Hugh McGuire has been building tools and communities to bring books onto the open web since about 2005. He's the founder of LibriVox.org (free public domain audiobooks, made by volunteers from around the world), Pressbooks (an open source book publishing platform built on WordPress). He's also Executive Director of the Rebus Foundation , a non-profit that is building the infrastructure to support books on the open web, by: building a new collaborative model for creating and publishing Open Educa...
Aug 27, 2018•50 min
Series: Biblio File in France Kickshaws is a private press founded in Paris in 1979 by John Crombie, and Sheila Bourne who often produces artwork for the books. Together they have hand-printed more than 150 small books. The design, typography and materials used to create Kickshaws publications are unusual. As a result it's difficult to define exactly what they are. Among other things, they display a wide range of type-faces and designs, letterpress printing in multiple colours, and unusual forma...
Aug 20, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Series: Biblio File in France Maylis Besserie is a French radio broadcaster. She works for France Culture , the French national cultural radio station of the Radio France group, where she has produced documentaries and live programming about cultural issues since 2003. Over the years she has interviewed many artists and authors. She currently produces a summer program called la grande table d’été. I met Maylis at her home in Paris. We talked, among other things, about the perfect author intervie...
Aug 13, 2018•57 min
Series: Biblio File in France Krista Halverson is director of the newly founded Shakespeare & Company publishing house and editor of the first-ever history of the bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart . Previously, she was the managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story , a magazine of fiction and art, published by Francis Coppola and headquartered in San Francisco. I met with Krista at the bookstore to talk about the history of Shakespeare...
Aug 07, 2018•1 hr 11 min
Born in 1931, Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry. This from Wikipedia: Technicians of the Sacred (1968), which signalled the beginning of an approach to poetry that Rothenberg, in collaboration with George Quasha , named “ethnopoetics,” went beyond the standard collection of folk songs to include visual and sound poetry and the texts and scenarios for ritual events. Some 150 pages of commentar...
Aug 03, 2018•40 min
Series: Biblio File in France A recent fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Berlin) and visiting researcher at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches Centre-Européennes (Sorbonne-Paris IV), Daniel Medin joined the faculty of The American University of Paris in January 2010. He has taught German, English and comparative literature at Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis and the Free University Berlin. He is associate director of the Center for Writers and Trans...
Jul 30, 2018•42 min
Stephen Weiner is an award winning writer about comics & graphic novels. He has been writing about comics since 1992, and is the most recognized librarian responsible for promoting graphic novel collections in public libraries & bookstores. He is the director of the Maynard Public Library in Maynard, Massachusetts. His books include: 100 Graphic Novels for Public Libraries, The 101 Best Graphic Novels , Faster than a Speeding Bullet: the Rise of the Graphic Novel, The Will Eisner Compani...
Jul 30, 2018•25 min
John Ralston Saul was elected President of International PEN in October 2009 (his term ended in 2015). His award-winning essays and novels have had an impact on political and economic thought in many countries. Declared a “prophet” by TIME magazine, he is included in the prestigious Utne Reader’s list of the world’s 100 leading thinkers and visionaries. His works have been translated into 22 languages in 30 countries. He has received many national and international awards for his writing, most r...
Jul 27, 2018•27 min
Series: Biblio File in France Economist Jean-Guy Boin is the former Director General of the International Bureau of French Publishing ( www.bief.org ), the international promotion organization of French books. He has held various positions in the book sector: teacher and trainer, researcher specializing in publishing economics, general administrator of a publishing house of literature and human sciences, head of the department "book economics" department at the Ministry of Culture and Communicat...
Jul 23, 2018•36 min
Series: Biblio File in France Héloïse d'Ormesson is a French publisher who founded a publishing house that bears her name. She studied comparative literature at Yale University in the United States, where she landed her first job in publishing, and then returned to France to work at Flammarion as director of foreign literature, and subsequently as an editor at Denoël , Laffont , and within the Gallimard group of companies. In 2004, she founded Editions Héloïse d'Ormesson with her partner Gilles ...
