February 27, 2004

StorySouth Shortlisted Authors Talk About Their Work

Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with the idea behind storySouth's Million Writers Award. The editor, Jason Sanford, wanted to promote fiction published in online journals and this seemed like a good way to spread word of mouth. Now that the awards process is in its last stage, I thought it would be good to hear from the short-listed writers about their work. Nearly all the writers responded to my request for blurbs, so without further ado, here they are talking about their stories.

Sefi Atta: "A Union On Independence Day," published in Eclectica.
I wanted to write this story in 1995, the year that the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged, after an infamous military prosecution that led to Nigeria’s suspension from the Commonwealth. Saro-Wiwa was an activist for the Ogoni people and through his struggle against Shell BP, I learned about the environmental havoc in the Niger delta. In 2002, again the plight of this region was headline news when a group of women from Escravos occupied a Chevron terminal and allegedly threatened to strip, if their demands for fairer environmental policies were not met. My narrator, Eve’s, voice was clear to me by now, and I was ready to follow her, but her migration to the US was so tied to the demise of her community, and I didn’t know how to overlook her people or their testimonies. It bothered me that I might have to in order for Eve’s journey to fit into a short story, so I expanded the territory of the story to include them.
Thanks to Eclectica for publishing the story and to StorySouth for selecting it. Also, thanks to Carve magazine, In Posse Review and Mississippi Review for the rest of my online stories.

Max Dunbar: "The Unrequited," published in Summerset Review.
The story was inspired by a beautiful woman from where I grew up, who is still my muse and ideal reader. The locale is based on my home town, a post-industrial shithole (a bit like Derry in Stephen King's IT) where all you could really do was sit around in pubs. I wanted to write about unrequited love, about being shy and young and trying to cut a path to that special person through the bullshit jungle of social situations. It was a fairly deep and personal story to write.

Jon Fasman: "What They Weren't Worth," published in The Morning News.
The idea for this story came from a newspaper article that mentioned in passing the origins of the phrase "worth your salt". At the time I read it I was working on a longer fiction project (which became a novel called The Geographer's Library, due out from Penguin in January 2005) and needed a little break. So just for fun I started making up other metaphorical measures and attributes of worth and came up with a list of around twenty. From those I selected ten and fleshed the explanations out; I still didn't know that I was working on a story. But when I saw them all lined up, the notion of using them as the skeleton of a short story seemed natural. For better or worse, I find it impossible to write without a form or structure already in place; the shape and geometry of a story, for me, always precede the plot and characters.
I was unemployed in London at the time and was thinking about home, and also about immigrants and derelicts, both of which I had become (and proudly, too). London is the most international city on earth, which is why I love it; I think a curious person (especially a culinarily curious person, as I am) cannot live there without spending a good deal of walking-around time thinking about immigration and rootlessness.
James Cecilia seeing Frances Lowell in a classroom was the first scene that I wrote. I like James very much; he deserves more space than I gave him here, but I think I'll come back to him. He has a future. So does the word farm the characters cultivate at the end of the story. I'm not sure where that idea came from, either, but I like the mixture of physical and metaphorical, and I like that the end of the story removes you from the real world and into a theoretical one.

Randa Jarrar: "You Are A 14-Year Old Arab Chick Who Just Moved To Texas," published in Eyeshot.
I wrote “You are a 14 Year-Old Arab Chick…” while I was working on my novel. The first person voice I was using was restricting, so I impulsively switched to second. I wanted the reader, who is probably not a chick, an Arab, or a 14-year-old, to relate to a girl whose experiences are never heard or celebrated. Some of the details of the story are autobiographical – running away after listening to Nirvana, attempting to become a vendor, being banned from writing to a friend solely because he was a boy, my father’s confusion with Ps and Bs, and the hot twin with the ignorant tent question. But the rest stems from my imagination: I didn’t move to Texas till I was 20, I didn't sell all my gold for $60, and my mom never saved any of my letters (yes, mama, I’m still mad at you).

