This month we’re celebrating our illustrated books, with our Picture Perfect theme. Earlier this month we encouraged you to feast your eyes on the beautiful pages of Michael Cunningham’s dark and perverse collection of fairytales A Wild Swan and Other Tales and now, to lift your Friday, we have an interview with its illustrator, the amazing Yuko Shimizu.
When Barbara the Slut came into the office on submission, it was all we could do at 4th Estate not to print out multiple copies and throw them at passers by. The book, a collection of short stories so stark, so honest, so true and so unashamed, was published just two months ago and in its time, has garnered quite the online presence. We couldn’t help but reach out to Electric Literature to pilfer some of their amazing interview with Barbara‘s author Lauren Holmes… Read more…
Interview courtesy of our friends at FSG’s Work In Progress. For more information, interviews and extracts visit http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/
This year’s Book Expo America launched with a marquee conversation between Jonathan Franzen and critic Laura Miller. The two sat down in front of a packed crowd to discuss the writing of Franzen’s latest novel, Purity (coming September 1st). Their conversation ranged from the story of the book’s name to its eponymous protagonist, and to the importance of climbing one’s own mountains as a writer. The following transcription of the conversation has been edited for length. Read more…
July sees the publication of Yiyun Li’s short story A Sheltered Woman, winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2015. Auntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for a hundred and twenty-six families and looked after a hundred and thirty-one babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the hundred and thirty-second baby and his mother Chanel prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei’s life – a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment. Read more…
To celebrate the publication of Mainlander, 4th Estate were lucky enough to sit down with its author Will Smith (screenwriter of the Thick of It, VEEP and more). We spoke about The Thick of It, VEEP, the politics of the UK versus the US, working directly under the Messiah of satire Armando Iannucci, and the novel writing process. Listen to and download what we thought might be a fairly typical author interview, but very quickly descended into a laugh-a-minute chat about creativity, the anomaly that is Jersey, and accidentally writing feminist characters. Read more…
This autumn, we’re celebrating 30 years of 4th Estate, and with it, we’ve hand-picked 30 of our memorable, moving and award-winning titles. While remember, remembering the 5th of November, we’ll be looking beyond (or behind?) Bonfire Night, and reaching far back into our memories, touching on our specially selected classic 30 titles. Read more…
The long-awaited publishing of Consumed gave us a chance to interview its writer, the director and king of venereal horror, David Cronenberg. In this wonderfully in-depth yet satisfyingly broad interview, we speak about the book, Cronenberg’s processes, how similar writing prose is to directing, film, existentialism, the advancement of technology and, nausea. Read more…
