January 31, 2006

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

From the Mail and Guardian comes the news that the Bush administration is urging Arab governments to fund Hamas:

The United States is urging Arab states to continue funding a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, even though Washington is threatening to cut its own aid. Western diplomats said on Monday that President George Bush's administration has already contacted Arab governments that give the Palestinian Authority support and requested them to continue their funding.

The US position behind the scenes contrasts with its public stance, in which Bush has said he will cut aid to the Palestinian Authority unless Hamas renounces violence and stops demanding the destruction of Israel.

The US plea to the Arab world is because it does not want the West Bank and Gaza to descend into chaos as a result of choking off aid. It also fears that if it stops funding the Palestinians, countries such as Iran or Syria could step into the breach, enhancing their image in the Islamic world just as Washington seeks to isolate them.

In other news, Sharon's Kadima Party officially launched its electoral campaign today.

State of the Site

In honor of the State of the Union address tonight, and in the interest of greater inter-agency cooperation, here is a list of regular readers of Moorishgirl who work for the government:

cia.gov
nsf.gov
nih.gov
nara.gov
doe.gov
lanl.gov
llnl.gov
gao.gov
hhs.gov
fcc.gov
faa.gov
usdoj.gov
epa.gov
treas.gov
sec.gov
nasa.gov
dhs.gov
army.mil
af.mil
dcma.mil
usmc.mil
uscg.mil
dss.mil
navy.mil

To the CIA employee(s) who reads this site regularly: Thanks for putting up with all the literary news. And don't worry, I'll have plenty more leftist rants for your report soon enough.

Michelle Lin Recommends

"A Good Place for the Night by Savyon Liebrecht, Persea Books. I found this Israeli author's short story collection at the Independent and Small Press Book Fair back in November. The first story, "America", had me hooked after the second page. The collection is made up of seven short stories, each taking place in a different locality (America, Germany, Hiroshima, a kibbutz, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and a post-apocalyptic world.) The book blurb says that the collection focuses on "place, on men and women physically or emotionally distant from home." I would go further and say that place is, in these stories, often an imagined construct (most obviously in "America"). The collection also seems, to me, to be about the precarious lies we tell ourselves to make our lives bearable, and what happens when these lies fall apart. To summarize: "America" is told from the point of view of a little girl whose mother runs off with another man and his daughter to America, and her and her father's attempts to cope with this betrayal. "The Kibbutz" is about an orphaned child of a mistreated and mildly handicapped couple, and his eventual discovery of the truth behind their deaths. "Germany" focuses on an Israeli reporter in Munich who is covering the trial of a former Nazi commander responsible for his father's death. "Hiroshima", one of my favorites in the collection, is about an Israeli woman's nine years' stay in Japan and the terrible forces that drive her to leave. And "A Good Place for the Night", the title story, is about a post-apocalyptic world, an inn where several survivors take refuge. I would highly recommend this book."

Michelle Lin is an editorial assistant at Cambridge University Press. In her spare time, she runs New York Brain Terrain, a calendar of intellectual events in NYC, edits her father's book, publicizes another book, and scours the Archaeological Institute of America's database for fieldwork opportunities. She was a coordinator for APA for Progress, a Howard Dean-inspired grassroots organization dedicated to increasing APA involvement in politics, but is currently laying low on the political front. She has studied with author Tom Farber at Berkeley. An aspiring writer, she hopes to publish one day, when she can overcome her laziness and make the 7-block hike to the post office to mail out her stories.

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

RIP: Wendy Wasserstein

As has been widely reported, playwright Wendy Wasserstein has died.

Wasserstein's writing was known for its sharp, often comedic look about what women had to do to succeed in a world dominated by men.

"She was an extraordinary human being whose work and whose life were extremely intertwined," said Bishop, who produced most of her works, first at Playwrights Horizons and later at Lincoln Center Theater. "She was not unlike the heroines of most of her plays _ a strong-minded, independent, serious good person who happened to have a wicked sense of humor."

Wasserstein found her greatest popular success with "The Heidi Chronicles," which won the best-play Tony as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989. Its insecure title character (played by Joan Allen) takes a 20-year journey beginning in the late 1960s and changes her attitudes about herself, men and other women. Equally popular was "The Sisters Rosensweig," which moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway in 1993, and concerned three siblings who find strength in themselves and in each other.

Wasserstein was only fifty-five years old. She will be missed.

