February 28, 2005

Help, Please

I'm working on a project and need to talk to other Arab American bloggers. If you are one, or know of one, please email me web addresses at llalami AT yahoo DOT com

Readers Respond: Author Royalties and Used Book Sales

Readers continue to respond to this post, and its follow-up, about whether authors should get royalties on used books. Colleen Mondor, Children's Book Review Editor at Eclectica, and who worked in a used bookstore in Alaska for two years, weighs in on the logistical problems raised by a subsequent-royalties system of the kind that A.S. Byatt wants:

In the larger stores (Powells, Strand, etc.) [employees] inventory by title, regardless of new or used, but in most used stores the used books are all lumped together by the "Used" category....we had no idea what we had by title as far as the inventory system was concerned. So in order to compensate authors we would have to inventory every used book by title as they came in, keeping in mind that a large number of them do not have ISBN codes, and then what? Notify publishers that we have the book? Or do we notify them only after we sell the book? When purchasing new books, it is all done up front, when the store buys the book from the wholesaler (like Ingram). But how would this used process work? As I check out the new and used bookstores in my town now, I see various displays of books from 100 years old to six months ago...and some are sold by hand receipt that merely states "books" under the description. How do you keep track of that by title? And who keeps this whole mess honest? (...)

Quite simply, the system does not exist for most stores to accommodate the sort of tracking that some authors (Byatt) seem to want. And that is how it is in the used world. Do you think Ford gets a cut from used trucks sold at the local street corner car lot? Do fashion designers get money from thrift store sales or record companies from the used record stores? It doesn't happen because it would be insane to try and do. I'm not even going to start on how chaotic the pricing standards would be. A book that sells in Florida for $10 might get only $1 in AK...same condition, but the subject matter demands a higher price in one locale as opposed to another. Would authors be happy with such haphazard pricing?

Powell's David Weich is similarly skeptical of subsequent-royalty schemes.

New books get sold, not leased. The implicit contract of such an exchange transfers ownership to the buyer; whether it's a book or a painting or a couch or a dog or a rock that has been sold, the purchaser now *owns* it. At that point, the artist or toy maker or craftsman has ceded control over the product. I don't buy into the idea that a writer's product is any different, or more valuable, than that of any craftsperson. It strikes me as self-righteous and belittling of others' work.

If a publisher were to resell a book's content -- the issue has come up in various forms over digital republication rights --then the writer may very well have a legitimate claim to additional compensation. However, if a writer were due compensation every time his/her book is resold, the value of the item would immediately decrease; in effect, the original bookstore customer is paying for a different product: a product with no resale rights. And this arrangement isn't particular to the book industry; it's the basis of our economy. Should the maker of my desk lamp get a cut when I resell it at a yard sale?

Comparisons between books and other products also form the basis of reader Ken Bronson's response:

I first heard this argument that content originators should get compensation for sales on used items when Garth Brooks made the case that musicians and songwriters should get money for used CD's. I don't get how a book or a cd or a movie is different from a car or a toaster. I can sell my car and Chrysler won't get a kickback. I never really researched why artists think they are selling something different than toasters. Sorry but no one has ever explained it in a way that makes sense to me.

Since books have been compared here with used trucks, CDs, desk lamps, and toasters, I feel compelled to point out a couple of things. There is a difference between books as art objects and books as products.

When taken as art objects, books don't have a monetary value and cannot be quantified in the same way. Books are not written according to a specific set of independently verifiable features. Our reactions to them are entirely subjective--we may love them or hate them. They can make us laugh or cry; they can reshape our views of life or leave us thoroughly untouched; they can make us happy or so angry that we issue fatwas over their authors.

However, when a book is sold to a publisher, when it has an ISBN, a nice cover by Chip Kidd, a fancy author photo by Marion Ettlinger, and a price tag, it becomes a product, indistiguishable from other products on store shelves. The expectation that it should be treated any differently strikes me as a little absurd.

Debut Authors Talk About Their Work

The Observer catches up with six authors, about the moment they've been waiting for (some for longer than others) the publication of their first novel. Here's a sample, from writer Carole Cadwalladr.

[N]obody asks to have a novelist in the family. In particular, nobody asks to have a novelist who writes about dysfunctional families in the family. (And I won't even begin to describe what it's like having your dad read your novel - your dad who, according to family legend, or at least my mother, last read a novel in 1962 and therefore doesn't understand the concept of made-up things being printed in books.)

