My interview with Mark Leyner has been included in The Believer’s new anthology of writers talking with writers, Always Apprentices. I’m still very stunned at the company I’m keeping in this  book. You can buy it here at Amazon  or at an independent store near you.

Wherein we discuss reality TV as part of an ancient aesthetic form, Rodney Dangerfield, Gilles DeLeuze, and a Czech village named Syzygy.

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon DE

“Incredible…IQ84 meets CSI.” The Atlantic

“Brilliant, and refreshingly unsentimental.” The Guardian

The Composites includes 66 pages of character images from throughout literary history, full-color design, as well as  excerpts from: Herman Melville, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Victor Hugo, Bram Stoker, Gustave Flaubert,  J.-K Huysmans, and Thomas Mann.

All royalties from this book will be donated to Joyland Magazine. Since 2008 Joyland—funded only by donations and grants—has had a mandate to support and publish emerging authors from across North America and around the world.

This entire project has been a collaboration with Tumblr users and that collaboration has changed everything about myself as a writer and as a reader. For that, and making this project work, thank you. (And please keep sending the suggestions. The Composites will return next week after a brief vacation.)

Literary Identity: The Composites from Tumblr on Vimeo.

Earlier this month I spent an afternoon at the Tumblr office talking about characters, Tumblr-as-art platform and the digitization of literature with very smart, very wonderful people. The video from that day is now up at Storyboard. Thanks to videographer Ryan Jones and everyone at Tumblr for the invitation!

This came today. No online link, but I also had a talk with Jungle World.

But just in time for Bloomsday this weekend, I’m happy to announce an upcoming exhibition of The Composites at the Illuminations gallery of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. The all-digitally screened exhibition will run from January 28 to February 21, 2013 and include images from the site as well as exclusive composites taken from Irish literature.

I did create a “Buck Mulligan” image for this weekend and, yes, it turned out to look a bit like David Mitchell.

The Believer has run two excerpts, here and here, of my forthcoming interview with Mark Leyner. The full interview runs around 6 thousand words and covers not only his new novel The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but his early influences and his years spent script writing in between novels.  

I interviewed Sheila Heti for The Huffington Post about the 10^th anniversary edition of her first collection The Middle Stories and a little bit about her upcoming novel, How Should A Person Be? That and Leyner’s book were my favorite reads of the last year as both managed to scrape the barnacles off the idea of what a novel could be.

One of the more interesting facets of this project has been the speed at which it has been discovered and written about. I was juggling an interview schedule not a week after posting what I thought was going to be a slow burn participatory project—I was new to Tumblr and didn’t know if fellow Tumblrs would respond.

That meant I really didn’t have time to think about why I was doing the project much less why it was proving popular. It wasn’t until this week when I found myself getting my first full body airport scan that I started to grasp why The Composites found a place in culture so quickly, and internationally.

Here’s a breakdown:

US: People Magazine, The Atlantic, and CNET.

UK: Guardian and BBC.

International: Rue89, Stern, Slate France, Sky Italy, Lidovky (Czech Republic), and El Periodical (Spain).

In North America, technology and culture have been in a 10-year sprint to forensicize everyday life far beyond the need of basic law enforcement.  Internationally, of course, that has been the case much longer with Europe having to negotiate surveillance culture for decades. I think that theory is borne out by the fact that reality television wasn’t popular here until the mid-aughts.

Christian Bök called The Composites notably Ballard-esque (Vaughn from Crash was one of the first characters created) and riffing on that I’d also say that the combination of a law enforcement media and literature is a snapshot of inner space right at a time when literature is experiencing an ontological crisis. Writing’s struggle with digitization emulsifies well, it seems, with technology’s struggle with issues of privacy and security.

Where this goes from here, I don’t know. I will continue to take suggestions—1,000 and counting—and post one or two characters every week. I’ve really enjoyed collaborating with the readers on Tumblr, as they’ve dispelled the notions that the Internet fluent don’t read and that readers don’t like “unlikeable” characters.