Jul 16, 2018•58 min
Series: Biblio File in France Pierre Astier and Laure Pecher are co-founders of their own eponymous literary and film agency . Pierre represents mainly French-speaking authors and publishers. After working in the art world for ten years, he created the quarterly short stories magazine Le Serpent à Plumes in 1988. In 1993, together with Claude Tarrène, he set up a publishing house of the same name focusing on contemporary fiction. Laure represents both authors and publishers. After having studied...
Jul 09, 2018•58 min
" Ashley Obscura is a Canadian-Mexican writer, publisher and editor. She is the author of the poetry collections Ambient Technology and I Am Here (Metatron, 2014) and four digital poetry projects: LIGHGHT, How to Be A Rainbow, Aura Halo and Oh, Inverted Universe. The founder and managing editor of Metatron Press , Obscura currently lives in Montreal, Quebec where she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Professional Writing." We met at her new offices in Montreal and talked about, am...
Jul 02, 2018•56 min
Robert Weaver (1928–2008) was an influential, well-loved Canadian editor and broadcaster. He was born in Niagara Falls and educated at the University of Toronto, and worked at the CBC where he created a series of radio shows that featured then unknown Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Leonard Cohen. In 1956 Weaver founded The Tamarack Review, a long-standing Canadian literary magazine. Over the course of his career, Weaver edited more t...
Jun 25, 2018•50 min
Glenn Horowitz is an agent in the sale and placement of culturally significant archives to research institutions throughout the United States. Authors, artists, musicians, designers, and photographers he has represented include Norman Mailer, James Salter, Deborah Eisenberg, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Grushkin, the Magnum Group, Nadine Gordimer, and Danny Fields. I met Glenn in his Manhattan offices. We talked about, among other things, the imaginative packaging of authors' a...
Jun 18, 2018•52 min
Jonathan Galassi is the author of three collections of poetry and a novel, Muse (2015) set in the publishing world. He is also president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and an eminent translator of Italian poetry. We met in his New York office (with the window open) to talk about, among other things, book publishing, Stanley Unwin; convincing, moving, artful voices; the capacity to hear; reading, aesthetic response and shrewdness; Tom Friedman; confidence, style, overpaying for boo...
Jun 11, 2018•49 min
" Jonas Hassen Khemiri is one of the most important writers of his generation in Sweden. When his debut novel, One Eye Red (Ett öga rött) was published in 2003, Khemiri’s eccentric and imaginative prose made a huge splash and reached an audience far beyond traditional literary circles. The book was awarded the Borås Tidning Award for Best Literary Debut Novel and also became an enormous bestseller. Khemiri’s equally original second novel, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger (Montecore – en unik ...
Jun 05, 2018•59 min
" Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his PhD, he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publications, particularly The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books ." His multi-award winning books in...
May 30, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Adam Gopnik has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism and of the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic. We met in Montreal at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival to discuss his book At the Strangers' Gate . Among other things we talk about bookshops, art in the 1980s, the art critic Rob...
May 25, 2018•53 min
Matthew Zapruder is a poet, editor, translator, and professor. He earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Sun Bear (2014), Come On All You Ghosts (2010), The Pajamaist (2006), and American Linden (2002). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residen...
May 18, 2018•1 hr 36 min
Anita Engles is the Executive Director of the American Bookbinders Museum based in San Francisco, California. It's the only museum of its kind in North America celebrating and exploring the culture and tools of bookbinders and bookbinding from its earliest forms through the changes and innovations of the industrial revolution. In addition to the craft and artistry of binding, it focuses on the stories of the men, women, and children who worked in binderies. We sat down in the bookstore at the mu...
May 14, 2018•21 min
Andrew Hoyem is the creative spirit of the Arion Press. He's a published poet and exhibited artist who occasionally includes his own writings and drawings in Arion books. The concepts for all Arion publications originate with Hoyem, who chooses literary texts, commissions new work from writers and artists he admires, and designs the books, including their bindings and typography. In the Press's livre d'artiste series, he has worked closely with distinguished artists, many of whom come to the Pre...
