The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

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 Byzantine philology, she worked for five years at Le Serpent à Plumes as rights manager. In 2002, she started publishing classics with Les Classiques du Monde at Editions Zoé (Geneva). The three of us met in their garden in Le Perche, France where we talked about, among other things, the role of the literary agent, writers festivals and conferences, finding the best most passionate publishers, Archipelago Books and Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, African authors in France, paradise near Paris, commissioning books, writing workshops, espresso, differences between French and American agents, Eastern European markets, the invasion of American authors, lack of diversity, resistance by French publishers to agents, film rights, musical chairs, translation, author-agent relations, differences between pitching publishers and producers, Andrew Wylie's client list, Aslı Erdoğan, passion and luck, Patrice Nganang, and the most exciting part of the job.   

"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, among other things, smart phones, Saskatoon and open skies, Montreal and multi-culturalism, Concordia University's Creative Writing Program, others' doubt as good ammunition, creating space, new forms of digital poetry, Alt Lit Gossip, how the Internet benefits upstart publishers and poets, Wild "This is happening whether you like it or not" literary readings, making poetry accessible, ambition among Millennials, "Follow your dreams" advice, Rupi Kaur, Instagram poetry, nostalgia, relationships with authors, sex in your twenties, menstruation, vulnerability, poetry and freedom, the importance of publishing poets at the start of their careers, teaching poetry, and mentors. 

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 than a dozen anthologies. In 1979 he launched the annual CBC Literary Prize.   Elaine Kalman Naves is an award-winning Quebec writer, journalist, editor and lecturer. She's the author of Robert Weaver, Godfather of Canadian Literature. In discussing it we talk about, among other things, Niagara Falls, Toronto, spinster aunts, the love of books and reading, bank jobs, the University of Toronto, Northrop Frye, abortion, CBC Radio, 'Canadian Short Stories,' editing Alice Munro, understatement, anthologies, The Tamarack Review, the popularity of the Anthology radio program, Margaret Atwood, pipe rituals, drinking, Robert Fulford, listening, editorial and critical standards, honesty, the CBC Literary Prize and William Notman.

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' archives, the maturing of research institutions, kaboosing like collections, natural sympathies, technology coming on line, letterpress printing as a nostalgic gasp, the shift to digital, Bob Dylan's archive, the Woodie Guthrie Center, the transformation of Tulsa, the Kaiser Foundation, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Watergate and the University of Texas, the importance of the creative process, New Criticism, identity politics, the melting of textual studies, the growing importance of ancillary material; Bernard Malamud, Bob Giroux, Strand Bookstore, envy, small versus major research institutes, Michael Ondaatje, Canada's lack of interest in its writers' papers, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Conrad Black, FDR, and archives as a non-traditional market. 

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 books, reader loyalty, Faber & Faber, Bob Giroux, T.S. Eliot, Mitizi Angel, Elizabeth Bishop, the Random House system, the magical aura of FSG, Giacomo Leopardi, editors becoming publishers, Roger Straus, conglomerates, paperback rights, Hothouse, old maids and cocksmen, Bob Gotlieb, pertinent questions, Marilynne Robinson, fragmented culture and disturbing politics, Trump taking the air out of the publishing business, Rupi Kaur and Instagram poets, diverse cultures, the average age of The New Yorker reader, Amazon reviews, and the rewards of owning books. 

"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 tiger), was awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize, and won Swedish Radio’s Award for Best Novel. Upon its US publication by Alfred A Knopf, The New York Times Book Review dubbed the novel “wondrous.” His latest best-selling novel Everything I Don’t Remember (Allt jag inte minns), was published in the fall of 2015 and translated from Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles the following year.  I met Jonas in Montreal at the Blue Met Literary Festival. We talk here about the latest novel, self-publishing, writing first novels, the comedy and tragedy scale, ambivalence, George Saunders, tenderness that doesn't fall into cliche, filtering favourite authors, voices, plays, truth, perspective, Nietzsche, disappearing, Stockholm, Nordic Noir, American accents, love and cliche, writing poorly really well, Karl Ove Knausgård, Proust, sleepwalking, memory, speed, language as power, writing, and uncertainty. 

"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 include The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006); a memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999); two collections of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2008) and Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture (2012); a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays (2002); a two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), which included the first English translation of the poet’s “Unfinished Poems. Daniel was in Montreal attending the Blue Met Literary Festival when we met to talk about, among other things, his book, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017); the Greek view of the universe; disasters; Odysseus being a jerk; readers and texts; Homer, The Odyssey and anthropology; the fluidity of human identity, and its multiplex, relational nature; time; bored Gods; death and meaning; fathers; New Criticism; autobiography in criticism; being intelligent and interesting versus being right; robots and objectivity; self-knowledge and literature; open heart surgery; stupid good reviews; why memoir is such a strong form; Oprah and shared emotion; Cavafy; preserving culture; crazy families; truth, tragedy and myths; the Titanic, the Kennedys and glamour. 

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 Robert Hughes, George Soros, ambition, Jeff Koons, morality versus mortality, value and money, public and privates selves, monstrous helium balloon personalities, blue rooms and big stores, our sons and daughters and their definition of success, the contradictory impulses of interesting art, the critical calling, Richard Avedon and charismatic mentors, wives, love and Mordecai Richler, Mr. Sensitivo and repertory cinema, married sex and The Civil War, fathers' advice, intellectuals, a benevolent universe, and the secret of writing. 

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 Residency Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With Brian Henry, he co-founded Verse Press, which later became Wave Books. He is now an editor with the firm.  He's also a guitarist in the rock band The Figments and an associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program in Creative Writing.  His most recent book is Why Poetry (2017). We met in his office in Oakland, California to discuss it, and, among other things, Joseph Conrad, life expanding beyond the ordinary, the material of language, painters and paint, troubling representation, the absurdity of using inconsistency to critique a poem; surprise, truth and beauty; genre arguments; poetry being found in translation; strange worlds and words; clarity and the best of intentions; exploring things beyond the bounds of propriety; Terrance Hayes; Keats's 'To Autumn' and Tom Paulin's interpretation of it; sleepwalking and defamiliarization; revealing and making new meaning; Shakespeare; the scariness of silence; being heard and answered; the influence and talent of Frank O'Hara; poets as archivists of language; the vibration of words; the debatability of the colour green; literal reading; perfume advertisements; the death of those close to you; helping people to make their lives better; and making poems that are worth reading.  

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 museum after I had gotten a great tour of the place from docent Madeleine Robins. We talk, among other things, about the process and human experience of bookbinding, the book as IT, the industrial revolution, the tools and unique equipment housed at the museum, funding, the special collection of publisher's bindings, designers, temporary exhibits, founder Tim James, preserving and telling the story of the craft of bookbinding, keeping history alive, artist books, the book arts, and places the literary tourist should visit when in San Francisco.