December 29, 2004

Of Tsunamis

Since Saturday, I've been trying to figure out what a proper response would be to the disaster currently unfolding in South Asia. I type something, erase it, start over. I can't think of a 'proper' anything-no response, no word, no feeling seems quite adequate. I struggle to find reference points, ways in which the catastrophe could be anchored, compared, examined. But I was not yet born when Agadir trembled. I have only vague memories of television images of Armenia. And Bam was knocked off the news within 48 hours. But this. This is different. The magnitude of the horror seems so great, so unbelievable that no natural disaster of modern times seems to compare. As I write this, the toll is believed to be 80,000, and is expected to climb with the spread of disease.

Most of the 80,000 victims are Asians, of various nationalities, religions, and ethnic backgrounds, though if you were watching CNN you'd think it was mostly tourists who'd been hit. Is the suffering of brown people so common, so habitual, so expected, that we only notice it when Westerners are involved? Perhaps we only notice pain when it has a face like ours, hair and eyes and skin the same as ours.

One thing has been amply demonstrated since the turn of this new century: even as we insulate ourselves, we're not as remote as we think we are. Connections are there, whether we acknowledge them or, at our peril, deny them. The humanitarian toll of the earthquake and tsunami is only now beginning to be counted, but the economic and political consequences are not likely to be known for quite some time. If you haven't done so already, consider making a donation to the Red Cross or Red Crescent or UNICEF or any other charity. Or you can go to tsunamihelp which is a clearinghouse of donation numbers, survivor info, tips, and images.

I haven't been able to write since the weekend. I've been reading, but mostly I've been day-dreaming, thinking about the significance of this, how it relates to religious belief, and how it relates to art. Amateur video is being replayed on TV, but the image that I can't seem to shake from my mind is from a print by Hokusai, In the Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa, with the tentacle-like curls of the wave, the fishing boats caught inside it, and Mount Fuji in the background, cold and distant, unaware of the horror beneath.

December 22, 2004

Brief Hiatus

Like many of our noted blogging pals, we're going to take a break here at Moorishgirl until the first week of January. We'll be using the time off to mull over some changes to the site and put the final touches on new features. See you all in 2005.

The Awkward Dead

A few days ago I mentioned the novel that Zapatista leader Sub-Comandante Marcos is co-authoring with Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo, and which is being serialized in the Mexican paper La Jornada. The Guardian has translated a portion of the extracts.

Bye Bye Library?

Last week, Google announced its plans to partner with major libraries in order to give access to millions of books to its users. The plans raises issues of copyright, and yesterday's editorial at the NY Times spelled them out:

At the outset, this project will be limited to books that are old enough to no longer be under copyright. This is as it should be. It will serve as a demonstration of the immensity - and the immense cultural value - of works in the public domain, and could well kindle a new appreciation of the significance of the public domain.

Beginning with older books will also give Google, the libraries and book publishers time to sort out the problem of creating a comprehensive digital library of books that are currently under copyright. As always in negotiations over intellectual property, the trick will be to balance public utility, corporate profits and the welfare of writers, scholars and editors, and to do so, if possible, without the intervention of Congress.

While I'm all for digitizing information and propagating it by the simplest means possible, I'm also concerned that some people on Capitol Hill might use this as a further excuse to cut funding for libraries.

The Case for the Sarcasm Point

Over at Slate, Josh Greenman makes his case for sarcasm punctuation.

The English language must evolve. Not with emoticons or lol or brb or l8r or GRATUITOUS all caps used for emphasis, not with Spanglish or bumbling Bushisms or even cryptic Kerryisms. We don't need more quotation marks that "hedge" or try to make the same "old" thing sound "fresh." What we need is an honest effort to incorporate the way we live today. My fellow Americans, we need to embrace a new punctuation mark—one that embraces the irony and edge of contemporary conversation and clarifies rather than condenses or confuses.

It is time for the adoption of the sarcasm point. Why the sarcasm point? We have a mark that conveys that we mean or know something. We have one that says it with volume and force! We have one that communicates that we don't know something, don't we? We need one more: to do for language what shade did for drawing, what color did for television, and what eyebrows did for expressions—introduce finesse.

