singular interviews – The Endless Bookshelf

A singular interview with Christopher Brown

Mossback

I have known Chris Brown for many years, first through reading his essays in the pages of The New York Review of Science Fiction and other publications, and then in person at Readercon and in a few larger cities. We share an interest in the ragged edges of the planet and in science fiction, and we’ve walked together to one or two of the green worlds you can find just a few steps from the usual paths. His novel Tropic of Kansas was an Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year, “dark, nimble, hilarious, deeply alarming, truly American”, and he was a good person to talk to when I was writing A Conversation larger than the Universe. His Field Notes newsletters are always interesting and fun. Disqualified by such ties of friendship from writing a review of A Natural History of Empty Lots, a book that grew from his years of walking and thinking around in his neighborhood, I asked him the only question that needs asking, and his answer in this singular interview (from A Natural History) is elegant and definitive.

Henry Wessells : Have you ever seen a chupacabra ?

Christopher Brown : Almost a decade after I went on the Bigfoot watch, I had a close encounter with a chupacabra. It was May 2015, on the Sunday night before Memorial Day. We were in Marfa, Texas, where we had taken our visiting friends, Henry Wessells and Mary Jo Duffy, native Philadelphians who live in New Jersey and work in New York. After dinner on our last night, we headed east on Highway 90 to check out the Marfa Lights. It was around 9 p.m. The radio was tuned to the local public radio station, which was playing its “Space Music” show-ambient instrumentals that suited the mood. About two-thirds into the nine-mile drive, a ghostly creature crossed our path, walking right across the road, rather slowly.

Slow enough that we got a long look as it passed through the beams of our headlights. Four-legged, definitely not a deer, a figure of ethereal white. Bigger than a dog, different than a coyote — even though that’s probably what it was. They say most chupacabra sightings are really just coyotes with mange. We all saw it, were similarly baffled, and agreed that it was both something that had a rational explanation that the brevity and circumstances of our sighting would not let us figure out, and that we also had just experienced an encounter that had an authentically paranormal frisson. It was definitely a chupacabra, we understood, as we also understood that a chupacabra is simply a creature you encounter that does not follow the taxonomic indicators of its species, looking so strange, in the moment you see it, as to provide you an experience of the alien and a welcome excuse to make up your own legend.

Tree Portal

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Chris Brown’s new book, A Natural History of Empty Lots

— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, forthcoming 17 September 2024 from Timber Press.

link : https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/christopher-brown/a-natural-history-of-empty-lots/9781643263366/?lens=timber-press

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A singular interview with John Crowley

Henry Wessells: Were you already living in Massachusetts during the writing of Little, Big?

John Crowley: The first part of the book — the first third, approximately — was written in New York. I can’t remember whether that first part was titled Edgewood or not. Not long after that — 1976 or so [dates are slipping from me] — I moved to Lenox in the Berkshires, where I took up where I’d left off — basically at the beginning of Part Two, though I think it hadn’t got a title either.

I did complete the book in the Berkshires, a hefty MS. I had just finished the draft when I was going on a trip to Vermont, and it occurred to me that the MS might be lost if the house where I was living then were to burn down while I was gone. I decided to put the MS in the (unplugged) refrigerator, which seemed a safe place even in fire. When I returned after a few days I found that the MS was safe, no fire, but the unplugged fridge had also melted its ice in the summer heat and the box — but not the MS — was soggy. No harm done.

When the Bantam edition came out in 1981 I was living in a little house on the grounds of a large old Berkshire mansion. I held a celebration there — Matt Tannenbaum, Laurie, my Bantam editor, my long-ago girlfriend Mickie up from NYC, Tom Disch, and Annulf Conradi, who was publishing the German edition. (Were you there? I can’t remember). We sat out on the grass — it was high summer. A great day, a great moment.

[5 November 2022]

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John Crowley is author of Little, Big and many other books, most recently And Go Like This and Flint and Mirror. He recently celebrated his eightieth birthday.