But they've been champs. (My dad's verdict? 'Very enjoyable. I mean I don't think it's going to win the Booker ... ') and they've defended my decision to have written it.

The Orientalist: Excerpt, Review, Questions, Interview

Tom Reiss' The Orientalist, his biography of the elusive Lev Nussimbaum, the man who may or may not have been cult author Kurban Said, is reviewed in the New York Times by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. (The paper also posts the book's first chapter on its site, along with a picture of the very photogenic author.) Wheatcroft recaps the major points of Nussumbaum's fascinating life, finds a couple of factual errors in Reiss's work, but otherwise gives the book a positive review, concluding,

Whether this astounding and bitter story has any moral I am not sure, but it defies the old phrase "stranger than fiction." It's just as well that Reiss didn't write his "Quest for Kurban" as a novel. Who would have believed a word of it?

What I find rather interesting myself is that Reiss's central thesis (that Lev Nussimbaum was Kurban Said) isn't presented as just that--a hypothesis. Amardeep Singh points out that in the Anchor Books version of Ali and Nino, there is an afterword that points to another possible author: Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels.

It was impossible for decades to identify the author behind the pseudonym, but it now seems clear that "Kurban Said" is a pseudonym for two different people-- a woman, the baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, and a man Lev Nussimbaum. . . . Lev Nussimbaum--who possibly had the original idea for the novel--was Jewish, born in Baku [in Azerbaijan] in 1905. Nussimbaum's father took Lev and perhaps a German governess to Berlin during the tumult of the Russian Revolution. Nussimbaum completed his studies there, became a journalist and later wrote books about Mohammed, Nikolas II, Lenin, Reza Shah Pahlevi and regional geo-political issues. These books were published in London and New York under the name Essad Bey, the name he had taken in his youth when he converted to Islam. After Hitler seized power, Nussimbaum fled Berlin for still-independent Austria where an intense friendship with Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, her family, and her circle, developed. Ali and Nino is almost certainly result of this relationship. Which sections of the novel are the work of which author remains an unsolved mystery.

This is the stuff that legends are made of, and I'm sure speculation about who the real Kurban Said is won't stop anytime soon.

In other news and coverage about The Orientalist, Nextbook contributor Boris Fishman interviews Tom Reiss about the book.

Photo credit: The Orientalist
Related post: The Orientalist.

Another Leroy Piece

The gender-blurring wunderkind JT LeRoy's new work of fiction, ''Harold's End,'' is billed as a novella but in fact barely weighs in as a short story. There may be almost 100 pages here, but they are small in size and somewhat airy. This book has been padded unabashedly: there's an introduction by Dave Eggers, who first published an early version of the text in McSweeney's; an afterword by Michael Ray, LeRoy's editor; a dozen watercolors by the Australian artist Cherry Hood; and nearly four full pages of acknowledgments (Billy Corgan, Gus Van Sant, Tatum O'Neal, Lou Reed and sundry others are gushingly thanked). It's no exaggeration to say it takes more time to read through the press packet than the actual story -- a modest, sometimes affecting tale of a boy, his pet and scatological perversion. LeRoy's brief career has generated the kind of magazine-feature publicity usually reserved for movie stars.

Good thing the NY Times does its part.

Gilchrist on Writing

I'm a fan of Ellen Gilchrist's work (In the Land of Dreamy Dreams is one of my favorite collections) but somehow I missed that she has a new book out about craft, The Writing Life, due to come out in March. The Mississippi Press devotes a page to Gilchrist, her work, and a reading she gave at Newcomb College Center for Research on Women.

A portion of the book is dedicated to the delicate balance between an artistic life and family commitments.

In the essay, "Writing What you Know," Gilchrist tells of a talented young writer who wrote a marvelous story about bullies on the back of a school bus. She had to drop out of the writing course for the birth of her third son. Gilchrist ran into her at the Fayetteville Athletic Club.

Reading from the book, Gilchrist said, "I'd like to get back to school but as you can see it isn't going to happen soon,' she told me. You're collecting material,' I told her. Besides, this is the real creation. Everything else is a shadow.' I hope so,' she answered and disappeared to the swimming pool."

February 24, 2005

It's A Wrap

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

Just Call Me DJ MG

Josh Levin compares rappers and bloggers over at Slate.

Those of you obsessed with external appearances may think I'm kidding. What, you ask, could those champagne-swilling, "bitch"-shouting rappers have in common with those Jolt-pounding, "read the whole thing"-writing bloggers?

