Eye 94 interview with Jeremy Kitchen & Michael Sack

I gave a radio interview a couple of weeks ago to Jeremy Kitchen and Michael Sack on Eye 94 (105.5 FM Chicago); Jeremy has now sent me a link to a recording. For those who might have liked to listen and missed the show, the whole thing is here

Profile by Christian Lorentzen in New York Magazine

According to my publicist, I have NOT committed professional suicide.  Good to know. The whole thing here.

Ilana Teitelbaum on HuffPo

As so often, the interviewer has more interesting things to say than I do.  The whole thing here

My first time – Paris Review video interview

Tom Bean and Luke Poling, directors of Plimpton!, have been commissioned by the Paris Review to do a series of video interviews in which writers talk about their first book.  They came up to my cottage in Vermont to talk to me back in March, and the video is now online here.  (About five hours of the interview could not be included in a video of sane length; someday, perhaps, some OTHER documentarist will be badgering Tom and Luke for this precious unseen footage.)

Bottle Rocket Science – Podcast with Scott Gosnell

Interview with Scott Gosnell, in which my shortcomings as a media personality are, like, I mean, you know, you know, you know, revealed.  Scott kindly pointed out that the podcast form gives people time to hit their stride. Hm. In any case, we talk about The Last Samurai, work in progress, Paul Graham’s great discussion of schlep blindness, much more.  The occasional clucking noises in the background are me talking to my neighbour’s cat Frannie, who kept wandering across my laptop mid-Skype.  The podcast is available in various formats, all on offer at the end of Scott’s blogpost  here.

BOMB Magazine : Mieke Chew (photos Jesse Ruddock)

Helen DeWitt’s personal library is on display as part of The Library Vaccine, an exhibition of six distinctive collections at Artists Space in Soho. The books, shipped from DeWitt’s home in Berlin, are exhibited on one side of the gallery. The facing wall is covered in Xeroxed passages of books in different languages, printed emails, and screengrabs of her works in progress. Between, there are books on five large, white tables.

A viewer might wander around this space with the impression that to see “The Library of Helen DeWitt” is to see inside the mind of a writer. One might think the point is to view the books she holds most dear. This would be a mistake. Many of the books are included precisely because they represent a failure in DeWitt’s eyes. Without her guidance, it is up to the viewer to decide which contain great poetry and which are examples of what not to do with a book. This is not a test, but rather an argument expressed through objects.

The rest here.

The Fabulist : Jesse Barron

One advantage of living in a pleasant and inexpensive European capital is that people want to visit you. Another, that there is access to the Internet. Neither paves the road of novel-finishing, and so the American writer Helen DeWitt decided to leave Berlin two years ago, taking with her a toothbrush and laptop. A series of stays in the small towns and writers’ colonies of the American eastern seaboard ended this September in New York, where she now spends afternoons at Artists Space gallery in SoHo, writing at a long white table. The light is plentiful and clean, and she can ride the elevator down to smoke, every so often, on the bubbly cobblestones of Greene Street. There’s even room for her library. Under the banner of The Library Vaccine, Artists Space presents discrete collections of various writers’ books. DeWitt’s just arrived from Germany accompanied by an impressive catalogue: Having your library indexed from Albersmeier to Zweig is what you get when you sublet to Berlin artists “for a couple months,” then vanish for two years. DeWitt says she could go back if she could sell another novel. I ask if that’s what she’s working on. “No,” she says.

The rest here.

New York Observer : Michael Miller

The first time Helen DeWitt disappeared was in 2000. . . .

 

The whole thing here.

Some qualifications on paperpools, here and here.

LA Review of Books : Lee Konstantinou

We conducted this interview over email last month (as the inserted images probably make clear).

In bold defiance of the LARB tradition of having an absentee interviewer, I present the questions that inspired these responses, though, in the hopes of pre-disorienting the reader, detached from the provided answers.

1. Was there a time when you decided to dedicate yourself to writing?

2. You’ve said that you decided in the late 1990s to write ten novels each in a single voice — an antidote to the complexities posed by The Last Samurai. Lightning Rods was one of those novels. What were the other nine? What voices did they feature? What state of completion are they in?

3. Did writing a book about male sexual obsession pose special challenges? Were you sympathetic to Joe’s sexual fantasy life? Did you find it hard to understand why he might be attracted to the sorts of acts he found appealing?

the rest here

Lee Konstantinou’s review of Lightning Rods here

Scott Esposito’s review here

n + 1 : Elizabeth Gumport and Chris Glazek

 

Early in September, Christopher Glazek and I spent a long, pleasant afternoon interviewing Helen DeWitt. Helen had arrived in New York a few days earlier, about a month before her latest novel, Lightning Rods, was to be released by New Directions. There were miles of book tour events to be traveled before she slept, and our discussion was one of them. But it was a Friday, and the end of summer, and the city was warm and mild and forgiving, and all in all our meeting felt less like an interview and more like a conversation. The three of us met on the Upper East Side and talked for many hours, as if we had nowhere to be. I don’t think any of us did.

The rest here