Sometimes a gift shows up unannounced. This interview came about as a result of David Godine asking me to participate in a panel discussion, organized under the auspices of the Massachusetts Center for the Book, on influential books printed, published, written, or conceived in Massachusetts. Naturally enough, one of my first thoughts was whether Little, Big could be added to this list. I found that another participant, Matt Tannenbaum of The Bookstore in Lenox, also holds the book in high esteem.

A singular interview with Henry Wessells, by Michael Swanwick

Singular Interviews, by Michael Swanwick. Tenth in an Occasional Series

Henry Wessells is not only a writer of fiction, criticism, and critical fictions but a bookman as well — a professional dealer in rare books and related materials. It is in this latter capacity that this question was posed.

Michael Swanwick: If you could own one essentially unobtainable rare genre book, what would it be?

Henry Wessells: I would like to own Erasmus’ own copy of Utopia (Louvain, 1516); or, failing that, More’s own.
But you know me very well, Michael, to ask such a question, for I (or a character calling himself “I”) have answered your question twenty years ago in the pages of NYRSF, when I summoned into being an imaginary book “I” needed to know in order to write about the work of Don Webb. That book is Irimari, ou, la reine zombie de la Guiane (Brussels: Auguste Poulet-Malassis, 1866) by Gérard de Kernec, and its English translation by Swinburne, Eurydice in Guiana, published anonymously in 1871 by John Camden Hotten. In “Book becoming power” (NYRSF, March 2000), D. owned Lester Dent’s copy of that book, and even now I wouldn’t mind owning a copy of either edition myself.
That was easy; there was no hesitation, for I have been thinking about the literature of the fantastic ever since I was seven years old. Not that I read Utopia at that age. I have seen the copy of Frankenstein which Mary Shelley inscribed to Lord Byron (one genius to another), but I never felt I needed to possess it.
I did, of course, answer your singular question in a concrete sense, by thinking about a book which did once exist, for a key aspect of our mode of literature is the literalization of metaphor.

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First published in the New York Review of Science Fiction 355 (June 2021).
Copyright © 2021 Michael Swanwick. Reprinted by permission of the author.

A singular interview with Mark Valentine

Henry Wessells: Mark, this question, which comes from Charles Lamb*, you have already answered more than once in a fictional mode, but perhaps there is still a candidate or two whom you might wish, as Lamb suggested, to encounter “in their nightgown and slippers, and exchange friendly greeting with them”: which literary figure from the past would you like to meet ?

Mark Valentine: I spend a lot of very agreeable hours rummaging in second-hand bookshops looking for the book I do not know I want until I find it, the one I have never heard of until it calls to me from the shelf. There is something about the title, or the author’s name, or the binding that makes me curious, so I ease it from its niche and look inside. Then I seem to know at once if it is for me, because of a certain elusive quality of the prose or the highly recondite contents, or both.

And so, resisting the urge to ask Dickens about the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to absorb a grape or two with Ronald Firbank, to risk the wrath of Baron Corvo, to ask about that remote inn The Dog at Clambercrown with Jocelyn Brooke, to sip cautiously at a glass of Dog & Duck punch with Arthur Machen, or a cocktail with Michael Arlen, to discuss the Holy Grail with Mary Butts, or Anne Ridler, or Charles Williams, or Sally Purcell, to ask Walter de la Mare whether there is anybody there, or to tell so many neglected writers that their time will come, has come, I shall opt instead to meet the yet-to-be-found, the discovery-to-be, the patiently waiting presence, the spirit that haunts all second-hand bookshops, the Unknown Author.

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Mark Valentine is author of, most recently, Sphinxes & Obelisks (Tartarus, 2021), and many volumes of fiction, including The Collected Connoisseur (with John Howard) and The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things. He is author of a monograph on Sarban and editor of Wormwood.

* in an essay by William Hazlitt : Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen (1826).

A singular interview with Michael Swanwick

Henry Wessells: Michael, you are a resident of Philadelphia, a Philadelphian, even, of long standing (probably as long as I have been an ex-Philadelphian): what is the oddest thing (or incident) you have ever seen or witnessed in Billy Penn’s Town?

