Interview with Kristina Born

And An Account of the CLMP Spelling Bee

At the Indie Books column at The Faster Times, there's an interview with a young word wrangling author Kristina Born by author Christopher Higgs who edits an incredibly cool site: Bright Stupid Confetti. Born's work is being published by YEAR OF THE LIQUIDATOR, a new press by Shane Jones and Blake Butler.

You can also view my piece on the CLMP Spelling Bee, where James Frey, Francine Prose, Michael Musto and Alex Kuczynski dazzled, got stumped, and mispelled some easy words, proving that it still makes me feel badly when big-name writers can't spell any better than non-reading humans. But all in "good fun." To be fair, many of the words "walked out" on were tough, which, I guess, is the point.

Original illustration by Andre da Loba.

Thomas Bernhard

Now He's Irritable, Now He's Not



If you like Thomas Bernhard, you will most likely like this interview with the Austrian writer at his most irritable, "Thomas Bernhard for Life," that Christopher Higgs at HTML Giant found in June.

In the video above, Thomas Bernhard seems not as irritable as he does in his books and interviews, but maybe that's because he's in Mallorca and he's trying to be different from the Mallorcans, who are very irritable. I can't say for sure, because I don't understand what he's saying.