For starters, both groups share a love of loose-fitting, pajama-style apparel. Still not satisfied? Bloggers and rappers are equally obsessed with social networking. Every rapper rolls with his entourage; every blogger rolls with his blog roll. Women can't win an audience in either profession without raunching it up like Lil' Kim or Wonkette.

And don't forget those silly, silly names. Even if he didn't flaunt his devotion to pimping and pit bulls, you'd probably guess Snoop Dogg is a rapper. And Fedlawyerguy-yeah, probably a blogger. But the "blogger or rapper?" parlor game can stump even the nerdiest gangsta. Does uggabugga hate on wack emcees or wack Charles Krauthammer? What about Mad Kane? Big Noyd, Justus League, Uppity Negro, Little Brother, Cold Fury, and South Knox Bubba? (Answers: blogger, blogger, rapper, rap group, blogger, rap group, blogger, blogger.)

Lord. Help. Us.

No one is safe from that book.

The Mother of All Book Tours

Forget Clinton's book launch party. Books by statesmen (statesmen lit?) are taking on a whole new dimension in Turkmenistan, according to the Post.

In Sicily, a reception was held recently to launch the Italian translation of a controversial book written by Saparmurad Niyazov, dictator and "president for life" of Turkmenistan. In Amsterdam, a Dutch translation of the book was unveiled at a party in a historic 17th-century house.

The various releases this month of the two-volume "Book of Spirit" -- "Ruhnama" in Turkmen -- are part of an international drive to boost the book's circulation as well as what the government-controlled Turkmen media call a "victorious march around the world" by the author-president, 65, also known in his country as Turkmenbashi the Great.

Even more disturbing is the fact that Niyazov has reportedly ordered all the libraries in his country closed. The book's translation in other languages is "funded" by corporations eager to do business in the oil-rich nation. And what do the corporate spokespersons have to say about this? Why, that it's harmless of course:

"We sponsored it for inter-cultural understanding," said Arantxa Doerrie, a spokeswoman for Zeppelin Baumaschinen, a German machinery company that translated the second volume of the book and presented it to Niyazov this month. The company plans to distribute the book in Germany, she said.

"In principle, yes, it is a dictatorship," Doerrie said, "but simultaneously we see that very much is being done to help the people there -- for the infrastructure with the building of streets, for example. That is what we understand. We sell building equipment, so yes, there is a market for us there, but we see our contribution as a way to help the people there."

Way to help.

Just Another Day In The Life

Amy Tan picks apart the Cliffs Notes of The Joy Luck Club and discusses labels applied to her work, according to this Tallahasse Democrat article. She apparently also brings her pet Yorkies (in "black, purse-sized bags") to public events.

Book Dreams

Some writers are committed to publishing their work no matter what. How committed? How does $15,000 sound?

E-Panel with Lit Mag Editors, Take Two

Looks like Dan Wickett is a recidivist. Last month, he hosted an e-panel with the editors of several prominent literary journals. He does it again this month. His guests are David Lynn of The Kenyon Review, Gina Frangello of Other Voices, Jason Sanford of storySouth, Martin Lammon of Arts & Letters, Don Lee of Ploughshares, Esther Lee of Indiana Review, Barry Silesky of Another Chicago Magazine and Aaron Burch of Hobart.

Readers Respond: Author Royalties and Used Book Sales

Several readers wrote in to Moorishgirl in response to this post, about whether authors should get royalties from used book sales. Chris Beha wondered why some people are shocked by the idea of charging royalties on used books.

Why is it selfish for authors to want to get paid for such a labor intensive project? And why do the used booksellers who turn these books around with enormous profit margins get off the hook? If I come to The Strand in NYC with a box full of two hundred used books, they might pay me twenty dollars for the lot. They'll mark each one up to four or five bucks, knowing full well that most will just sit on their shelves forever. These places have essentially no overhead costs whatsoever--they have to pay rent on the space and they have to pay their surly employees. 95% of dollars spent in the Strand go to the Strand. We take this part of the used book trade for granted. Now, if they had to pay the publisher some small amount for each book they sold, why couldn't that money would come largely out of their profits, not out of the consumers pocket?

Maybe books should be given away for free, but they're not. Given the fact that readers are going to pay money for books, why not try to insure that more of that money goes to the people who wrote the books, rather than to middlemen?