Michael Swanwick: There’s a lot of competition. Philadelphia was a much grittier place when I came here in the early Seventies. The sin district, with its stripper bars, burlesque theaters, and hookers, was right next to City Hall. But I remember one evening when I was walking along 12th Street with Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper, approaching Market Street, where the Terminal Hotel used to be. There was a let-up in the traffic, so I crossed the street. When I got across, I looked back and saw that Gardner and Susan were still on the far side, walking. Then a car came screeching down the street and the driver, seeing the two of them, drove up on the sidewalk and tried to run them down. No reason at all. It was just madness.

Susan and Gardner both threw themselves against the wall so the driver couldn’t kill them without crashing into the hotel. He slammed the car back into the street and roared off. This was before Gardner became editor of Asimov’s. So his death then would have changed the course of science fiction.

Things like that happened in Gardner’s presence. Once, on South Street, he saw a man stabbed to death with a fork. But that’s not really my story to tell.

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Michael Swanwick is author of, most recently, The Book of Blarney (Dragonstairs, 2021), The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus (Subterranean, 2020), an The Iron Dragon’s Mother (Tor, 2019), as well as critical monographs on Hope Mirrlees and James Branch Cabell. He is the originator of this useful conceit, the Singular Interview.

Some good things in this strange year

Dear friends and readers,

here is the third update of the Endless Bookshelf during the pandemic year 2020, when time has seemed at once to dilate and to compress. It has sometimes been difficult for me to write new work in a sustained manner. Blurred lines, or the deadline of no deadline. Others may enjoy virtual conferences but these have not attracted me or prompted me to finish a story the way that a scheduled reading slot at Readercon always used to. It has, however, been a year of many good books old and new.

— Elizabeth Hand. The Book of Lamps and Banners. A Novel. Mulholland Books, [2020]. I am the dedicatee of this book, and perhaps more. It is a signal honor to be part of the latest in Liz Hand’s chronicle of the adventures of Cass Neary. I had read some early versions of the novel in typescript, but when I got my copy on publication day in September, I was compelled afresh. As Cass says, ‘I couldn’t rest.’ I read it straight through into the early hours of the morning. A pretty intense philosophical object is at the heart of the novel (see below under recent reading). Disqualified from reviewing the book and constrained by my own conscience from naming it the best book of the year (or declaring a tie with The Private Life of Books), I am free to urge you all to read the novel. I am pleased to present

A Singular Interview* with Elizabeth Hand

Henry Wessells The London of the Cass Neary novels always seems rooted in lived experience. How did you come to the house of Harold the bookseller?

Elizabeth Hand You’re absolutely correct that nearly everything in the Cass novels is drawn from my own experience (with a few exceptions — murders, fatal overdoses, ritual sacrifices, etc.). Harold Vertigan’s rare bookshop-cum-home is no exception, though as you well know, Harold actually lives and works in the NYC metro area.

For the book, however, I transplanted him to North London, to a particular minuscule enclave, Vale of Health, a hamlet in Hampstead. I came across it some years ago while wandering on the Heath, one of my very favorite things to do in London. Vale of Health is a tiny village hidden toward the upper part of the Heath, with a very few very narrow winding roads and mostly small old houses, some linked by cobblestoned alleys lit by old-fashioned lamps — they resemble some lost corner of Narnia.

The whole place appears utterly charming and otherworldly (not excepting the parking area filled with caravans, trailers, and retired food and ice cream trucks). So of course I knew I would have to use this lovely setting as the scene of an awful murder: the fictional Harold, with his wide-eyed delight at all things, his mild eccentricities (bare feet, seersucker in winter), impeccable taste (fine champagne), and deep knowledge of the book trade, could only live (and die) in a place like the Vale of Health. His real -life counterpart, on the other hand, will be discovering rare books and edible mushrooms for decades to come on this side of the great grey water.

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* I thank my friend Michael Swanwick for this useful conceit.

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— Ng Yi-Sheng. Black Waters, Pink Sands. Math Paper Press, [2020]. This newest book from the author of Lion City presents two recent performances written by Ng Yi-Sheng: Ayer Hitam: a Black History of Singapore, and Desert Blooms: the Dawn of Queer Singapore Theatre. Ayer Hitam is a remarkable history of the world through an examination of the history of Black people in Singapore.