A.C. Koch: "Solid Gone," published in Stickman Review.
Believe it or not, the story started off as an attempt to write something about the attacks of September 11th, and ended up taking a completely different direction. At the time, I was listening to the Harry Smith American Folkways Anthology that a friend had given me, and the sadness of what happened on that day was reflected for me in some of that mournful music. Originally, the main character Margie decides to rent a car and drive across country because all the airports are closed, but I ended up revising any direct reference to 9/11 out of the story, and instead made Margie the author of her own complications, set into motion by the death of her father. Her ambivalence about returning to her old homelife is synonymous with my feelings about being an American in the age of terror.
The title comes from a Grandpa Jones bluegrass tune which goes, “She’s gone, she’s solid gone,” a phrase I’ve always loved to chew over. Can the absence of something be so solid and tangible you can knock on it?

Rattan Mann: "Self Analysis," published in Spoiled Ink.
It may seem strange but I never think, plan, or analyze anything I write. The idea has to come from my unconscious and I just follow the ideas instead of leading them. The idea of "Self Analysis" came to me in a dream in 1978. Thus the story was written in 1978 but has remained unrecognized till now. I am deeply thanful to SpoiledInk and storySouth for this recognition.

Gokul Rajaram: "The Boy With The Hole In His Head," published in Eclectica.
When I visited India two years ago, my mom told me about a neighborhood boy who actually had a hole in his head, the result of a cycling accident when he was very young. I was curious/desperate to meet this boy but it didn't work out. After I returned to the US, my imagination took this basic idea and ran riot, culminating in the story. I have also been fascinated by how the same story changes when examined from different points of view. I decided to use the multiple POV approach in this story, using dream sequences to link all the POVs.

Jonathan Redhorse: "The Atomic Tellermans," published in Gator Springs Gazette
The idea for “The Atomic Tellermans” came to me in July 2002. I was preparing to take a few classes at Cambridge University for their two-week international summer school program and I had to do some preliminary reading on such topics as World War II, 20th Century Conflicts, and NATO. As I was reading Wilson’s Ghost by Robert McNamara and James G. Blight, I came across a passage describing a hypothetical process for international nuclear disarmament that would rely on total weapons disposal by everyone in order for it to work. If there was a straggler, then obviously that country (or non-state entity) would hold a strategic advantage. So then I thought, “I should write a story about a suburbanite threatening his neighbors with a nuclear weapon.” Except for Section 3, most of the story was handwritten during class lectures at Cambridge and at my current school, the University of Denver, from August to December 2002.
I could analyze this story to infinity. But I won’t because it would be exhausting and I don’t want anyone to be exhausted. Instead, we should burn calories laughing.
I think the fact that the story was nominated for anything is a weird, happy, wonderful accident. The fact that it was picked up by Carrie Berry (a flabbergastingly creative and industrious individual) for online publication in the Gator Springs Gazette is another amazing accident.
As I approach the start of my third decade, I hope that everyone will be privy to significant happy accidents, provided they are willing to put in the effort for others.

Claudia Smith: "How To Catch A Good Girl," published in Word Riot.
In high school, I was painfully shy. I had no boyfriends; I never dated. I wore baggy clothes to hide the breasts that were quickly growing into Double Ds. I was what you might call a good girl, and I'm sure that has something to do with this story. Although it went through a few revisions, I wrote this quickly and in one sitting. The voice and character came as a surprise to me. There is some bite to this piece, but also, I hope, beauty and intimacy.

So, read the stories and vote for your favorite here.

February 26, 2004

A Plea

I've been following the news of the recent earthquake in Hoceima and surrounding villages (northern Morocco), and things are getting worse. Please, please, please donate money to the victims here.

The British Oprah

The Guardian has an article on Channel 4's Richard and Judy, essentially discussing the effect of TV promotion over book sales.

Harriet Wilson Memorial

The town of Mitford, New Hampshire is planning to erect a memorial for Harriet E. Wilson, author of Our Nig, a scathing memoir of her life as a "free" black woman in the mid-1800s (this is the same Wilson whose book was "rediscovered" by Henry Louis Gates in the 1970s.)

