Podcast: The Slippery Animal
Podcast: Sex, Crime, and Other Arbitrary Genre Labels
Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 27 –
Sex, Crime, and Other Arbitrary Genre Labels
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“The emotions are what interest me in writing erotica, rather than the hydraulics. . . . Essex House showed me that you could write erotica without pandering to the lowest common denominator”
Maxim Jakubowski has had an amazing multi-decade, multi-genre career as a writer, editor, translator and publisher. During Book Expo America in New York, we sat down to talk about how he feels about being The King of the Erotic Thriller, the silliness of genre labels, the perils of having a bad book habit (but not a “bad-book habit”), the story of publishing the first The Mammoth Book of Erotica
“As a publisher, you have to accept that it’s a business. And genre was always accepted as solid, an area where you don’t lose money: crime, fantasy, science fiction, horror, thrillers.”
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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:
- Michael Dirda
- Phillip Lopate
- David Rothenberg/Clive Bennett
- Theodora Goss/Valya Lupescu/Nancy Hightower
- Jesse Sheidlower
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About our Guest
Maxim Jakubowski worked for many years in book publishing as an editor (including titles by William Golding, Peter Ackroyd, Oliver Stone, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ustinov, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Paul Ableman, Sophie Grigson, Marc Behm, and Cornell Woolrich) and launched the Murder One Bookshop, which he owned and ran for over 20 years. He now writes, edits and translates full-time in London. He was born in London and educated in France, and his books have been translated into many languages. From an early age, he was always fascinated by popular culture and his writing and editing has criss-crossed all areas, from science fiction & fantasy to thrillers and, inevitably, erotica.
He conceived one of the genre’s first major contemporary anthologies, The Mammoth Book of Erotica
Credits: This episode’s music is Song for Bob by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The conversation was recorded in Mr. Jakubowski’s hotel room in Manhattan on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
Podcast: Wine, Women, and Novel-Writing
Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 23 – Wine, Women, and Novel-Writing
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“Restaurants follow the opposite direction of stories: they’re like finding a book of blank pages and trying to come up with something to fill the space. That’s not how it goes with stories.”
Charles Blackstone, managing editor of Bookslut, joins us to talk about his new novel, Vintage Attraction, out this week from Pegasus Books! We recorded in Chicago last April, so he wasn’t in full book-publicity mode, and I hadn’t read the book. Instead, our conversation veers all over the place, covering his descent into post-grad career madness, the problems with getting mired in literary theory, what he does at Bookslut, how he deals with the sheer volume of books published every day, Chicago’s restaurant culture, the similarities between deconstruction and molecular gastronomy, and how to master the party-throwing art of taking a guest’s coat while handing them a beverage.
But we really do talk about Vintage Attraction (which has great blurbs from Jay McInerney and Gary Shteyngart)! I promise!
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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Charles Blackstone is the managing editor of Bookslut, as well as the co-editor of the literary anthology The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together
Credits: This episode’s music is Graceless by The National. The conversation was recorded at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago on a pair of AT2020 cardioid condenser mics
Books ahead
On Friday evening, Amy was over at a neighbor’s, so I spent some time downstairs in the library, looking at my books and pulling ones that I hope to read in the year ahead. I’m going to list them here so I can check back in December and see how far I deviated from plan. Also, so I can look like a smartypants:
- The Sun Also Rises
– Hemingway (re-read)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
– Hemingway
- Tender is the Night
– Fitzgerald (re-read)
- Money
– Martin Amis
- Under the Frog
– Tibor Fischer
- Chronicles, vol. 1
– Bob Dylan (re-read)
- The Learners
– Chip Kidd
- The Aeneid
– Virgil (tr. Fitzgerald)
- The Metamorphoses
– Ovid (tr. Mandelbaum)
- The Dictionary of the Khazars
– Milorad Pavic
- Life
– Keith Richards
- Cultural Amnesia
– Clive James (I’ve been winding my way through this for quite some time, and hope to finish it this year)
- Brideshead Revisited
– Evelyn Waugh
- Stories
– Anton Chekhov (tr. Pevear & Volokhonsky)
That’s only 14 books, so I’ve left myself plenty of wiggle room. I don’t think I’ll start a major reading project this year, like tackling Caro’s biography of LBJ or re-reading Proust. I’ve been thinking about re-reading Middlemarch
Unrequired Reading: December 3, 2010
It’s our Hanukkah edition of Unrequired Reading! Lots of Jewish posts for you to check out!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: December 3, 2010”
Il Miglior Gatsby
You’re probably too polite to admit that your tired of all these Rufus posts, but what can I do?
I know! I can post links to this four-part essay by Susan Bell on how Max Perkins & F. Scott Fitzgerald edited The Great Gatsby: one, two, three and four! Enjoy!
And I promise that tomorrow’s Unrequired Reading collection will be Rufus-free!