“Interview” magazine & the Virtual Memories Show podcast

Two new interviews! In both of which my dumbphone has a cameo.

Christopher Bollen wrote up our conversation, which is published in Interview magazine, complete with a Warholesque photo illustration: Has Caleb Crain Written the First Occupy Wall Street Novel?”

And Gil Roth edited the audio of our conversation into episode 334 of his Virtual Memories Show podcast.

I had great fun talking to both!

Chicago Instagram residency, days 4 & 5: Chicago flashback and my mood board

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This is Caleb Crain, author of the novel "Overthrow," which comes out tomorrow from @VikingBooks. My husband says that people on the internet like mood boards, so here are some art postcards that hang over my writing desk. Above the bulletin board is a reproduction of Wilhelm Bendz's painting "Interior from Amaliegade with the Artist's Brothers," which I scissored out of the New York Times when it was reproduced there a few years ago. On the bulletin board proper, clockwise, from top left, and then snaking into the middle are postcards of the following: Frédéric Bazille's "Le Pêcheur à l'épervier," Jean-Étienne Liotard's "Trompe-l'oeil," Nicolas Poussin's "A Dance to the Music of Time," Félix Vallotton's "La Manifestation," Thomas Jones's "A Wall in Naples," Giovanni Bellini's "St. Francis in the Desert," Richard Diebenkorn's "Cityscape #1," William Scott's "Mackerel & Bottle," Claude Monet's "Les Roses," Luigi Ghirri's "Capri," a photo that I took of the Tower of London, and a medieval manuscript page with an illustration of a barge, taken from a Book of Hours made in Ghent in about 1480. I bought the Vallotton postcard at an exhibit of his work at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2013, about a year after I started writing "Overthrow," and we ended up using the image on the novel's dust jacket!

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Chicago Instagram residency day 3: A manuscript page

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Hi, this is Caleb Crain, on day 3 of my Instagram residency for the Chicago Review of Books. I'm a Luddite, as I confessed yesterday, and I always write fiction by hand (though I always write nonfiction on a computer—sorry, I can't explain the discrepancy). Here's a photo of a page of the manuscript for my new novel, "Overthrow," which comes out on Tuesday from @VikingBooks. It's from an early scene in the book, and I admit that I chose this page because the revisions on it look so impressively elaborate. (On many other pages, the marking up isn't so rococo.) My method is that the left-hand pages are for scribbles, and the right-hand pages are where I try to write fair copy, once I think I know where I'm going. But sometimes, like here, even on the right-hand page I'm still going for a wander. I start out writing double-line-spaced, but on this page the revisions have crept into the interstitial lines that would have been empty.

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