Books - Access Interviews

David Sedaris

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

For someone who sells books by the truckload (almost eight million in 25 languages) and who can instantly fill theatres with audiences craving to hear him read from his work, comic essayist David Sedaris might cut a more charismatic figure.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

The successful novelist, who burst on to the literary scene in 2002 with 'Everything Is Illuminated', turns his attention to vegetarianism and ethical consumption

Paulo Coelho

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Over orange juice and a boiled egg, the bestselling Brazilian author talks about reconverting to the Catholic faith of his boyhood and life as an internet junkie

Talitha Stevenson

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Novelist Talitha Stevenson's life fell apart in line with the global financial meltdown. For six years she lived the hedge fund dream in Portobello with her banker husband. Last summer they split up and now she is living with friends in Shepherd's Bush.

Zoe Margolis

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Bars and clubs are over,” sex blogger Zoe Margolis, 36, tells me. “It's all fun and flirty. But you're not really finding anything out about someone if you meet them in a bar. If you want to have a relationship or casual sex, the internet is a really good place to meet, because you can weed out those who seem a bit psychotic!”

Hilary Mantel

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Her ability to inhabit her characters has brought Hilary Mantel countless fans, and now the Booker prize. As she works on the sequel to 'Wolf Hall’, she talks about her battle with illness, her childlessness and the hypocrisy of the literary establishment .

Katie Davies

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

What sort of woman tames the funniest man in London? A clever one, of course. But that's not necessarily a guarantee of wit or intellect. Often long legs or a generous cleavage will do for a comedian.

Hanif Kureishi

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Hanif Kureishi used to be seen as an enfant terrible of books, shocking the literary world with some of his work. Now in his mid-50s , and with a new collection of short stories, he has said that if they are lucky, writers get ten years when they are considered young and fashionable before their work varies and goes up and down. Hanif Kureishi discusses whether this is really the case.

Sharon Osbourne

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Sharon Osbourne will be two hours late for her interview. A photo shoot is overrunning says her marvellously named assistant, Silvana Arena. As we enter the Osbourne mansion in Hidden Hills, a gated estate off Interstate 101 above Los Angeles, there is a fight going on unchecked in the hall. Two leettle dourgues from Osbourne's vast collection of over-groomed life forms are doing snarly battle, possibly for mastery of the pile of poo that lies mid-floor.

Hilary Mantel

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Girls as young as 14 are ready to have babies, a Mann Booker Prize-winning author has claimed. Hilary Mantel, 57, told the Sunday Telegraph: 'Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable. 'I think it is that men's lives have set the timetable. Men reach a sort of sexual peak when you are 20, a social peak when you are 40. 'There is this breed of women for whom society's timetable is completely wrong.'

Gary Greenberg

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Psychotherapist and author of Manufacturing Depression Gary Greenberg talks to Tim Adams about drugs, depression and true love. Gary Greenberg first realised he suffered from what we have come to call depression one afternoon in 1987. He was 30, in a failing marriage, and the understanding came to him after he had lain on the floor all afternoon in his study and watched particles of dust falling in a shaft of light while "racked by some unspecifiable pain, like my whole being was a phantom limb".

Katie Davies

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

It’s amazing how often Alan will say something like, “Do you fancy a weekend in Milan?” And I’ll say, “Yes, sure.” And when we get there, he’ll say, “Oh, look, there’s a football match on.” This is the man who left the celebrations for me winning the Waterstone’s prize so he could get to the ground for the second half of the Arsenal-Liverpool game. It doesn’t surprise me any more. I see the sights or go shopping.