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The weekly Field Notes of Chris Brown, a newsletter of ‘ecological fact as applied science fiction’: https://edgelands.substack.com

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The Avram Davidson Universe

During this year, Seth Davis has brought many stories by Avram Davidson into audio book format, and initiated a monthly podcast The Avram Davidson Universe. I was happy to be a guest: it was a fun conversation with Seth Davis and a chance to consider “O Brave Old World!”, one of the stories from The Other Nineteenth Century. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1310005/6138964-the-avram-davidson-universe-henry-wessells-o-brave-old-world

Other guests have included Ethan Davidson, Eileen Gunn, and Michael Swanwick, who named Avram Davidson as “the best American short fiction writer of the twentieth century’.

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The release of The Booksellers documentary to a worldwide audience. https://booksellersdocumentary.com

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Tom La Farge

Tom La Farge (1947-2020) died on 22 October. Tom was author of The Crimson Bears (2 vols., 1993-95), a modern classic worthy of a wider audience. Harvard class of 1969 (and former president of the Harvard Lampoon), with a doctorate from Princeton, he was the most literary man I have ever known. Quietly and without heeding fashion or compromising his vision, he wrote his books. He taught a generation of students in the English department at Horace Mann School. I knew Tom since 1993, and wrote about the early phase of his literary career in an essay for the New York Review of Science Fiction, now available here:

https://endlessbookshelf.net/bargeton.html.

Tom’s interest in writing with constraints, approached ‘dialogically and not ideologically’, led him to form the Writhing Society, some fruits of which can be found on its blog, http://writhingsociety.blogspot.com. He had recently completed The Enchantments, a series of three novels published 2015-18. Tom is survived by Wendy Walker and his son Paul La Farge.

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In Memoriam ‘Dirleddy’: Jan Morris (1926-2020)

My review of the remarkable fantasy of historiography and ultimate travel book, Hav (2006), originally published in the New York Review of Science Fiction for April 2007:

https://endlessbookshelf.net/hav.html

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Back to Basics

current reading:

— Isabel Yap. Never Have I Ever. Stories. Small Beer Press, [forthcoming, February 2021]. Fantastical stories, published 2012-2018, by Manila-born author Isabel Yap, with three stories original to this collection. This arrived in today’s mail, and I am eager to read it!

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— Samuel L. Clemens. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain. Introduction by Sherley Anne Williams. Afterword by David Lionel Smith. Oxford University Press, 1996.

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— Herman Melville. The Confidence Man His Masquerade [1857]. Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1984. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle. Northwestern Newberry Edition, volume ten. ‘As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims’, all along the river shore and on the planks of the Mississippi steamboat Fidèle, a work that cries out for performance. To read it is rewarding work.

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re-reading:

I am re-reading Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in small bites, in the Penguin Classics edition (I have read it in first edition and in the 1892 Bentley edition); and over the past months have read several of the Travis McGee novels of John D. McDonald. I have been reading or re-reading at Samuel L. Clemens in the Oxford Mark Twain, a hybrid uniform edition: photofacsimile texts in standardized format with great new essays (Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay for The Diaries of Adam and Eve is outstanding; and Toni Morrison on Huck Finn).

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— Joanna Russ. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. University of Texas Press, [1983]. Always a delight and a provocation to read: ‘growth occurs only at the edges of something’. See also below, in the Commonplace book.

— Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. A favorite book: foxed, shaken, the same copy I first read at age eleven.

recent reading:

— Tom Mole. The Secret Life of Books. Why They Mean More than Words. Elliott & Thompson, [2019]. This was fun. Clearly the author and I share some interests and predilections beyond the chance similarity of titles.

— Michael Swanwick. Rainbow Clause. Dragonstairs, 2020. Eight short short stories in his ongoing investigation of the taxonomy of American myth.

— [Donald E. Westlake] Richard Stark. Dirty Money [2008]. A Parker Novel. With a New Foreword by Laura Lippman. University of Chicago Press, [2017].

— — Deadly Edge. Random House, [1971].

— — Slayground. Random House, [1971].

— — Plunder Squad. Random House, [1972].

— P. D. James. A Taste for Death. Knopf, [1986].

