Link Roundup: Author Interviews and Publishing News

1. ABC Australia’s “The Book Show” recently interviewed Jason Anthony about his eight years in Antarctica. Jason wrote about his time there in “The Heartless Immensity,” featured in our current issue.

2. VFH Radio commissioned a brief feature about Binh Dahn and Robert Schultz’s paired chlorophyl photographs and poems, which were published in our winter issue. Their collaborative work honors the victims of the Khmer Rouge through an unusual method of printing their portraits. You can listen here:

[podcast]http://www.vqronline.org/media/2009/binhdahn.mp3[/podcast]

3. NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt says poets don’t mind the recession, what with already being poor. Neither do the folks running small poetry presses, since their books are money losers, no matter the economy. I have to suspect this comes as cold comfort to poets.

4. Farrar, Straus & Giroux VP Elisabeth Sifton isn’t sure that books as we know them can survive the book trade’s poor decisions and competition from the web:

I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.

5. Julien Bousac has depicted the Palestinian territories as a nation of islands by rendering Israeli territory as water, as featured on the always-excellent Strange Maps. Bousac emphasizes that “[t]he map is not about ‘drowning’ or ‘flooding’ the Israeli population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines, even less a suggestion of how to resolve the conflict.” We’ll have more on this topic in our summer issue, which comes out July 1.

6. Royal Dutch Shell is on trial for the execution of a Nigerian critic, in addition to paying Nigerian troops to commit human rights abuses on Shell’s behalf. The trial begins in New York next week. John Ghazvinian wrote about the clash between Nigerians and multinational oil companies in “The Curse of Oil,” in our Winter 2007 issue.