Another Lit Scandal

The Book Standard's Kimberly Maul reports that children's author Harriet Ziefert’s latest book, A Snake Is Totally Tail will not be released in April, because it bears striking similarities to another children's book by Judi Barrett.

When Kirkus Reviews children’s editor Karen Breen received a review copy of the book, she told Kirkus sibling publication The Book Standard that she immediately recognized close similarities between it and Barrett’s book and that she was sure that title had been used before. Comparing the advance readers’ copy of Ziefert’s book to Barrett’s, it’s obvious right away that 12 of the 23 lines in Barrett’s version are repeated in Ziefert’s, including identical concluding lines: “A dinosaur is entirely extinct. This book is finally finished.”

In response to The Book Standard’s inquires, Blue Apple Books released a statement in which Ziefert says, “I have no recollection of ever seeing Ms. Barrett’s book—though it would be foolish of me not to consider the possibility that I might have seen it decades ago and that its structure and some of its language imprinted themselves somewhere on my subconscious.”

In 11 of the 12 instances in which an animal is mentioned in both books, the language is duplicated word for word, for instance: “A crab is conspicuously claws,” “a duck is quantities of quack” and “a porcupine is piles of prickles.”

You can read the full article here.

NYC Event: Another Road Home

Reader David S. sends word that Danae Elon's Another Road Home will be screened tonight at 6 pm at Symphony Space in New York.

Symphony Space
2537 Broadway at 95th Street
212-864-5400
Reserve tickets here.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion led by Adam Shatz with Elias Khoury, Dahna Abourahme, Bashir Abu-Manneh, Danae Elon, Stuart Klawans, David Ofek, Richard Pena, Ella Shohat and Debra Zimmerman. Signed copies of Khoury's Gate of the Sun will also be available.

Interview for HODP

Nora McCrea's interview with Diana Abu-Jaber and me appears on the website of 2 Gyrlz Quarterly.

State of the Union: We're Fucked

Tonight, President George W. Bush will deliver his sixth State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at 9 pm EST. Watch it on C-Span tonight. The Nation magazine offers its own, alternative State of the Union, with commentators John Conyers, Bernie Sanders, Jessie Jackson Jr., Dennis Kucinich, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, and others chiming in with their own evaluations.

RIP: Nellie Y. McKay

Professor Nellie Y. McKay, who served as editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, passed on. The New York Times' obit highlights her important role in contemporary culture:

The anthology, published in 1997, was widely credited with codifying the black American literary canon for the first time. The book, which generated considerable attention in the news media, was assigned in college courses worldwide and also proved popular with a general readership. Nearly 200,000 copies are currently in print, the publisher said yesterday.

At more than 2,600 pages, the anthology spans black literature from the earliest Negro spirituals to late-20th-century writers like Gloria Naylor, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley. It was published in a second edition in 2004, adding the work of younger writers like Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead.

"It's very necessary that we do this to establish the centrality of the African-American experience," Professor McKay told The New York Times in 1996. "There needed to be a book that gave a coherent text of African-American literature."

Read more on McKay here.

January 30, 2006

Nunez Reviewed

Sigrid Nunez's new novel, The Last of Her Kind, was reviewed this Sunday in the Washington Post.

Sigrid Nunez begins her fifth novel, The Last of Her Kind, with this intriguing sentence: "We had been living together for about a week when my roommate told me she had asked specifically to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own."

Pairings of young women have had a long history in fiction -- from Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair to Scarlett and Melanie in Gone with the Wind to the Vassar classmates in Mary McCarthy's The Group, the prototype for so much women's fiction to this day. Traditionally, a rather bland and conventional woman has been paired with a much more compelling rulebreaker who in the end must pay heavily for her transgressions either by losing her status in society -- or by losing her life. In The Last of Her Kind, the formula receives a different spin, but it is still operative.

I was interested in the novel (which I have yet to read) because I was hoping for a fresh take on this pairing of young women in college, but the review isn't fully positive. If you've read it, let me know what you think.

Most Censored News Stories of 2005

Project Censored's list of the top 10 most censored news stories of 2005 is available at Common Dreams. Among them: The continuing assault by the White House on the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act and other public-information legislation, which, under normal circumstances, enable the public to find out just exactly what the government is doing behind closed doors; the invasion of Fallujah, and the U.S. military's use of chemical weapons (otherwise known as "weapons of mass destruction" when they're in the hands of dictators); increased powers of surveillance against U.S. citizens; and so on. Find out more at Project Censored's site, or buy the book.

Link via Metafilter.

