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SF Signal Interviews Brian D'Amato

SF Signal: Mulholland is reprinting Beauty this month and it debuted in 1992 to rave reviews! Will you tell us a bit about the novel?
D'Amato: We call it a literary thriller about cosmetic surgery. SF Signal readers will recognize a more precise term, “biopunk,” but that term wasn’t around when it came out.
SF Signal: When you write, is there anything in particular that you need to have in order to get the creative juices flowing¸ or can you write anywhere? Will you tell us a bit about your writing process?
D'Amato: As I recall, and I don’t recall it too well, most of the juice-flowers I used in the Beauty days were illegal…but as for my current writing process…I’d say yes, one should write anywhere.

vintageanchor:

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
—The Raven (1844), Edgar Allan Poe

openroadmedia:

Here’s to the crazies among us.

newyorker:

The Paradise of the Library: James Salter on Jacques Bonnet’s 40,000 volume personal library, and his new book “Phantoms on the Bookshelves”: http://nyr.kr/Pqz8oc

A tide is coming in and the kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years, of being washed away. The physical possession of a book may become of little significance. Access to it will be what matters, and when the book is closed, so to speak, it will disappear into the cyber. It will be like the genie—summonable but unreal. Bonnet’s private library, however, comprised of more than forty thousand volumes, is utterly real.

Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W.H. Auden. The Tale of Mr Toad. Howard’s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.

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—	Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home (via cystallineambermoments)

Things have changed. The world has evolved. A punch in the mouth ain’t what it used to be.

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—	Joe R. Lansdale, Doggone Justice