A few people put the blame of authors' losses on online retailers, which make it exceedingly easy to buy a used copy of a book that has just barely come out. George at Bookninja, for example, explained his reasons for continuing to link to Amazon thusly:

I have to jump in here and say that the reason we continue to link to Amazon (even though their American arm donated primarily to the Bush campaign during the election) while most of the other lit bloggers have moved to Powell's, is because, as I understand it, Powell's will sell you the cheapest copy of a book by default. This means if there's a used copy of your book sitting beside a new copy online, the used copy gets sold first, and you, the author, get what the French call "Jacques Squatte".

I am one of those who've made the switch a while back, and so I was curious to hear what Powell's would have to say about this. I posed the question to David Weich, Director of Marketing and Development at Powell's. Here is his response:

Depending on the type of link a partner uses or the search terms a customer keys into our site, we may display a sale-priced or used copy first. As a rule, we want to show the customer the best deal; our display depends on available inventory. But we would never sell a used copy in place of a new one if the customer wants a new book. We don't hide new books and we certainly don't substitute used copies for new; we give customers a choice, just like in our stores.

That said, it's kind of a funny argument to make that Amazon represents authors more respectfully than Powell's. I won't get into the dozens of surreptitious and self-serving ways that Amazon blackmails publishers into even displaying an author's titles (it's the only bookseller that proudly promotes its pay for placement system, and that system doesn't just affect the Home page - every inch of the Amazon web site has been bought). But to stick to the subject of new versus used: consider the scope of Amazon's Marketplace section, where used sellers worldwide post their inventories, and which allows Amazon to offer used copies of virtually every book in print right alongside new ones.

Blink
Powells.com -- new for $18.16; out of stock used
Amazon -- new for $15.57; 51 used copies starting at $13.73.

Max Tivoli:
Powells.com -- $9.80 new; out of stock used
Amazon -- $10.50 new; 57 used copies starting at $7.76

I could go on, but I'll spare you. Keep in mind, however, that Marketplace is by far Amazon's fastest-growing segment and to date the only part of their book division that has registered profits.

So, do you agree? Disagree? Send reactions to llalami AT yahoo DOT com.

Another Home Land Rave

Sam Lipsyte's Home Land continues to draw raves:

I'm sorry if I'm the last dork to show up at the party and I'm telling you things you already know. I don't know Sam Lipsyte at all. I don't know anybody who knows Sam Lipsyte at all. But on a recent Sunday morning I picked up his novel Home Land, and then I spent the next 12 hours reading it. It's funny and sad and cruel and awful. It makes David Sedaris seem a little lightweight. It makes David Foster Wallace seem a little out of touch. It makes Rick Moody seem, well, unnecessarily Moody. It makes one laugh out loud while pondering the ways in which all lives, invariably, go wrong.

Read the rest of Benjamin Alsup's review, which appears in Esquire.

Giveaway: Calamity And Other Stories

I'm starting a new feature this week, to run on Thursdays, in which I give out some free goodies to the first person who emails and provides a mailing address. I thought I would start with Calamity and Other Stories, a lovely new collection of short stories by Daphne Kalotay.

Update: The winner is David from Washington, DC. Congrats!

It's My Party

Today is my birthday. I don't usually look forward to the celebration, since it's so often associated in my mind with a particular number that moves inexorably up. But this year I find myself very much at peace with myself, enjoying my thirties, and discovering new things every day. I suppose this has more than a little to do with the upcoming publication of my collection--it's been such a dream of mine, for a very long time, and to finally be able to see it come together has been very rewarding, but I also like to think that I've finally learned to just relax and enjoy life. I'm thinking of buying myself something special from Powell's, spending some time with my Mom, and maybe going to Le Bouchon with Alex tonight.

February 23, 2005

This Just In: Don't Mess With Salman

Salman Rushdie is reportedly upset about having been misquoted by Patrick French in his review of the widely lauded Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. (I haven't yet bought the book, but plan to this weekend.) The review quoted an old essay by Rushdie, in which he described Rajashtan as "colourful" as proof that the writer was out of touch with reality, and using an "insider-outsider" perspective.

Rushdie went on: "As a look at my essay A Dream of Glorious Return, published in Step Across This Line, will quickly show, I was talking somewhat satirically about the tourist-Rajasthan that was presented to Bill Clinton on his visit to India ("People wear colourful clothes and perform colourful dances and ride on colourful elephants and these are things a President should know") while the non-colourful realities of the drought and so on were not drawn to his attention."

Rushdie added: "It is quite improper to quote my essay selectively so that he can praise my friend Mehta by making me look foolish."

On a lighter note (or darker, depending on your perspective), Rushdie threatened to take a baseball bat to a reporter who's written mean things about his wife, Padma Lakshmi.