May 07, 2018•44 min
Kris Arnett is the proprietor of Kona Bay Books which is located in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. She also owns Hilo Bay Books in, you guessed it, Hilo, which is located on the other side of the Big Island of Hawaii. I met with Kris recently at the Kona location to discuss bookstores. Among other things we talk about books touching everything and everyone, barbers, the Upstart Crow* bookshop in San Diego, Borders, driving across the Big Island, big box stores, suspense and romance, excitemen...
May 04, 2018•31 min
David Bull is an ukiyo-e woodblock printer and carver who heads the Mokuhankan ukiyo-e studio in Asakusa, Tokyo. Born in Britain, Bull moved to Canada at age 5 and lived there until 1986 when he relocated with his family to Tokyo to pursue ukiyo-e. He first discovered Japanese woodblocks while browsing an art gallery in Toronto at age 29. Intrigued, he started making his own prints without formal training. He is known for his work on the Ukiyo-e heroes kickstarter crowd-funding project together ...
Apr 30, 2018•58 min
Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic novelist. He won the Nordic Council's Literary Prize for his novel 'The Blue Fox' (the Nordic countries' equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) and the novel 'From The Mouth Of The Whale' was shortlisted for both the IMPAC Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His novel 'Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was' was awarded every Icelandic literature prize, among them the 2013 Icelandic Literary Prize. His latest published work is the de...
Apr 25, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Alice Notley is a poet whose work has influenced generations of poets; she is considered a pioneering voice on topics such as motherhood, feminism, disobedience and domestic life. Notley has experimented widely with poetic form and has written a book of criticism, a play, and a biography. She has also edited three publications. Her collage art appeared in Rudy Burckhardt's film "Wayward Glimpses" and her illustrations have appeared on the cover of numerous books, including some of her own. With ...
Apr 17, 2018•1 hr 15 min
Eli MacLaren is an Assistant Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal. Subjects taught include Canadian poetry and fiction; First Nations writers; bibliography and the history of the book. We met to discuss an article he wrote for Canadian Poetry entitled ‘Significant Little Offerings: The Origin of the Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books, 1925–26'. We talk, among other things, about the literary publishing environment in Canada during the 1920s, Lorne Pierce's idealistic nation building, ris...
Apr 09, 2018•42 min
Jason Guriel is a poet and critic whose work has appeared in such publications as Poetry, Slate, Reader's Digest, The Walrus, Parnassus, Canadian Notes & Queries, The New Criterion, and PN Review. His poetry has been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, and in 2007, he was the first Canadian to receive the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine. He won Poetry's Editors Prize for Book Reviewing in 2009. His essays and reviews are collected in The Pigheaded Soul (The Porcupi...
Apr 02, 2018•47 min
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator. Born in Cardiff in 1937 she has written more than ten books of poetry. In 2008 she was appointed the third National Poet of Wales ( Ifor ap Glyn took over in 2016). In 2010 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, only the second Welsh person to receive the honour. In 2011 she was made a member of the Gorsedd of Bards and in 2012 she received the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award. We met sever...
Mar 26, 2018•15 min
I met with Professor Nick Mount at his University of Toronto offices in "Toronto" to discuss his book Arrival, The Story of CanLit . We talk among other things about the pronunciation of Toronto, the non-Toronto-centricity of his book, Alistair MacLeod, the CanLit boom, early Canadian writers publishing first in the United States, novels that are so bad they're good, the 1960s, history turning into myth, academic versus commercial success, reviews of the book, Margaret Atwood's Survival , prospe...
Mar 19, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Zachariah Wells is the author of three collections of poetry ( Unsettled , Track & Trace , and Sum ), as well as a children’s book Anything But Hank , with Rachel Lebowitz), and a collection of critical essays . He is also the editor of Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets and The Essential Kenneth Leslie . His poems have been translated into Bosnian and Spanish and adapted into operatic songs by composer Erik Ross. He lives with his family in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We talk, heartily, here about C...
Mar 12, 2018•1 hr 15 min
