Salon.com > Michele Filgate

Salon’s ultimate book guide

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Need a last-minute gift? Or sitting on a gift card and need a great book to read over the holiday break?

You could check out our What To Read Awards for the top-10 books by our Laura Miller as well as our favorite critics. Or, you could get some recommendations straight from the authors of some of our best books of 2012.

As part of a long-standing Salon tradition, we asked the authors of the books that we loved most this year to tell us about a 2012 book they read and loved. Junot Diaz, Gillian Flynn, Lauren Groff, Andrew Solomon, Tana French, Victor LaValle, Jess Walter, Maggie Shipstead and more contribute their picks below. Take the whole story shopping.

David Abrams, author of “Fobbit” (Grove Press, Black Cat)
“Breed,” by Chase Novak (Mulholland Books)

What To Read Awards: Michele Filgate

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:55:00 +0000

Michele Filgate is a freelance critic who has written for Salon, O, Vulture and the Daily Beast.

Michele's top 10:

1. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” by Katherine Boo
2. “Glaciers” by Alexis M. Smith
3. “My Only Wife” by Jac Jemc
4. “The Middlesteins” by Jami Attenberg
5. “How to Get Into the Twin Palms” by Karolina Waclawiak
6. “All We Know: Three Lives” by Lisa Cohen
7. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff
8. “May We Be Forgiven” by A.M. Homes
9. “Heroines” by Kate Zambreno
10. “Understories” by Tim Horvath

Everything you need to know about “Cloud Atlas”

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

David Mitchell, the author of "Cloud Atlas," told the Paris Review in 2010 that "'Cloud Atlas' is a novel about whose echoes, eddies and cross-references even its author possesses only an imperfect knowledge.” Yet the directors of the new film -- Tom Twyker, Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski -- took a different approach to Mitchell’s brilliant book. They turned six overlapping stories into more concentric circles than the author had himself.

In the book, we get these stories one at a time, until the author circles back around to them halfway through the narrative. The film takes a different approach. The stories are threaded together from the beginning of the movie, with some of the connections made more obvious and some made ... not so obvious, to say the least. It's only natural to emerge with your head spinning and lots of questions.

We're going to answer those for you. Let's start with the basic plot of the movie -- but keep in mind that these stories are woven together over the whole movie. We'll move chronologically.

Joyce Carol Oates: Romney’s ghastly!

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:24:00 +0000

The numbers always vary, but most contemporary writers don’t publish in the double digits — let alone the triple digits, like Joyce Carol Oates. She writes under her own name as well as pseudonyms (including suspense novels by Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly), and the amount of work she has produced so far, at 74 years old, is astounding.

Yet what’s even more admirable is how strong-willed she is. It comes across in her work, in her attention to characters who are often stuck in terrible situations. It absolutely comes across in her most recent collection of short stories, "Black Dahlia & White Rose," where Oates often translates the ordinariness of everyday life into a psychological drama.

And it was on display in our recent interview, over email, in which she called Mitt Romney "ghastly," questioned whether there's a "glass ceiling" for women writers and said while she regrets nothing, she does wish she hadn't written so many critical reviews of other writers early in her career.

I’d like to talk about your writing process in general. I’ve read that you still write your drafts by hand. Why is that?