PowellsBooks.Blog

Describe your latest book.
Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono is a personal memoir in which I tell the story of how my own life and the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono intersected over a period of 45 years. Ever since I met them in London in 1968, I was fortunate to have been able to interview both of them at a number of significant moments in their lives, and my book uniquely focuses on John and Yoko as coequal partners both in life and in art — the two halves of one sky.

In 1968, I did the first extensive interview with John after he and Yoko had become lovers and collaborators. John would later remark to me that "Yoko is the most famous unknown artist — everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does"; and in 1970, with his encouragement and participation, I wrote one of the first in-depth profiles of Yoko in which I described her extraordinary life and explored her often-misunderstood work as a filmmaker, poet, singer-songwriter, and pioneer of performance and conceptual art. And ...

Describe your latest work.
My new young adult Finishing School series, set in the same world as the Parasol Protectorate only 25 years earlier, features a lady's seminary located in a giant caterpillar-like dirigible floating over Dartmoor in which young ladies are taught to finish everything — and everyone — as needed. There will be steampunk etiquette. There will be well-dressed espionage. There will be Victorian fake food. There will be flying mechanical sausage dogs named Bumbersnoot. The first book, Etiquette and Espionage, releases on February 5.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Let It Steep: Chronicles of a Wierdo between Tea Breaks

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?
These days I'm really into rereading some of my past favorites. It's like visiting old friends. I just went back to Sorcery and Cecelia, a deliciously fun and very polite romp by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Not unless you count going to Boston Worldcon to meet Tamora Pierce.

Describe the best breakfast ...

Describe your latest book.
My latest book — that is, my latest completed book — is Heat. Heat, simply put, is about all things hot. It is a natural sequel to my book Cold, really just a march up the thermometer from where Cold left off. But what a topic! It is warm bloodedness and fever, the first appearance of fire on earth, cooking, climate change, fuels like wood and peat and coal and oil, historical figures like Galileo Galilei and Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Captain James Cook, volcanoes, the sun, and the beginning of the universe. And it is a topic that let me wander in places I would have otherwise missed — ambling ill-equipped into deserts, stepping across recently hardened lava just inches above the earth's inner red glow, and walking barefoot over burning coals. It bound me to scientists like Faraday and Lavoisier and Tyndall. It gave me an excuse to taste crude oil and a reason to hike 70 miles to a site once coveted by Edward Teller, father of the ...

Describe your latest book.
Right now I have my hands in several pots, so to speak. I have just finished a nonfictional autobiographical work called The $60,000 Dog, a book about the critical role animals play in my life, in all our lives, even though we give it scant thought. The book traces my trajectory from a nine-year-old girl who finds a mysterious egg in the forest to a middle-aged woman contemplating crepuscular bats during bouts of insomnia. While the book tells the tales of swans, raccoons, horses, and more, its focus is on the relationship between humans and dogs, specifically my relationship to my own dogs who present me with many a moral and emotional quandary along the way. What does it mean, for instance, if my affection for my dogs is as deep as my affection for my family, my children? Does that make me psychologically warped, constricted? Or does it suggest a more elastic humanity, capable of embracing and loving life in its myriad forms? The book tussles with this question, and several others.

I'm also in the process of gathering and ordering almost ...

Describe your latest book.
Glittering Images, which took five years to write, is a concise survey of Western art, starting with Egyptian tomb paintings and ending with the digital revolution. There are 29 chapters, all illustrated in full color, which trace the evolving styles of art down the centuries from antiquity to modernism. The last chapter is on George Lucas's Revenge of the Sith, the sixth and most recent film made in the Star Wars series. I declare that its operatic climax on the volcano planet of Mustafar is far more powerful on the visual and emotional level than anything else in contemporary art.

Glittering Images was intended as a companion book to my last release, Break, Blow, Burn, which was a study of poetry aimed at the general audience. Today people are swamped with visual clutter — text messages, email, Twitter, flashing online ads, manically edited TV commercials. Glittering Images invites the reader to slow down and relearn how to see in a focused, stable, contemplative manner. I especially want to reach young people who have had little or no exposure to great art. The fine arts ...

