What’s left behind: an interview with Tom McCarthy

Origin: Static Issue 07
Content: Text

With themes of memory, psychosis, agency, repetition, authenticity and death, Tom McCarthy’s novel, Remainder is the contemporary catastrophic novel par excellence. First published in 2005, it has established its writer as an original and important voice in fiction. Here, the author talks to Static editor, Roger Orwell, about the book and some of the ideas which encircle its narrative.

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Biography

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist. He lives and works in London. He grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out. His debut novel Remainder was first published in 2005, and has since been translated into more than ten languages. In 2008 it won the Believer Book Award. A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was published in June 2006. His second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007. He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair, Theology and the Political and The Milgram Experiment.

McCarthy is also founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, artists, philosophers and political activists that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events.

He has also tutored and lectured at various institutions, including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art. He is currently teaching a course on Catastrophe with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.