David Sedaris, Nam Le, Daniel Silva, and Other Author Interviews: Five New Books for July

David Sedaris

When Your Are Engulfed in Flames

Last March, The New Republic called bullshit on humorist David Sedaris, accusing him of exaggerating his autobiographical stories. Oh well. Sedaris' new book, When Your Are Engulfed in Flames,is as improbably hilarious as his others, and it doesn't look like he's about to apologize on Oprah anytime soon. Sedaris spoke with Mother Jones from his house in London.

Mother Jones: So, do you exaggerate?

David Sedaris: Boy, do I. And if it weren't for The New Yorker fact-checkers, I'd do it more. I've always been up front about that. I think that was what was weird to me about it, was this idea that I had somehow been caught. I had written [in The New Yorker] that my spiders got so obese that their legs started chafing. I talked to the spider expert at the natural history museum, and he said that spiders' legs never rub together. I said, "No, I know they wouldn't. I'm just saying it as a joke." I don't know how easy [The New Republic] thinks it is to make shit up. To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don't see how that's big news.

MJ: Your book includes a story about your experience wearing a Stadium Pal, a hidden device for men who don't want to use public bathrooms. How many times did you use it?

DS: I just wore it two times. I thought, "Okay, I'm going to wear it for a solid week." Taking it off hurt so much that there would be no way that you could torture your skin like that, there would be no way that you could put it on and take it off every day for a week. There'd be nothing left down there. One of the days, I wore it doing a reading in a bookstore. So my calf got bigger and bigger and bigger, and my brother kept kicking me. His whole mission was to break that bag so that I would have lots of urine on myself.

MJ: When did you feel like you were a writer? Did you have an "aha!" moment where you said, "I'm a writer"? Read the rest of David Sedaris' interview here.

Sandy McCutcheon

The Hill of Mice

The View from Fez is arguably the most popular English-language blog in Morocco, and one which is oft-quoted on Global Voices. Since its inception in 2005, the blog has had over 400,000 visitors from all over the world; they come to learn about Fez, be entertained, and live vicariously through the blog's authors, one of whom is Sandy McCutcheon.

McCutcheon is the author of 11 novels and has just completed “The Hill of Mice” - a novel set in the Fez Medina. He is the founder of The View from Fez and its primary author. McCutcheon is also a gracious host as I learned last year when he invited me to visit the riad for one of his many parties. I recently had the chance to interview him.

When did you first visit Morocco? What drew you to Fez?

I first came to Morocco seven years ago and fell in love with the country in general and Fez in particular.

Fez attracted me because of the vibrancy of the people and the extraordinary history that surrounds you on every corner. Yet my view was that here was an exceptional city in transition - the traditional lifestyle hand in hand with technological progress. The arrival of the internet in the Medina, the great mobile phone coverage and the uptake of new design and building techniques alongside the traditional all indicated a city that was very much on the move. Read more of Sandy McCutcheon's interview here....

Nam Le

The Boat

Nam Le was recently in town to read from and sign The Boat,a wildly diverse and intense collection of short stories that did not immediately strike us a short stories and which prompted an interesting dialogue. While we make a point in our author interviews to ask questions that would be of interest to our readers, we found that in this case, we were compelled to ask some pointed questions about our own reading experience as we started this collection thinking it was a novel. Over weeks of email and a meeting at The Dresden last week, we sorted it all out. And lest you think we are the only ones who are crazy enough to cry foul about the elusive "stories" title on the book cover, take a look at Antoine Wilson's review ofThe Boatthat appeared on Sunday in the LA Times.

There is much discussion in the publishing world about how difficult it is to get a collection of short stories published. Even more difficult, so the gossip goes, is publishing an unlinked collection of short stories – a collection without common characters from one story to the next, without an obvious place or overt theme tying each story together. How, then, did you come to write (and find a publisher for) a collection of short stories so wildly different from one another? Well, first off, thanks a lot for pointing out the fact that the collection’s all over the shop! Really. Second, I can tell you that I never imagined, as I was writing these stories, that they would end up in a collection – for pretty much exactly the reasons you mention. I was writing these stories just as I started seriously reading short stories, and in part the diversity in this book is attributable to my having become simultaneously smitten with so many stories of all shapes and narratives stripes. I wanted each of my stories to work completely on its own terms, to answer solely to its own aspirations.