Believe it or not, the world we've landed in is not only more image-obsessed than we've ever seen. It's also more text-based than ever. We finger-type and we thumb-type. We e-mail, we IM, we blog. And the forms cannot contain the content. There's a dastardly disconnect. Among other things, it makes Dave Barry columns somewhat difficult to read. Someone must step into the sarcasm chasm_¡

George Bernard Shaw would be so proud_¡

Take That, OFAC

The Association of American Publishers is offering grants to publishers interested in releasing three Iranian novels in translation here in the U.S.

The association announced recently that it would give $10,000 each to publishers who would release "The Drowned" by Moniru Ravanipur, "The Empty Palace of Soluch" by Mahmoud Dawlatabadi and "Christine and Kid" by Houshang Golshiri. Money would be divided among translation costs, promotion and publicity.

"We got the idea a few years ago when some Iranian writers visited the United States and complained that works from Iran were not available in translation," Jeri Laber, a human rights activist and consultant to the association's International Freedom to Publish Committee, said Monday.

The grant is funded by the Open Society Institute, which is part of billionaire philanthropist George Soros's foundation.

December 21, 2004

Jean Harfenist Recommends

"I regularly give away copies of Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley," Harfenist says. "It's an old book (first published in 1923) about the daughter of a tobacco tenant farmer in 1920s Kentucky and it's the unblinking, outspoken story of a superior young woman trapped by her body and her culture. With the emotional accuracy of Sister Carrie—and without a sniff of sentimentality or self-pity—it triggers something so strong that readers either love it or hate it. And that’s the sign of a book worth reading."

Jean Harfenist's novel-in-stories, A Brief History of the Flood, received wide critical acclaim when it appeared in 2002. Michiko Kakutani called it "wonderfully wry-melancholy," and declared it "an auspicious and stirring debut." Harfenist is a native of Minnesota, a graduate of New York University, and now lives in Santa Barbara with her husband.

If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

From Movies to Books

First, it was filmmaker Neil Jordan, who went back to his literary roots in October, with a novel titled Shade.

That same month, filmmaker John Sayles also reconnected with his early work, this time with a collection of short stories titled Dillinger in Hollywood: New and Selected Short Stories.

Now filmmaker Alan Parker has also released a book, this time a historical novel titled The Sucker's Kiss.

What next? A children's book by Tim Burton? Oh, wait, that's already been done.

Bloggers' Favorites

Newley Purnell rounds up some bloggers' favorite books of 2004, including picks by Lizzie Skurnick (The Old Hag), Mark Sarvas (The Elegant Variation) and yours truly.

Garrett in Review

Paul Mandelbaum, who provided one of the book recommendations in the Tuesday series, has a new book out, a collection of short stories titled Garrett in Wedlock, and it's reviewed in the L.A. Times.

Moorishgirl In India

Over at the Business Standard, Nilanjana Roy has a nice Op-Ed about OFAC, titled: The fatwa that almost was:

Over the last few months, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an offshoot of the US Treasury Department, almost succeeded in doing what only the most stringently-controlled dictatorships have managed. They came close to shutting down free speech and crippling the right of writers to be heard.

Their weapon of choice was red tape rather than the religious fatwa, but if OFAC’s amendments to the regulations had gone through, it would have had just as chilling an effect on dissident writing. (...) Dissident writers cannot afford to lose the chance to be heard in the US; it took a battle to ensure that they didn’t lose this chance, but hey, the righteous won.

But too many of us are conscious of how close this could have been. It took the combined efforts of half-a-dozen influential US publishers, eminent academic institutions, a writers’ movement and a Nobel Peace Prizewinner’s lawsuit to get OFAC’s laws overturned.

Roy is also kind enough to mention Moorishgirl and my own take on the bloody mess.

December 20, 2004

Rushdie Profile

A full profile of Salman Rushdie in the Hindustan Times offers the usual tidbits about the icon's life and work, the infamous fatwa, turbulent love life, and numerous honors. But for my money, nothing beats Kitabkhana's report on the Rushdie reading in Delhi.

