Surplus Matter

A Short Story Festival, organised by Tales of the Decongested (who celebrate their fourth birthday) and Apis Books (who brought out the Tales of the Congested anthology), will take place at Foyles in London on 5 April as part of Get London Reading 2008. Tom McCarthy will read at 2.55pm on the dot.

Tom McCarthy and Rod Dickinson’s Greenwich Degree Zero installation features in the History Will Repeat Itself exhibition in Berlin.

His knack of harnessing bold ideas to offbeat wit and close-focus storytelling skills makes McCarthy one of the fictional finds of the decade.

Men in Space is one of The Independent’s books of the year.

Remainder features among the best books of the year lists of the New York Times and Publishers Weekly.

Tom McCarthy has a new US agent.

Tom McCarthy was interviewed on the Leonard Lopate Show in NYC on 21 September 2007.

If this was a Wednesday Top Ten I’d probably choose ten different books entirely, and another ten on Thursday.

Tom McCarthy’s Top Ten novels in The Book Depository.

I’m interested in people’s readings of the books. A novel doesn’t end when it’s written; in a way, that’s just the beginning: the ‘meaning’ isn’t enclosed within it but emerges from its meeting with other texts, other moments — all textbook deconstruction stuff, I know, but no less true for that. Having said that, some readings are much more productive than others. Ones that interpret Remainder, for example, as a straight allegory or ‘solve’ it by suggesting that the hero’s dead but doesn’t know it yet are interesting but limited. The critic Andrew Gibson, who’s just put out a book on Beckett and Badiou, told me that my work is about ‘the radical death of the world,’ adding that this is the theme of twenty-first century philosophy. I’m not sure I understand what he means but it sounds really good.

Mark Thwaite interviews Tom McCarthy in ReadySteadyBook.

In the UK, the mainstream publishing industry has almost purged itself of what should be the ‘literary’ in literature,” he says. “Most mainstream houses are publishing competently written, ultimately quite banal, middlebrow books, nicely packaged, that maybe ask the odd question and make us think a bit. The mode of experiencing literature has moved elsewhere: into the art world.”

Tom McCarthy argues that “Literature is always premised on its own impossibility” in Boyd Tonkin’s profile/interview (from today’s Independent).

What is it that actually lies at the heart of this bewildering universe of signs? It is worth pointing out that Hergé’s final, incomplete volume, Tintin and Alph-Art, was a story about international art fraud which stands as the greatest enigma in the canon. Could it be that Men In Space is McCarthy’s coded conclusion to Hergé’s unfinished work?

Alfred Hickling reviews Men in Space in the Guardian.