May 28, 2004

Memorial Day Hiatus

It's a holiday weekend and I've got family in town and loads of stuff to do still, so I'm taking Friday and Monday off. Be back Tuesday. In the meantime, check out Birnbaum's interview with Ben Jones (The Rope Eater).

May 27, 2004

Spawns of Da Vinci Code

The latest shortcut to publishing stardom: Renaissance mysteries. At the center of this new genre is the work of two friends who were interested in The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a manuscript published in Venice in the 15th century. Dinitia Smith explains it all here. The Rule Of Four has debuted at Number 6 in the NY Times bestseller list.
Link via Bookninja.

Lewis Profile

The Scotsman has a long, whitewashed profile of Bernard Lewis, the man whose scholarship is relied upon by the Bush Admnistration.

Lewis speaks in richly fruity tones that, to American ears, signify an old-style English charm and elegance: to British ears, his voice is a reminder of a distant imperial age. "There is," he says, "a certain melancholy pleasure in having been right when so many were wrong."

What he considers to be "right," he doesn't say. Later on, the neo-cons' favorite author says:

"I’m cautiously optimistic about what’s happening in Iraq," he says, although warning that democracy will take time to be built and must be allowed to develop in a specifically Iraqi rather than American fashion.

I suppose that speaks for itself.

Markandaya Profile

Kamala Markandaya has passed away a few days ago and Outlook India has a profile.

Indo-Canadian poet and academic Uma Parameswaran, who has studied Markandaya's oeuvre and interviewed her, is of the opinion that she was "a pioneer member of the Indian Diaspora, and her best novel, The Nowhere Man (1972) foreshadows many diasporic issues with which we are preoccupied today".

Here's the article.

WLS

The L.A Weekly has just published its literary supplement, and offerings include reviews of MG favorite Purple Hibiscus, David Bezmozgis' story collection Natasha and Other Stories, and Lisa Glatt's A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That.

Link via Mark.

Public Service Announcement

Leave Maud alone, people.

Birnbaum at YPR

YPR says that this week, it will present " presents Interviews with Interviewers, wherein we’ll be interviewing interviewers on the art of interviewing interviewees. If you think that sounded stupid, be grateful we’re not Prince, or you’d have read “NtervU” six times in the preceding sentence." Duly noted. The first person to submit to the NtervU is Robert Birnbaum. Sample quote:

Y.P.R.: Who do you wish would interview you?
R.B.: The question of who I would like to interview me sounds like a form of who would I like to play me in the movie of my unwritten-but-tending-toward-self-glamorization memoir, Three Hands Clapping. If Robert Duvall were playing me then I would like Jennifer Connelly playing Joan Didion interviewing me. In real life, I would hope that Cynthia Ozick could be interested enough in me to want to have a conversation.

Read the conversation here.

May 26, 2004

Imad Rahman's I Dream of Microwaves

In Imad Rahman's debut collection, I Dream of Microwaves, B-movie actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, has just lost his role on America's Most Wanted (playing Manuel Gutman, a convicted felon who had "crossed the line from gun-toting menace to shotgun-wielding assassin"), and his prospects are so poor that his next job is to play a Bosnian refugee in order to get his wife Eileen's philanthropic grandmother to part with her money.

Abdul-Jabbar's wife convinces him to act the part because, she says,

Americans have no sense of international politics, of global community, of social duty outside their neighborhoods. The world falls apart and we dream of microwaves.

Eileen takes off for South America shortly thereafter, and Abdul-Jabbar drifts from one job to the next, dressing as Zima Zorro to hawk booze to customers, renting his wife's home out to pornographers who want to "combine fucking with intellectual social commentary," posing as a repo-man for a video-rental company, taking a part in Apocalypse Now: The Musical, and so on.

There are some wonderfully realized moments in the book. The opening story, for instance, works both as an ironic send-up of how we look at minorities and as a reflection of the struggle to fit into expectations. And Rahman displays a biting sense of humor throughout.