Rose Tremain

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

The author who made her name with Restoration deserves to emerge from the shadow of her illustrious peers. William Golding nicked Rose Tremain’s suitcase. Yes, really. “It was a British Council tour I did with Richard to Lisbon” — Richard Holmes, that is, biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, author most recently of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, and Tremain’s partner — “it was an amazing group of people, and it included William Golding — one of the last tours he did before he died. We had identical suitcases, and at the airport he took mine, which caused a deal of ructions. I never got to see what was in his,” she says, laughing at the memory and arching an eyebrow. “Richard had to handle it. He’s such a diplomat. ‘Sir Bill ... I think you’ve got Rose’s underwear . . .’ ”

Hanif Kureishi

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Martin Amis is not the only one to dread ageing. Hanif Kureishi has said some pretty grim things about mid-life and after too. In his brilliant novella The Body, first published eight years ago and now at the heart of his Collected Stories, Kureishi imagined what it would be like for a man in his mid-sixties to have his brain transplanted into a young, handsome body.

Joshua Ferris

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

The author, 35, in his own wordsI come from a very illustrious line of divorcees. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each – eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.When I was 11, I started following the stock market. I didn't understand a word, but I would choose my stocks for the week and I'd call my father and ask him how they were doing. He bought me a call, like an option – $50, I think it was Nike. I felt very mogul-ish.If I'm not working on the book, it's always there. I don't know what the proper metaphor is – maybe a pilot light; maybe, more accurately, a low-grade fever.After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting – an artist – or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.My proudest shameful moment in the office is that my boss nicknamed me Captain Tuttle, the fictional person in MASH they would blame whenever anything went wrong.After my parents divorced, my father and I played chess through the mail, with Velcro chess pieces. It would take, what, four years for a game?Everybody is carrying around their little backpack of woe. You know, my father's always complaining about his sinuses – any given day you call him, he knows the barometric pressure. My mother has low blood sugar, so all she eats is chicken. My wife, every once in a while she says: "I don't have enough skin" – it just means she has cramp. And I suffer from insomnia.My next book is going to be about religion. Obviously, that's a rather inexhaustible topic.The inanities and absurdities of corporate life are so obvious that I had to avoid them like the plague when I wrote my first book [Then We Came to the End]. I found a great deal of nobility there – you know, people doing jobs they might not like, doing it for their kids. Which is not to say that I felt those things while I was there… I felt my life was draining away.I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.As far as I'm concerned, writing a book is the most preposterous thing a person can do. Because it's so all-consuming. Even a mediocre writer has done something really difficult. You can dismiss a book as a bad book, but you can't dismiss the achievement as a bad achievement.Love, loss of love, sanity, loss of sanity: whatever I thought was pertinent and necessary in my latest book was enabled by the fact that the hero was ill.Who knows about any marriage? The word's still out on my own marriage.Inevitably I find myself coming back to fiction; I have a fortunately limited patience for the truth.I felt fairly lost as a boy. When we moved to Key West from a small town in Illinois, I was bored to tears. I kept thinking: the ocean is supposed to be a boy's dream. I enjoy the beach now that I drink beer, but at the time all I had was Gatorade. I think I would have been much happier if we'd moved to a mountain, or somewhere near an abyss.I think most things are either funny or bleak.The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense. The Unnamed is published by Viking, £12.99guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Dick Francis

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Dick Francis sits bolt upright at the mention of horse racing. The sport of kings has fed his imagination for more than 50 years and writing thrillers about racing has made him one of the world’s most successful authors. His red-rimmed eyes light up as he recalls his racing days. “Beating the other man, there was nothing else like it,” he says.

Cary Fukunaga

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Sin Nombre director Cary Fukunaga talked to ShortList's Andrew Lowry about making the Mexican gangster film and his plans on adapting Jayne Eyre.

Michael Cera

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

ShortList's Joe Ellison caught up with the Youth In Revolt star to see how he's finding life as lead man, in a cast containing Ray Liotta and Steve Buscemi.

Mark Millar

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

The comic book writer on Kick-Ass, Wanted and much more.

Anouchka Grose

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Falling in love is a complicated, messy, mad endeavour - and staying in love is even worse," observes the writer and psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose. With her white-blonde crop and vintage wardrobe, Grose, 40, doesn't look like your typical shrink. Her south London consulting room (which doubles as her living room) is full of arty curios. There are Mills and Boon book jackets on the wall. In the window is the jokey banner: "Cheap romantic advice."