‘Mother Tongue Apparatus Tell Me What To Say’ – Alan Kelly interviews Beat the Dust’s Melissa Mann
‘It’s one of the downsides of being self-employed and a northerner; we like to graft. A motto in my family growing up was ‘do the work first’, the idea being that having finished your business, you can then enjoy yourself guilt-free. The flaw in this concept, of course is that there’s always work to be done.’ Alan Kelly interviews Beat the Dust’s Melissa Mann…
‘The fact is The Humbling is a fine, short novel’ – The Humbling by Philip Roth
The book that The Humbling most closely resembles is 1990’s Deception – in which two lovers engage in an adulterous affair largely through dialogue a la Manuel Puig – which demonstrates to me, if nothing else, this isn’t a late flowering digression from Roth’s career but rather a novel that fits within the canon.