First link via Kitabkhana.
Second link via TEV.

RIP Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante has passed on.

His effervescent novel Tres Tristes Tigres, published in English as Three Trapped Tigers, captured the rum-soaked, salacious Havana of the late 1950s and became a classic of Cuban literature. As most of his writings, the novel bubbled with the witty Cuban speak of the streets and a cast of eccentric characters.

Although he wrote ''in Cuban'' instead of the high-brow Spanish of many of his contemporaries, he earned high-brow praise, winning in 1997 Spain's Cervantes prize, the most prestigious in Spanish literature.

He was also an outspoken critic of the Communist regime in Cuba.

Budnitz in the Press

Judy Budnitz's new story collection Nice Big American Baby is reviewed in the SF Chronicle and on NPR. You can read "Miracle," one of the stories from the collection, over at the New Yorker site.

Pashtun poetry

A new book is about to give Pashtun culture something to be known for, besides war and terror: poetry. The BBC reports that the collected works of poet Rahman Baba have been translated by English teachers Robert Sampson and Momin Khan Jaja. The book doesn't appear to be available from online retailers, though a small selection of Baba's poetry appears in this book.

Lit Mag News

The first issue of new mag Barrelhouse is now available for sale, and features work by Stephan Clark, Stacey Richter, David Barringer, and the ubiquitous Steve Almond.

Storysouth has announced its list of notable online stories of 2004. Ten stories will be selected from this list on March 1, at which point voting will be opened to the public. Good luck to all.

February 22, 2005

Ruland on NPR

Writer Jim Ruland, who guested here a few weeks ago despite, he said, "being neither moorish nor a girl," has a piece on NPR about the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Ruland attended the SBVT reunion last January in Orlando, Florida, with one member of the group: his father.

Between Pastel Book Covers

Rosemary Goring wonders whether romance novels shouldn't be subjected to the same level of criticism as literary fiction.

Some say [romance novels] need no publicity, being destined for the top-10 lists without a cheep from the literary pack. Others believe they should be reviewed on the same terms as any other novel. The problem is, these books rarely attempt to do anything new. Their success lies in their formula. The settings may change, and the names of their characters, but the ingredients are so familiar and well-used, it's surprising there are any of them left in the fridge.
It seems unfair to analyse such novels by the standards used to evaluate more artistically ambitious works. And yet should they slip by, year after year, without scrutiny?

She takes a closer look at Josephine Cox's The Journey.

Soniah Kamal Recommends

"I first read Moghul Buffet by Cheryl Benard eight years ago and I have yet to come across a novel that has made me laugh so hard," Kamal says. "It's part detective story, part social satire, and part bildungsroman. There's a lusty Muslim cleric and a gay Indian actor, there's an American businessman convinced he's out to be murdered and an American woman married to a Pakistani feudal lord, there's a bunch of future Talibans involved at the moment in doing good and a policeman who constantly misinterprets clues: how all these characters come together is ingenious and delightful. I read this at least once a year simply because it's one of the best stories around."

Soniah Kamal's short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologized in the US, Canada, Pakistan and India. Her debut novel An Isolated Incident is scheduled for release with Penguin in the fall. She also blogs at drunkonink.

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

Ishiguro on his "Campus Novel"

The Guardian's Tim Adams talks to Kazuo Ishiguro about his latest novel, Never Let Me Go.

Kathy herself first surfaced in Ishiguro's notes almost 15 years ago when he had a sense of a book about a group of young people with a Seventies atmosphere. 'They hung around and argued about books,' he says. 'I knew there was this strange fate hanging over them, but I couldn't work out exactly what it was.' He used to tell his wife Lorna he was writing a campus novel and she was suitably horrified by the idea. It was only relatively recently, when he was listening on the radio to various programmes about biotechnology, that the particular fate of his sketchy students became clear to him.

Warning: Article contains a couple of spoilers.

Madame Bovary, En Bande Dessinee

Here's something different. Gemma Bovery, a comic book by British writer Posy Simmonds, is largely based on Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

Originally published as a comic strip in the Guardian, it's the story of Gemma Tate, a London magazine illustrator who marries a man named Charlie Bovery and moves with him to a village in Normandy. Gemma and Charlie have just enough money to drop out of the corporate grind and style themselves as "creative," but she soon grows bored with the aimlessness of their lives.

