Conversations with Ian McEwan

Conversations with Ian McEwan collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the author (b. 1948) of such highly praised novels as Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach.

McEwan discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and the major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.

McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with some of the greatest minds of his time - Martin Amis, Christopher Ricks, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, Antony Gormley, David Remnick, and Steven Pinker - provide readers the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.

Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor, Ryan Roberts.

Available from the University Press of Mississippi, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or from a variety of Independent Booksellers.

McEwan's New Novel -- Solar

Random House is delighted to announce the publication of a new novel by Ian McEwan, Solar.

Solar is an engrossing and satirical novel which focuses on climate change and will be published on 18 March 2010. This story – of one man's ambitions and self-deceptions – is a stylish new work by one of the word's greatest living writers.

Michael Beard is in his late fifties; bald, overweight, unprepossessing – a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. An inveterate philanderer, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. When Beard's professional and personal worlds are entwined in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself, a chance for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster.

Dan Franklin, Publisher, comments: 'Solar is a novel about one of the most serious threats to our world – global warming – but is also very, very funny. It shows a fresh side to Ian McEwan’s work, that he’s a comic writer of genius.'

Continuum's Ian McEwan Competition

Continuum is generously giving away free copies of Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives to undergraduate students. If you wish to enter the competition, please answer the following three questions:

1. What was the illustrious nickname Ian McEwan acquired in the 1970s?

2. In which unnamed city is The Comfort of Strangers set?

3. From which Jane Austen novel does Atonement take its epigraph?

The first ten students who email the correct answers will be sent a copy of the guide.

Please send an email with your answers to: ccoalter@continuumbooks.com and be sure to include your name, the name of your university and your preferred postal address.

The competition ends when the tenth book has been given away. Good luck!

New Book of Essays on Ian McEwan's Work

Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
Edited by Sebastian Groes
Continuum, 2009.
ISBN: 9780826497222

A valuable addition to McEwan scholarship, this collection of essays from the Contemporary Critical Perspectives series helps define and guide the future course of McEwan studies.

Purchase online from Continuum, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, BN.com, or a wide selection of high-quality Independent Booksellers.

Contents:

Preface: Ian McEwan and the Rational Mind, Matt Ridley

Introduction: A Cartography of the Contemporary: Mapping Newness in the Work of Ian McEwan, Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope University, UK)

1. Surreal Encounters in McEwan’s Early Work, Jeanette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)

2. ‘Profoundly Dislocating and Infinite in Possibility’: Ian McEwan’s Screenwriting, M. Hunter Hayes (Texas A&M University, USA) & Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope University)

3. The Innocent as anti-Oedipal Critique of Cultural Pornography, Claire Colebrook (University of Edinburgh, UK)

4. War of the Words: Atonement and the Question of Plagiarism, Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University, UK)

5. Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in Atonement, Alistair Cormack

6. Ian McEwan and Modernist Time: Atonement and Saturday, Laura Marcus (University of Edinburgh, UK)

7. Ian McEwan and the Modernist Consciousness of the City in Saturday, Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope University)

8. On Chesil Beach: another 'overrated' novella? Dominic Head (University of Nottingham)

Journeys without Maps: An Interview with Ian McEwan by Jon Cook (UEA, UK), Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope University, UK) and Victor Sage (UEA, UK)

Includes a chronology, bibliography of further readings, and an index.

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Purchase online from Continuum, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, BN.com, or a wide selection of high-quality Independent Booksellers.

Ian Hamilton: Collected Poems

Ian Hamilton: Collected Poems
Edited with an introduction by Alan Jenkins (Faber and Faber, 2009)

Ian McEwan writes about his relationship with Ian Hamilton in Another Rounds at the Pillars, and the text of McEwan's essay is available online at the Ian Hamilton Website.

Synopsis from the Publisher:

"A professional man of letters -- critic, editor, biographer -- though never a professional poet, Ian Hamilton (1938-2001) referred to his poems as 'miraculous lyrical arrivals', and he bided their time with exemplary patience and humility. His widely praised first collection, The Visit, published by Faber in 1970, was incorporated into Fifty Poems in 1988, itself expanded to Sixty Poems in 1998. In a preface to the former collection, he wrote: 'Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think. And in certain moods, I would agree.' Readers of Hamilton's condensed and immaculate oeuvre have felt otherwise: the poems of his youth and middle years (there was to be no opportunity for a late flowering) acquired talismanic significance for his contemporaries, and their combination of terseness and emotional intensity continues to set an example to younger poets. Edited by Alan Jenkins, this authoritative Collected Poems contains all of the poetry that Ian Hamilton chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems; it also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus. The result is an edition whose thoroughness and tact are themselves a moving tribute, restoring to view one of the most disinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry."

Purchase from Faber & Faber.

Ian McEwan's New Yorker Profile

Daniel Zalewski, "The Background Hum." The New Yorker, 23 February 2009: 46-52, 54-61. (Registration required for full access).

Ian McEwan is the subject of an extensive New Yorker profile that provides several new insights into his life and works. In addition to meeting with McEwan several times, Zalewski interviewed friends and family members, including Martin Amis, Craig Raine, and James Fenton. The article provides an intimate view into the life of a novelist at the height of his abilities.

The online edition provides limited access, so head out to your local newstand for the full version. The New Yorker does, however, provide access to a few archived pieces, including "The Diagnosis" and "On Chesil Beach".

Ian McEwan talks with Richard Dawkins

Ian McEwan talks with Richard Dawkins: Root of All Evil? [This is the uncut interview from the Channel 4 TV program 'The Root of All Evil?', hosted by Richard Dawkins. This video is part of the DVD collection available through the RichardDawkins.net store].

Ian McEwan Remembers John Updike

From The Guardian (28 January 2009):

"He was a modern master, a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English. He dazzled us with his interests and intellectual curiosity, and he turned a beautiful sentence. Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals – who can follow him? Updike gave the impression he had a lot more writing to do. We are all the poorer now." -- Ian McEwan

McEwan also pays tribute to Updike on the BBC (Watch
Video)