Original Voices Award

Via Publishers Lunch I hear that Khaled Hosseini is the winner of the Borders Original Voices Award for The Kite Runner. You can read more about Hosseini over at his website.

February 25, 2004

Doom Seekers Unite

Samuel Huntington is at it again. This time, he predicts gloom and doom because "unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves." Link via A&L Daily.

The Weight Of It

If this is a trend, then it's certainly a long overdue one:

Poets and writers are awakening to the notion that the man-versus-fat story encompasses all the original struggles of man - against others who loathe him, a God who seems to doom him and, perhaps especially, against the self that fails, despairs and, occasionally, wins. What better story can be told?

I don't know about "better" story, but that's certainly a good story that should have long been told, and a lot of people are doing just that. Beside Jen Weiner's Good In Bed, the article mentions Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang's collection What Are You Looking At (which features writing by the likes of Junot Diaz) and a bunch of other memoirs and fiction due to hit shelves soon.

Things You Didn't Need To Know #55

If I were a book, I'd be Huckleberry Finn! (Link via Ed.)

February 24, 2004

Mardi Gras

And it's about to be très, très gras, since it's my birthday. So I'll take off early today and see you back here tomorrow.

Kwani?

Reuters has an article on Kenya's literary magazine, Kwani?

Kenya's only literary magazine, Kwani? is part of a wider cultural revival giving the country a more assertive artistic presence in Africa, one often shaped by anger at a venal ruling elite that has presided over the country's long decline.
At the heart of much of the new writing is the conviction that the country has barely begun to realize the promise of its independence from Britain in 1963, betrayed by the failures of a complacent over-40 generation mired in tribalism and corruption. (...) More than 2,500 copies have been sold at about $6 a copy, a vast amount in a poor country where few among the mostly rural population read for entertainment.

Visit Kwani's website here.

His Teeth Were There, But Was He?

Today's Doonesbury asks that question, and is offering 10 grand to anyone who can corroborate the claim. I like his approach. Rather than look for someone who's saying that Bush wasn't in Alabama during his service, he'll offer money to anyone who says Bush was there.

Nostalgic Moment

Seamus Heany has a new translation of Antigone, which is excerpted in the Guardian today. It brought back those heady days of high school when my tenth-grade teacher was having us read Jean Anouilh's adaptation. She swooned over her pet students, Omar and Leila (no, not me), as they read stanza after stanza while the rest of the class drifted gently to sleep.

Morocco Quake

I just heard that an earthquake struck the port city and beach resort of Hoceima in northern Morocco. Current toll is 226 says Reuters, but likely to rise to 300 says AP. There is concern that some surrounding villages where people live in ancient mud structures could be hit. The earthquake happened almost 44 years to the day after the 1960 earthquake which wiped out the southern port city and beach resort of Agadir. You can donate money for relief efforts here.

February 23, 2004

Since I'm Such a Jinx, I'll Take One For The Team

My voting record is such that every candidate I've voted for or supported in major elections has lost, not just a regular, dignified loss, but a spectacular one. I voted for Nader in 2000 (don't blame me--I lived in California at the time; Gore took that state in a landslide) and the men and women in robes appointed the Shrub. I voted against the recall and the Terminator won. I donated to Dean and he became the butt of jokes. Now Nader is running again, and everyone's already talking about the chances of another four years of Bush. But see, this time, I've got a plan: I'm going to vote for Bush.

Blog Linkage

Terry had a post over the weekend about the decline in readership of magazines, which he attributes to increased interest in blogs. Terry makes the point that bloggers ought to give credit for the sources of their links and discusses his own policy for giving link credit. But, he adds,

Not all bloggers feel this way. Certain of our colleagues are bad—a few notoriously so—about giving credit to other bloggers. I’ll name no names, but I will say that the stingy practice of link-poaching has lately come in for quite a bit of backstage criticism.