The narrator of "Gemma Bovery" is Raymond Joubert, another dropout from the rat race, an intellectual who has chosen a "simpler" life as an artisan - the village baker. But being a very good baker is not enough to occupy his mind, for Joubert grows obsessed with Gemma - in part because her name and her evident marital frustration and boredom with provincial life remind him of Flaubert's Emma Bovary. And his obsession with this parallel between literature and life contributes to the calamity that overtakes Gemma and Charlie Bovery.

Sounds like fun.

The Orientalist

The Denver Post has an excerpt of Tom Reiss' The Orientalist, a book that I have been dying to read ever since I heard about it. It's a biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish millionaire who escaped revolutionary Russia, transformed himself into a Muslim prince, and wrote Ali and Nino, which became a huge bestseller in pre-WWII Europe.

On a cold November morning in Vienna, I walked a maze of narrow streets on the way to see a man who promised to solve the mystery of Kurban Said. I was with Peter Mayer, the president of the Overlook Press, a large, rumpled figure in a black corduroy suit who wanted to publish Said's small romantic novel Ali and Nino. Mayer tended to burst into enthusiastic monologues about the book: "You know how when you look at a Vermeer, and it's an interior, and it's quite quiet, yet somehow, what he does with perspective, with light, it feels much bigger-that's this novel!" A love story set in the Caucasus on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Ali and Nino had been originally published in German in 1937 and was revived in translation in the seventies as a minor classic. But the question of the author's identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese café-society writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot. In the jacket photograph of a book called Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus, the mysterious author is dressed up as a mountain warrior-wearing a fur cap, a long, flowing coat with a sewn-in bandolier, and a straight dagger at his waist. Mayer and I were on our way to a meeting with a lawyer named Heinz Barazon, who was challenging Overlook over proper author credit on the novel.

Read the rest of the first chapter here.

Leon L'Africain

I wouldn't normally have paid much attention to this book list, billed as "reading list to while away waning winter" but the choice of a favorite Amin Malouf book, Leo Africanus, changed my mind. It's an imaginary, lyrical biography of a real, historical figure, Hassan Al-Wazzan, a 16th-century Moorish ambassador. Al-Wazzan was caught by Sicilian pirates on his way back from a pilgrimage to Mecca and was given as a gift to Pope Leo X. He became the renowned geographer Leo de Medici, or Leo Africanus, and was witness to a number of historical events.

Pamuk in Trouble?

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faces criminal charges in Turkey over statements he made about the Armenian genocide to a Swiss newspaper. Pamuk's statements (that "30,000 Kurds and over 1 million Armenians had been killed in Turkey") are considered controversial in Turkey, the only country that continues to deny the genocide and in fact alleges that it was the Armenians who exterminated the Turks.

It's particularly ironic that Pamuk should be molested about this, since his latest novel, Snow, features several references to the genocide. Given Pamuk's worldwide reputation, and Turkey's desire to join the EU, it's unlikely that the charges will actually be followed up, but we'll keep an eye on this story.

Links via Maud.

R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson

As has been widely reported yesterday, Hunter S. Thompson took his own life at his home near Aspen. Over at Bookslut, Michael Shaub has been keeping up with all the articles, obits, and rememberances.

Hi again

Thanks to Randa for doing such a great job on Friday. I spent the three-day weekend mostly relaxing and trying to over that awful cough. Posting should resume at the regular pace this week.

February 17, 2005

Link Soup

I've been struggling with a cough and sore throat for nearly three weeks now. At first, I thought that it would go away on its own, and continued work on my revisions. That didn't work so well, so in between printing out portions of my book, I chugged cough syrup, and drank green tea, and even took that horrid Zinc that Alex swears by. Nothing worked. So now I'm trying a different approach: rest. That means I will have to bow out early today, though not before pointing out a couple of worthwhile links:

• The Morning News' Tournament of Books has entered Round Two, and the first match up pits Roth's The Plot Against America with Boyle's The Inner Circle. The judge is Maud Newton.

• The Rake has a great report about Michael Chabon's talk at the University of Denver. "Chabon is the picture of the perfect college roommate-if you brought him home for Thanksgiving, he'd charm the hell out of your parents," he says. The charming man talked about the genesis of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

• Sam Lipsyte's Home Land has gotten a lot of attention from blogs and so Mark tracked the sales rank of the novel to see if there was any effect. Short answer: yes.

The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday here at Moorishgirl. I will be back at the helm on Monday.

Lit Blogs in the Press

Nice write-up in USA Today by Ed Nawotka about the growing role of literary blogs in "decoding the industry and creating an alternate literary community." MobyLives, Complete Review, Maud Newton, Kevin Smokler, and yours truly are quoted, and the article also mentions personal faves like Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind and the Elegant Variation.

