October 28, 2004
Weekend Starts Early Here
That's about it for me. The lovely and amazing Randa takes over tomorrow, so do check back. Next week is likely to be busy with a wrap-up of the PEN celebrations for the new Best American Short Stories, a post about the election, a review of either Snow or three debut novels that have been sent to us, and of course the usual lit news.
Guène Book Sells
From the Newsweek and NY Times hype, it was clear that a deal would be forthcoming,and today Publishers Marketplace reports:
19-year-old Faïza Guène's debut novel KIFFE KIFFE TOMORROW, recently profiled in the NYT, to Jenna Johnson at Harcourt, for publication as a trade paperback, for publication in spring 2006, by Matt Seidel at the French Publishers' Agency, on behalf of Hachette Littératures (NA). Rights have been sold in Japan, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
You Know Things Are Bad When...
Some 60,000 ballots in a mostly Democratic county have gone missing. Absentee ballots missing the names of John Edwards and John Kerry were mailed to Ohio voters. In Milwaukee, a flyer has appeared that tells people who have had traffic violations they are not eligible to vote. In a break with 80 years of tradition, the New Yorker endorsed a candidate for President. (NYer link from Maud Newton.)
On The Symbolism of the Stick and the Puck
A University of Victoria English professor is scheduled to teach a new course titled "Hockey Literature and the Canadian Psyche." The class is reportedly full, and a few students are hoping to audit.
Strike Two in As Many Weeks
Wal-Mart has returned 3,500 copies of George Carlin's book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops, which were shipped by a distributor. The chain hadn't placed an order for the book, presumably in an effort to protect its fragile audience from good comedy. Last week, Wal-Mart also cancelled orders for John Stewart's America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction.
It Comes From A Place Of Love
Tod Goldberg, who's been guesting at TEV these past few days, provides this dead-on impression of Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt
Michael: Tod, in your transcendent novel Living Dead Girl, you stretch the boundaries of fiction in such a way that the world seems to lack...order...and love, like that poem by Rilke, becomes something like an infection of the soul, a commentary on the socio-economic role we all play in that God and money and danger and the all-encompassing nature of what I like to call "the bukakke" becomes almost a parable from the Bible; or a tone poem; or perhaps it's like a song you hear on the day your dog dies and that song become synonymous with the death of your dog, until dog, becomes...God. Is that what you were trying to do?Silverblatt will be interviewing Dan Chaon today at 2:30 PST.
Tod: Uh. Yes.
Goldman on NPR
Francisco Goldman was interviewed on NPR about his new novel, The Divine Husband, which is so far getting rave reviews.
The Comfort of Labels
When Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty won the Booker last week, nearly every headline mentioned it was a 'gay novel'. He talked to The Telegraph about his reactions.
Does he mind? "It really took me back, I have to say," he says, fumbling to pour our tea through a dainty silver strainer. "I thought we'd gone beyond that sort of talk. I think when newspapers give you those sort of headlines they're really trying to create a shock which isn't there. The book's principal character is gay, of course, but that's really only one part of the story."People love to put labels on writers, it makes things neat and simple. In "Entr'acte," the article I posted earlier about book prizes, there was this little snippet about this year's NBA:
This year, the jurors for the National Book Award for fiction provoked groans by shortlisting five little-known women writers living in New York City, two of them first-time novelists. Further, of the five novels, none had sold more than 2,500 copies before it was shortlisted.Sure, they're little known writers, but what does their being women have to do with anything?
Apple Poet
A piece by Ghanaian poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes will be available on iTunes, making him the first African poet on the service.
"You Love Me, You Really Love Me!"
Alan Riding files an article about "book award season" as he calls it--the Nobel, Booker, NBA--and asks who benefits from the prizes. The authors, sure, but mostly the publishers, who are eager to sell more copies, and who go to great lengths to court juries. Riding cites a new book by a French journalist, which alleges that prizes are nothing more than scams.
