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Tom McCarthy's 2005 debut, "Remainder", managed what the jackets of so many first novels promise: a fresh and—in this case—unsettling take on contemporary life. It is about a brain-damaged man who marshals millions of pounds and a troupe of actors, consiglieres and forensic experts to reconstruct a memory. It is an intentionally confusing and difficult book that manages to draw on both Proust and Beckett, yet remain intoxicatingly readable.

McCarthy's subsequent monograph on Hergé's beloved comic cartoon journalist, "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", his avant-garde collective—The International Necronautical Society—and his second novel, "Men in Space" (2007), have been no less divisive. He has received accolades and abuse, and has squabbled with critics, once declaring that a prominent publication needed a "Semtex enema".

Still, he has been eking out a place in the canon. In her essay "Two Paths for the Novel", Zadie Smith anoints McCarthy's "Remainder" as one of the paths. His latest novel, "C", has been selected for the 2010 Man Booker longlist. Over e-mail, McCarthy spoke with us about authenticity, politics, "Remainder" and "C", a book that is as strange and powerful as anything McCarthy has done before.  read more »

“World Enough” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Maureen McLane’s second poetry collection, is a vacation unto itself. Her poems immerse readers in languid summer nights in the country and Parisian days. It is a treatise of sorts on the idea of "place": the mental, physical, visual and  emotional spaces we inhabit.

The forms of McLane's poems travel too; some are modelled after British romantic ballads, others the French rondeau, a few take inspiration from the haiku and some come in free verse. This exploration, sometimes playful, sometimes academic, grants these poems lives of their own.

McLane is a professor of English at New York University, a frequent essayist and winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Nona Nalakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. In keeping with the travel theme, Maureen McLane answered More Intelligent Life's questions about criticism, form and the visual aspects of writing from “a remote region of the American north-east”.

More Intelligent Life: "World Enough" seems to encompass many worlds, emotional, temporal, natural. Why the title, "World Enough"?

Maureen McLane: The phrase “world enough” surfaced more or less organically in my poem, “Passage I":

I thought I had all the time
and world enough to discover what I should
when it was over

The phrase itself comes from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”—

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.  read more »

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A successful web venture involves some basic, low-tech ingredients: a great design, a concise pitch, a name that’s fun to say and a practical purpose. An enterprise that has evidently nailed all four is Tumblr, a three-year-old blogging and social-media tool now adopted by everyone John Mayer to the Paris Review . (The Economist even created a Tumblr blog this very week.)

Mark Coatney, a former senior editor at Newsweek and Tumblr’s latest hire, describes the site as “a space between Twitter and Facebook.” For the inside scoop on everyone’s favourite new hybrid, More Intelligent Life spoke with Tumblr’s 24-year-old founder and chief executive, David Karp.

More Intelligent Life:  Where does the name “Tumblr” come from?

David Karp: Back when we were starting Tumblr, there was a burgeoning movement in the blogosphere towards a format called “tumblelogs” [a variation on blogs that tends towards shorter stream-of-consciousness posts, often with mixed media]. These are where the initial inspiration for Tumblr came from. We wanted to be the first and best platform for “tumblelogs”, so the name seemed appropriate.

MIL: When did Tumblr officially launch?

DK: February 19th 2007, on our company Wordpress blog.

MIL: How many users have jumped on board?  read more »

Jennifer Egan's new book, "A Visit from the Goon Squad", is the sort of social novel no one calls a social novel. Like Mary Gaitskill's "Veronica", Zadie Smith's "On Beauty", or every novel by Michel Houellebecq, Egan here explores the hazy hierarchies of looks, talent and fame among those privileged enough to obsess over such things—what Egan calls “the looks/fame cost benefit analysis” .

Egan is famous for defying categorisation. Her books already include a realist Bildungsroman, a gothic thriller, and a DeLillo-like novel about image culture. This novel is another big leap, featuring the entangled stories of ageing musicians and the woman who love (and professionally publicise) them. The miracle of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" is that nothing—not even a section devoted to an extended PowerPoint presentation—feels forced. No two sections employ the same style but each exudes the same joyful verve, the same charge of a stylist revelling in her skill. (In describing a newfangled television set, for example she writes: “The TV is new, flat, and long, and its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged.”)  read more »

If the idea of a trilogy offers authors an organising principle and a formal constraint, it offers readers the reassuring promise of more where the first book came from. Vendela Vida’s trilogy began in 2003 with “And Now You Can Go”, a starkly witty exploration of a young woman’s travels after a trauma, and continued with “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” (2007), whose young heroine unravels the question of her parentage over the course of a journey in far north Lapland. Vida’s newest offering, “The Lovers”, concludes the series by entering the consciousness of an older and decidedly wiser (though no less adrift) presence. The novel concerns a widow, Yvonne, who returns to the scene of her honeymoon and discovers, in the gently decomposing old town, several new ways of thinking about her marriage and herself, not all of them a comfort.