Jessa reacted to Terry's post angrily. She disliked the mysteriousness of the quote above. She doesn't dispute that she doesn't always credit her sources, but she attributes that to the fact that she bookmarks links and then forgets their source (Interestingly enough, Terry admitted to the same habit in his post.)
What's amusing about this little brouhaha is that it stands in sharp contrast to the view (most recently expressed by Jennifer Howard in that infamous Washington Post article) that lit bloggers are a clickish group who tend to uniformly praise one thing or berate the other.
In case you're curious, I always try to cite the source of a link plucked from a fellow blogger, even if the link is from a site as widely read as the New York Times. But there are so few sources of literary interest, that lit bloggers are going to the same places, so it would be really surprising if people didn't get to the same links independently. In fact, there are topics I won't even cover (e.g. the recent Woolf/Bloom allegations) because several other bloggers are already on top of them and I'm not sure there's much more I can say that I couldn't just add to the comments sections of their sites. At any rate, I don't see blogging as a zero-sum game where people compete for links and need credits. I'm too busy reading stuff to worry about who's giving credit to my links.

Paging MT Experts

With the change over to the new design I have a couple of MT changes I still need to make. If you're willing to help, please email me: llalami at yahoo dot com.

February 19, 2004

Flanagan Hoopla

When the March issue of The Atlantic finally arrived in the mail, I immediately started reading Caitlin Flanagan's cover story, How Serfdom Saved The Women's Movement (now available online.) I figure anyone who can inspire such feelings of disgust in both Maud and Emma while at the same time earn Jessa's admiration should be worth a look. But merely a couple of paragraphs into the article I found myself disliking Flanagan's smug tone, the way she feels superior to (or bad for, depending on how you want to interpret her) other women who have to drop off their kids at day care because, you know, they "worked more because of economic necessity than because of a desire for professional advancement or emotional fulfillment." These women, she says, were missing out because they couldn't stay at home and note "every little moue of delight or displeasure" that crossed their children's faces. But Flanagan did. And she did it all thanks to her very industrious nanny who "did all the hard stuff." It would be easy to dismiss all of this if it were just a matter of tone. It isn't, of course. Flanagan practically pillories mothers who keep their jobs and have to hire nannies. Of her own choice to do so, she says only

Why was I supposed to endlessly wipe down the kitchen counters and lug bags of garbage out to the cans and set out the little plastic plates of steamed carrots and mashed bananas that the children touched only in order to hurl them onto the floor?

Why indeed? Shouldn't the answer to this question somehow involve the man of the house? Flanagan doesn't say. She goes on:

Wasn't I designed for more important things than putting away Lego blocks and loading the dishwasher? I was! It was time. Cherchez la femme.

And femme she does find, in the person of a nanny. Flanagan proudly says that she pays her nanny's salary as well as her Social Security taxes. But while she is letting herself off the hook about her nanny hiring she hurls an enormous amount of guilt towards working women who hire nannies, accusing them of advancing their careers at the expense of thirld world immigrants. Where are the men in all of this? In our enlightened times, shouldn't men share in the responsibility of raising the children and therefore face up to what their nanny choices entail? Why not throw a little responsibilty and guilt their way? But, no. Piling on women is so much better. The single worthwhile point that Flanagan makes is about Social Security. She makes it (very, very) abundantly clear that while the women's lib movement has decried the loss of Social Security wages for women who stop working in order to have babies (the Mommy Tax), it hasn't made an equal fuss over the fact that few nannies receive those wages. Okay, point taken. But again, a quick look at her Slate article about this confirms the argument that she is focused on women--not couples--as being the hirers, and therefore exploiters, of nannies. The rest of the 10,000-word article is more filler material. To top it off, Flanagan cites the loathsome Girlfriends books, playfully derides a woman's choice to work outside the home ("leaving the New York Times! exposing herself to snubs at cocktail parties!"), and makes silly quips ("[Naomi Wolf] had wanted a revolution; what she got was a Venezuelan"). There is a point in the article somewhere, but you'll have to slug through all the self-satisfied bullshit first.