Guy Konopnicki, claims the Goncourt is the most blatant example of conflict of interest: he says that it bends to pressure from publishers (who nominate books for consideration) and that some jurors are themselves writers with close ties to leading publishers. Further, the jurors, appointed for life and in some cases in their eighties, are out of touch with public taste.I doubt the problem is restricted to the Goncourt, and given the current trend, we can't be too far from the Harveyization of publishing. Somewhere, a lowly assistant is probably working on putting together gift bags for jurors.
October 27, 2004
Tintin In Diplomatic Row
The Democratic Republic of Congo has recalled its ambassador to Belgium after critical remarks made by the Belgian foreign minister ruffled feathers, the BBC reports.
While visiting Africa, Mr de Gucht said Congolese politicians were unable to introduce democracy or end corruption. (...) Henri Mova Sakanyi said in a statement that the minister was treating Belgium's former colonies like children and was "completely ignorant of the basic rules of diplomacy".Thanks to Jonathan for the link.
The comments border on "racism and nostalgia for colonialism", the minister said. "It's Tintin in the Congo all over again."
NaNoWriMo 2004
National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is due to start in 4 days, and Chris Baty, the man who founded it, is interviewed over at AlterNet.
Guène Profile
French-Algerian writing sensation Faïza Guène is profiled in the New York Times today. An earlier profile had appeared in Newsweek last month. The newspapers are interested because Guène's first novel, a funny take on the daily life of a small Moroccan family in a suburb of Paris, has already sold 25,000 copies in France, and because the author is barely out of her teens.
In her torn jeans, scuffed Adidas and zipped-up sweatshirt, Ms. Guène seems alternately pleased and uncomfortable with her success. She doesn't like being a symbol of the suburbs or being likened to Françoise Sagan, the French writer who died last month and who wrote her best-selling first novel, "Bonjour Tristesse," when she was 18.Negotiations with American publishers are said to be underway. If you're reading me in France, je peux lire le bouquin en francais, so send it along!
"I don't want to be the Sagan of the housing projects," she said. "That's a bit much. I don't want to be called the Arab girl from the suburbs who had a tough life and made good because I don't think I had a tough life."
Still, she is pleased that it is not only soccer players and rap musicians from the suburbs who can make good, and proud that a neighbor told her that her book was the first he had ever read.
(Thanks to all the readers who sent the NYT link.)
Misstating The State Of The Union
According to a recent Gallup poll, a staggering 42% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Given the 9/11 Commission�s findings to the contrary, it would be fair to say that these 42% of Americans are, well, misinformed. And who can be blamed for it but the media? Newspapers, magazines, and especially TV media seemed so eager to play nice with the administration that they blindly reported President Bush and Vice-President Cheney�s claims that Saddam had links with Al-Qaeda.
In this climate, a book like Misstating the State of The Union becomes a must read. Prepared by the Media Matters Network, it provides a catalog of all the distortions, obfuscations, omissions, or outright lies told by right-wing commentators like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, or (my personal favorite) Bill O�Reilly. Among the false claims propounded on fair and balanced news: that Bush inherited a recession (it began after he took office); that he is fiscally conservative (under his leadership, the U.S. went from a $200B surplus to a $400B deficit in just 4 years); that the war in Iraq was necessary (the country did not have weapons of mass destruction); that Bush cares about education (he under-funded his own No Child Left Behind act); or that he is tough on crime (the number of violent crimes has risen under him.) As we head into what is sure to be a contested election, voters would do well to read up on the real record of George W. Bush, not the one fabricated in Karl Rove's office and repeated on Rupert Murdoch's stations.
To be fair, though, Misstating the State of The Union is also a book with an agenda. Besides exposing lies or fabrications, it also wants to prove that things were better under President Clinton. I should say en passant that I was not a huge fan of Clinton (and, boy, did my Republican friends love me then!) and while I agree that, by nearly every possible measure, America was better off four years ago, I�m not convinced that it�s all attributable to Clinton (as opposed to other factors that worked in his favor.) Still, at least he had people laughing at us, an immeasurably better reaction than hating us.
