Virginia Quarterly Review

Link Roundup: Author Interviews and Publishing News

Waldo Jaquith — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:15:07 +0000

1. ABC Australia’s “The Book Show” recently interviewed Jason Anthony about his eight years in Antarctica. Jason wrote about his time there in “The Heartless Immensity,” featured in our current issue.

2. VFH Radio commissioned a brief feature about Binh Dahn and Robert Schultz’s paired chlorophyl photographs and poems, which were published in our winter issue. Their collaborative work honors the victims of the Khmer Rouge through an unusual method of printing their portraits. You can listen here:

3. NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt says poets don’t mind the recession, what with already being poor. Neither do the folks running small poetry presses, since their books are money losers, no matter the economy. I have to suspect this comes as cold comfort to poets.

4. Farrar, Straus & Giroux VP Elisabeth Sifton isn’t sure that books as we know them can survive the book trade’s poor decisions and competition from the web:

I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.

5. Julien Bousac has depicted the Palestinian territories as a nation of islands by rendering Israeli territory as water, as featured on the always-excellent Strange Maps. Bousac emphasizes that “[t]he map is not about ‘drowning’ or ‘flooding’ the Israeli population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines, even less a suggestion of how to resolve the conflict.” We’ll have more on this topic in our summer issue, which comes out July 1.

6. Royal Dutch Shell is on trial for the execution of a Nigerian critic, in addition to paying Nigerian troops to commit human rights abuses on Shell’s behalf. The trial begins in New York next week. John Ghazvinian wrote about the clash between Nigerians and multinational oil companies in “The Curse of Oil,” in our Winter 2007 issue.

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Podcast: Interview with Dimiter Kenarov

Waldo Jaquith — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:37:09 +0000

VQR contributor Dimiter Kenarov visited us here in Charlottesville last week, and VQR editor Ted Genoways recorded a discussion with Dimiter about his article in our spring issue, “The Mask of Sanity: On the Trail of a Serial Killer in Macedonia,” about reporter Vlado Taneski, who was hot on the trail of a murderer in the small town of Kičevo when the unthinkable happened.

Spoiler warning: this interview gives away who the killer is—the mystery at the center of the article.

If you enjoyed “The Mask of Sanity,” you may also like “Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Georgi Stoev’s Gangster Pulp,” Dimiter’s account of the rise and fall of a Bulgarian mafia hit man turned tell-all author, which is the May 18 issue of The Nation.

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Interview with Ashley Gilbertson

Waldo Jaquith — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:00:55 +0000

Every month 690 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans commit suicide. I’ll repeat that: Every month 690 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans commit suicide. PTSD or major depression are reported by 300,000 Iraq veterans. Those veterans who file disability claims to receive assistance wait an average of 183 days for help. The situation is reprehensible, and there’s no sign that it’s going to improve.

That’s the topic of photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson’s “The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce,” featured in the Fall 2008 issue of VQR. He tells the story of just one veteran, the 23-year-old Pierce, who took a handgun and shot himself in the head on the night of July 25, 2008, tortured by the memories of what he’d seen and what he’d done in his two tours of duty in Iraq.

I sat down with Ashley a few weeks ago to discuss how he became interested in this topic, why it’s so important, and what it’s been like for him to write about and photograph something so difficult.

Download as an MP3

Also, you can listen to the talk Ashley gave to UVA students and the public at the Jefferson Society here at UVa in October, on the same topic.

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Interview with Elliott Woods

Waldo Jaquith — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:12:48 +0000

Virginia NPR station WVTF interviewed Elliott Woods about his article about the aftermath of the Mosul chow hall bombing. Woods’ “A Few Unforeseen Things” focuses on how the attack affected those left behind, and for Veterans Day, he explains to WVTF’s Sandy Hausman how the modern citizen-soldier concept makes that burden heavier than ever.

Listen as an MP3

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Interview with Jon Schneider about Ezra Pound

Waldo Jaquith — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:59:30 +0000

On July 14, 1959, the Richmond News Leader ran an editorial by Ezra Pound entitled “Keynes Brainwashed Electorate with Economic Hogwash.” It was his first and last publication in the Virginia newspaper—despite a yearlong stint as its foreign correspondent in Europe. Jon Schneider unearthed the story of how Pound came to hold such an unlikely position, and in the current issue of VQR we publish Schneider’s narrative and Pound’s submissions to the paper. We also have a collection of Pound’s communications with VQR about the publication of “Canto 99″ at the same time, which includes some correspondence overlapping with the News Leader communications.

I sat down with Jon a few days ago to discuss how he came across these letters and manuscripts, and what they tell us about Pound’s life at the time.

Download as MP3

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Cecily Parks Interviewed

Waldo Jaquith — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:00:09 +0000

Literary reading podcast Apostrophe Cast is featuring a reading by and an interview with Cecily Parks this week. Cecily is one of the authors in the new VQR Poetry Series — we recently published “Field Folly Snow,” her first collection of poems, and we podcast her March reading here at the University of Virginia. Apostrophe Cast is also running a contest for the best illustration for one of Cecily’s poems. The winner gets a copy of the book.

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Podcast: Superhero Stories

Waldo Jaquith — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:30:56 +0000

Yesterday afternoon I sat down with VQR editor Ted Genoways to talk about our new issue, specifically the “superhero stories” theme. In this eighteen minute long discussion, Ted talks about the three superhero fiction pieces (Scott Snyder’s “The 13th Egg,” Tom Bissell’s “My Interview with the Avenger,” and George Singleton’s “Man Oh Man—It’s Manna Man“), Bill Sizemore’s profile of Pat Robertson, and Rosamond Purcell’s “The Stories of Strangers: Mexican Ex-Voto Paintings.”

Download as MP3

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Wright, Simic Reading Audio

Waldo Jaquith — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:01:56 +0000

VQR held a reading for poets Charles Wright and Charles Simic as a part of the Virginia Festival of the Book weekend before last. The hour-long event was recorded by the festival, and is provided here for for your listening and dancing pleasure.

00:00-05:04: Introduction by Ted Genoways
05:20-34:11: Charles Wright
34:46-1:08:00: Charles Simic

Download as MP3

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VQR Poetry Series Reading Audio

Waldo Jaquith — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:00:49 +0000

A week ago, the four authors inaugurating the VQR Poetry Series were assembled for the first time, as a part of the annual Virginia Festival of the Book. The four authors read from their respective books, and we had the good sense to record the event.

00:00-03:05: Introduction by Ted Genoways
03:15-15:37: Jennifer Chang (The History of Anonymity)
15:50-29:42: Kevin McFadden (Hardscrabble)
29:58-39:29: Cecily Parks (Field Folly Snow)
39:36-51:02: Patrick Phillips (Boy)
51:25-57:54: Q&A

Download as MP3

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Podcast of David Morris Interview

Kevin Morrissey — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:36:12 +0000

David Morris, author of “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground” in the Winter issue of VQR, is interviewed at Charlottesville’s WINA Radio. Interview is available as streaming media or a downloadable podcast.

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