New Trend In Publishing

I'm not sure what "hip-hop life" is, but whatever it is, it's apparently selling.

Should Sound Familiar

French intellectuals are upset with the centre-right government over what they see as a war on intelligence. They're upset about the current cultural climate, which they say tends to divide people over simplistic alternatives (veils: for or against.) They're upset about budget cuts to scientific research. They're upset about new powers accorded to police at the expense of civil rights.

Sad Distinction

The world's oldest prisoners of war, Moroccan soldiers captured by the Polisario front in the early days of the Sahara conflict, are due to be released today according to this AP report. The Polisario still detains another five hundred men that to this day it refuses to let go.

The Bookstore

We saw The Bookstore last night at the Guild Theater (part of the Portland International Film Festival.) At times the movie lacked focus, but it more than made up for it with its engaging characters and so we enjoyed it quite a bit, particularly because of Hend Sabri. She plays an aspiring singer who specializes in Asmahan covers and who is desperately trying to escape her husband's bookstore for a better life.

The Latest in Euphemisms

Not prisoners of war, not enemy combatants, not detainees. Now they're called "guests".

February 18, 2004

Words Without Borders

One of my favorite online mags, Words Without Borders, is featured in this New York Times article.

The idea took root well before Sept. 11, when [Alane] Mason heard from a group of German publishers, complaining as usual about the provincialism of Americans in the world of letters. She said she began to think about her own lack of knowledge of new writers from other countries, came up with the idea of an online magazine and applied for a grant.

The magazine's Middle-East section is particularly worth your while

Of Language and Writing

Bookslut links to an article about Panos Karnezis in which he talks about his choice to write in English.

Apart from the commercial advantages of being able to sell English-language fiction worldwide, there are technical reasons, too, for Karnezis' choice. "The Greek language is a bit like Spanish - more other, much more wordy. It's common to have very long sentences. As a language, Greek is more dramatic. I try to bring the Greek experience - the bathos, the pathos - into English."
Is there a tension, then, between the language and what Karnezis is writing about? "Yes, yes. It's very interesting. You can explain a man's macho attitude with one word in Greek. You can be much more specific. Here, you have to do it in a few sentences, which I find a great challenge. It's like building a wall."

For my part, I wrote in Arabic and French when I was a kid but English superseded those languages by the time I started college. When I wrote in Arabic I found it hard to keep up with the rhythm. Pick up any novel in Arabic and you'll see that a sentence can run a page or two. I needed the finality of the period, perhaps because I had been already exposed to non-Arabic punctuation from a very early age. In French I wrote mostly poetry, long pieces that were meant to sound like Lamartine or Hugo and later like Baudelaire or Verlaine. I started learning English in high school and liked the mechanics of the language and soon I was reading almost everything I could get my hands on in English. Sometimes I even read French or Arab writers in translation. After a few years English became the language I think in. Sometimes when I talk to my mom my Arabic comes out garbled, like a translation of something I'm conceptualizing in English. (There's fodder for you Sapir-Whorf people.) Some of my favorite writers are non-native speakers: Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad and more recently Ha Jin and I end up re-reading them almost every year. Sometimes I wonder if language choice affects the kinds of stories I'm writing or thinking about writing. I suppose the only way to find out is to switch back and see. I certainly plan on trying that someday.

Spy Novels: The State of The Art

Fred Kaplan asks whether spy novels are any good these days. I just started Absolute Friends, so I'll save this article for the weekend.

Reading List Additions

I'm not familiar with Israeli author Etgar Keret, but this article intrigued me.

[Y]et the funny, talkative, self-deprecating literary star is the "ordinary" one in a family that is a microcosm of the country's extremes. Keret's elder brother is "a certified genius" and militant activist who formed Israel's Legalise Marijuana movement, and fights police brutality and the building of the security wall through the West Bank. His sister, an ultra-Orthodox Jew with 10 children, campaigns against cars entering her area of Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Her beliefs forbid her from reading Keret's sharp-edged fiction but the Hasidic books she has given him influence his writing with a universal, fable quality.