October 26, 2004
The Only Time You'll Hear Us Say We Believe! We Believe!
I believe in President George W. Bush. I've always believed him. I believe the president invaded Iraq to secure liberty and democracy for the Iraqi people. I believe he had compelling evidence that Iraq was a significant threat to America and the world, and presented that evidence in a complete and balanced manner. Like 42 percent of Americans – and 62 percent of Republicans – I believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks.Thomas F. Schaller on why he believes. Link via Daily Kos.
She Might Be Keeping Him Company Soon
Sarah has the skinny on a horrifying agent scam that started unfolding last week. Biba Caggiano, a celebrated chef who's published several cookbooks, is suing her agent, Maureen Lasher, alleging that the latter sold two books and cashed two six-figure advances from publishers Harper Collins without Caggiano's knowledge. Caggiano claims she only heard about the books in July, when her publisher contacted her directly. Meanwhile, it appears that Lasher has vanished.
I remember going to an agent panel at UCLA during the 2003 L.A. Times Festival of Books, where Maureen Lasher was present, along with agents Michael Carlisle and Bonnie Nadell. While Carlisle and Nadell provided success stories and names of clients they represented, Lasher spent the time allotted to her mostly relating an anecdote about an unsual query letter she'd received. She unfolded a piece of paper and read the bizarre pitch, and then hit her punchline--the author had sent it from jail. Attendees were mostly annoyed, seeing as how none of them were guests at penal colonies, and seeing how they wanted to know how to write a good letter, not listen to bad ones.
Being Printed vs. Being Published
The November/December issue of Poets & Writers (not yet online) has an excellent article by M.J. Rose about the realities of publishing a novel. Among the many sobering facts she mentions in the article: that more than 10,000 novels are published per year; that the average publicist at a major house handles 10 to 30 titles a month; that as many as 75% of novels released today are sent off into the world with minimal publicity effort on the part of the publisher; and perhaps most sobering of all: more than half of all debut fiction writers never go on to publish a second book.
Many writers are bewildered when their publisher spends no time on marketing or publicizing their books. Didn't they buy it? Shouldn't they try to sell it? In a crowded marketplace, though, a book that underperforms can still be written off as a business loss, whereas for the writer that particular event could determine his entire career. Rose suggests that, regardless of how excited a publisher may be about a book, writers take their careers into their own hands.
Here's where expectation comes into play. Instead of feeling privileged when the deal is signed, the author is better served by realizing that he or she has now become one of the many authors the publisher is working with. It's somewhat similar to going from the academic honor roll into a competitive market.Hiring a publicist, starting a webpage or blog, and going on a small book tour on their own dime are some of the things authors can do to find an audience for their books. Rose made blog headlines last month when she took to the blogosphere for a virtual book tour to promote her latest novel, The Halo Effect. She also maintains the blog Buzz, Balls & Hype over at Publishers' Marketplace.
Short Story Favorites
As part of the announcement for its 2nd annual short story award, the Scotsman asked Ian Rankin, Ali Smith, Kirsty Gunn and others to name their favorite short stories. The writers had to give two answers: one pick by a Scottish writer and one by a 'world' writer. The world selections were pretty much all Anglo-Saxon, but Anton Chekhov and Marguerite Duras got mentioned.
Fall 2004 Tin House
The Fall 2004 issue of Portland-based Tin House magazine is just now out, with fiction from Aimee Bender and Mary Yukari Waters among others, and a piece by George Saunders on writing. It's not online yet, but when it is, I will provide a link.
A Rock, An Island
Peter Culshaw files a very depressing article for the Telegraph about the increasing isolation of the U.S. in the arts--musicians, filmmakers, artists, and writers have recently had unpleasant dealings with the immigration system here, depriving audiences of the encounter.
Department of WTF
David Plotz thinks he's so effing funny, he cracks himself up: Who's Worse: The French or The Saudis?