Eventually, however, the one-liners and absurd set-ups are all that keep the stories going, each new joke trying to top the one before it. Substance recedes to the background in favor of pop-culture references, and the reader ends up alienated.

I really wanted to like this book. So few short-story collections are published these days that I often start them with a favorable stance. But this Eugene Ionesco-style universe didn't quite work for me.

May 25, 2004

Defamation* and Search Engines

I suppose you already know this, but just in case you didn't, if defamatory material is found through Google, it doesn't mean you can sue it. On second read, there's also this little tidbit that may be of interest to bloggers.

By contrast, the defamation liability risk of selection sites such as The Drudge Report -- that is, sites that offer collections of specially culled links to other sites -- remains uncertain. Someone who chooses a link may count as having published the material to which the link leads -- and may be held to have the state of mind to be held liable for the choice. This argument has been used in the context of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and could be used in the defamation context, as well.

It should be interesting to see how things develop.
*Thanks Maud.

Paranoid Nation

Many of those questioning the White House line on Berg were fringe, yes, but they fed on the doubts of a mainstream no longer sure what to believe. Last week, the U.S. either bombed a safe house for terrorists, or an Iraqi wedding. Ahmad Chalabi is either an asset and one of the fathers of the new Iraq, or a spy. And Donald Rumsfeld either authorized the kind of torture meted out at Abu Ghraib, or knew nothing.

The Village Voice's Kareem Fahim on those conspiracy theories that have been making the rounds of the blogs.

U.S. Soldiers in Korean Lit

Depictions of U.S. soldiers in Korean literature are often negative, says the Chosun Ilbo.

There were many works written after the war that depicted the dark atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s in which children who should have been going to elementary school instead were working as U.S. military houseboys and pimps. Yet more works, despite featuring stories that take place is or around U.S. bases, stressed the social corruption that they claim forced us into such a situation.

Poems, novels, and short stories are examined in the article, reminding me how unfamiliar I am with Korean literature. Ideas for a good place to start are welcome.

Oyez, Oyez

At long last, issue Number 4 of Pindeldyboz is going to be available June 12.

'Its Best Use is as a Doorstop'

A kind reader emailed to point out Brian Whitaker's take on The Arab Mind, which appeared in The Guardian.

Consider these statements: "Why are most Africans, unless forced by dire necessity to earn their livelihood with 'the sweat of their brow', so loath to undertake any work that dirties the hands?"
"The all-encompassing preoccupation with sex in the African mind emerges clearly in two manifestations ..."
"In the African view of human nature, no person is supposed to be able to maintain incessant, uninterrupted control over himself. Any event that is outside routine everyday occurrence can trigger such a loss of control ... Once aroused, African hostility will vent itself indiscriminately on all outsiders."
These statements, I think you'll agree, are thoroughly offensive. You would probably imagine them to be the musings of some 19th century colonialist. In fact, they come from a book promoted by its US publisher as "one of the great classics of cultural studies", and described by Publisher's Weekly as "admirable", "full of insight" and with "an impressive spread of scholarship".
The book is not actually about Africans. Instead, it takes some of the hoariest old prejudices about black people and applies them to Arabs.

Read Whitaker's article here.

May 24, 2004

Prison Lit

Nilanjana Roy's review of Gregory Roberts’ Shantaram centers largely on comparisons with Henri Charriere's Papillon, and seems to imply that the classic prison novel is a pulpy tale of the author's adventures. But prison has also produced some classics, and Roy cites Pilgrim's Progress. There are others. Don Quixote, Fanny Hill, and several of O. Henry's stories come to mind. Email me if you think of others.

IR Between Cultures

Nice blurb about Indiana Review's Between Cultures issue. Order a copy here.

Paging Fact Checkers

I don't really have much to say about this Alice Walker profile except, perhaps, "Coño, El Che isn't Cuban. "

Abu-Jaber Profile

Ed links to this SF Chronicle profile of Diana Abu-Jaber.