As for how they came to be published – a couple of years ago I holed myself up for seven cold months on the top floor of a barn in Provincetown to work on a novel, but found myself compulsively returning to and rejigging these stories. Finally I set the novel aside, knuckled down on the stories, collated them and sent them to my agent to hold in escrow. (He too was waiting for my novel.) I told him not to let me touch the stories again. He read them, then told me he thought they were ready. At that point I realized how conventional wisdom in publishing works – it doesn’t, really. Read the rest of Nam Le's interview here....

Daniel Silva

Moscow Rules

Daniel Silva began his career as a freelance journalist covering the 1984 Democratic National Convention for United Press International. That stint led to a full-time job with UPI, and Silva eventually became a Middle East correspondent in Cairo and the Persian Gulf - the perfect background for writing thrillers as realistic as they are riveting.

Silva's 1997 debut, The Unlikely Spy, became a best-seller. And while he's never looked back, it was his fourth thriller that cemented his reputation. With The Kill Artist, he introduced his elegiac and enduring character, the master restorer of classic paintings and part-time assassin for the Israeli government, Gabriel Allon. Readers have eagerly anticipated each successive Allon adventure.

In his gripping new novel, Moscow Rules,a powerful Russian Arms dealer is secretly selling missiles to Middle Eastern terrorists and killing anyone who might leak that fact. It leads Allon to Moscow and a short, but brutal, stint in the notorious Lubyanka prison.

Silva spoke with the Rocky from his home in New York about what led him to feature the new Russia in his latest tale.

Being an author is such a solitary pursuit. Is it tough talking about your books?
Ah, that's a great question. You know it's something you do in private for months and months locked in the room and you have to give birth to this thing and then all of a sudden you have to talk about it. I always thought I would have been more comfortable in the old days, sort of the guy who hands in his manuscript and is left alone up in his cabin.

I think we can cross a line sometimes by talking about work. Sometimes it's best to let it speak for itself. Sometimes if we talk about it too much some of the mystery might get lost and it might detract from that special place that we take a reader. Read more of Daniel Silva interview here....

Toby Barlow

Sharp Teeth

In his debut novel, Sharp Teeth,Toby Barlow introduces us to a Los Angeles filled with werewolves who don't need a full moon to go from human to lycanthrope. They're everyday people, leading normal lives right under our noses, but that they can switch to animal form at will, and even become pets for lonely housewives when the heat is on. These werewolves are pack animals. Alone they are vulnerable, together they are strong, and they are bent on fighting other packs to take over the City of Angels.

There's more to Sharp Teeththan fantasy and horror. There's the love story of a dogcatcher who ends up in a relationship with a woman who is more than she appears. There's homage to Bukowski and Chandler as well as poets of millennia past. And to completely tweak us out, Barlow's written his five-part tale entirely in free verse. Reading the first 10 pages is a bit jarring, but once the rhythm kicks in, Sharp Teethis hard to put down. It's completely engaging on every level, with sympathetic characters and a driving plot that grabs you by the throat like a pit bull and doesn't let go until page 308.

Barlow has broken the rules of conventional novel writing, gaining a readership that continues to grow by word of mouth. Sharp Teethis a future cult classic that will continue to be discovered by readers hungry for sex, violence, and a fantasy world wrapped up in a literary work. Its sudden success has caught Barlow, whose day job is as a creative director of an ad agency, somewhat by surprise. A decade ago, when he was going through a rough patch, a psychic offered an unsolicited look into his future and told him to wait until he was 42 years old. On the day of his 42nd birthday, he kicked off his book tour and the LA Weekly gave Sharp Teetha stellar review. Nick Hornby has also praised the book, saying, "Sharp Teeth will end up being clasped to the collective bosom of the young, dark, and fucked-up." Barlow spoke to Mother Jones from Minneapolis. Read more of Toby Barlow interview here....

Other Author Interviews for Summer Book Reading can be found here.