October 25, 2004
Banipal Tour
London-based literary magazine Banipal is organizing the first-ever tour of Arab authors in the UK, with Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat, Palestinian poet and memoirist Mourid Barghouti, and Iraqi authors Samuel Shimon and Saadi Youssef taking part. Program details can be found here. The importance of the Banipal initiative is highlighted in this Herald article by Rosemary Goring (scroll down, past the Booker commentary.)
Support For Achebe
Lawmakers in the Nigerian state of Anambra have thrown their support behind Chinua Achebe's refusal to accept his country's National Honour of Commander of the Federal Republic. Two weeks ago, Achebe had said that, under Obasanjo's leadership, the situation was "too dangerous for silence."
Shakespeare As Sufi
In a paper to be presented at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre next month, Dr. Martin Lings will propose a new theory about the Bard--that he may have been a Sufi.
Lings argues that the guiding principles of Sufi thought are evident in Shakespeare's writing. The plays, he believes, depict a struggle between the dawning modernist world and the traditional, mystical value system. And, like the Sufis, the playwright is firmly on the side of tradition and spiritualism. (...) The famous line of Prospero's 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on' is a complete fit, he claims, adding that King Lear's words also eerily echo Sufi ideas when he tells his faithful daughter: 'Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense.' Lings makes the point that the Bard is 'quite at home' with 'Gods' in the plural.
Lings, who was once in charge of Koranic manuscripts at the British Museum, is also the author of Muhammad: His Life Based on The Earliest Sources, an excellent biography of the Prophet that I would highly recommend. Observer link via Moby.
Story Experimentation
Jonathan Lethem's latest book, the short story collection Men and Cartoons, enabled him to do some experimentation, he says in this interview with Regis Behe.
The short form provides Lethem with opportunities to experiment and work outside the restrictions of a novel. "Access Fantasy," a fable about consumerism set in a world where cars clog the streets, is 22 pages set in a single paragraph. "The National Anthem" uses a letter to narrow the gap between two friends.The book features the characters of Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude from Lethem's earlier novel, The Fortress of Solitude.
"That's a really interesting piece for me, because I've never fooled around the epistolary form at all before," Lethem says, noting one of the few books he's read that has a similar construct is Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein."
Bootleg Lit
When bootlegged versions of Bill Clinton's My Life appeared in China a few people reported of a few "changes" made to the original text. An Op-Ed in the NY Times details a few of them:
The fake version reveals a Clinton family obsessed with China's strong points, with how Chinese science and technology "left us in the dust." Readers will learn that the future president, to impress Hillary's mother, had rhapsodized about such things as the Eight Trigrams, documented in "The Book of Changes" several thousand years ago. Another retranslation of the pirated translation last summer has Mr. Clinton explaining to Hillary that his nickname is "Big Watermelon."More seriously, the fake versions also excise references to lack of freedoms in China. You can read the rest of "Bill Clinton's Fake Chinese Life" here.
Spain's Moroccans
The NY Times has an interesting article about Spain's effort to integrate its Muslim (mostly Moroccan) population under the new Zapatero regime. Crucial to this effort is ensuring that financing for mosques comes from local sources, rather than foreign ones, particularly Saudi. Some are citing the separation of Church and State as an argument against government subsidies, but others point to the fact that Catholic clergymen receive salaries from the Spanish government. Spain's ability to fully integrate its Muslim population seems to me to depend on whether it can start by having fair practices.
October 23, 2004
Walker Bio
Alice Walker has been a bit out of touch lately, but this review of Evelyn C. White's biography of her is a nice reminder of some of her earlier work, breakthroughs and breakdowns.
French Phenomenon
A posthumously published novel, written by Irène Némirovsky, an emigré Russian Jew in France during World War II, is quickly turning into a phenomenon. Titled Suite Francaise it is an epic told in five volumes. The first book is an account of the exodus of 1940, when the Jews fled the Germans; the second is a study of a small village under the occupation, including the treacheries of collaboration. Other volumes are yet to be published. Némirovsky wrote i>Suite Francaise while in hiding in a small village in the 1940s with her family. She was deported and died ten days after arriving in Auschwitz, but when her daughter fled their home she took the manuscript with her. It was only recently that she finally decided to transcribe it. The results are said to be extraordinary.
