Perry Meisel is a professor of English at New York University. He has written and lectured for over 40 years and is a prominent thinker in critical theory. Primarily researching structuralism, his work tackles a disparate range of subjects, from pop culture and Henry James, to rock & roll and the popular television show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. His most recent book is The Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan. [read full interview]
Alex Wheatle’s novels explore the themes of racism, poverty, youth unemployment and discrimination with confidence and nuance. His most recent novel, Brenton Brown, was published by Arcadia in 2011. Frazana Rahman asked Alex to discuss some of his thoughts on ‘black British writing'. [read full interview]
Emma Wright quit her day-job in publishing to start a poetry press, The Emma Press, which published its first volume, The Flower and the Plough, earlier this year. With an Anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse launched on 26 September, Wright's project is picking up steam. We spoke to her about ambitions, aesthetics, and the elusive ground of the 'mildly erotic.' [read full interview]
Norman G. Finkelstein is a man of contradictions. He is the Brooklyn-born son of concentration camp survivors who has enraged American Jews by denouncing the cynicism of what he calls the 'Holocaust industry'. He is a polemicist and inveterate contrarian who demolishes his opponents by scouring footnotes and soberly checking facts. In this wide-ranging interview with Review 31 to mark the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Finkelstein turns his fire on the 'silly, sectarian, cultist politics' of the pro-Palestinian movement and defends Israel’s right to a peaceful existence as part of a two-state settlement. At the same time, he pulls no punches on the revived 'peace process', dismissing it as an attempt to impose a 'historic defeat' on the Palestinians. [read full interview]
Lars Iyer is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he is one of the country's foremost Maurice Blanchot scholars. He is also the real-life embodiment of the fictionalised narrator 'Lars' in his trilogy comprising the novels Spurious (2010), Dogma (2012) and, most recently, Exodus (2013), all published by Melville House. Here, he discusses the destitution of academic life under the conditions of contemporary neoliberal society; the exhaustion of thought and thinking; the relation between literature and philosophy; and what it means to be British and attempt to think. [read full interview]
Jennifer Mercieca is an associate professor at Texas A&M University. She writes about the history of rhetoric and discourse in America, from the revolution in her first book, Founding Fictions (University of Alabama Press, 2010), to Barack Obama in her second, an edited volume, The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations. Here, she discusses apathy, citizenship, and the role of rhetoric in political change. [read full interview]
Ned Beauman is a British novelist who lives in New York. He is 28. He’s had two novels published by Sceptre - Boxer, Beetle and The Teleportation Accident - and his third book, Glow, will be published in 2014. He was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists of 2013. His first two novels play with the conventions of historical fiction and jump between different time periods, but both are partly set in a 1930s German diaspora, and are concerned with the rise of Nazism. Charlotte Geater spoke to him about totalising systems and sympathetic characters in fiction. [read full interview]
Adam Kotsko is a professor at Shimer College in Chicago. He has written both academic theology and books on pop culture, including Awkwardness, which uses works including The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Knocked Up to examine the fundamentally social – and fundamentally awkward – nature of human existence. Kotsko is also the translator of Italian philosopher and historian Georgio Agamben, a regular blogger and tweeter of sardonic quips. [read full interview]
Rafik Schami was born in Syria in 1946 but fled to Germany in 1971, where he has been living in exile for the past 40 years. While in Germany he co-founded the literary groups Südwind and PoLiKunst to help popularize immigrant literature; he writes only in German, and his most recent novel, The Dark Side of Love, is translated by Anthea Bell. Schami has won numerous international awards and has been translated into 23 languages. He and Barbara Schwepke of Haus Publishing have recently founded Swallow Editions, an imprint dedicated to bringing Arabic literature to the West. [read full interview]
Alex Niven is a London-based writer and a recent addition to the editorial team at Zero Books. Zero was founded by Tariq Goddard, Mark Fisher and Matteo Mandarini at the tail end of the noughties; among its early titles were Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism, Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism and Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman. Alex's own book, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero in 2011. We talked to him about books, music, sport, and a politics ‘beyond Dalston’. [read full interview]