What follows is a conversation between the book designer Peter Mendelsund and the author Mark Z. Danielewski.

Peter Mendelsund: Before we get into a discussion about the package for your new book, The Fifty Year Sword, I'd love to address some larger questions about the future of the physical book... OK?

One of the things I like about you, Mark, is that you embrace all formats. You are obviously invested in the book — the actual, tangible artifact — as well as being (from what you've told me) yea-saying about the opportunities presented by the ebook and other digital forms. Even more importantly, you seem to be interested in exploiting these forms, graphically, to their utmost extent.

Describe your latest book.
It is titled Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man, and it is coming out in May from Doubleday. This is the first ever autobiography of Clarence Birdseye, the man who developed the frozen food industry. Birdseye could be called a foodie in that he thought about food constantly. Every letter he wrote was describing a meal he had recently enjoyed or an interesting dish he had sampled. But, born in 1886, he was a 19th-century foodie. Born at the height of the industrial revolution, he believed that industry would make food wonderful. He constantly thought of ways to industrialize food. He even worked with farmers to make their products more suitable to industry. His dream was for high quality fresh food to be made available to everyone. He saw this as a growing movement in the world. He imagined his native New York food self-sufficient, growing its produce hydroponically on roof tops and freezing it to have throughout the year.

He was a curious man in both senses of the word, interested in absolutely everything, and in how to improve it. But ...

Describe your new book:
This book is the story of my life — the ups, the downs, and the music.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
When I was thinking about what to call this book, I went through a whole lot of different possibilities, but I just kept coming back to My Cross to Bear. It's what this book is all about.

How do you relax?
I've always found that nothing helps me kick back quite like music. When I throw on an old blues record — doesn't matter how many times I've heard it — it always manages to do the trick.

Describe the best breakfast of your life.
I can't say what it was, but I can say with almost absolute certainty that I ate it at the H&H Restaurant in Macon, Georgia. Ever since the start of the Allman Brothers in 1969, the H&H has been making the best meals around Macon.

What is your idea of absolute happiness?
Playing music with a group of incredible musicians — basically being on stage with the Allman Brothers.

Who's wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
Well, ...

Describe your latest book:
Right now, I've got a bunch of different things going on, most of them having to do with the interface of science and literature. I'm developing a show for HBO called Emoticons about punctuation that can turn into robots, but at the same time I'm doing some neuroscience research. It's about chemicals that get released in the brains of runners that make it impossible for them to not constantly tell other people they're runners. I'm also working on a new crime series where the books come out in reverse order so there's less stress on the reader. In book 14, which will be the first one to come out, all the characters are healthy and in their 80s. And this summer, I've got a nonfiction manga coming out about why so few people my age are named Connie.

Or are you asking about my new novel, Wild Thing? Which is all those things combined, but available in February.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Ideally "One-Man Bachelorette Party: The Shockingly Long, Happy, Successful, Revenge-Laden, Sexualized, ...

Describe your latest book.
In 1975 I was a naïve hippie. While working at my uncle's bar in Illinois, I met an apple farmer and three months later we were married. I fully expected to live this kind of back-to-nature, granola existence. Having babies. Growing and canning all of our food. Instead, I found myself swimming in pesticides and shunned by my new husband's family, living an isolated existence in a 400-square-foot house. The Orchard is told mainly through the eyes of my 20-something self. It's a fish-out-of water, up-close-and-personal examination of '70s and '80s farm culture from a raw perspective.

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
Scooby-Doo. Because I have the feeling he wouldn't be judgmental. Of course I'm talking about a purely platonic relationship.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I worked at a Levi's Strauss factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I sewed back pockets on jeans. You know that little red or orange logo? I sewed that too. Spread the fabric over machine's flat surface, pocket positioned at marks. Hit the gas with ...