Bookslut Managing Editor Charles Blackstone is a writer-about town.

The town is Chicago. It’s toddlin’, as you know, and I imagine Charles eating long lunches in the patio seating of River North restaurants, sampling the delicate cheeses available in our bountiful Midwest, and later watching the sunset stream over west town from his window with the satisfaction of knowing that it is all being well done, and done well. I’ve lunched with Charles on the patio, performed with him now and again over the years, and have come to admire the apparent effortlessness he uses to approach the literary life.

He was kind enough to submit to a conversation below, where we talk about oh-so-many things. Enjoy!

[SIC] (October 2013) is a completely plagiarized text that is part of the DEAD/BOOKS trilogy (Blank, [SIC], and Ink, Jaded Ibis).

[SIC], the Latin abbreviation for “as written,” includes public domain works I have published under my name, including “Caedmon’s Hymn,” Sherlock Holmes, and the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. [SIC] also includes works in the public domain after 1923, and so includes Wikipedia pages, intellectual property law, genetic codes, and other untoward appropriations.

Janice Lee is one of the more interesting writers I know. Period. And here is our conversation on her new book Damnation (Penny Ante Editions), contemporary literature, and the expectations of “identity” from the readers, editors, and publishers.

Jeff Selingo’s new book, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students (New Harvest, 2013), finds the editor at large for the Chronicle of Higher Education articulating the challenges to contemporary higher education. He also explores possible new directions for a future in which learning may well be unbundled from many of its traditional structures.

I interviewed Selingo and published a short version of our conversation at the Huffington Post under the title “When the Jobs of Tomorrow Don’t Exist Today: Jeff Selingo on College, Liberal Arts, and the Possible Future.” Here, I let the conversation expand to its full flowering, and then move at its close to issues of contemporary publishing.

R. Clifton Spargo knows how to find the un-findable.

When confronted by the great absence in the late portion of doomed jazz age/literary power couple F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s mad and troubled romance—their undocumented trip to Cuba—he did what any debut novelist with enough gumption to change careers would do: he fabricated (and went to Cuba himself), with style and perceptive nuance.

In her essay “Other Types of Poison” (in the July issue of Harper’s, released mid-June) novelist and short-story writer Rebecca Makkai explores the legacy of her Hungarian grandparents—well-known leftist Hungarian novelist Rozsa Ignacz, and her divorced husband, Janos Makkai, principal parliamentary author and proponent of Hungary’s infamous Second Jewish Law of 1939.

I talked with writer Alexandra Chasin about her project Writing On It All on Governors Island, in New York Harbor (about three minutes from both Manhattan and Brooklyn by ferry).

From June 15 to June 30, artists, writers, and interested members of the public will collaborate in a series of unusual writing activities in an out-of-use house on the island.

Move the mouse or scroll your iPad screen to the space at the close of Amazon.com “Editorial Reviews” section for Daniel Levin Becker’s excellent Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard UP 2012).

There, you’ll find a repetition of the “Book Description,” from earlier in the page, now inflected with all-too-common Amazon character errors:

The youngest member of the Paris-based experimental collective Oulipo, Levin Becker tells the story of one of literature’s quirkiest movements—and the personal quest that led him to seek out like-minded writers, artists, and scientists who are obsessed with language and games, and who embrace formal constraints to achieve literature’s potential.

“’s” is html code for a right singly quote, and “&mdash,” of course, is the em dash (—). These reverse-engineered impregnations of the Descrption are certainly errors, but also candy-store windows for those who take a sly delight in the structural underpinning of how words on a web page may be “put” there, so to speak, in the first place.

While I’d taken it upon myself to pick some horrific non-horror films a few Halloweens ago (Guillermo del Toro’s eyes-in-the-hands guy, you’re always on my mind), this year I was interested to know what my fellow TNB contributors might say were the most terrifying movie scenes they’ve endured to date. Below, if you dare to read on, you’ll find those iconic dead-eyed twins, bad hell-spawn hair, an unfathomable choice, and more, but first I’ll get this party started with Willy Wonka’s boat ride from the 1971 Mel Stuart film.  Most of my phobias can be traced back to these two manic minutes in the tunnel:

If remix culture—predicated on both intensified user interaction and a crowdsourcing ethic—offers any clues to the future of publishing Jeff, One Lonely Guy may just be the Starchild of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Put simply, this is a sui generis exploration of loneliness, alienation, and depression packaged and bound—a book that is neither novel nor memoir, neither familiar nor completely strange.

 (The Merry-Go-Round is Beginning to Taunt Me[1])

1. Author As [not circus] Dog Trainer (Cris)

You can’t lie to a dog. Or you can’t lie badly. While training dogs, you need to be “telling” them, with both body-language and voice, that they are the center of the universe to you, and that what they do for you—and what you’re doing together—makes you happier, and means more to you, than anything else in the world. They can tell if you’re lying. If you’re unconsciously communicating to them that you’re disappointed or upset because you’re thinking about something else, something offstage—whether your life’s true dilemma or your most current disappointment—they take it on as stress. To dogs, it’s all about them. So the trainer has to be able to convince the dog of that, whether it’s true in the trainer’s larger life or not. Problem is, the dog can usually tell. A good trainer doesn’t have “a larger life.” It’s never “just a dog” and therefore easy to lie to.

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

Chapter 1:
A Character

Seriously, a blank novel?  This has got to be a joke.

We do destroy 200 books in the trailer, many with a chainsaw.

Yet, it’s not a joke. But it’s a damn funny one.

BLANK is not completely blank, really. The text contains 20 provocative chapter titles, listed in the front matter and then scattered throughout the book as the introduction to each chapter. These titles take the form or word strings such as “A Character,” “Another Character,” “They Meet,” etc.

In the wake of Amazon’s removal of Phillip R. Greaves’ book, The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-lover’s Code of Conduct, we offer some other titles they might consider pulling (Note: this is not to defend the above book):

Davis Schneiderman took the quiz.

Davis Schneiderman played the game.

Davis Schneiderman took the ‘what psychedelic-era pop song crossed with a washed-up sci-fi character are you?” quiz. Answer: Tomorrow Never Knows Mr Spock…