Tag: Siri Hustvedt

Virtual Memories Show #129:
Amanda Filipacchi – Donkey Skin

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“I love the notion of great beauty hidden in ugliness. Or vice versa.”

Amanda Filipacchi joins this week’s show to talk about her latest novel, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty: A Novel (WW Norton), her solution to sexism in the publishing world, her misgivings about contributing to a website of authors’ 10 favorite books, her attraction to surrealism and fairy tales, her garden-of-forking-paths approach to fiction, and more! Give it a listen!

“My big life obsession is my lack of productivity and my constant struggle to be more productive. . . . In theory, I have a routine, but I don’t find myself sticking to it.”

Also, I make a pretty amazing bookstore discovery in the airport in Milwaukee, and give (as expected) heady praise to Clive James’ new essay collection, Latest Readings.

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We talk about a bunch of books in this episode. Here’s a list of ’em (Note: if I ever go to a Patreon crowdfunding model for the show, this is the first thing that goes subscriber-only):

• The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty: A Novel – Amanda Filipacchi
• Love Creeps: A Novel – Amanda Filipacchi
• The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Blazing World – Siri Hustvedt
• In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
• Survival In Auschwitz – Primo Levi
• The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
• Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky
• The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
• Emma – Jane Austen
• The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel – Haruki Murakami
• Up in the Air – Walter Kirn
• Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade – Walter Kirn
• Big Brother: A Novel – Lionel Shriver
• We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
• May We Be Forgiven: A Novel – A.M. Homes
• Sparta: A Novel – Roxana Robinson

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:

• Rhonda K. Garelick
• Virginia Postrel
• Yasmina Reza
• Jessa Crispin
• Merrill Markoe

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About our Guest

Amanda Filipacchi is the author of four novels: Nude Men (Viking/Penguin 1993), Vapor (Carroll & Graf, 1999), Love Creeps (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), and The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (W. W. Norton, Feb. 2015). Her fiction has been translated into fourteen languages and been anthologized in The Best American Humor 1994 (Simon & Schuster), Voices Of the X-iled (Doubleday), and The Good Parts: The Best Erotic Writing in Modern Fiction (Berkley Books). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

Born in Paris, France, Amanda Filipacchi was educated in both France and the US, and has lived in New York since the age of seventeen. She earned a BA from Hamilton College and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She lives in Manhattan with Richard Hine, also a novelist.

Credits: This episode’s music is Head in a Box by Lori Carson. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Ms. Filipacchi by Marion Ettlinger.