Authors and Editors in Conversation

Authors and Editors in Conversation Interrogation: Jeff VanderMeer FSG Originals

In Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, the book's protagonist - known to readers as simply "the biologist" - prides herself on her evasiveness under interrogation: "Tell me about your parents. What are they like?" she would ask, a classic opening gambit. "Normal," I replied, trying to smile while thinking distant, impractical, irrelevant, moody, useless. . . . "What are your earliest memories?" "Breakfast." A stuffed puppy toy I still have today. Putting a magnifying glass up to an ant lion's sinkhole. Kissing a boy and making him strip for me because I didn't know any better. Falling into a fountain and banging my head; the result, five stitches in the emergency room and an abiding fear of drowning. In the emergency room again when Mom drank too much, followed by the relief of almost a year of sobriety. Of all my answers, "Breakfast" annoyed her the most. Lucky for us, Jeff is a little more cooperative than his characters when it comes to Q and A. To celebrate the launch of Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach Trilogy, he's answered some questions from his editor, Sean McDonald. They talk about Jeff's inspiration and his influences, how the setting here relates to Earth as we know it, and an exciting movie deal. We're happy to report that not a single answer here is "Normal." Or "Breakfast." Read on...

"Read. Then we'll talk." Matthew Olshan Book Keeping

When I was fifteen, my maternal grandmother, who hosted a lively reading group in Washington, D.C., handed me J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and said, "Read this." I was perched on the uncomfortable Wormley sofa in her living room, which she'd decorated in the late fifties along scrupulously modern lines. Everything was rectilinear and muted - a contrast to the bright confusion of perfumes and colognes that still hung in the air from the previous night's Great Books discussion... Read on...