So the Babu met Rushdie during his visit to Delhi, and it was everything he'd thought it would be--ie two ships that passed in the night, one of them an ocean liner, the other a very small dinghy. We exchanged brilliant, sparkling conversation, or rather Mr R tossed off one bon mot after another while The Babu said, "Er, the kababs are that way" and "So how's the Haroun opera doing" and "Um, haven't read the anthology yet" and "Ain't Padma hot?" (Okay, he didn't say "Ain't Padma hot?" But he definitely thought it.)

And, for those who want to read more about Salman + Padman, there's always this.

Sweet Irony

Was Abe Lincoln gay? A new book by C.A. Tripp (a former researcher for Alfred Kinsey) alleges that the founder of the Republican Party claims that he was.

'He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me,' his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, once told a friend.

It also includes a diary excerpt by one upper-class Washington woman who wrote of Derickson: 'There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him, and when Mrs L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!'

Scholars have long debated Lincoln's sexuality, and as early as the 1920s were making veiled references to his relationship with Speed. However, critics say that in the pioneer days men sleeping together in rough circumstances was not uncommon.

The book is called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.

About Brown

Erin Nowjack writes about the correspondence she shared over many years with Larry Brown, who passed away a few weeks ago. Nowjack became curious about Brown's work after reading a blurb he'd given to her brother, John O'Brien (Leaving Las Vegas):

It was his first novel, "Dirty Work," that gripped me. In it, Brown tells the story of two tragic Vietnam vets: one who lost his face to the war, the other his limbs. There is a scarred and burned woman. There is booze. Amid this bleakness, Brown manages to achieve tenderness. And humor. And humanity.

I already had begun to do my own writing and was flattened with awe. I devoured the rest of Brown's books. The more I read, the more it fueled my curiosity about him and his relationship with John. Two and a half years after my brother punctuated his life with a single bullet, I wrote Brown a letter.

Update: The article is archived at Erin Nowjack's site.

December 16, 2004

Later

That's it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday. Have a great weekend!

Washington Square Mag Benefit

Those of you in NY might want to check out this reading on Friday night:

December 17th @ 7:00 pm
James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)
Matthew Rohrer (A Green Light)
Hannah Tinti (Animal Crackers)
Benefit for Washington Square Magazine
19 University Place, 1st Floor lounge
New York City
$5; $3 for students

Handler Profile

The L.A. Weekly runs a profile of Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket, to coincide with the release of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The newspaper's Dave Shulman tries to impress Handler:

When talking with an author of books in which prominent characters are named Baudelaire and Poe (and nary a page passes without some further highfalutin cultural or literary reference), one should feel intimidated by the author’s casual brilliance and, despite one’s public school education, try to impress him with the one thing you actually know:

"Baudelaire translated Poe, didn’t he?" I say, as if the thought had just occurred.

"Mm-hm," Handler replies, duly impressed. "And you’re the first person, ever, to note that. Apart from my editor."

"Really? Damn — I win!"

"I was sure you were going to say, ‘Baudelaire . . . was a French poet, right?’ Then I could say, ‘Wow, you’re so smart for figuring that out. What was it — was it the word Baudelaire that helped?’"

Heh. Read the rest here.

LeGuin, Race, and Hollywood

Writing in Slate, Ursula LeGuin reports on a significant aspect of her novels that didn't make it to the small screen: race.

Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future science fiction books are not white. They're mixed; they're rainbow. In my first big science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In the two fantasy novels the miniseries is "based on," everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg, is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend, Vetch, is black. In the miniseries, Tenar is played by Smallville's Kristin Kreuk, the only person in the miniseries who looks at all Asian. Ged and Vetch are white.

My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

LeGuin reveals that her editors at Parnassus and Atheneum never gave her any problems for this, but filmmakers who brought Earthsea to the small screen simply excised race from the story, and cast white actors.

For Austen Fans

A few days ago, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was voted the "most life-changing novel" by female readers. In the Guardian, Austen expert John Sutherland proposes a quiz about the author and the novel.

