Do what they say you couldn’t. Create your own terminology. My writing is a portrait. A debacle. An admission. Romanticizing bliss, ills. Bizarre friends, torn Ideals. How would you describe Cambodia? Les Cook: A puzzle missing a piece. Cambodia can bring a person to madness or settle them. Cambodian people are the most forgiving people… Read More »When asked what I follow/believe, my answer is easy. ‘Les Cook’

In this wide-ranging interview, Beauvoir discusses her views on the intersection of philosophy and political activism Interview: John Gerassi Gerassi. It’s now about twenty-five years since The Second Sex was published. Many people, especially in America, consider it the beginning of the contemporary feminist movement. Would you … Beauvoir. I don’t think so. The current feminist movement, which really started about five… Read More »Interview with Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex 25 years later

This interview, entitled “Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter,”  was published in 1967  in the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur on April 5. It was conducted by Guy Dumur.  Posted to Reddit, the source of the translation is not cited. However, a translation of the same interview exists in “Desert Islands: and Other Texts, 1953–1974.” Deleuze discusses the… Read More »“Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter,” Interview with Gilles Deleuze

Günter Gaus (1929–2004) conducted a series of interviews with prominent political and cultural figures for the German television stations ZDF and SFW between 1963 and 1973. After withdrawing from the series to serve as the permanent representative of the Federal Republic of Germany to the GDR, he resumed his interviews in 1984, albeit in a… Read More »Günter Gaus, “Conversation with Hannah Arendt,” from the Series Zur Person (1964)

Accommodate or confront? Either reaction allows rightwing populism to set the political agenda, argues Jürgen Habermas in interview. The Left must regain the initiative and offer a credible response the destructive forces of unbridled capitalism. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik: After 1989, all the talk was of the ‘end of history’ in democracy and the… Read More »Jürgen Habermas on the emergence of the authoritarian/populist leadership and the new global disorder

PETER SLOTERDIJK is one of the most controversial thinkers in the world. From 2001 to 2015, he was the rector of the State Academy of Design at Karlsruhe, Germany, where he has been a professor of philosophy and media theory since 1992. From 1989 to 2008, he was director of the Institute for Cultural Philosophy… Read More »A Messenger of the Rope: In Conversation with Peter Sloterdijk

Barbara Cassin is a distinguished French philosopher and philologist who was awarded the Grand prix de philosophie by the Académie Française in 2012. The interview below is a companion piece to “More Than One Language ,” an essay by Cassin on the value of multilingualism published in the March 2017 issue of e-flux journal. I have heard… Read More »The power of bilingualism: Interview with Barbara Cassin, French philosopher and philologist

Pierre Lévy is one of the world’s leading thinkers, not only in the vast area of cyberculture, but also in the fundamental field of knowledge and its processes. He was essentially the first to focus research on collective intelligence when it became a determining factor in the competitiveness, creativity and human development of knowledge-based societies.… Read More »Interview with Pierre A. Lévy, French philosopher of collective intelligence

Michel Onfray is widely acknowledged to be one of France’s most prominent thinkers. A self described ‘Anarchist Hedonist’ he is an original and important philosopher who has worked within multiple domains of Continental and French philosophy. He is also an active political commentator who holds strong opinions on matters of geopolitics. This interview with him… Read More »Interview with French Philosopher Michel Onfray

Portrayal—if we take the word at its origin, to draw or to paint, to depict in words—may well be the aim of any novelist. Few have mastered portrayal the way Heather O’Neill has. In O’Neill’s novels, clusters of words move across the page the way tiny black spiders might dance across the keys of a forgotten… Read More »“A wit that helped them survive”: An Interview with Heather O’Neill

The Canadian writer made his name bringing intellectual sparkle to everyday subjects, and his new book – about how strangers interact with each other – is no exception Curated from The Guardian By Sean O’Hagan In the flesh, Malcolm Gladwell is exactly as I imagined him to be: engaging, polite, dauntingly cerebral and supremely self-assured in that… Read More »Malcolm Gladwell: ‘I’m just trying to get people to take psychology seriously’

By Lee Yew Leong Curated from Asymptote Restless after the release in 1996 of his first novel, Self, which he likened to “the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team,” Yann Martel embarked for Bombay to begin work on a novel set in Portugal, funded by a grant from the Canada Council for… Read More »Yann Martel shares Canadian fiction recommendations, and details his relationship to his translators

Alice Munro reacts to being described as ‘our Chekhov’, and discusses why she chooses to write stories that violate the discipline of the short story format and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. Curated from Bookbrowse What draws you to short stories as opposed to novels? What do you find that the shorter… Read More »An interview with Alice Munro

Margaret Atwood has been writing with insight and wit about this world, and the world maybe to come, for more than 60 years. On 21 July 2010, Andrew Tate found the novelist, poet and critic online and on form in Toronto. Recently, your fiction has emphasised the urgency of the environmental problems we face. Can you recall… Read More »Margaret Atwood: “Readers don’t like being preached to”

By Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times The situation was so incongruous I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Here I was at one of those New York “press openings” for a new movie. The format was pretty standard. A hotel ballroom was filled with a half-dozen round tables, and each table… Read More »Harold Pinter talks about his play ‘Betrayal’ and why ‘Pinteresque’ is indefinable to him

The following conversation took place at the Sorbonne university, during the ‘Arcadias’ conference co-organised in October 2011 by the universities of Paris-Sorbonne and the Sorbonne Nouvelle. The event was organised by Professor Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Dr Julie Vatain and chaired by Elisabeth Angel-Perez, Julie Vatain and Liliane Campos. Elisabeth Angel-Perez: There is no need to introduce… Read More »Tom Stoppard on intellectual pleasure, the bifurcation between the theory and the practice of theatre, and the unity of chaos

Here, award-winning writer, poet and playwright Jackie Kay is interviewed by fellow acclaimed writer Ali Smith. Read on two explore what two literary greats have to say on the many fascinating themes in Jackie’s novel Trumpet. By Ali Smith How do you feel and what do you think about Trumpet now, nearly twenty years on? How do you… Read More »Ali Smith interviews her close friend Jackie Kay about writing, jazz and the power of art in her novel ‘Trumpet’

By Freya Wooding Freya Wooding (FW). Your work draws upon sources from a wide range of the arts: other literature, music, visual art, and so on, and I’d like to start by talking about the continual presence of visual art in your work. What is it that attracts you to keep going back to write about… Read More »‘I Don’t Know Anything About Art’: An Interview with Ali Smith

By JOHN FREEMAN For 17 years, England’s most daring novelist has lived in a white terraced house at the end of a quiet block in South London, across the street from a housing estate. The flight path to Heathrow steadily dribbles planes down the horizon. It’s a Friday afternoon in August, the air creamy and… Read More »It’s not belief; It’s very much jerry-rigged structures of things you can depend upon just to get you to the next ravine. WILL SELF