Litquake: San Francisco's Literary Festival 2012

5-13 October 2012

Litquake is San Francisco's nine-day literary festival for booklovers, complete with cutting-edge panel discussions, unique cross-media events, and hundreds of readings. Litquake's Lit Cast is our selection of the best-of in writerly conversations and readings from throughout the year, many of them recorded at the "Epicenter", a monthly Litquake series which embraces a theater of ideas between writers and readers.

Litquake co-founders, Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl, act as hosts of Lit Cast and banter freely about the history of famous venues in San Francisco or tell personal anecdotes from their experiences with writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and so forth. Adam Johnson, Peter Carey, Geoff Dyer, Carolyn Burke, and Alice LaPlante are all currently featured in conversation with other artists or reading from current works. Irvine Welsh, Steve Erickson, Nathan Larson, Joshua Cohen and others to come soon. Many events from this year’s festival, 5-13 October, will also be live-streamed or recorded and published later. [Read More]

Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald

A 2011 article from The New Yorker

W. G. Sebald

Mark O'Connell (New Yorker) on why you should be reading W. G. Sebald (link via David Pearce): 'It is probably too early to predict the extent of the influence Sebald’s hybrid books will exert on the shape of the novel, but it isn’t an exaggeration to say that he erased and redrew the boundaries of narrative fiction as radically as anyone since Borges. British writers like Will Self and, in particular, Geoff Dyer, have been inspired by Sebald’s figurative and literal rambling. Dyer’s work—part essay, part travelogue, part fiction—sometimes reads like a less melancholy, more comic (and more English) variant of Sebald’s peregrinatory prose. One of this year’s most impressive novels, Teju Cole’s debut “Open City,” owes a clear debt to Sebald. James Wood, in his enthusiastic review in the magazine, commented on the way in which Cole moves “in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work.” On a more superficial level, Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” adopted the trademark Sebaldian tactic of integrating photographs into its text.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Making of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn
• Grant Gee, Patience (After Sebald)
• W. G. Sebald, Across Land and Water
• W. G. Sebald as Academic
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• James Wood on Sebald's Austerlitz

Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

New book explores the themes raised by Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Geoff Dyer has written a book exploring the themes of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction film Stalker.  The publisher, Canongate Books, reveals that the film has 'obsessed' Dyer all of his adult life, and that it acts as 'a point of departure for a wonderfully digressive exploration of cinema, of how we understand our obsessions and of how we try to realise - no, discover - our deepest wishes.' Aside from the slightly cloying blurb, I wonder whether Dyer's new volume might be worth a look. The book will be called Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, and will be published in February 2012. [Read More]