Just Remember: The TV Adds On 10 Pounds

Okay, so I'm told the blog panel for Housing Works will be broadcast on C-SPAN/Book TV next Monday at 12:00 am, EST. Set your TiVo.

Bezos, Besando Republican Culo

For his weekly column at Moby, Dennis Loy Johnson looked at corporate political donations from online booksellers. The results may surprise you.

[W]ondering whether to buy books online at Amazon.com or at BarnesandNoble.com? Does it make the decision easier for you to know that 98% of B&N's corporate political donations went to the Democrats, while 61% of Amazon's went to the Republicans?

Or maybe you'll be encouraged to get offline entirely and shop at an old–fashioned brick and mortar store upon hearing the news that Borders gave 100% or its donations to Democrats?

For other eye-opening revelations, go to buyblue.org.

In The Library

All day I've had that Sesame Street song stuck in my head: In the library, you will find, books of every shape and kind, in the library, li-li-li-libraryyy! Now I know why: The town of Salinas, birthplace of John Steinbeck, will have no libraries next year. All three are closing, as part of a cost-cutting move.

Blogging, Book Deals

I'm sure this has been linked to everywhere in the blogosphere, by writers and non-writers alike, but the NY Times has a piece about bloggers getting book deals. Salam Pax (Where is Raed), Jessica Cutler (Washingtonienne), Belle de Jour, Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette), and a few others are mentioned.

They're Human?

Whenever the NY Times does a piece on a book featuring Muslim characters (or, more rarely, written by a Muslim author) I can always expect a few laughs. It's no different with this article on The Kite Runner, the best-selling tale of a friendship between two Afghan boys, written by physician-turned-novelist Khaled Hosseini.

Let me decode a few things for you (emphasis mine). Consider the opening paragraph:

Few aspects of this swank oceanside resort call to mind the harsh grind of daily life in Kabul, Afghanistan. Yet when a local book group met here recently to discuss "The Kite Runner," the stunningly successful first novel by an Afghan immigrant, many group members said they felt they were reading pages out of their own lives.

In other words, readers of this novel can be assured of its 'universality.' Of course, I suspect that when Muslim readers are bombarded with the latest John Grisham or Stephen King, no one bothers to convince them that the characters have lives just like their own.

And in case you missed that opening paragraph, let's repeat the lesson:

People who have read the book, however, speak almost exclusively of how they were touched by its universal themes. "There are so many basic human emotions at work here," said John Tegano, a member of the Palm Beach group.

But wait, there's more!

The reactions of the Palm Beach group suggest that [it will continue to sell for a year or two]. "I recognized so many things that happened in my time," Ms. Campbell said, referring to the years she spent living in a French convent, a Jewish girl hidden away by the nuns as her parents and dozens of neighbors were deported by the Nazis. "What struck me about the characters here is that they're all very human."

Gasp! You don't say! You mean they're the same species as us?

All joking aside, I was concerned when I read that the original draft of the book had the Afghan protagonist marry an American woman, but the publisher thought that it was too "unbelieveable" and made Hosseini change the wife to an Afghan. Recently, author Jervey Tervalon revealed in an L.A. Weekly article that he was told by his black editor that unless he "changed the white, upper-class love interest of my black protagonist to something, anything else" he couldn't get the book published. Someone should ring publishers and inform them that miscegenation is legal.

Nobel Judge Change

Kjell Espmark, the chairman of the jury that decides on the Nobel Prize for literature has stepped down after 17 years, and has been replaced by another man, Per Waestberg. With secrecy typical of Nobel judging, no reason was given for the change.

Nigerian Celebrations

Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Emecheta Buchi, Ben Okri and 20 other writers were honored last weekend in Ibadan, as part of the celebrations for the "best 25 books written over the last 25 years" in Nigeria.

Said Memoir

Jean Said Makdisi's new book Teta, Mother and Me is reviewed in the Daily Star. It's a memoir of three generations of women in the Said family (yes, that Said.)

[T]he book is much more than just a memoir - it is a discovery for both the author and the reader of a richer and more complex past for Arab women than both ever would have imagined.