What many blogs do better than the conventional print media is offer a sense of the global literary culture by providing links to foreign book coverage.

Fortunately, Nawotka doesn't reprise the all-too-common take that bloggers are a cozy little group of insiders.

Shalit Responds

Wendy Shalit, whose NY Times essay about the representation of Orthodox Jews in literature drew quite a response in the literary community, has a riposte in this this piece.

All the authors I discussed are great writers, and I'm sure they are good people too. Nevertheless, they are simply not from the fervently-Orthodox community that is featured so negatively in their novels. Unfortunately, the media (and many readers) seem to feel that these writers are representing the traditional Jewish community - one "grants us the illicit pleasure of eavesdropping on a closed world," and another describes wacky newly religious types with "devastating accuracy" - when by their own admission the authors do not identify with these worlds.

In quoting the authors' public statements about themselves, such as Nathan Englander's explanation that he's disillusioned with his Modern Orthodoxy or Tova Mirvis's considering herself "liberal, feminist, open Orthodox," I am not critiquing their personal choices. I am examining why sometimes their haredi characters lack realism. The fact that these authors do not come from the specific subgroup they often write about would not be an insurmountable obstacle, so long as they didn't rely on negative stereotypes. Unfortunately, sometimes they do. The traditional Orthodox characters in their novels tend to be hypocrites.

Do you agree? Disagree? Send an email with your thoughts to llalami AT yahoo DOT com

Egyptian comics

We mentioned the new line of comic books featuring Mid-East superheroes last October, and now the Post runs a similar piece.

AK Comics intends to flood the Arab world with Zein and three other action idols: Rakan, a hairy medieval warrior in Mesopotamia; Jalila, a brainy Levantine scientist and fighter for justice; and Aya, a North African described as a "vixen who roams the region on her supercharged motorbike confronting crime wherever it rears its ugly head."

North African vixen? Sounds like my kind of girl.

February 16, 2005

Blurbing: A Cure For Insomnia

Adam Langer talks about how he fights insomnia: he keeps up with his blurb requests. Except he's having trouble with the format:

[At] this moment, I'm struggling with the blurb format, which often seems to be a particularly literate form of Mad Libs:

"This (adjective) and (adjective/noun) cuts to the bone of (evocative phrase). Reminiscent of the works of (mainstream author) and (groovy, less well-known author), this (adjective) work marks (insert writer’s name) as a (choose one: [a] writer at the top of his/her game; [b] a bold new voice of his/her generation)."

The cynic in me has always read blurbs with a sensibility borrowed from Mad Magazine: "When they say 'ambitious,' they really mean 'I didn’t finish the damn thing.'" My favorite unpublished blurb is one that was written by a very famous Hollywood personality, who I unfortunately can't identify here: "What do you want me to say?" the blurber wrote. "I'll write anything!"

Read the rest here.

Casa Book Fair

The 11th Casablanca International Book Fair, which takes place from 11 to 20 February, features Spain as a guest of honor. Among the many events planned are tributes to Ahmed Sefrioui, Driss Chraïbi, Abdellatif Laâbi and Juan Goytisolo, as well as readings by Moroccan authors Edmond Amran El Maleh, Mohamed Tozy et Mohamed Bennis.

In related news, Morocco's Minister of Culture complained about low readership in the kingdom. No word on what he plans to do about it.

Moroccan Zeitgeist

I was quite interested to read about A Life Full Of Holes: The Strait Project, an exhibition of photographs by Tangier-born Yto Berrada, and quite disappointed that none of the pictures were available online. The photographs explore issues of migration, similar to the ones I deal with in The Things That Death Will Buy: the "harragas"--people who risk life and limb trying to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in order to make it in Europe. The word has its root in the verb 'hrg,' meaning 'to burn'. Those who migrate in this way burn their papers, burn their past lives in hope of new ones. Here's Barrada on the project:

'The word strait, like its French - and as chance would have it, Arabic - equivalent, combines the senses of narrowness and distress. The collapse of the colonial entreprise has left behind a complex legacy, bridging the Mediterranean and shaping how movement across the Strait of Gibraltar is managed and perceived. Before 1991 any Moroccan with a passport could travel freely to Europe. But since the European Union's (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait. A generation of Moroccans has grown up facing this troubled space that manages to be at once physical, symbolic, historical and intimately personal.

