Virtual Memories Show 462: Ed Sorel “My wife convinced me that when someone compliments your work, you say, ‘Thank you,’ and don’t explain to them why the drawing is actually lousy.” Legendary artist, illustrator, cartoonist, & author Ed Sorel joins the show to celebrate the publication of his memoir, Profusely Illustrated (Knopf). We get into…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 460: Rutu Modan “I don’t feel that I finished everything I want to say with comics. I feel like comics are my way to express myself and tell my stories.” With TUNNELS (Drawn & Quarterly, tr. Ishai Mishory), Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan has created a fantastic, thoughtful, wonderful, hilarious, complex, cinematic thrill-ride…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 456: Zoe Beloff “I’m a story scavenger. I’m not like a novelist who comes out with stories from scratch. I find stories, whether of real people, or just a scrap of film or old postcards. They’ll tell you stories. I think of myself as a voice through with people speak. They’re my…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 453: Nadine Sergejeff “What you see when you enter the Philip Roth Personal Library are about three-thousand, seven hundred and twenty books* that have marginalia, are presentation copies, or are otherwise special.” [* Librarians are very exact] It’s part 2 of a 2-part show about the new Philip Roth Personal Library at…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 452: Rosemary Steinbaum “His reading and his writing are intertwined. That’s the main theme of the Philip Roth Personal Library: a writer at work reading and a reader at work writing.” It’s part 1 of a 2-part show about the new Philip Roth Personal Library at the Newark Public Library! This week,…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 451: Jacques Berlinerblau “I think what’s different about Roth is the wink and the nod and the game; he’s signaling to us in his fiction that he’s writing about events and people that are very close to him, and yet repeatedly denied doing so. No one else engaged in that gamesmanship with…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 446: Heywood Gould With his compulsively entertaining new book, Drafted: A Memoir of the ’60s (Tolmitch Press), author, screenwriter, and director Heywood Gould takes his reader on a rollicking tour of New York City in America’s most turbulent decade as he explores his draft-dodging days in the buildup of the Vietnam war….
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 444: Jonathan Baylis Writer Jonathan Baylis joins the show (in person!) to celebrate the latest issue of his autobio comics series, So Buttons (Tinto Press/Alchemy Comix). We talk about how he found a home in the Pekar mode, writing scripts for cartoonists to draw, and how he went all-Harvey for a strip…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 425: Vivian Gornick “I’m a writer who developed around the practice of lucid, simple, compact writing. I turned out to be something of a minimalist. . . . but for a long time I felt myself a negligible writer because I couldn’t write big.” Literary and feminist legend Vivian Gornick joins the…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 416: Wendung “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves,” said George Orwell, but he died at 47, so what does he know? To celebrate turning 50, I use an obscure Woody Allen movie to talk about why I can’t take stock of my life. Then the good part: I ask nearly…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show 415: Jerome Charyn “Any great work is a shove to the incomprehensible, but it’s JUST on our side instead of the other side. You have to take tremendous risks in order to find your language.” With his amazing new novel, Sergeant Salinger (Bellevue Literary Press), Jerome Charyn evokes and explores J.D. Salinger’s…
Read More
Virtual Memories Show: The Guest List 2020 It’s time for our year-end Virtual Memories Show tradition: The Guest List! I reached out to 2020’s pod-guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year, as well as the books or authors they’re hoping to read in 2021! Thirty guests responded with…
Read More
Recent Comments