Tom McCarthy was born in 1969 and grew up in London. His creation, in 1999, of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a 'semi-fictitious organisation' that combines literature, art and philosophy, has led to publications, installations and exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, from Tate Britain and the ICA in London to Moderna Museet in Stockholm and The Drawing Center in New York. Tom regularly writes on literature and art for publications including The New York Times, The London Review of Books and Artforum.
Below is a Q&A with this author.
1) What led you into writing?
I always wanted to write.
2) What was your earliest career aspiration?
To be Shakespeare. I wrote 'Macbeth, by Tom McCarthy' aged 7.
3) Can you describe your book Men in Space and its inspiration in thirty words?
It's about disintegration – of all types – in the wake of the collapse of communism in Prague.
4) Do you have any plans for your next book (C)?
It's about technology and mourning.
5) What has been the most exciting moment in your career?
Having my first novel, on its initial limited release by a small art press, reviewed at length in the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't expected that, and knew that nothing would be the same again.
6) What are you reading right now?
Your questions.
7) If you could have dinner with any three people, past or present, who would they be?
They'd be characters, not writers: one of Sade's libertines, Huysmans's Des Esseintes, Melville's Queequeg.
8) Which period in history would you most like to have lived through?
I'd have liked to be a regular at Warhol's Factory. Or the French Revolution.
9) If your house was on fire, which three books would you save from the flames?
My copy of Finnegans Wake; my diary from when I was eight (best thing I've ever written); my copy of The Sound and the Fury.
10) What do you do to relax?
Look out of my twelfth-floor window.
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