Berrada's exhibition takes its name from the book by Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (edited by Paul Bowles), A Life Full of Holes. If you are a reader from Liverpool, drop me a line at llalami AT yahoo DOT com and let me know what you think of the exhibition.

Sam Spade on NPR

More love for The Maltese Falcon's 75th anniversary: Commentator John Ridley has an NPR piece about Sam Spade's San Francisco.

February 15, 2005

Sixteen Years Ago: The Fatwa Against Rushdie

From the Guardian's archives, a 1989 article announcing that Salman Rushdie went into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa declaring the book to be "against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran" and urging all Muslims to execute the author.

The threat to Mr Rushdie's life is the latest twist in a saga of increasingly violent opposition to his book by Muslims who insist it is blasphemous about the prophet Mohammed. It has been banned in India, where Mr Rushdie was born a Muslim in 1947, and in South Africa. Last month, copies were burned in Bradford, Yorkshire, and last weekend five protesters were shot dead by police during demonstrations in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Looking back now, it's hard to imagine any book today getting the kind of attention that The Satanic Verses did. I remember clearly the discussions the book triggered in my family. Some were quite uncomfortable with a book in which prostitutes were named after the Prophet's wives, but others (like my atheist cousin) saw nothing of interest. No one, though, felt Rushdie should be censored, much less condemned to death. Of course, in times of controversy, one only hears the voices that rise above the din. And, as is often the case, the protests and the threats came mostly from people who hadn't read the book.

There is a brilliant passage in Zadie Smith's White Teeth, in which young Millat and his friends talk about joining a protest in Bradford.

'It's a fucking insult!' said Millat, spitting some gum against the window. 'We've taken it too long in this country. And now we're getting it from our own, man. Rhas clut! He's a fucking bador, white man's puppet.'

'My uncle says he can't even spell,' said a furious Hifan, the most honestly religious of the, lot. 'And he dares to talk about Allah!'

'Allah'll fuck him up, yeah?' cried Rajik, the least intelligent, who thought of God as some kind of cross between Monkey-Magic and Bruce Willis. 'He'll kick him in the balls. Dirty book.'

'You read it?' asked Ranil, as they whizzed past Finsbury Park.

There was a general pause.

Millat said, 'I haven't exackly read it exackly-but I know all about that shit, yeah?'

To be more precise, Millat hadn't read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book, could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of other books; could not pick out the writer in a line-up of other writers (irresistible, this line-up of offending writers: Socrates, Protagoras, Ovid and Juvenal, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, D. H. Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flashbulb). But he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelt of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a film-maker; that he should go back to his own country, or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands.

That Smith could capture the ignorance and the anger of these goons so brilliantly in just a couple of paragraphs has always impressed me. Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, pick up a book, any book, today and celebrate the freedom to read.

Birnbaum vs. Hoffman

Robert Birnbaum's latest interview is Eva Hoffman. The two chat about "her passports, living in England, the symbolic meanings of such things, After Such Knowledge as a culmination, 2Gs, Ruth Franklin, Melvin Julius Bukiets, September 11, Noam Chomsky, the Enlightenment, Barbara Ehrenreich, social democracy in Europe, David Rieff, Christopher Hitchens, writing fiction, Cynthia Ozick, students at MIT, Samantha Power, Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lectures, David Mitchell, and [Birnbaum]".

Marc Acito Recommends

"While many authors have been touted as the next David Sedaris, only Susan Gilman deserves the mantle," Acito says. "Gilman's new book, Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless is both laugh out loud funny and touchingly poignant. Whether she’s describing an encounter with a Maharishi who looks like "a lawn troll in drag," or her teen obsession with Mick Jagger ("Where were the magazines for 15 year old girls in love with British bi-sexual coke-heads, thank you?"), Gilman’s delightfully warped perspective abounds. An unapologetic sexual hedonist ("Being told to 'wait until marriage' was like being ordered to hold our breath for twelve years") she weaves hilarious tales of a youth misspent "staggering around bars in lace stockings and leather jackets, then coming home with toilet paper stuck to our shoes," as well as working in a series of dead-end jobs ("like terminal illnesses") that make you wince with recognition. Ultimately, however, it is Gilman's razor-sharp intelligence and smart-mouth feminism that leaves you thinking well after the laughter fades."

Marc Acito's first novel, How I Paid for College, A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater was named an Editor's Choice by both the New York Times and Advocate Magazine. A film adaptation of his teenage tale of disorganized crime is in the works at Columbia Pictures.

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