Surplus Matter

Black Box Video

Tom McCarthy talks about his Black Box Transmitter exhibit and about the art/writing interface.

His Favourite Author

A short video clip in which Tom McCarthy talks about Georg Trakl.

The Importance of Being Encrypted

One of the real structural understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event. It’s not something that you can contain and narrate, but it’s like this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward. Contemporary novelists don’t really understand that, but contemporary artists do.

Tom McCarthy interviewed in the June 2008 issue of The Believer.

McCarthy On Spanish TV

A very entertaining feature on Tom McCarthy courtesy of Spanish TV.

Dorian Gray Territory

I hold out little hope for Spielberg’s film. I suspect it will be sanitised and anodyne, devoid of the complexities that make Tintin so compelling. Hergé complained in his last years that his creation was killing him. The final sequence in the incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art shows, in what I’ve always seen as a cryptic cry of desperation on its author’s part, the hero being led off to have plaster poured on him and thus be turned into an artwork called “Reporter” — condemned, that is, to die inside his own simulacrum. This is dark stuff, Dorian Gray territory. If I had my way, the film would be directed by David Lynch.

Tom McCarthy on the political trajectory of the Tintin cartoons and Spielberg’s forthcoming movie.

Black Box Video

Tom McCarthy talks about his Black Box Transmitter exhibit and about the art/writing interface.

His Favourite Author

A short video clip in which Tom McCarthy talks about Georg Trakl.

McCarthy Lands Believer Book Award!

In the same way that Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy tells its story through architecture in book form, Remainder is an art installation disguised as a brilliant novel.

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder receives The Believer’s fourth annual Book Award.

At the Heart of a Noise

There’s a secret written into the book’s very title. McCarthy is telling us less about, say, what literature is than what it isn’t. We come to a novel expecting it to tell us everything that it can, to be replete. McCarthy lifts the rug to show us that the more a story tells us, the more it hides. Channeling Barthes, McCarthy characterizes Tintin — whose exploits so often involve misread missives, misunderstood map coordinates, misconstruction of another character’s language — as standing “guardian . . . at the heart of a noise.”

Eric Banks reviews Tintin and the Secret of Literature in the Los Angeles Times.

All the Latest

All the latest news concerning Tom McCarthy’s artistic, literary and promotional activities.