Using unpublished family documents, the memories of friends and acquaintances, and histories of the region and period, Makdisi traces her family's personal story against the backdrop of political events as they take place in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States. The story details her grandmother's early childhood in Ottoman Syria in the 1880's; her mother's experiences of two world wars and their repercussions for the Middle East; and the author's own experience of raising a family in Beirut, amidst the endless, futile, disillusioning fratricide of the Lebanese civil war.

Said Makdisi's memoir is as yet unavaible here, but you can check out her previous book, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir.

Thanks to Jonathan for the link.

December 15, 2004

OFAC Backs Down?

Reuters reports that OFAC is backing down.

"OFAC's previous guidance was interpreted by some as discouraging the publication of dissident speech from within these oppressive regimes. That is the opposite of what we want," Stuart Levey, Treasury's undersecretary for the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a statement.

"This new policy will ensure those dissident voices and others will be heard without undermining our sanctions policy," Levey said.

The new rule allows U.S. publishers to engage in "most ordinary publishing activities" with people in Cuba, Iran and Sudan, while maintaining restrictions on interactions with government officials and agents of those countries.

Under the previous rule, a license was required to publish authors from embargoed countries such as Iran -- a nation dubbed in 2002 as part of the "axis of evil" by President Bush along with Iraq and North Korea.

For the legally inclined, the relevant document appears here.

Was it the fear of being seen as opposing that freedom of speech martyr, Salman Rushdie? Or being publicly rebuked by Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi? Or the relentless work of activists, writers, publishers, journalists, and all others who have protested? Whatever the cause, OFAC's backing down from the requirements of a license is a victory, though given their track record this past year, optimism should be tinted with caution.

Thanks to Hurree for the Reuters link.

Rushdie Was Right Then, He's Right Now

When Sudanese author Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North was published in 1969, it was described by Edward Said as one of the 'finest novels to be written in Arabic.' Among other things, the story is a sarcastic retelling of Heart of Darkness: A man leaves his home, goes 'native,' and suffers the consequences, except this time, the journey is to the heart of Europe, where the narrator experiences violence and betrayal. The novel offered an alternative take on the issue of colonialism, and is probably one of the most important books of fiction to be published in the wider Arab world. It was banned in the Sudan for a long time.

Before poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to leave Cuba in 1980, he had tried on three separate occasions to smuggle a manuscript of Farewell to the Sea out of the island without success. While he was serving a prison sentence for the 'crime' of being homosexual, a guard burned Arenas' manuscript right before his eyes. Arenas finally succeeded in publishing Farewell to the Sea, a lament on the lack of freedom to be, freedom to love, freedom to speak in post-revolutionary Cuba. He died before his book could be published in his native country.

Iranian novelist and feminist Shahrnush Parsipur was jailed shortly after the 1989 publication of her novel Women Without Men, which offered a frank depiction of women's sexuality to a society that wants to repress it. It wasn't the first time that Parsipur had been sent to jail for her writing. Despite the commercial success of some of her fiction works, all of Parsipur's books have been banned at one point or another in Iran. She now lives in exile.

I am able to tell you these things because, as a citizen of a free nation, I have access to the works of these fine writers in translation. For this to be possible, someone had to buy the rights, get the books translated, edited, published, and distributed.

If these three books were to be written today, they would all but be banned in the United States.

While the new rules put in place by the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the Treasury Department do not (yet?) criminalize publication of books from countries under embargo (Iran, Sudan, Cuba), they prohibit U.S. publishers from editing, translating, or otherwise providing any 'services' to the authors. What OFAC is saying is that these authors should have had the forethought of being native speakers of English. And just because these people risk life and limb in their native countries for the right to speak doesn't mean that they should be free to publish here in the States. After all, there are innocent American readers that need to be protected from evil-doer authors.

In a characteristically American response to this ridiculous situation, a lawsuit has been filed against OFAC by the Association of University Presses, the Association of American Publishers, Arcade Publishing, and PEN American Center. The text of the lawsuit contains a declaration by PEN's president, Salman Rushdie, an author who knows all too well the price of freedom of speech.