"It wasn't great for 'Crescent' to come out when the war was being launched; it gave me some initial attention, but it wasn't appropriate," says Abu-Jaber. "People were asking me things like, 'Why do (Arabs) hate us?' and asking me to speak for the Iraqi nation, which I really didn't want to do and hadn't intended to do in any fashion. It was frustrating to political activists who read it and wanted it to be more staunchly directive in what it says."

Abu-Jaber's Crescent is just now out in paperback.

'Round The Sphere

Several of my favorite bloggers are mentioned in this week's New Yorker. Lizzie reviews Alice Randall's latest in the NY Times, and Sarah tackles Heaven Lies About Us in the Denver Post.

May 23, 2004

New Lahiri

Fans of Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies have had few short stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author to nibble on (beside " Nobody's Business," which appeared in The New Yorker and was anthologized in BASS 2002.) So it was a special treat to find "Hell-Heaven," in this week's New Yorker. Enjoy.

I'll Give You A Piece of This Arab Mind

According to a recent New Yorker article, Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind was used by some neo-cons to justify the meme that Arabs can only be handled through violence and may have served as a pretext for some of the practices at Abu Ghraib.

[Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind], it is said, gave these hawks in Washington the idea that the Arabs understood only force, and their greatest weakness was shame and humiliation. The daughters of Mr Patai, a Hungarian who moved to the US and taught at Princeton and Columbia universities, have condemned how their father's work is treated. In a statement, they said: 'There's nothing new about written work, including scholarly work, being put to uses its authors never dreamed of. But still it rankles when it's an esteemed family member who is being maligned."

See, they're generous. They classify it as academic work, whereas it really belongs under the heading "Caricature." But, then again, what the hell do I know, I'm supposed to only understand force. Read the Independent article here.

Why You Should Get Your Lit News From Blogs

Michael Maar's allegations that Lolita was plagiarized were first reported in the Telegraph and mentioned here on Moorishgirl in mid-March, with further details that same month. Other lit blogs also commented on the news. Now the New York Times has caught on, with a piece about the allegations and the general disbelief they engendered.

Book Ban

Another follow up on the challenge to Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by the Federal Way School District. The Seattle P.I. says that a complaint was filed against the teacher and that as, a result of this brouhaha, the district will now have to approve reading lists for all grades.

Indian Lit Star

The Tribune India has an interview with Rupa Bajwa,whose debut novel, The Sari Shop, was on the Orange Prize longlist.

What is it to be a Punjabi girl writing in English?
Being a ‘Punjabi Girl’ certainly didn’t make things easier. Neither the Punjabi bit nor the girl bit.

You can also read the Guardian's review of the novel here.

That Explains Why He's Got A Story There Every Couple of Weeks

The Guardian profiles John Updike and reveals, among other things, the writer's competitive side.

If Updike's name now commands respect throughout New York and beyond, it is in part thanks to the magazine inseparably identified with the city. He has been a contributor to the New Yorker for half a century and shows no signs of drying up. "John is very competitive with the younger writers," says Roger Angell, who has been his editor for fiction at the New Yorker since 1976. "For about 20 years he's thought he's on the brink of not being able to write any more short fiction. If I mention that we've got a story by a terrific young writer, he'll say, 'Oh really', and within a couple of weeks he'll send in a wonderful short story."

Read it here.

Bigoted Young Tintin - Take Two

In response to Friday's post on race issues in the Tintin comics, a kind reader sends this link to a parody site called Tintin and the War in Iraq, featuring General Alcazar as President Bush, Captain Haddock as a UN inspector, Sheik Abdullah as Osama Bin Laden, etc. The only misstep is that Tintin is presented as a French (rather than Belgian) citizen. Still, it's really quite good. Have a look.

'That You May Be Abbas Al-Abd' - Take Two

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of emails I received about the entry on Ahmad Al-Aidy's new book, An-Takoun Abbas Al-Abd. Unfortunately, I don't know where you can order the book online, and if I find out, I will post the information here. In the meantime, your best bet is to find someone who can get you the book from Egypt. (BTW, thanks, Randa!)

