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Posts From Author: knopf

Seriously Questioning…Duncan Hannah

Duncan Hannah is is an artist who became popular in the 1970’s in New York’s avant-garde and glam and punk rock scenes, acted in a number of underground movies, and showed several of his figurative portraits in 1980’s infamous Times Square Show. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Art Institute. His new book is Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies. Duncan is speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show on March 20th, themed A Matter of Time, alongside David Enrich, Stefan Merrill Block, and Joselin Linder. We spoke to Duncan ahead of the show… Describe your current project: I edited my journals from the 1970’s, which Knopf is releasing as “20th Century Boy” What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? Probably either Curious George or Harold and the Purple Crayon. What is your favorite line from your current work? The last line of the book, “Look for what you love.” What is your favorite first line of a novel? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities What advice would you give to aspiring writers? Be a vacation reader! What writer do […]

Love in the Time of Genocide

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014; 320pp …how did “a sleepy country of poets and dreamers,” and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to having their souls raped — and raped by a eunuch (Grofaz: the virgin Priapus, the teetotal Dionysus, the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex)? Where did it come from, the need for such a methodical, such a pedantic, and such a literal exploration of the bestial? These are the questions that orbit the singularity at the center of twentieth-century history. In his second Holocaust novel, The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis sketches a few possible answers while acknowledging — in a thoughtful afterword — that we nevertheless “know almost nothing about the why.” In Time’s Arrow (1991), his first foray into this particular zone of interest, the Holocaust is glimpsed obliquely — like the Medusa reflected in Perseus’s shield — through the lens of Amis’s formal fireworks. The action happens in reverse: people spring to life and are packed on trains that take them away from concentration camps; relationships begin with rows and end […]

Re Martin Amis

Martin Amis was doubled on Saturday night at the New School. He was appearing as part of the tenth annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, established by his great friend Salman Rushdie, who had a front-row seat for the occasion. Stage left was the real Amis, head cocked and battle-ready; opposite him sat interviewer and critic John Freeman; and between them was actor Anatol Yusef, who spoke only the historical Amis’s words, taken from interviews conducted since the 1970s in Interview magazine. The concept was simple but rather brilliant: Freeman would interview Amis-past and -present interactively, with Amis-present annotating, approving or contradicting his earlier selves. It was fascinating to watch. Starting with The Rachel Papers (1973), Amis’s writing was inevitably compared with that of his father, Kingsley, whose most famous books include comic classic Lucky Jim and The Old Devils, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize. “I still think it delegitimises me in a weird way, having a writer-father,” said Amis-present, who’s written thirteen novels, several collections of short fiction and a wealth of criticism and social commentary. “I’m like Prince Charles, who talks with this sort of ex cathedra authority based on absolutely nothing at all. With me, everyone slightly suspects I got […]

Maggie Shipstead’s “Seating Arrangements”

A wedding was always an aphrodisiac, full of temporary pairings driven by vicarious hope. Love was in the air, weak and snappy as static electricity. – Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf, 2012) Maggie Shipstead‘s debut novel, Seating Arrangements (Knopf, 2012), is a witty social comedy with an exploding whale at its heart. Set largely over the course of two days preceding a wedding on New England island Waskeke, it assumes the perspectives of a series of characters, mostly control-freak father-of-the-bride Winn Van Meter and jilted younger daughter Livia, as it reveals the emotions that coalesce around the lives of the uptight well-to-do as they come together and fall apart. It’s funny and sharp and unpleasant and relentlessly well observed. Winn is a vigorous fifty-nine, a man for whom “each day was a platform for accomplishment”. Heavily governed by social mores — he thinks somewhat reproachfully of his daughter Daphne as “a pregnant bride, no point in pretending otherwise” — he spends most of the book obsessing over his prospective entry into a posh golf club called the Pequod. (Appropriately, perhaps, his quarry is somewhat elusive.) He’s a patriarch of the old school, imagining and favouring male offspring: “His son would join the […]

Plundered Hearts: The Poetry of J.D. McClatchy

Honouring J.D. McClatchy in 1991, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters stated, “It may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation.” Since then, his reputation has grown as exponentially as his output. A poet, essayist, librettist — and Professor of English at Yale — McClatchy is certainly one of the hardest-working poets in America. Knopf has kindly published a new collection of his work, Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems, providing readers with a perfect introduction to his world. One of the new poems, “Prelude, Delay, and Epitaph”, is as good a way in as any: A finger is cut from a rubber glove And cinched as a tourniquet around my toe. The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed. The shots supposed to have pricked and burned The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice. The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish Gray, the color of flesh on a slab, the size Of a fetus floating on the toilet’s Styx, But lumpen, the blunt hull of a tug slowly Nosing the huge, clumsy vessel into port. McClatchy continues; this is just the “prelude”. But there is much even in this […]