Keret's books are read by very different segments of the Israeli and Palestinian populations, and his work is available in many translations. Still, he seems to rub some people the wrong way.

A.B. Yehoshua, the elder of Israeli literature, complains that Keret's fiction is narrow and non-ideological. Keret says, "I think I'm very political." But unlike the tribal definition of politics that states "You're stupid and we know what you need", he believes ambiguity is moral and small, human stories hold more truth than the big, certain narratives of his predecessors.

Keret's latest book is a collection of stories, The Nimrod Flip-Out (not yet available on Amazon apparently) but you can get his best-selling collection, The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God.

Menendez Reading

Ana Menendez will be reading from Loving Che, her new novel, at Powell's tonight, though unfortunately I won't be able to go as I already had plans to go see this tonight.

February 17, 2004

Pimpin'

I just found out my Pindeldyboz story has been selected by StorySouth as one of their Notable Online Short Stories 2003. I see several Zoe friends on the list, including Heather Fleming, Avital Gad-Cykman, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Wendy Vaizey, Alan C. Baird as well as other fine writers like Sefi Atta, Randa Jarrar, Antonya Nelson, etc. Pindeldyboz scored six nominations. Other journals with multiple nominations included Eclectica, Eyeshot, Fiction Warehouse, LGCR, LitPot, McSweeney's and Spoiled Ink.

And They Said It Wouldn't Sell

I haven't read Eats, Shoots And Leaves, but I love the idea that a topic isn't best-seller material until it becomes one. Look out for new grammar books in the same style to pop up in a bookstore near you.

Support the Arts: Subscribe

The new issue of Mizna is up, with poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye and Suheir Hammad, and fiction by Laila Halaby. Mizna is also hosting oud musician Simon Shaheen in Minnesota (!) in March.

Don't Tell The Folks In Miami

Alice Walker is in to Cuba to promote the Spanish translation of her novel Meridian. And no, amigos, she's not meeting with Fidel, so settle down.

Monoliths Galore

This New York Times article, Arabs in US Raising Money to Back Bush, starts with a startlingly broad generalization:

Wealthy Arab-Americans and foreign-born Muslims who strongly back President Bush's decision to invade Iraq are adding their names to the ranks of Pioneers and Rangers, the elite Bush supporters who have raised $100,000 or more for his re-election.

Funny thing is, the paper of record has nothing to back up this assertion, save for a few people who happen to be, well, not quite Arab: there's mention of several wealthy Iranian donors, Pakistani donors, White House dinners, etc. but not really of Ahmed Bin Mohammed of Dearborn or whatever. Perhaps faintly aware of the oddness of the generalization that wealthy Arabs are donating to their nemesis, the writer tries to qualify it:

One reason may be that Arab-Americans are not a monolithic group.

Gee, you think? Why, then, does the very title of the article send the message that these wealthy donors are of the same ethnic group? This is just bizarre.

The Cost of Being Black

How can disadvantage persist so long after most laws, minds and practices have changed? Thomas M. Shapiro argues in this sober and authoritative book that we should look to disparities of wealth for the answer. Whites are wealthier than African Americans, and whites' wealth advantage is much bigger than their advantages in either income or education (the point of Shapiro's earlier study, Black Wealth/White Wealth, co-authored with Melvin Oliver). Whites start out ahead because they inherit more from their parents, and America's racially segregated housing markets boost whites' home equities, while depressing those of African-American families. Shapiro, a professor of sociology at Brandeis, takes readers through the implications of these inequities and concludes that African Americans will not gain significant ground in the wealth divide until inheritance and housing policies change.

The Washington Post reviews Shapiro's The Hidden Cost of Being African American.

