Interviews, etc.

I’m trying really hard to avoid the Clinton Orgy of Coverage because, well, it’s kind of boring. So instead I offer the following:

Ray Conlogue seems to be the Globe & Mail’s pointman for all this literary of late (Rebecca Caldwell, where did you go?) as he talks to Alain de Botton (who’s 34??? That young? I had no idea) and Patrick McGrath.

The Telegraph does their usual delayed-tactics update and offer up a plethora of interviews with Chang-Rae Lee, Diana Middlebrook, and Nadeem Aslam.

Writing for the movie-centric site The Trades, Scott Juba interviews Leslie Silbert about her Renaissance-flavored debut THE INTELLIGENCER and, unsurprisingly, who she’d want to play the protagonists, PI/spy Kate Morgan.

Maurice Gee is the latest novelist to be honored with a doctorate, this from the University of Auckland.

More folks are remembering Canadian publishing titan Jack McClelland, gathering yesterday at Toronto’s super-swanky Granite Club to fete him with booze and hors d’ouevres.

RIP, Mattie Stepanek. The young man who wrote bestselling poetry volumes has lost his fight with a rare form of muscular dystrophy.

And finally, another former president is working on a tell-all biography–but in this case, it’sit’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed president of Haiti now hiding out in parts obscure in South Africa. Still pissed off about his “kidnapping,” he plans to reveal all about his unjust treatment, and claims the book is “95% complete.” Whether it’ll show up as one of the Deals of the Day is, of course, another matter altogether…