And perhaps that is the biggest indication of how low we have sunk as a nation. That the man who, in 1989, had to defend his right to free speech from religious zealots, should in 2004 have to defend others' right to free speech from OFAC zealots.

Stand with Rushdie, again.

December 14, 2004

Paul Mandelbaum Recommends

"I just finished reading Josip Novakovich's wonderful novel April Fool's Day," Mandelbaum says. "It chronicles the life of one Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian whose knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time makes him a useful guide to that hauntingly perverse pocket of the world, the Balkans. Spanning fifty-plus recent years, the book naturally devotes some of its attention to war and its horrors (in a particularly chilling scene, Ivan comes across the crucified body of a Muslim friend from medical school), but the novel's main focus is Ivan’s struggle for survival and a meaningful existence. Novakovich’s vision encompasses the broadly philosophical and the minutely sensory; his voice is inviting and compelling, morally alert without being moralistic, and he never loses sight of what makes for a good story."

Paul Mandelbaum is the author of Garrett in Wedlock, part of which appears in the Winter issue of Glimmer Train Stories. He also edited the anthology First Words: Early Writings From Favorite Contemporary Authors, including juvenilia by Margaret Atwood, Rita Dove, Stephen King, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Updike and others.

If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

Rushdie In India

Kitabkhana rounds up some of the reactions to Salman Rushdie's visit to Kolkata (Calcutta) this week:

Rushdie, with quote marks
Looks like the man's being mobbed on his Kolkata visit. He had fun: "In America, we have to deal with strange growths called Bushes." And so did the press. In which Salman chacha reveals that he wants to write a book on Machiavelli, Padma Lakshmi says that his new book has "a lot on cooking", and one news report does its best to put Rushdie's life and works into perspective. Grimus was "a science fiction", and Rushdie also wrote "The Moor's Last Sight". And the anonymous author serves up the most entertaining review of The Satanic Verses yet: "The novel was a story of two Indian actors who fell on the Earth after an Air India aircraft exploded mid air. The book criticised terrorism."

Hurree also weighs in on that most important of all lit questions: Who is hotter, Salman Rushdie or Brad Pitt?

Revolutionary Collaboration

Subcommander Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, is co-authoring a detective novel with best-selling crime writer Pablo Ignacio Taibo. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro has the scoop. And the NY Times has a piece about it as well.

The first six chapters of the book, titled "Awkward Deaths," are to be a sort of Ping-Pong game, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos is to write chapters one, three and five, introducing his detective, Elías Contreras. Mr. Taibo would write chapters two, four and six, using the protagonists in his previous books, Detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. In the seventh chapter, the two detectives must meet at the Revolution Monument in Mexico City, where Pancho Villa and Lázaro Cárdenas are buried.

Neither collaborator knows how the book will end, or how long it will be, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos has chosen to tell the story from a future perspective, with his investigator looking back at events. Mr. Taibo's narrative will stick to the present.

La Jornada, a left-wing newspaper, has agreed to publish the chapters serially. The first effort by the masked-guerrilla-turned-novelist appeared on Dec. 5. The second chapter was published Sunday.

Other collaborations currently being worked on: A romance novel co-written by Marwan Barghouti and Amos Oz, a horror novel penned by Manuel Marulanda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and, lastly, a memoir co-authored by Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych.

Hate Lit, In Translation

An Azeri translation of Mein Kampf by a newspaper editor in Azerbaijan has infuriated Jewish groups there and resulted in the impounding of all unsold copies.

Azadliq newspaper said it had taken Mr Zeynalli more than two years to translate the book and that local press have been publishing it in fragments for the past two years.

But by publishing the book in full, Mr Zeynalli may have broken a national ban on Hitler's anti-Semitic text.

Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union and took part in World War II against Nazi Germany.

Bad Sex Award Conferred

on Tom Wolfe, for I Am Charlotte Simmons. According to the Reuters piece, Wolfe nabbed the award for this passage.

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue," one of his winning sentences begins.

"But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns -- oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest -- no, the hand was cupping her entire right -- Now!"