Update Your Blogroll

Thanks to a reader at the Temple De Hirsch Sinai Library in Seattle and to the proprietor of the blog himself, I've discovered that Kinnblog (which had linked to MG a couple of weeks ago) is the first lit blog in the Hebrew language. It's run from the offices of Kinneret-Zmora Bitan-Dvir Publishing House in Israel, though it's independent of the house itself and features articles on local and international literary news.

May 21, 2004

Bigoted Young Tintin

The current Tintin exhibition at the London Maritime Museum continues to generate ink, this time by A.N. Wilson in the Telegraph.

It speaks volumes about the difference between modern England and France that the only title unavailable in an English translation is Tintin au Congo, written in 1946. We had read it in English in a borrowed book, but after serious nagging from the youngest Tintin fan in the house, I went off to the European bookshop in Warwick Street to buy it new. When we had read Tintin au Congo together, the six-year-old remarked, with the accurate callousness of her age, that Herge had made the Africans really stupid, and also that he had depicted them as having black skins, whereas they should have been dark brown.
She could have gone further. The inhabitants of Congo with whom Tintin has dealings are not merely black, they are scarcely human. When Tintin records the cynical remarks made about them by their witch-doctor ("ce peuple ignorant et stupide sous domination de moi") the villagers would only confirm his prejudice. They think he has been trapped in the actual horn of the phonograph. (The attempts by the Africans to get an antiquated steam engine back on the rails come to nought until Tintin bellows at them for their laziness.)

Later on, Wilson takes further exception to the book, noting that the African landscapes weren't depicted as magically and beautifully as in "Tibet, South America and Arab lands," where other Tintin adventures were set. See, all I remember from Tintin and The Crab With the Golden Claws are the savage 'Berabers,' and the mock Arabic script. Tintin and The Land of Black Gold stirs up memories of the evil Sheik and the insufferable Abdullah. The landscapes, if there were any, must have gone right over my head.

Link via Bookninja (again.)

What Else Is New?

Russell Smith makes the connection between Iraq and Heart of Darkness.

Update: Oops, looks like Bookninja got to this link already. (Scroll to 5/20 entries.)

Authorized Version

W.W. Norton is going to publish the reports of the 9-11 commission's investigation. Or you can get it free online.

El Jefe's Shame

Repression may be good for journalism, it turns out.

Cuba has jailed more journalists per capita than any nation in the world, yet the number of people willing to take up the risky profession is growing, American officials say.

Read more about the risky profession in the island.
Update: A reader sends this link about five Cubans and Cuban Americans imprisoned in the U.S. Alice Walker is due to speak tomorrow at a forum in their support.

May 20, 2004

Thirty-Five?

I thought it was a typo, but no. Bill Clinton's My Life will retail for $35, according to this article. If you're just looking for titillating details, you're safer going to the video store. At least there'll be a payoff down the road.

After Arabs, Latinos

Three months ago, I mentioned Samuel (The Clash of Civilications) Huntington's new book Who Are We?, in which he claims that Latinos haven't assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, a "fact" which threatens U.S. identity. Now that he's targeting another kind of brown people, let's see how long it takes before everyone calls him what he is: a maniac. Look, it's already starting: Carlos Fuentes responds. Also, Roberto Lovato.

Nabokov Profile

David Kipen has an article about MG favorite Vladimir Nabokov. Luckily, the article is more about the writer's work and his visits to California than about the recent sales of memorabilia or the allegations of plagiarism.

Nabokov's prose sometimes recalls the private language of identical twins, completely assured in its conspiratorial willingness to be strange. He makes every admiring reader into his twin, which may help explain why many feel so territorial about him. Always oblique yet never obscure, Nabokov's prose sounds like English on the morning of its birth, with every word equally available to him, and all the ruts of habit gone suddenly smooth.

Read the entire article here.

