From Paul Auster on his teenage writing to Naomi Wolf on orgasms to Sam Lipsyte's bleak hilarity, here is the best of our literature writing – all in honour of World Book Day
It's World Book Day! Apparently – according to the be-all-end-all of sources, Google – there's been 129 million books published, ever. Sod drawing up a reading list from that – instead, we've gone through the best book interviews from our archive to give you something decent to read on your commute home. From David Cronenberg on Kafka’s masterpiece to Naomi Wolf on becoming the vagina's unofficial biographer.
The British novelist behind The Teleportation Accident – one of the freshest, most exciting and darkly comic novels written in recent years – talks to us about joining the dots between east London, quantum physics and Nazis on Ketamine.
Uncovering the little-known connection between the vagina and the female brain. Naomi Wolf's book Vagina: A New Biography combined historical research and science with her trademark cutting cultural-analysis. Here, she spoke to us about becoming the vagina's unofficial biographer.
Film's Fly guy on his enduring love of Kafka's novella, the ultimate body-horror classic: “I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a 70-year-old man. Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis?”
A specially commissioned short story from one of American literature's true radicals, Blake Butler. His surreal, terror-tinged style is experimental and often just plain mental: fiercely provocative, wilfully challenging and regularly overrun by staggeringly violent, brain-buggering imagery.
The towering American novelist who went to the same Bronx high school as Jack Kerouac; piloted early jet fighter planes in dogfights in the Korean war; risked his life pursuing a passion for solo rock-climbing; worked in the movies; sold swimming pools; and worked steadily and slowly to create a slim back catalogue of books, talks to us about a summer he spent promoting his book All That Is.
Dazed has had the pleasure of watching Sam Riviere emerge as one of the best young poets in the country, here we talk to him about hitting the poetry publishing big time.
As readers in their trillions made Fifty Shades of Grey the biggest book on the planet, writer Katherine Angel’s masterful debut Unmastered provided an aptly timed, erudite, pretty much perfect antidote to all the shoddily written erotica out there. We spoke to her about sex, porn and making the erotic academic.
A true rogue and a true legend and we were truly pleased to speak to him again, when we phoned him up on a film set and spoke about explicit film and why the novel's not dead yet.
America’s don of dark literary humour, Sam Lipsyte returned to the short form here, where, alongside a Q&A, he introduces an exclusive story from his collection, The Fun Parts.