— — The Skull beneath the Skin. Scribner’s, [1982].

— — Devices and Desires. Knopf, [1990].

— Feux Follets. Revue de création littéraire. Départment des Langues Modernes à UL Lafayette, [2020]. L’imaginaire louisianais in a nice rich anthology.

— Big Echo Interviews 2017-2020. Edited by Robert G. Penner. Big Echo, [POD: 6 November 2020].

— Lester Del Rey. The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976. The History of a Subculture. Garland, [1980].

— David Rothkopf. Traitor. A History of Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump. Thomas Dunne Books, [2020].

— Philip K. Dick. The Slave Race. With a Preface by Adam Newell and a frontispiece by Sharon Newell. Sangrail Press, 2020. Edition of 250 numbered copies. First 25 copies issued with an original blockprint initialled & numbered by the artist. A nice production.

— Michael J. DeLuca. Night Roll. Hamilton, Ontario: Stelliform Press, [2020]. A very good supernatural story of a new Detroit.

— Megan Rosenbloom. Dark Archives. A Librarian’s Investigations into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2020]. This is an advanced philosophical subject. The prose does not rise to the level of the topic. Far more interesting and informative is Jennifer Kerner’s interesting study, Anthropodermic Bibliopegy, (2019). See also the archives for November & December 2009.

— Mark Valentine. The Blue Coronation Bench. Photography by Julian Hyde. Voices in a Lane, 2020. Edition of 40. The hidden mystery of the everyday.

— Michael Swanwick. Blue as the Moon. Dragonstairs, 31 October 2020. Stories for Hallowe’en. ‘White as a Sheet’ is brilliant: swift and utterly devastating in the spiral of its change in tone.

— John Howard and Mark Valentine. Powers and Presences. Dust-Jacket & Title Page Art by Paul Lowe. [Neuilly-le-Vendin]: Sarob Press, 2020. Three new novellas and two short essays in appreciation of Inkling novelist Charles Williams (1886-1945).

— Strange Tales. Tartarus Press at 30. Edited by Rosalie Parker. Tartarus, [2020]. New stories from Reggie Oliver, Rebecca Lloyd, Mark Valentine, D. P. Watt, N. A. Sulway, and others.

— Mike Ashley. Starlight Man. The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood. Constable, [2001].

— Mike Ashley. Algernon Blackwood A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 1987.

— M. John Harrison. Light. Bantam Books, [2004].

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— Maria Dahvana Headley. Beowulf. A New Translation. MCD x FSG Originals, [2020]. Making it new: ‘stories that haven’t yet been reckoned with’ (from her introduction, dated on a distant day, 3 March 2020)

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Commonplace book

‘To begin at the beginning: The United States has always been a corrupt society.’ — Gore Vidal

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‘Could it be that all these authors were not — as I had unthinkingly assumed — in subsidiary
traditions, but parallel ones? And that the only thing unique, superior to all others, and especially
important in my tradition — was that I was in it? Was centrality really a relative matter?’
— Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing

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a beautiful rain from Ireland in the mail (on the current issue of The Green Book)

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The America that never existed is always more powerful in our imagination than that which was there and now isn’t.
This American sentence is far more frightening than its English source:
‘The England that never existed is always more powerful in our imagination
than that which was there and now isn’t.’
— David Southwell (who is not responsible for my détournement)
http://folklorethursday.com/?p=970

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‘If, as a Black, Southern woman reader, I can find a way to connect to so many stories by other writers whose works don’t center me, then I know others can do the same when they encounter works that place them on the margins’ — Sheree Renée Thomas, in Locus

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Sailing, Creeping, Boring — William S. Reese

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There is an exhibition of early ownership marks and other aspects of the physical evidence of reading, at the RAI Library in Barcelona La vida privada dels llibres del CRAI Biblioteca de Reserva, Barcelona https://crai.ub.edu/sites/default/files/biblioteques/Reserva/expo/index.php

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The Temporary Culture website is fully functional and allows readers to purchase all current books of the press — including the new edition of The Private Life of Books — and a selection of other books and material of interest. https://temporary-culture.com

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Thank you for reading. Happy New Year!

Henry Wessells