On the off chance that anybody’s bothering to surf the web today-don’t you people know there’s sales going on out there?-here’s a few recent interviews to keep you entertained until Sarah and I come back to work on Monday...

⋅Joss Whedon discusses his new Buffy comic book with Entertainment Weekly. "We’re calling it ’Season 8,’" and he’ll be writing the first four issues then turning the rest over to a team of writers that we’ve heard from other sources might include Lost/Heroes producer/writer Jeph Loeb. And, yes, it picked up right where the final episode left off, with the Hellmouth closed up and all those new slayers running around...but due to licensing restrictions, among other reasons, we won’t be learning how Angel’s cliffhangers played out.

⋅Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance author Robert Pirsig gives what he claims will be his final interview to Tim Adams of the Guardian, to promote the recently republished sequel memoir, Lila. You can’t get better fortune cookie mysticism this side of Paulo Coelho: "It is not good to talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness," Pirsig says. "If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don’t talk about it no one knows it is there."

⋅Claire Messud reveals the impulses behind The Emperor’s Children: "I’m pretty interested in people’s self-deceptions and illusions, and how important they are, how destructive they are, or how necessary they are." She also tells a cautionary tale of her youthful days as a publishing apparatchik, when her boss declared, "No book that’s going to sell less than a thousand copies should be published." Ouch.

⋅Okay, technically speaking, it’s not an interview, but if all you did with the Internets this weekend was read the Eos-hosted roundtable discussion on secret/fantastic histories, you’d be well entertained. The panel consists of John Crowley, Jeffrey Ford, James Morrow, and Tim Powers-the latter of whom spills the secret to many of his greatest novels: "I’ve found lots of historical characters whose lives could plausibly (well, almost plausibly) include familiarity with, and action in, very secret magical goings-on, and it’s fun to concoct supernatural explanations that cover even their recorded, apparently-mundane actions." And when you’re done with that link, you can go on to the second part of the discussion. That ought to hold you for a while!