Get This Woman A Comedy Special

Stand-up comic Tissa Hami, whose act includes cracking airport jokes while wearing an Islamic Hijab, has put up the lyrics to her Ramadan Song on her website (to be sung to the tune of Adam Sandler's Hannukah Song, of course.)

LCGR Issue No. 2

Issue No. 2 of the Land-Grant College Review came in the mail yesterday and I curled up on the sofa with it. The magazine has fewer stories this time around, but there is no decline in quality. I quite enjoyed stories by Roy Kesey, Alan Cheuse, and Jim Hanas, among many others. If you're in New York, why not go to the launch party? It will be at Ode to Go on May 22nd.

Thanks

One of the great things about blogging is the opportunity to communicate with people who share my interest in books, especially when their opinions are different. I've learned a lot these past few years and just wanted to say thank you to my readers for their emails.

May 19, 2004

Edward P. Jones's The Known World

The trouble when a book has received or been nominated for nearly every imaginable prize is that it's often hard to judge the book on its own merit. Cynic that I am, I started reading The Known World with the expectation that, somewhere down the line, I'd find something that would confirm my suspicion of the enormous attention it garnered. Fortunately, I was wrong. This is an extraordinary book.

Jones takes an odd footnote in the history of slavery (the existence of slave-owning black families) and delivers a compelling novel, one that goes beyond the oddity to reveal insights about human nature. The story of Henry Townsend, a former slave who becomes a slaveowner himself, is told in a succession of brief scenes, interspersed with research notes.

Set in fictional Manchester County, Virginia, the novel opens with Henry's death and follows the events that result from it, through the eyes of a number of characters: his parents, his wife Caldonia, his former master William Robbins, and so on.
Jones' spare prose often mixes the matter-of-factly with the kind of detail that can break your heart. Witness how, after a wedding, a bride is presented with this gift:

About three o'clock, after matters had quieted down some, Belle went out to where her maid was in the backyard and returned with a slave girl of nine years and had the girl, festooned with a blue ribbon, stand and then twirl about for Winifred. "She's yours," Belle told Winifred. "A woman, especially a married one, is nothing without her personal servant." All the people from Philadelphia were quiet, along with John Skiffington and his father, and the people from Virginia, especially those who knew the cost of good slave flesh, smiled. Belle picked up the hem of the girl's dress and held it out for Winifred to examine, as if the dress itself were a bonus.

At times The Known World is quite difficult to read, perhaps because of the distance Jones puts between him and his material. But this is a necessary choice, given the complexity of the story and the bleak subject matter. At the same time, he is deeply attuned to the contradictions of human nature and to the moral compromises we make in order to survive in the world.

May 18, 2004

O'Connor Farm Open

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that Flannery O'Connor's childhood home had received some of its original furniture back. Now I hear that the author's farm, Andalusia, is open to the public.

'Boche Babies'

A new book gives voice to children born of the affairs between French women and Nazi soldiers or, as they were once called, Boche babies.

According to research cited by author Jean-Paul Picaper, a staggering 200,000 were born between 1941 and 1945 - a long-neglected generation of people now entering their 60s, who are at last able to speak out about the shame and trauma they went through. (...) Michelle Colin for example, who was handed over to an orphanage when she was a few weeks old, recalls being made to write out over and again in her jotter the words, "I am the daughter of a Boche."

The book is called Enfants Maudits.

Have You Seen Me This Morning?

When Dan Cryer interviewed E.L Doctorow for Newsday he mentioned the author's long list of achievements. Doctorow's reply:

Everything that could possibly happen to a writer is bad. Lack of recognition is very bad, No money, very bad. A lot of money, very bad. Whatever happens, it's full of dangers and hazards for the writer. Writing isn't just a matter of putting words on a page. If you do this long enough, there's a kind of loss of self. It can drive a writer to drink, depression, whatever. The hazards are quite visible in the physical wreckage.

Thanks, now I feel great.

The Ayatollahs Have Caught On

A few days ago, I mentioned an exciting new film that was playing to sold-out crowds in Iran--a satire of the religious establishment. Well, the Ayatollahs have caught on. The movie's going to be withdrawn.