Last Crossing

To Americans, a bestseller in Canada is like a tree falling in the forest. Unless it's written by Margaret Atwood, they don't hear it and it doesn't exist. A beautiful novel by Francis Itani followed that parochial rule last fall. No. 1 in Canada, "Deafening" barely made a sound on the other side of the border. This baffling literary disconnect between the world's two most connected nations is about to be tested again. Guy Vanderhaeghe's "The Last Crossing" was selected as one of the best books of the year by Canada's major newspapers. The Canadian Booksellers Association chose it as their favorite novel of 2002, and readers there have sent it to the top of the bestseller list. If there's any literary justice, any thirst for adventure, any love for a great Western, then "The Last Crossing" won't just cross the Canadian border, but shatter it.

The Christian Science Monitor reviews The Last Crossing.

February 16, 2004

Yeah, But Where Are World-Exclusive Photos?

The BBC finds it useful to let its readers know that author Helen Fielding just had a baby. We are standing by for news on who Julian Barnes is dating, what Mark Haddon is wearing, and who's doing Audrey Nifenegger's makeup.

Hermit Interview

Anne Tyler responds to the NY Times' emailed questions.

Bard Readings

Wellesley students staged simultaneous readings of all of Shakespeare's works, including his poetry, in a 24-hour period.

February 12, 2004

Valentine Haiku

If you're good at haiku (I'm not), you could enter the Guardian's Valentine's Day haiku contest: Verse Your Valentine.

Not On The President's List

Kareem Fahim reviews Tariq Ali's Bush in Babylon for the VLS.

In a sense, Bush in Babylon hosts the exiles' debate: leftist poets versus Pentagon collaborators, a struggle for authorship of an unwritten Iraqi future. One side waits for Nasser, and the other for Jefferson. Perhaps Iraq should be left to a younger generation with a shorter memory.

Read the full review here.

TFR Woes

The Florida Review is having trouble staying afloat, due to recent budget cuts.

It is still unclear whether The Florida Review will receive money next year, but this time Leiby said they will be prepared if they do not receive the money. Leiby has already begun work on grant applications and has plans to increase the subscription base as well. Without UCF's regular contribution, subscriptions were responsible for paying the entire cost of the fall and spring issues, Leiby said. Donations will help to pay for future issues.

They are having a fee-paying contest to help raise funds.

Moroccan Hilloula

Six-hundred Moroccan Jews from Morocco and around the world came together this week in the town of Rich to celebrate a hilloula (pilgrimage) at the tomb of Rabbi Itzhak Abessehra. Details here.

February 11, 2004

Forgive The Freudian Slip

Harvard University is going to publish an undergrad sex mag. The Boston Channel's headline: Harvard to Pubish Sex Mag.

Escape Lit

Ted Conover's Newjack, an account of his life as a rookie prison guard at Sing Sing, was used by inmates to plan an escape, according to this article.

And I Still Don't Have the TV Hooked Up

Morocco will play Tunisia in the finals of the African Nations Cup. Full coverage here.

Mostly Foggy

I finally went to see House Of Sand And Fog last night and didn't care for it much. In the book, you shift allegiances with each point of view and yet you can still feel for each character. In the movie you don't. They all end up coming across as hateable, starting with Behrani. I like Ben Kingsley a lot, but in this movie Behrani was quite dry for a while then overly melodramatic at the end. Blah.

February 10, 2004

Khadra's Latest

Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra (alias Mohammed Moulessehoul) has a new novel coming out in the U.S. Unlike his previous works, which were set in Algeria where Islamists continue to battle the military-backed government, this new work is set in Afghanistan and tells the story of an educated, once-prosperous couple struggling under the Taliban. The Christian Science Monitor has a review of The Swallows of Kabul.

Princess Leia, Recidivist

Carrie Fisher continues to mine her family's history, this time for a new novel The Best Awful. She gets a NYT review.

Lit Journal's Blog

The Missouri Review has started its own blog: Inside the Missouri Review.

February 09, 2004

Proustinia

Am I the only one who can't quite make sense of this Village Voice piece about Marcel Proust? It looks like a review of a recent translation of Proust's A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur but there are two many em-dashes and bizarre changes in subjects with each new paragraph. Oh, and I guess there's also a quickie review of a recent translation of Céleste Albaret's biography of the man.