"One of the great 20th century authors ... A gigantic literary and historical gift," said the daily La Croix. "A work of exceptional force ... remarkable because written not after, but during, the war," said L'Express. "A suberb work ... A capital discovery," said the Le Point weekly. "A chef-d'oeuvre ... ripped from oblivion," said Le Monde.Foreign rights to the book have been sold in some 18 countries, including the United States, so we'll soon have a chance to read it here.
Booker Partying
The New York Times covers the Man Booker celebrations and I was getting quite impressed that people were so interested in a literary prize until I got to this line.
In years past, the Booker acquired a reputation for fierce infighting and very public feuds over nominees and winners. But this year there was little of that, and at Soho House the Toibin and Hollinghurst factions mingled relatively easily. It may have helped that most people admitted to not having read the books — at least not yet.Ah then, never mind the book. Just tell these people whom they're supposed to adulate.
October 21, 2004
Introducing Randa
Good news, kids. I've asked the one and only Randa Jarrar to appear as regular Friday blogger on Moorishgirl, and I'm delighted to announce that she has agreed. Randa's stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Sex and the Umma, and Eyeshot. She won the Million Writers Award earlier this year. She outlines the difficulties of writing her first novel (mainly procrastination in the forms of single motherhood, trailer living, food, Namco, excessive moving, a punk rock plumber, Kafka tattoos, and a homeless SCA guy) in the current issue of Kitchen Sink. She also has stories in Dinarzad's Children, the first anthology of Arab-American fiction. She lives in Austin, Texas, where her days are spent revising, fantasizing about November 3, playing poker with her kid, and making strangers feel uncomfortable. So, please stop by and say hi to Randa tomorrow. I'll be back next week.
Persian Poetry in Translation
Here's an interesting article by Jordan Rosenfeld about how the recent OFAC rules about publishing material from "Axis of Evil" countries affect literature. Through her Translation Project poet Niloufar Talebi has been working on translating, editing, and publishing Iranian poetry here in the U.S. but the new rules have sparked concern about whether she'll be able to continue. Still, she seems determined, and wants to eventually publish an anthology.
"I'd go with a publisher that wouldn't fetishize the project for their 'literature-of-color' niche. I would also like a publisher that would be interested in starting dialogue in educational circles because that's where we can plant the seeds of understanding."Related Moorishgirl posts: 1, 2, and 3.
This Just In
Ana-Marie Cox (a.k.a Wonkette) has just sold her debut novel. Publishers' Marketplace reports:
"Wonkette" Ana Marie Cox's novel DOG DAYS, a comic tale about "a young Washingtonian Bridget Jones-type," to Julie Grau at Riverhead, reportedly for $275,000 (according to the NY Post), at auction, by the David Black Literary Agency.I hope for her sake that Matthew Klam (who wrote sarcastically about her and other political bloggers in the NYT) won't review it when it comes out.
Operation Homecoming
Last April, the NEA announced that it was launching an initiative to help U.S. troops serving in Iraq write about their experiences. Dubbed "Operation Homecoming" the program enables soldiers to take writing workshops with established authors, and will publish some of their writings in an anthology next year. I've been apprehensive about this program from the very beginning, because I tend to be suspicious of any government oversight over art. Writing in Slate, Aleksandar Hemon makes the argument much more eloquently than I have in this blog. Here's the money quote:
There is no doubt that some valuable writing—both as history and literature—could come out of Operation Homecoming. But even if the good people of the NEA and their writing instructors have nothing but the purest intentions in their hearts; even if workshops serve as some form of group therapy; even if the NEA received blanket security clearance from Wolfowitz and the Department of Defense to publish whatever would further the understanding of the war experience—even if all that were the case, any account of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom that does not include testimonies of the freedom-shocked Iraqis cannot avoid being a lie. A similar lie is at the heart of the Vietnam War mythology, built around the fallacious belief that the main victims of the war in Vietnam were Americans, even if for every dead American soldier there were dozens of dead Vietnamese civilians. If in those workshops the American epic of greed and power is being translated into another self-help manual of national victimhood, then the result will be nothing but therapeutic propaganda.Hemon link via Golden Rule Jones.