The Campaign Against Article 301

Speaking of censorship: Reader Elizabeth Angell sends word that there is now "an organized campaign in Turkey" to remove article 301 from the penal code. Article 301, you'll remember, was the little law that makes it illegal to "insult Turkishness," and which made it possible for a zealous prosecutor to bring charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk last year. Pamuk's only "crime" was to talk about the genocide of Armenians in 1916. While the charges against Pamuk have now been dropped, other writers still stand accused under the same law. A repeal of article 301 would be a major win for freedom of expression in the Turkish republic. Here is the website of the campaign: 301 Hayir (in Turkish only.)

Related: Orhan Pamuk Goes On Trial.

Beyond Belief

What do novelists and psychics have in common? In a brief essay for The Guardian, Hilary Mantel answers:

Which other self-employed persons stand up in public to talk about non-existent people? Novelists, of course. We listen to non-existent voices and write down what they say. Then we talk with passion and conviction about people no one can see. Our audiences are complicit, of course, whereas the audiences for professional psychics are ambivalent. They teeter on the edge of delusion and the edge of derision. For the psychic, it's a no-win situation. If she gets it wrong, she's rubbish. If she gets it right, she's a cheat. One of the things I learned while writing the book is that scepticism can be held as firmly, devoutly, illogically as any religious position. Elaborate edifices of fraud are proposed - so elaborate, so unlikely, that it's easier to believe that, after all, the dead are speaking

Mantel's Beyond Black, which features a medium, has been praised by readers I trust, so I will have to add it to my TBR pile.

Osama and the Reformation

In an opinion piece for the Sunday Los Angeles Times, Reza Aslan argues that Osama Bin Laden should be viewed not just as a murderous criminal but also as a "principal figure" of the Islamic reformation, comparable to Martin Luther and other radicals of the Christian reformation.

Of course, there are those who reject the very idea of an Islamic reformation, let alone any attempt to draw parallels between the histories of Islam and Christianity. But while such parallels can be strained, there are certain similarities between the Christian and Islamic reformations that should not be dismissed, not least because they reflect universal conflicts found in nearly every religious tradition. Chief among these is the question of who has the authority to define faith: the individual or the institution?

In Islam, this question is somewhat complicated by the fact that it has never had a centralized authority — there is no "Muslim pope," no "Muslim Vatican." Religious authority in Islam is the province of a host of small, competing, though exceedingly powerful, clerical institutions that have maintained a virtual monopoly over the meaning and message of Islam for 1,400 years.

Yet, during the last century, as Muslims have increasingly been forced to regard themselves less as members of a worldwide community than as citizens of individual nation-states, a sense of individualism has begun to infuse this essentially communal faith.

Aslan's No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam is now out in paperback.

Opium Turns Five

Opium Magazine celebrates its fifth year with a series of events in New York this weekend. On Friday, February 3rd, our pal Jim Ruland will be reading alongside Sam Lipsyte at the Happy Ending Lounge. (Details here.) And then on Saturday, February 4th, an all-star gathering of humor writers will take place at the Slipper Room. Readers will include Jonathan Ames, Diane Williams, Jonathan Baumbach, Amanda Filipacchi, Dennis DiClaudio, Tao Lin, Shya Scanlon and Todd Zuniga himself. (Details here.)

Flower Warriors

Regular reader Mina J. sends in a link to this article about a tribe of goat herders in Saudi Arabia where men and women decorate their hair with flowers. But this being Paris-Match and not National Geographic, the author, Thierry Mauger, gets nearly apoplectic as he describes the "breathtaking beauty" of the men, compares them to "Christs of cathedrals," and otherwise lets his imagination run wild at the encounter.

The photos appear in a book by Thierry Mauger titled Thierry au Pays de L'Or Noir. (God almighty. And you thought the Tintin-era orientalist crap was a thing of the past.)

Photo above: Thierry Mauger/Paris-Match.

Authors' Favorites

The San Francisco Examiner asked several working writers about their favorite authors. Daniel Handler has a more...muscular approach:

I just saw Jim Shepard read from his novel Project X (Vintage) at the Make Out Room, and he killed. There were a bunch of writers there, all reading to raise money for a progressive candidate, and we were all excited to read with Jim Shepard but we could tell that most of the audience hadn't heard of him, and the more we talked him up the more I could see people getting nervous that he was a "writer's writer" --that is, some difficult, pretentious guy that only other writers like. But then he took the stage and in 20 seconds I saw several cynical hipsters laughing so hard they had to put their drinks down and hold their stomachs. And, I should add, it's a novel about a high school massacre. As I told the crowd that night, I want you to buy a book by Jim Shepard and read it, and if you don't like it come to me. I'll give you your money back and then I'll kick your ass.