And what could be sexier than otorhinolaryngological caverns?

Faiza Guene Profile

The Daily Star runs a profile of French sensation Faïza Guène, whose book Kiffe Kiffe Demain has already sold 70,000 copies so far.

The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Guene, a writer and aspiring filmmaker, grew up in Les Courtillieres, one of Paris' large public housing projects in the northeastern suburbs. Her novel, "Kiffe kiffe demain (More of the Same Tomorrow)," recounts the life of a heroine named Doria. (The title loses a lot in the English translation - "Kif kif demain" would be the correct spelling but Guene changed it to reflect the verb "kiffer," slang for liking something, so the title would have an upbeat connotation.) The book was published in August 2004. It was an instant hit.

The book is due to come out in the States with Harcourt in Spring 2006.

Related posts: 1 and 2.

Thanks to Jonathan for the link.

December 13, 2004

Traig on Virtual Book Tour

Jennifer Traig's memoir of her troubles with OCD, Devil is in the Details was published earlier this fall, and garnered her some very good reviews. She's taking over Mark Sarvas' blog, The Elegant Variation for the day, as part of her virtual book tour. Be sure to stop by and read her posts.

New Rushdie Book

Something to look forward to: Salman Rushdie is said to be working on a new book about Machiavelli, the Hindustan Times says. Rushdie was in Kolkata for a talk and book signing.

Link from TEV.

Lorca Controversy Continues

The controversy over whether Federico Garcia Lorca should be exhumed is still raging in Spain. The poet and playwright, who was shot dead in 1936, in the early days of Spain's civil war, has come to symbolize General Franco's faceless victims.

Part of the lore surrounding Garcia Lorca is that his burial place is a mystery. In fact, the family and most experts agree on the general location, a ravine in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada near the village of Viznar, about five miles from Granada. It was a killing field, historians say, littered with the corpses of hundreds of people.

In a sense, the family argues, the mass grave itself is a fitting monument, a place of natural beauty that bears witness to an awful chapter of repression and political murder.

But others maintain that it takes someone of Garcia Lorca's stature to finally bring attention to Franco's victims, the vast majority of whom were buried anonymously, their families left to decades of uncertainty and shame. By contrast, pro-Franco dead have been honored by memorials and statues paid for by a string of governments.

Where Writers Are Read

What's it like being a writer in France? You starve (the way you would here, but there you do it on brie and baguette), you produce (at the rate of one book a year), people actually read your books (and you'll get reviews). If you make it big (or are re-discovered after you're dead), they bury you in the Pantheon and have headlines about how your loss leaves them in despair. Exaggeration? Only slightly.

Cristina Nehring's NY Times piece, though, essentially states the fact that France is a nation of bibliophiles, but doesn't go much beyond that. She picks a few titles from this year's rentrée litteraire, declares them "disconcertingly weak," generalizes to the rest of current French fiction, and ends with a bit of shoulder shrugging.

Mahfouz Medal Awarded

Iraqi novelist Alia Mamdouh has won the 2004 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for literature for The Loved Ones, first published by Saqi Books in 2003. The Loved Ones is due out in translation in 2005 but one of Mamdouh's earlier novels, Mothballs, is available online.

First Books

Antony Beevor, Ali Smith, David Almond, Ian Rankin, and Margaret Atwood reflect on their first books. My favorite is probably Margaret Atwood's piece about how she "published" her first collection of poems, at the tender age of 21. The book was printed in a cellar, and Atwood herself set the type, though she had to do each poem separately because there was a shortage of letter As.

Then — how did I get the nerve? — I actually went around to various bookstores and got them to place the book. Bookstores were different then: small, individually owned, run by kindly gnomes with a tolerance for eccentricity. They must have thought that I was a fool or a lunatic, or — in the Toronto parlance of the day — “different”, but this did not seem to bother them. As the book was small, it sold for 50 cents. I should have kept 249 of the things, as the price has now gone up considerably.

The title of this tiny but peculiar effort was Double Persephone; the poems rhymed and scanned, and were about sex and death, with some rebirth tossed in: my optimism was showing early. As I recall, the word chthonic was in them, so it was pretty deep stuff.

