Tom McCarthy

The right to avoid questions from Congress has a long and contentious history. Just ask gangsters, Ken Lay … and EinsteinWhen IRS executive Lois Lerner asserted her right, under the fifth amendment, to avoid taking questions from the House oversight committee on Wednesday, she joined a long line of would-be witnesses to tell Congress to kiss off.The tactic came into vogue in the early 1950s, when legislators developed a habit of dragging private citizens to Washington, accusing them of being...Read Full Story

Telephone Picture EM 3 — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy In an interview published back in 2010 (coinciding roughly with the release of his excellent novel C), Tom McCarthy evaluated his work: I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it. It’s like DJing. McCarthy’s new essay “Transmission and the Individual Remix” explores the...Read Full Story

Tom McCarthy’s marvelous, confounding new novel C tells the life story of Serge Carrefax and his strange adventures at the beginning of the twentieth century. The novel begins with Serge’s birth on his parents’ estate Versoie; he’s born with a caul, a “veil around his head: a kind of web,” a mystic mark that both disconnects and, paradoxically, joins him to the world. At Versoie, Serge’s father Simeon experiments with wireless technology and runs a school for deaf children while Serge’s deaf...Read Full Story

British Cover for C Surplus Matters has reprinted last week’s edition of The Sunday Times interview with/profile of Tom McCarthy about his new novel C, our favorite new novel of 2010 (The Sunday Times is not free, so thank you, Surplus Matters). The author of the article, Robert Collins, situates McCarthy’s C as an indirect answer to David Shields’s argument in Reality Hunger that the successful modern novel must be a synthesis or remix. We’ve been critical of Shields’s argument, which...Read Full Story

The bipartisan privacy caucus has asked the tech giant for answers about its potentially invasive innovationWhat's the most dystopic future you can imagine resulting from Google Glass? That facial recognition technology will allow a Glass-wearer to walk past you and instantly know who you are and what you do? That Glass-holes might walk into a train station and instantaneously see Google pushpins tracking any celebrity travelers, the recently divorced or children from wealthy families? Or...Read Full Story