Alex Christofi's Blog, page 4
July 30, 2015
The Pixar Guide to Wellbeing
On its release in America, Inside Out had the biggest opening weekend for any original film in box office history, sailing easily past Avatar’s $77m to an incredible $91m. It’s already Pixar’s eighth consecutive film to have taken over $500m worldwide, and we’ve only just had the opening weekend here in the UK, where it took 7.35m. If some were beginning to worry that the studio had gone the way of Disney, following five years of prequels, sequels and the critically mixed reception to their f...
April 30, 2015
En Bref – an interview with Shakespeare & Co
Shakespeare & Co: Welcome to the firstinstallmentof En Bref, a new series we’re launching especially for Le Blog, featuring mini bookish interviews with authors we love—and have managed to persuade to answer our questions!
Who is your favourite novelist of all time?
George Orwell. His books have such a sense of purpose and he refuses to hide behind style—something you only have the confidence to do if you are a true craftsman.
What is your favourite sentence from any book ever?
If it were now...
March 16, 2015
Why I Write
I can’t say when or why I started writing. The truth is that I have always written. I wrote before I had any interest in why I wrote or what its purpose might be. I felt instinctively that words were the only way to arrange a thought, and arranging my thoughts became a kind of game. It is a kind of compulsion, which, since I am doing it anyway, I may as well use to understand and resolve the world around me. At a certain point I decided that I wanted to write for other people, to tell them st...
February 28, 2015
The Philosopher and the Window Cleaner
In my first novel, Glass, my main character strikes up a friendship with his live-in landlord, a man known only as the Steppenwolf. The Steppenwolf is a recluse, who shuts himself away in a cork lined room most days, in the hopes of writing a book which contains all life. He is a philosopher; my main character is a window cleaner.
It might not seem like the most realistic part of the novel, but it is actually inspired by a real life friendship between Marcel Proust and his maid, Céleste Albare...
February 19, 2015
On Writing the Shard
It was 2010 when I had the idea for my first novel, Glass. The recession had had time to trickle down to people of my standing, by then, and I was spending my Saturday taking a free stroll along the river, when I noticed a large concrete pillar poking up between all the glass buildings that squatted on the South Bank around the mayoral egg. This concrete pillar had a sign fixed to the top of it that said, THE SHARD, which didn’t seem like a particularly good name for what was essentially a bl...
Confession: this isn’t my first novel
They say everyone’s first novel is a veiled autobiography, so how did I come to write a novel about a window cleaner who finds himself hanging off Europe’s tallest skyscraper, the Shard?
Well, this isn’t technically my first time. In 2010, I read back through my recently completed first novel about a (handsome) young man called Alex who moves to London and gets depressed because it’s the recession. In a sort of weird homage to Greek tragedy, he also inadvertently has sex with his estranged twi...
December 23, 2014
The End of Serial
The final episode of Serial is out, marking the end of a series that has single-handedly revived the podcast as a cutting-edge medium, with over 20m downloads. For the past two months, the world has been gripped by the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted in 1999 for the murder of his high-school sweetheart, Hae Min Lee, in Baltimore County. The show has been produced by This American Life, a weekly staple at NPR which has told a self-contained story in an hour, presented for the past twenty...
November 19, 2014
Agent Hunter Q&A
This is a Q&A I did with Agent Hunter, run by the Writers’ Workshop to help aspiring writers find the right agent and get tips on the publishing process.
Q. What books/authors do you love in commercial fiction? (Crime, women’s) Give us some examples and say why you liked these books/authors.
I love Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series – they’re so quick and cunning, and she evokes her landscape with spare but telling detail, whether they’re in the French countryside or on the Italian coast. She a...
May 7, 2014
Miyazaki’s final vision
The animator-auteur Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement many times before, most famously after the success ofPrincess Mononoke(1997). Unlike most retired people, he has continued to make films, winning an Oscar forSpirited Away(2001) and receiving a nomination forHowl’s Moving Castle(2004). He has claimed that his latest,The Wind Rises(out in the UK on 9thMay), really will be his last. “This time I am quite serious,” Miyazaki told theAssociated Presslast year. By some counts, this is...
