Interview with Michael Shilling, Rock Bottom
Michael Shilling talks about his first novel, his own adventures playing and touring with various bands, and his current project–one he describes as Jane Eyre meets The Wire.
Michael Shilling talks about his first novel, his own adventures playing and touring with various bands, and his current project–one he describes as Jane Eyre meets The Wire.
Travis Holland’s first novel, The Archivist’s Story (2007, Dial Press), is set in Stalinist Russia in 1939. The book has been translated into eleven languages and has received numerous accolades, including: a Guardian Readers’ Pick of 2007, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Best Fiction of 2007 choice by Metro.co.uk, a Best Book of 2007 by both the Financial Times and Publisher’s Weekly, and the 2008 VCU Cabell First novelist award. He currently lives in Ann Arbor, where he is at work on his next novel. Jeremiah Chamberlin spoke with him for FWR on December 18, 2008.
In his most recent novel, The Count of Concord, Nicholas Delbanco revives a largely forgotten but fascinating historical figure who was, in his day, an international celebrity: renaissance man Count Rumford (1753-1814). Brian Short asks Delbanco about the story behind bringing this character back, as it were, to life–and the experience of picking up a manuscript again after 20 years.
In her debut novel, Preeta Samarasan tells the story of both one ethnic Indian family and the whole country of Malaysia, reminding us that History is the individual people it happens to.
Susannah Felts gets questioned about the line between fiction and autobiography on a regular basis. This speaks, she suggested, to a very real longing in readers to make that distinction. “We have this fascination with memoir,” she said. “We want to connect representations of reality to reality itself. There’s an insatiable need for that.”
