managed to get him on the line to read from and talk about his novel 'The Manual of Detection'. As you might expect, the creation of this novel is nearly as interesting as the novel itself, and just as complex. Thus, I'm splitting the interview in the interests of allowing readers to fully immerse in Berry's compelling story. You can hear the first part of our conversation by following this link to the podcast audio file.
New to the Agony Column
09-01-10: Commentary : Tim Pratt Finds 'Sympathy for the Devil' : "...Hell for the company..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Dan Basta at the Blue Ocean Film Festival : "Experiential learning is the way we learn best."
08-31-10: Commentary : Peter S. Beagle Reveals 'The Secret History of Fantasy' : : Telling Lies for a Living
08-30-10: Commentary : David Doubilet Captures 'Water Time Light' : Painting with Pixels
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview With David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes : "Everything people have always feared about photography comes true underwater."
08-25-10: Commentary : Vendela Vida 'The Lovers' : Reading and Revelation
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Live Reading and Interview with Vendela Vida At Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...there was an owl that came into this place we were renting one day..."
08-24-10: Commentary : Jeff VanderMeer and 'The Third Bear' : Absurd Is as Absurd Does
08-20-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes 'Deadman's Road' : Deader Than Thou
Agony Column Podcast News Report : On the Phone with Vendela Vida : "You do all this background information, most of which never makes it into the book."
08-19-10: Commentary : Gary Shteyngart Tells a 'Super Sad True Love Story' : Retro-Prescience
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Gary Shteyngart Live Reading and Interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...please like me, this will make up for Hebrew school if all of you like me.."
08-18-10: Commentary : Mark Pilkington Unleashes Weapons of Mass Deception : "ECM+CIA=UFO"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett and Barry Eisler for The Agony Column Live at Capitola Book Café, August 7, 2010 Q and A : "This is NewSpeak."
08-16-10: Commentary : Howard Norman Asks 'What is Left the Daughter' : The Past Always Rises
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Howard Norman : "I'd wanted to write from the beginning an epistolary novel; this is just an epistolary novel that's consisting of one letter."
08-12-10: Commentary : James O'Neal Copies 'The Double Human' : Proceeding into the Future
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler and David Corbett Live at Capitola Book Café on August 7, 2010 : "If anyone thinks it's absurd that the government might assassinate the founder of WikiLeaks, it's quite a bit less absurd than I wish it were".... — Barry Eisler
08-11-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes Huck Finn to 'Dread Island' : "Classics Mutilated"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "...they'll pick up that angle and run interference for us..."
08-10-10: Commentary : David Corbett Asks 'Do They Know I'm Running?' : Crossing Borders
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "These Families are making incredible sacrifices..."
08-09-10: Commentary : David Mitchell and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet : The World is Ever the World
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with David Mitchell : "The periodic table of the human heart is still the same now as it was then."
08-06-10: Commentary : Tim Powers Sails 'On Stranger Tides' : History, Fantasy and the Reality of Reading
08-03-10: Commentary : Robert M. Price Spins 'The Tindalos Cycle' : Terrorize, Horrify, Repeat
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Short Chat with Gary Shteyngart : "...the technology is outpacing our ability to absorb what it is doing to us..."
08-02-10: Commentary : A Second Tour Through 'The Passage' : Sending Characters into Time
07-30-10: Commentary : Subterranean Press and Robert R. McCammon Wake at 'The Wolf's Hour' : The Time Before Cheese
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : Allegra Goodman, 'The Cookbook Collector,' Noam Shpancer's 'The Good Psychologist' and Elie Wiesel 'The Sonderberg Case'
07-28-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space 2 : En Route, RJ Frith and Peter F. Hamilton
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010: Q & A : "The people you deal with at the publishers ... if they last the end of the week, you're lucky."
07-27-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space : UK Space Opera Demonstrates Excess is Not Enough (Part one, the Arrived)
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010 : "Well, I thought if I do faeries then nobody's going to say that I've got it wrong."
07-26-10: Commentary : Brian and Wendy Froud Seek 'The Heart of Faerie Oracle' : Cards, Books and a New Perspective