Winning Isn't Everything
Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit lost the Booker to Alan Hollinghurt's The Line of Beauty yesterday, but Dangor is a happy man.
Bitter Fruit has been selling in the tens of thousands since it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a level of commercial success he says he never expected. "My book was a little tiny book published in South Africa and the United States and now they tell me 30 000 copies sold in two weeks in the UK. That is significant."Last weekend, Edward Wyatt commented on the sales power of the Booker relative to American book prizes like the National Book Awards.
Reviewing the Work, the Writer
I was quite interested in Patrick Neate's review of Soul City
It is increasingly difficult to read a novel on its own terms. Even if you tear off the dust jacket, scrub the author photo and ignore the promotional blurbs, someone, somewhere (whether professional critic, blogger or even the author himself) is just desperate to tell you whether this book and, especially, its writer are cool or not. The writer is not just a writer; he's a brand with specific attributes. To consume his work is to make a statement about yourself as surely as if your chest were emblazoned with a fashion designer's logo.I guess Neate takes this mantra to heart, because his byline reads a simple, "Author of." At any rate, he delivers an interesting review of Soul City, though he can't help but engage in that very thing he warned about in his introduction: Comment on the author, not the work.
Pirates 0, Márquez 1
Gabriel García Márquez, whose new novel, Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes, appeared on the streets in Columbia before the official version is launched, may have the final word.
But the pirate copies are not the same as the final version of the book, 77-year-old Garcia Marquez's first novel in 10 years, editor Braulio Peralta said.The book appears to be available on Amazon.
"Check the pirate version that is coming out in Colombia compared to the legal version being launched today. All I'm saying is that Gabriel Garcia Marquez changed the last chapter," Peralta told journalists.
Mao Not So Hot Anymore
There's a shocker. A first edition of Mao Tse-Tung's Little Red Book failed to meet its reserve price at auction.
October 20, 2004
Yardley Getting Carried Away
Not having lived my adolescence in the States, I came to read some of the classic novels assigned in high schools here with a completely different eye than if I had had to read them for school. So I never had the sort of relationship with The Catcher in The Rye that other people my age may have. I read the novel as an adult and liked it, but I much preferred Salinger's short stories (Nine Stories is one of my favorite collections.) Still, I think Jonathan Yardley is being a tad hysterical in his review of the book, particularly here:
Rereading "The Catcher in the Rye" after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.There are lots of other novels more meriting of that kind of criticism, and if he can't think of any, he's welcome to dip into the ones being sent to us every day for review.
Religious Critics
The Vatican's newspaper,L'Osservatore Romano, isn't very pleased with Elfriede Jelinek's Nobel Prize, focusing in particular on her novel, The Piano Teacher, which was made into a movie a few years ago.
"Three hundred pages of brutal recklessness, perverse psychologies and destructive feminine genealogy, intended only to denounce the irremediable inheritance of evil, sin, violence in every form of love," was how L'Osservatore Romano summed up the novel.I'm always mystified when people think literature should present the world not as it is, but as it should be.
The newspaper criticized Jelinek's works because "her topics are quickly channeled into descriptions of the feminine world, between scenes of crude sexuality, which are not conducive to an understanding of the emancipation of woman." It assailed the work for "linking sex to pathology, power and violence."
Saunders Fans Rejoice
Jim Hanas reports that George Saunders will have a new collection of short stories out in 2006, titled The Red Bow.
