The Paris Review has an interview with Gay Talese, the journalist who wrote Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - the quintessential New Journalism story. The interview is here, and well worth reading. One of the nuggets that emerges is that Talese writes his notes on shirt boards. The plan for Frank Sinatra Has A Cold (written on a shirt board) is below.

Mountbatten, The Falling Man etc...

Yesterday, I reviewed Timothy Knatchbull's memoir in the Sunday Times. He was 14 years old when the IRA planted a bomb on his family's boat in Ireland, injuring himself, his mother and father, and killing his twin brother, his grandmother, his grandfather - Lord Mountbatten - and an Irish teenager called Paul Maxwell. He writes well.

Talking to Colum McCann on Saturday - who has written a novel called Let the Great World Spin, which I will be writing about on Sunday - he reminded me of a wonderful piece in American Esquire shortly after 9/11 called The Falling Man worth 20 minutes of your time.

Sedaris

I took a copy of David Sedaris' When We Are Engulfed in Flames to Tehran in April. I remember reading it in cafes, waiting for my translator to turn up, giggling. Crybaby - a story about sitting next to a grieving hulk on a transatlantic flight - never fails to make me feel better. When a strange man from the secret service phoned my hotel room in the middle of the night, I took out Crybaby, read it again, and went back to sleep like - well - a baby.

There are many remarkable things about the way Sedaris writes. He is so poised, for a funny writer, a little like Alan Coren in the way that he squeezes so much joy from the mundane.

Anyway, he has a new piece, about Australia, in the New Yorker, which is not his best, and still very much better than almost anything else you will have read this weekend.

The Brazilian Joyce

In tomorrow's Sunday Times I have a piece about Clarice Lispector, a writer considered to be the Brazilian James Joyce, and a stone-cold fox to boot.

The unlovely ES Magazine

The unlovely ES magazine - home to lengthy features about the sons and daughters of people who used to be famous, and purveyor of the world's most baffling standfirsts - published an oustanding interview with the bonkers Heather Mills on Friday. My old pal Hermione Eyre did the work. It was so funny, coffee came out of my nose.

I particularly enjoyed this:

Heather fancies herself a plain talker, no airs, definitely no graces. There's a sign in her loo that says: 'If any items apart from toilet paper get dropped in here, the bog monster will reach out and grab your dick or punani!' 'You need to be real,' she says, enlarging on why she has never had trouble attracting men. 'Down-to-earth, not fussy, not pretentious. I'll carry boxes, I'll clean toilets. I peeled 260 potatoes the other Sunday. That's why my nails are gone.'

Kindle and the future of reading

Loved this piece by Nicholas Baker on Kindle, and its greyness.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization.

You just don't get that kind of conversation in London anymore.

Sunday Times Magazine

I have a piece in the Sunday Times Magazine about Torquay, and the British seaside holiday. See it here with lovely photographs by Leo Maguire.