Today I discovered the esteemed BLDGBLOG has a veritable treasure trove of interviews with acclaimed authors centered around their urban themes and then merrily peregrinating to places like Utopian narrative, allegory vs. metaphor, and the things that mushrooms eat. (You know, like a city stroll. You get it.) Mentions of Calvino and Ballard and psychogeography as well as Borges obviously abound.
Link dump from the China Miéville interview:
In earlier interviews with such writers as Patrick McGrath, Kim Stanley Robinson, Zachary Mason, Jeff VanderMeer, Tom McCarthy, and Mike Mignola, we have looked at everything from the literary appeal and narrative usefulness of specific buildings and building types to the descriptive influence of classical landscape painting, and we have entertained the idea that the demands of telling a good story often give novelists a more subtle and urgent sense of space even than architects and urban planners.
This is from distant 2011; I don’t know if Geoff Manaugh kept up this glorious trend. Recent entries under his interview category were of interesting people from other fields.
Happy next twenty GoodReads reviews!
the Budafoki amended 