Saves Them From Having to Actually Review Books

When my book comes out, I want the cover to have a picture of a McDonald's hamburger. That way, I can be sure that Newsweek will actually devote some space to talking about it, the way they are about Tom Perrotta's Little Children. Apparently, the folks at Pepperidge Farm are pissed off that the cover to Perrotta's book features Goldfish crackers. The Lit Saloon explains it all.

Interviews

Mark has his long-promised interview with Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli) up. I'd put an excerpt here, except I think you should just go on over there and read the whole thing. Maud has inaugurated her Fiction Writers on Writing series with a conversation with Salar Abdoh, author of The Poet Game.

May 16, 2004

'That You May be Abbas Al-Abd'

The Daily Star's Youssef Rakha has a profile of Saudi-born Egyptian author Ahmed Al-Aidi's new book An Takoun Abbas Al-Abd, called "perhaps the first truly popular novel to appear in Egypt since the 1950s." The novel uses pop cultural references to The Matrix, CNN and Friends, a meandering plot, an interesting blend of the latest English slang into Arabic, and seems to be modelled on cult classic Fight Club. Of the book, Rakha says it is

something that highbrow authors, who have written without the benefit of a viable readership for half a century, would not have thought to produce.

It certainly sounds quite different from the usual Egyptian literary fare, and now I'm curious. Someone, please send me a copy.

Books in Translation

The SF Chronicle has a quick overview of some of the few books in translation slated for release in the next few weeks, all by Grove/Atlantic. Offerings include One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P. (translated from the Italian) and Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua (translated from the Hebrew). Kashua's book is reviewed in this weekend's edition of the Daily Star. Here's an excerpt.

What has so captured the imagination of critics everywhere is Kashua's nimble treatment of dual identity. His main character is a man who comes of age as he slips between Arab culture and Israeli society. He is a hybrid creature, hyphenated to the core. Inevitably, the juxtaposition twists his psyche: "I looked more Israeli than the average Israeli," Kashua writes in his character's voice. "I'm always pleased when Jews tell me this. 'You don't look like an Arab at all,' they say. Some people claim it's a racist thing to say, but I've always taken it as a compliment, a sign of success. That's what I've always wanted to be, after all: a Jew. I've worked hard at it, and I've finally pulled it off."

I'm going to have to look for this next time I'm at Powell's.

Bonus Point for Creative Use of "Imperialist"

David Kipen, who sometime last month did a piece for NPR in which he reviewed Swink, Black Clock, and Los Angeles Review, recycles his piece for the SF Chronicle. Add in an analysis of the latest issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, and voila!

But a West Coast literary magazine lives or dies not by how many trophies it racks up but by three seemingly straightforward criteria. These are: how it reads, how it looks and how well it reflects sensibilities in our neck of the woods, especially in light of news that the imperialist New Yorker now has more subscribers in California than in the Empire State.

Read the review here.

Scandal News, Part 56

It's Sunday, so it's time for the next installment in Seymour Hersh's investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal. This week, he contends that

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.

Read the article here. You know there's trouble when even The Economist has this to say.

May 14, 2004

Blogosphere Takes Another Turn Into Mainstream

Iraqi blogger Salam Pax has a movie deal.

Gaitskill Essay

"Love Lessons" by Mary Gaitskill. Go. Read. It.
(Thanks to Maud and Old Hag for the link.)

Jen at her Best

Jen Weiner takes on what's-her-face-from-that-book-about-socialites, and Erica Jong.

The Saddam Tapes

Colonel Beckwith and I told SH that we didn't think it was particularly funny that he had us looking for "Monkey Valley" and the "Camel Ass Testing Facility" when, it turned out, there were no such locations. Also, we told him we were unable to verify the existence of Mohammad Mohahaha and we do not believe his claims of having built an "infidel ray." We told him that, as a result of our disappointment, we would be denying his TV access. He said TV sucks anyway because they don't sing about him anymore.