Small Presses Elsewhere

Ha'aretz has an article about small presses in Israel.

How is it that right in the middle of a recession new publishers are setting up shop? It turns out that small publishers who start out during an economic slump adapt to operating under such conditions. There are a few rules that help them to survive, the first of which is "do it yourself" - the publishers save money by working from home, and are usually the ones who edit and translate the texts, design the books and are also in charge of advertising and public relations.

Read the whole thing here.

Last Bloombury

The last survivor of the Bloomsbury Group, Frances Partridge, has passed away.

Born Frances Marshall, she became the lover of group member Ralph Partridge, who was married at the time to painter Dora Carrington, who in turn was in love with biographer Lytton Strachey. The gay Strachey was in love with the "hopelessly heterosexual" Ralph Partridge. All lived together for a time in a house in the country.

And you thought your love life was complicated.

Come Again?

Jessa reviews a few recent comics for the Washington Post, including Joe Sacco's The Fixer. The one line bio made me smile, though: they could call a blog a "Web log" and still sound quaint, but they came off as a little more than anachronistic when they call it a "Web blog" (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, a print blog?)

Ahmed Marzouki's Tazmamart, Cellule 10

Ahmed Marzouki's Tazmamart, Cellule 10 is a memoir of his eighteen years in the infamous jail of Tazmamart, in the middle of the desert. In 1971, Marzouki was stationed at the ecole militaire d'Ahermoumou. He was taken to the town of Skhirat, along with hundreds of other student officers, for what he believed were military exercises, but was in fact a coup, plotted by General Mohamed Medbouh and by the director of the school, Lieutenant-Colonel Mhamed Ababou. The coup failed, and the entire group of students was quickly arrested, jailed, and sentenced to serve various sentences in the military prison of Kenitra. Then, two years into their sentence fifty-eight of the prisoners (some of whom, like Marzouki, not only didn't know about the coup but didn't even fire a single shot) were taken to a new prison that had been built for them: Tazmamart. They were to stay in solitary confinement for eighteen years. Only twenty-eight of them survived.

Marzouki struggled for years to understand the arbitrariness of his imprisonment, so it's perhaps not surprising that this book is written not so much as the narrative of his years in jail but as a close examination of the facts of the case. The reader is given the names and bios of each of the prisoners, the names and dispositions of the guards, the daily menu, the schedule devised by the prisoners, the constant (denied) requests for water or medicine.

And yet, the book feels lacking in at least two aspects: First, the chapter on the coup feels very distant and doesn't go into what Marzouki saw. This is a missed opportunity to give us an eyewitness account that is different from the accepted, official narrative. The second shortcoming is that, although Marzouki's fate was decided by an apparatus which was ultimately controlled by King Hassan, the king is curiously absent from the book. Still, Tazmamart, Cellule 10 is an important and necessary read.

February 06, 2004

Azar Nafisi Interview

Robert Birnbaum interviews Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran). An excerpt:

Sometimes it becomes very difficult to cast these characters. When a foreign writer writes about another culture, two things could happen simultaneously. One is you need to have deep knowledge of the context of that culture to create characters. Not necessarily negative or positive—sometimes when I read books about Iranian characters, I don't feel these characters become real for me. I don’t mean real by meeting them in real life but within the context of the book itself. So they become a little artificial, a little staged.

Link via Stephany, who's guesting over at Maud.

Suddenly A Screamer Doesn't Sound So Bad

Kerry was quite cozy with AIG, the AP says.

February 05, 2004

Munif Obit

The Guardian's obit for Abdelrahman Munif.

BoldType, LGCR, StorySouth

Issue Number Four, the Looooove Issue (long vowel mine, sorry) is now available here.

The good folks at LCGR are offering a free Bishop Allen CD with every subscription.

Nominations for StorySouth's Million Writers Award are due by tonight. Surely you must have read a story this year that you'd like to promote?