Now hear this: Martin Amis on "The Bat Segundo Show"

This is a great interview if you want to feel your eyebrows shooting up approximately once every 10 minutes. I am weirdly fascinated with Amis and will probably chase that down, but I don't trust him at all when he says (in this interview) he loves all his characters. Nope!

Reading on the Road: If I could escape, I would but first of all let me say

As you read this I'm packing myself on a bus to Washington D.C. for a few days. There will be many more weekend trips after this, but there won't be any more this summer.

I'm taking two much anticipated fall reads, Emma Straub's LAURA LAMONT'S LIFE IN PICTURES and Martin Amis' LIONEL ASBO STATE OF ENGLAND. (That latter title... such cojones.) And I'm bringing a paperback of Charity Shumway's TEN GIRLS TO WATCH that the good people at Atria sent me. I had seen the author's name around and was trying to figure out why it looked familiar -- turns out we were classmates in a summer course a few years ago. So, that's cool!

“Is Mitt Romney electable?” he continued. “On the face of it, he looks presidential and he’s not stupid. But he lets himself down hideously whenever he has a victory. He looks as if he’s had five grams of coke — he’s shaking with a power rush. And that was always the most impressive thing about Obama: how he didn’t let that happen to himself. As if he didn’t feel it.”
--Martin Amis for political pundit 2012

Reading on the Road: Martin Amis edition

"Junk novels were sold in airports. People in airports bought and read junk novels. Junk novels were about people in airports, inasmuch as junk novels needed airports to shift their characters round the planet, and airports served, in junk novels, as the backdrop to their partings, chance encounters, reunions and trysts. Some junk novels were _all_ about airports. Some junk novels were even _called_ things like AIRPORT. Why then, you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Movies based on junk novels were, of course, heavily reliant on the setting of the airport. So why wasn't one always seeing, at airports, junk novels being made into movies? Perhaps there really was a whole other airport, called, perhaps, Junk Novel Airport, or with a fancier name like Manderley International Junk Novel Airport, where they did them all... Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport."
--from THE INFORMATION

Via Things I Ate That I Love: Penguin's new Ink series gives old books new covers designed by tattoo and poster artists. I had seen that edition of THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM around but hadn't realized where it came from. I think this one is my favorite even though I haven't read the book yet, it's just so garish.