From "Saddam's Interrogation Tapes," by Brian M. Sack, over at McSweeney's. Link stolen from Bookninja.

May 13, 2004

Ali Interview

Monica Ali talks with the Telegraph's Marianne Macdonald about what the last year's been like for her. Yes, the irrelevant but somehow inevitable description of what the author wore on that day is included.

Book Ban

Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is being challenged by the Federal Way school district in Washington. The reason? A passage in the book includes a boy and a girl having sex. The shock!! The horror!!

[A student] told his mother, Lori Bridges, that [another] student drew an explicit picture of a boy and girl having sex as part of a class drawing exercise on the book.

Ah, well, then we should ban this book forthwith. Because, you know, boys only draw pictures of people having sex when spurred on by a work of literature.

Publishing & Californication

The Literary Saloon deconstructs Pierre Lepape's "Lost Without Translation," which appeared in Le Monde Diplo. Lepape's main point is the sorry state of publishing today in general, and the increasingly large market share accorded to books published in English, in particular.

And [the Frankfurt Book Fair] reflects the increasingly one-way flow of trade between the United States and its sidekick, Britain, and the rest of the Western world. French, Spanish, Italian and German publishers all go to the fair with a single and near-impossible dream: to sell a book to the Americans even for a derisory amount, or to a British publisher as a first step to the paradise of the US market.

Lit Saloon takes exception with two claims made in the article: that the number of books published in Spain is greater than in the UK, and that there have been no translated works to hit bestseller lists in the US. While Lepape's general argument about the lack of translated works in the US is certainly true, his bold assertion that there haven't been any that have sold here calls for counter-examples, and the Lit Saloon provides a couple: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and his recent Oprah selection, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I believe Bernard-Henry Levy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl (translated from the French) did quite well last year and, if memory serves, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (also translated from the French) sold approximately 40,000 copies, although I'm not sure if either book was on the NY Times bestseller list. Of course, the exceptions only serve to reinforce the general rule about the paucity of foreign works in American readers' hands.

The Sanitized War

Is best expressed in this pseudo-commercial: iRaq.
Link via Turbanhead.

Excuses, excuses

I haven't had my coffee yet and I'm feeling rather (or perhaps especially) grumpy today. So expect many links to the other fine literary bloggers who are attending to their duties with much more brio.

May 12, 2004

BASS 2004, Take Two

Several of you have emailed to express interest in Lorrie Moore's selections for Best American Short Stories 2004. Houghton Mifflin won't have a complete table of contents until mid-June, and I'll post it here as soon as I get the galley. But I can already tell you that, besides Mary Yukari Waters' "Mirror Studies" (published in Zoetrope: All-Story), R.T. Smith's "Docent" (which appeared in Missouri Review) also made the cut. Further Googling reveals that Angela Pneuman's "All Saints' Day" (Virginia Quarterly Review) and Trudy Lewis' "Limestone Diner" (Meridian) may be honored in the volume.

Thanks to Charles for the Missouri Review link.

Treasury Dept. Rules on Editing Clarified

The New York Press' Jamie Pietras does a great job of explaining the rules set up by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control regarding editing of books by citizens of Axis-of-Evil countries.

The laws themselves have been around for years. Cuban trade restrictions first emerged in 1917, while the Arab trade regulations have their genesis in 1977 legislation.

The recent brouhaha came up when the IEEE became aware of the sanctions and asked whether they were breaking the law when they were publishing articles by scientists from those countries, and OFAC's response resulted in the axe falling, then later a bit of more wiggle room.

OFAC finally got back to the engineers on April 2 of this year. Their widely publicized letter was posted on OFAC's website and was meant to answer industry questions. Style- and copy-editing were okay, it conceded, and not just for works coming from Iran, but for all the previously mentioned embargoed countries. The clarifications suited the IEEE, which backed off and touted a "First Amendment victory."

But in reality the current rules still make it difficult to publish works by writers from said countries.

Link first seen at TEV.