What’s Alex Garland Doing These Days? Playing Video Games, Mostly.
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.19.03 | 3:55 PM ET
It has been seven years since Alex Garland’s novel The Beach was published. In that time the book—the tale of a young British backpacker who stumbles upon what appears to be paradise on a small, secluded Thai island—has become a favorite of travelers throughout the world, inspiring a batch of travel-themed tomes that never quite matched the heights of Garland’s literary thriller. (If you’ve only seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, by the way, please read the book. The movie got it all wrong.) The success of the book also shoved the then twenty-something writer into the spotlight, which he quickly shied away from.
Recently, though, he gave a rare interview to Andre Paine of the Evening Standard, who reports that Garland has an obsession with video games. “I am not working at the moment,” the now 32-year-old Garland told Paine. “If I am going to write another novel, then I need a good idea and I just have not got one. I am stuck. The last thing I managed to produce was an eight-page comic strip, so I was thinking of maybe expanding that. Generally I do not have any plans to do any writing at all. At the moment I am playing on my X-box an awful lot.”