Booker Announced
Last year it was Monica Ali's Brick Lane, this year it's David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The most buzzed-about book for the Booker Prize lost to the quiet The Line of Beauty. Alan Hollinghurst's novel is said to be the first winner to ever feature a gay man as the main character. Here's a Guardian piece about it. The Scotsman asks whether the novel earned its win. (Their answer: Yes.) And some more details from the awards, courtesy of the BBC.
October 19, 2004
Saunders on Vonnegut
The inimitable George Saunders writes about Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for Amazon's Writers Under The Influence series.
My understanding of literature at this time was: Great Writing was Hard Reading. If written properly, you could barely understand it. Often, a scene I was imagining indoors suddenly sprouted stars and a riverfront. At a fictional dinner party where I had understood there to be three people present, six were suddenly required, based on the sudden appearance of three unfamiliar names. In terms of language, Great Writing was done in a language that had nothing to do with the one you spoke. The words were similar, but arranged more cleverly, less directly. A good literary sentence was like a floor with a hole hidden in it. You got to the end and thought: "Why'd he say it that way? He must really be a great writer." Plain American language was a degraded thing, good only for getting around your dopey miniature world, cashing checks and finding restaurants and talking about television and so on.Read the rest here.
Cloud Atlas Audio
Martha Woodroof talks about Cloud Atlas on NPR, visiting the question of whether the book's structure is a breakthrough or just a gimmick. The Man Booker is due to be announced on Tuesday, and I'm pretty sure David Mitchell's name will be called.
Funny, My Junk Mail Doesn't Have Blurbs
Debut author Daniela Kuper nearly threw out the blurb that Joyce Carol Oates sent her, thinking it was "an offer for loan consolidation, a new credit card or great savings at Shaw's." Her novel, Hunger and Thirst, came out last month.
How To Create Commerce
Apparently, not every Harlequin book that sells well in America meets with equal success in Europe, which is why the publisher put together a seminar in Italy to figure out how to appeal to women readers across the Atlantic. Sample findings:
"No cowboys," pronounced Alessandra Bazardi, editorial director of Harlequin Mondadori, a joint venture between Italy's leading publishing house and the romance fiction giant. "And no babies, or at least not on the cover. (...)"The truth of the matter is that I don't think that military and American uniforms are as popular in the translation market," Karin Stoecker, editorial director of Mills & Boon, Harlequin's British arm, told the roomful of authors dutifully scribbling down notes. (...) Along with cowboys and horses, the authors were told to skip ethnic heroes and not to let family members steal too much of the limelight. "But secret babies sell quite well, as do marriages of convenience, or arranged marriages and, of course, alpha heroes," Stoecker said.This reminds me of the earlier seminar that Mills & Boon held for romance writers in Aberdeen.
Thanks
Thanks to guest blogger Sefi Atta, whose debut novel, Everything Good Will Come, will be out later this month.
October 18, 2004
Yari Yari
Last week, I attended the Yari Yari Pamberi conference in New York University. Participants included: Alice Walker, Maryse Conde, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nawal El Sadaawi, Gloria Naylor, Edwidge Danticat, Walter Moseley, Sapphire and Octavia Butler, to name a few of the writers who participated in over sixty events including readings, performances, discussions, workshops and film shows for five days.
The goal of the conference, this year, was to expand and intensify the debate around globalization, explore possibilities and contradictions, continue strengthening ties among women of African descent, promote their literature, create a platform for young emerging writers and raise public awareness about global developments.
The first Yari Yari conference was held in 1997 and I missed it because I’d just moved to Mississippi. Attending this year’s conference was a small pilgrimage for me—New York University was where I took my first creative writing course and I promised myself that I would publish a novel by the next Yari Yari conference. Being there was like showing up at a huge family affair; I was excited and nervous.