What do I think of them now? They weren’t very good, but at least they were — oh, killing term — promising. I’ve been cheered up since by reading the juvenilia of other poets whose mature work I admire: Tennyson, for instance, has one that begins, “Airy, fairy Lilian”.

Best advice for young writers? This is a risky business. You’re on a tightrope. Below is Niagara Falls. Courage. One step at a time. Don’t look down.

The others are also quite good. Do take a look.

Kepel Book Review

William Dalrymple reviews Gilles Kepel's The War for Muslim Minds.

Reading Gilles Kepel's important book, it is easy to see why al-Qaida should be so enthusiastic about Bush. Bin Laden has always been open about his aims: by unleashing a clash of civilisations between Islam and the "Zionist-Crusaders" of the west, he hopes to provoke an American backlash strong enough to radicalise the Muslim world, topple pro-western governments and so install a new Islamic caliphate.

Bush has fulfilled Bin Laden's every hope. Through the invasion of secular Ba'athist Iraq, the abuses in Abu Ghraib, the mass-murders in Faluja, America, with Britain's obedient assistance, has turned Iraq into a jihadist playground while alienating all moderate Muslim opinion. We may have failed to capture Bin Laden, but we have succeeded in liberating the extremists, radicalising the unaffiliated and making life more difficult than ever for our natural allies: ordinary, decent, moderate Muslims.

Essential reading.

Proulx Profiled

I'm a big fan of the Guardian's profiles, because I almost always discover an unsual tidbit of information about the authors they pick. This week, Aida Edemariam profiles Annie Proulx, and I found her take on 'write what you know' quite refreshing.

The top floor of her house is filled with books, yet she only keeps those she likes. "It's very hard to mention a book she has not read," says Jenkins. She believes the best way to learn to write is to read - her own extensive and ever-changing list includes Thomas Mann, Patrick White, JF Powers, Haldor Laxness, Milorad Pavic, Flann O'Brien; she famously scorns that well-worn dictum, to write what you know. All it produces, she has said, is "tiresome middle-class novels of people who I think are writing about things they know, but you wish to God they didn't. My thing is, learn what you want to write about. Find out about it."

That, and I like a woman who built her own house.

December 09, 2004

Later

That's it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar guest blogs tomorrow and every Friday. Have a great weekend.

Saadawi For President

Egyptian author, doctor, and activist Nawal El Saadawi has announced she will run in next year's presidential elections in Egypt.

She told AFP news agency she did not expect to win, but wanted to get the Egyptian people "moving" to vote on important issues facing the country.

If the 73-year-old's candidacy goes forward, she would be the first woman to run for the presidency.

This is more of a symbolic move, of course, since, according to the article, the Egyptian constitution requires that a candidate be nominated by Parliament before being submitted to a referendum.

Link via TEV.

NY Festival of International Literature

PEN has announced the launch of a New York Festival of International Literature, which is to take place April 16 – 22, 2005 (no link yet). The week-long gathering will be an occasion to introduce or further acquaint American audiences with the finest international writers, including Adonis, Margaret Atwood, Breyten Breytenbach, Nuruddin Farah, Vaclav Havel, Michael Ondaatje, Wole Soyinka, Adam Zagajewski, and Salman Rushdie. They will be joined by U.S. resident authors like Chinua Achebe, Paul Auster, T.C. Boyle, Peter Carey, Edwidge Danticat, E. L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Gish Jen, Oscar Hijuelos, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, and Amy Tan. Part of the motivation for the festival is this:

There is also a shocking scarcity of international writing published here (less than 5% of literary titles compared to upwards of 50% in other developed countries). The lack of foreign writing, perhaps most of all, contributes to an alarmingly narrow American perspective on much of the rest of the world.

There will be readings, workshops, and performances for the festival, which is being billed as PEN World Voices.

The mention of Adonis and Chinua Achebe is enough to give me heart palpitations. If you live in New York, you lucky bastards, make sure you go. I'll keep a close eye on this one and post links when they become available.