Vida, who is also a founding co-editor at the Believer, spoke with More Intelligent Life about “The Lovers”.  read more »

Selena McMahan’s life as an international clown began when she won the liberal-arts equivalent of an internship at Goldman Sachs: the Watson Fellowship, a no-strings-attached $25,000 grant to travel the world for a year pursuing, well, whatever. Soon after graduating from Bowdoin College in the summer of 2005, McMahan used her award to tour nine countries on four continents—putting on clown shows at every stop. (The Watson may offer little in terms of future earning power, but every year it gives some 40 students from America’s elite small colleges a lifetime’s worth of stories.)

Her Watson year marked the beginning of what has become a one-woman circus. Upon returning to New York City, where McMahan had lived before college, she began volunteering with the American chapter of Clowns Without Borders (CWB). McMahan’s first trip with the organisation was to the FEMA trailer parks of hurricane-devastated New Orleans in 2007. Most recently, she took her clown show on tour in Ethiopia. Shortly after returning from CWB's annual meeting of international chapters in Berlin, McMahan spoke with More Intelligent Life from her apartment in France, where she first studied the art of the clown and where she lives now. We discussed the perception and politics of clowning around the world.

More Intelligent Life: Is there a difference between the way clowns are viewed in America and Europe?  read more »

On a bench by a country road, two shabby tramps named Gogo and Didi pass the time, waiting for someone who will never come, for something that will never happen. Colin Haigh knows how they feel.

Haigh was one of two understudies in the Theatre Royal Haymarket production of Samuel Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot" in Spring. In the event that Sir Ian McKellen (who plays Gogo) or Matt Kelly (who plays Pozzo) are unable to take to the stage, Haigh takes their place. But he spends most of his time waiting. More Intelligent Life spoke to Haigh about the important and often under-appreciated role of the understudy.

More Intelligent Life: Do you remember your first time as an understudy?

Colin Haigh: In 1979 I was offered an understudy job at the Royal Court Theatre in London, in a play called "Not Quite Jerusalem". I was covering two people in that. The play was so successful that they kept extending it by a week and then another week and then it went into a third week but I hadn’t gone on yet. Finally, on the penultimate night, one of the guys I was covering came in late and he was not at all well. I thought it was all over but I did have to finally gird my loins and do it.  read more »

“Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art through March 2011, presents photography’s 170-year history through the lens of its female practitioners. Viewers are led through six chronologically curated galleries; one enters in 1850, traces the medium’s developments and finishes in the present. The show includes 200 works by 120 women artists of vastly different renown and practice culled from the museum’s private collection. Mostly forgotten photographers of historical import are shown next to some of the most famous artists of the 20th century. The scale is striking, the scope stunning. The exhibition’s curators—Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Meister and Eva Respini—spoke with More Intelligent Life about their curatorial vision.

More Intelligent Life: Was it obvious from the beginning that the exhibition would be arranged chronologically? Did you work this way, seeking out earlier works and moving forward in time?

MoMA: As with each of our collection installations, we consider many different options before settling on an organisational structure. In that photography is perhaps the only modern medium where it is possible to tell its history exclusively with work by women, we were fairly certain we wanted to do that from the start.  We did work on the galleries simultaneously, because what you do in one inevitably has an impact on what comes before and after.  read more »

Tom Colicchio has had a stream of success in New York's restaurant business. The chef perhaps now best known as a judge in "Top Chef", a hit Bravo television series, made his name in the kitchen of Gramercy Tavern and then branched out with a successful series of Craft restaurants. Now in the cavernous Meatpacking space that once housed his Craftsteak outpost is Colicchio & Sons, a critically acclaimed restaurant that opened in January. Sam Sifton at the New York Times swiftly anointed the place with three stars (describing the food as leaping into the realm of "spooky perfection"), and the James Beard Foundation rushed in to grant Colicchio another best-chef award (his fourth), the country's most prestigious honour for chefs.

Things are good in the Colicchio camp, in other words. More Intelligent Life got a glimpse of the action by way of a conversation with Shane McBride, the chef de cuisine of Colicchio & Sons, who was kept on in a similar role from his time at Craftsteak. We asked him to fill us in on his off-day eating habits, favourite summer vegetables and his antipathy for eggplants.

More Intelligent Life: Given that you spend most of the day around food, what do you like to eat on your days off?  read more »

Miguel Horn, a young American sculptor with Colombian and Venezuelan roots, has become a bright, rising star in Mexico's art scene. He moved here directly after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, in order to train with Javier Marín, a world-renowned Mexican sculptor. Horn first asked Marín for a studio tour, and then persuaded him to offer an apprenticeship. Now, four years later, Horn's quirky and sometimes gigantic sculptures, done solo and in collaboration with Marín, can be found at galleries and on streets across Mexico City.

Horn is part of a new wave of Latin sculpture that is big, bold and expressive. His works draw from traditional colours, shapes and customs in a celebration of Latin cultures. In April his work was featured as part of Zona Maco, Latin America's Art Basel. This August, his first full solo show, at Terreno Baldío Arte in Mexico City, will feature his haunting, crumbling faces and forms (including a bronze of a man standing on his own beard, which he intends to make "really large"). Here he talks to More Intelligent Life about the art world in Mexico, local influences on his work and his desire to make "monumental" art.

More Intelligent Life: How did you get into art, and why sculpture?  read more »