A few of the key panelists were unable to attend: Buchi Emecheta who had blurbed my novel, Lucille Clifton, and Maya Angelou, who sent a videotaped message. It was great to see Alice Walker at the plenary session. The audience cheered when she described the day as “spectacular.” We were just beginning to dissect what globalization meant for artists of the Diaspora. Alice Walker described globalization as a toxic culture, an insane culture that we did not design. Aminata Dramane Traore said it was a process that has failed the African Diaspora because, for one, “Free Market has nothing to do with justice.” Some of the panelists encouraged writers to continue to be custodians of the truth. Jayne Cortez asked that we “trust our fingers and get to writing,” Nawal El Saadawi that we “undo the language of imperialism.”
Sitting in the audience, one discussion after another, I was struck by the voices of the panelists. They were the voices of women writers who are typically described as lyrical voices. Their voices were not lyrical; they were forthright, sad, angry, powerful, funny and loving. I must admit, I had to think twice when Walter Mosley asked about the term globalization itself: what it means, how it works and if it is new. For me it means that most of my stories come from Nigeria and most are published overseas and so I always have a sense of dislocation.
On Wednesday night, there was a dinner and reception for Yari Yari awardees. That, I didn’t attend, but I was able to feast my eyes on Toni Morrison for the moment she walked past. The highlight of the conference for me was the reading and discussion with Gloria Naylor and Edwidge Danticat. I thought the novelist Leone Ross and poet Lebogang Mashile gave superb readings. I ate some delicious oxtail stew with plantains, rice and peas at a Jamaican restaurant nearby with Peju Layiwola, a metal artist and Azuka, an effervescent poet, both from Nigeria. And I got to see my roommate from university, Kadija George, who publishes Sable Literary Magazine in London.
The intentions of the organizers came to pass at this conference. We were exchanging greetings, cards, best wishes and advice—yari-yariing, as Maya Angelou called it. We had so much love and respect for the writers who attended and they were open to us. Jayne Cortez and Rashida Ismaili, in particular, were ever-present, accessible and giving. Yari Yari was enlightening and it was a celebration.
A writer by any other name
In the United States, I came across novels by Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nawal El Saadawi, Leila Aboulela, Yvonne Vera, Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Calixthe Beyala, Sindiwe Magona, Tsitsi Dangaremgba and Assia Djebar.
I could not find most of them in bookstores. I had to special order some of them. African women’s literature is as tenuous a description of their works as—let us say—European men’s literature. With a few exceptions, they are marketed as textbooks and studied in Africana and feminist academic departments. I did not want to suffer that kind of literary apartheid.
My agent sent my manuscript to a limited number of publishers and two editors were interested, but they wanted re-writes. One of these editors left for another job before I revised my manuscript. I honestly can’t remember what happened with the second editor. She must have rejected my manuscript, but I have a capacity to forget unpleasant memories. I do remember that my agent queried Interlink Publishing about a year after that, and I did not hear from Interlink for about another year.
When I signed my publishing agreement with Interlink, I was four years older than the narrator of my novel. I started writing about her when I was two years younger. Waiting years to place a novel is not unusual for any writer, but during that period of waiting, I was writing short stories, one almost every week and some were awful. I sent them out anyway. I was anxious that I hadn’t published my novel. One day, I was giving a fellow writer an update on the progress of my submissions and she said to me, “But look at all the literary journals, they’re only publishing writers like you.”
Multicultural writers, she meant. Well, in the journals that I was submitting to, I’d find one or two stories that she might call multicultural. They were written by writers who were living in America, some were born in America, they had attended universities in America, graduated from MFA programs in America. They wrote perfect American English. Hell, they were middle-class rather than multicultural.
Now that my novel is about to be released, I know three other Nigerian writers who have been published in the United States: Helon Habila, Chimamanda Adichie and Chris Abani. All of them have been compared to Achebe, and I can’t imagine every writer from Mississippi being compared to—let’s say—Faulkner. Anyway, these three Nigerian writers of my generation have distinct perspectives and my novel adds a new one by baring the backside of the Lagos elite.
I do call myself a Nigerian writer and an African woman writer. In a sense, I am a multicultural writer too. My stories are rooted in one culture or the other: greed, lies, addiction, violence, silence, prejudice, any culture that a writer gets to expose.