12-30-09: Wrapping up 2009 With Jeremy Lassen : Time's Ten Best
Well, I understand why Jeremy Lassen is happy. Congratulations are in order; Paolo Bacigalupi's 'The Windup Girl' was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Time Magazine. And that's only part of what we talked about for the final Agony Column podcast of this year.
This was the year that saw some great speculative fiction; China Miéville's 'The City and the City,' Warren Fahy's 'Fragment,' as well as the explosion of some genre tropes. But then, who thought that vampires, having pretty much blown up every year since 'Interview With the Vampire' debuted, would continue to do so this year. And this was the year of some low-key heavy hitters; Caitlin Kiernan and Catherynne Valente. To hear our conversation about the end of the year and the end of the world, just follow this link to the MP3 audio file.
Thomas Frank
12-29-09: The Chat Before Christmas With Thomas Frank, December 24, 2009
"I mean, they had their chance, you know?"
—Thomas Frank
If there's one thing that's clear as we lurch towards a new year, it's that everyone is quite happy to be shut of the last ten years. From the Y2K panic to twin tragedies of 9/11 and the Iraq war, from housing bubble to the ugly crash, we are all simply so done. We're eager to draw the line and hope to quickly step over it, bringing nothing from the past that we may have to scrape off our shoes. We are all simply so done.
Let's all join Thomas Frank, then as he hoists a glass to "A Low, Dishonest Decade." While Frank is best known for 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' and 'The Wrecking Crew', this time around we got back to a book he wrote in "the before time," 'One Market Under God,' an excoriation of "Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy." After all, this little tome from Y2K sought to pop the bubble a mere eight years before it was large enough to take down, uh ... the world.
Of course, it wasn't just the sort-of, almost new Depression that rained on our parades. (Unless, like me, you’d invested heavily in BarrelWear once you saw things start to circle the Big Swirly.) There was also the tiny, almost insignificant matter, or pretty much our entire government being up for sale, and unhappily, not even to the highest bidder. It was the sort of decade in which even a man like Jack Abramoff, a guy who wears a black hat in case we didn't get who the bad guys were, starts to seen a little like a tragic figure. Sure, your sympathy might last all of ten seconds, and it is clearly tens second more than deserved, but at least had the decency to get caught and fess up. Everyone on the other side of his deals, with too few exceptions, is still in the business of selling the United States government to business; now they're in business and not in the government, and they're still toxic waste. We've managed to throw away the keys before they got locked up. I suppose it's just a matter of getting things in the right order. Listeners who want to hear to New World Order subjected to some Old World Wit need but follow this link to the MP3 audio file of our conversation.
Jeffrey Ford
12-28-09: A 2009 Interview with Jeffrey Ford at the World Fantasy Convention
"If you want to write, and you want to write a lot, you've got to have a lot of tricks in your bag."
— Jeffrey Ford
Few writers are able to live up to that quote, but Jeffrey Ford is most assuredly at the top of his own list. He does indeed have a lot of tricks in his bag, and it is obvious when you look at the variety of novels he's written. And he was perfectly at home at the World Fantasy Convention, where I managed to get a few minutes of his valuable time. With the pace he keeps, I suspect he could have written a story in that time.
But then, Jeffrey Ford's own story is pretty much speculative fiction itself. What I found really, really interesting, as a reader, in this interview, were Ford's descriptions of how he tortured grammar itself to create a surreal world, or a world that was as bizarre as the world we are living in. Since every day seems to offer up more evidence that reality is cognizant of the rules of reality than either fiction, speculative fiction, or fantasy, it seems that more writers will need to pick up Ford's tricks and tropes. Strap yourself in, if this century is going to be stranger than Ford's fiction, we're going to have some ... interesting times ahead.
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