Read others' recommendations here.

Hamas's Win

The reactions to Hamas's win in the Palestinian elections last week have been both depressing and amusing. Depressing because some people have acted as though the sky had fallen and the earth had stopped turning. How could it happen? they wondered. (Let me tell you how it could. When you have to live under a corrupt authority for ten years, when you watch your leaders build mansions and drive benzes while the humanitarian aid that was supposed to go to you goes to line their pockets, you're going to hit back at them with the only weapon that voters have: votes. From where I sit, Hamas's win is unsurprising.)

The reactions have also been amusing because, with Arafat gone and the Palestinians finally able to have elections, Bush was cornered into having to admit that "democracy" was on the move. Except that the result he got wasn't the one he was hoping for, so he'll look for a way to delegitimize it. Writing in Salon, Juan Cole makes this point rather clearly:

In a mystifying self-contradiction, Bush trumpeted that "the Palestinians had an election yesterday, the results of which remind me about the power of democracy." If elections were really the same as democracy, and if Bush was so happy about the process, then we might expect him to pledge to work with the results, which by his lights would be intrinsically good. But then he suddenly swerved away from this line of thought, reverting to boilerplate and saying, "On the other hand, I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have a -- if your party has got an armed wing."

So Bush is saying that even though elections are democracy and democracy is good and powerful, it has produced unacceptable results in this case, and so the resulting Hamas government will lack the legitimacy necessary to allow the United States to deal with it or go forward in any peace process. Bush's double standard is clear in his diction, since he was perfectly happy to deal with Israel's Likud Party, which is dedicated to the destruction of the budding Palestinian state, and which used the Israeli military and security services for its party platform in destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority throughout the early years of this century. As Orwell reminded us in "Animal Farm," some are more equal than others.

Please also read Jonathan Edelstein's thoughtful reaction to the elections, and the interesting discussion in the comments section.

January 27, 2006

HODP Goes Into Second Printing

Friends, I'm happy to report that Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits has gone into its second printing. (Time to get your hands on the signed first edition. Ha!)

Aslan on TV

Reza Aslan was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote the paperback release of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam earlier this week. You can watch the video on the show's site. (Speaking of Aslan, I was surprised to find out a blurb from my Oregonian review had been used for the back cover. I liked the book quite a bit, and if you haven't already read it, you really should.)

Ben Jelloun: 'Partir'

Tahar Ben Jelloun's new novel, Partir, is about young Moroccan men who want to leave everything behind to immigrate. Sound familiar? I think there's really a Zeitgeist in Moroccan art at the moment around the issue of immigration. Photographer Yto Barrada, filmmaker Yasmine Kassari, and rai musicians have all dealt with the issue in recent work.

Yahoo! news has a brief article (in French) about Partir. No word on an English translation yet. Ben Jelloun's latest novel to appear here in the U.S. is The Last Friend, which comes out in February.

O'Keeffe Wins Story Prize

As has been widely reported, Patrick O'Keeffe took home the $20,000 Story Prize on Wednesday night, for The Hill Road. The other finalists were Jim Harrison for The Summer He Didn't Die and Maureen F. McHugh for Mothers & Other Monsters. More at the Guardian.

January 26, 2006

Sins of the Past

Driss Benzekri, the man who spent 17 years as a political prisoner under the reign of King Hassan, and who is now the head of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, visited Washington this week. The commission had been charged with documenting abuses of the "years of lead" and with making recommendations. Its report was released to the Moroccan public earlier this year.

"In the course of our work, we were able to shed light on the fate of 742 persons who disappeared for different reasons. We called for compensation for them, as well as 10,000 other victims. Then we proposed a series of reforms to the constitution to ensure the separation of powers; and we recommended that the independence of the judiciary be inscribed in the constitution, and an end to legal immunity for security officials who commit human rights abuses. The main objective of our recommendations was to promote and protect all forms of civil liberties. Then we gave the report to His Majesty and it was made public."

The young king, who took over from his father in 1999, immediately embraced the report and its calls for compensation. Many former political prisoners appeared in public town hall meetings and on television, telling their stories in a unique form of catharsis. This is unprecedented in the Arab world.

This, of course, is real, tangible progress, and I think it's a huge step forward for Morocco (combined with the family law reform of last year, this really puts the country in the right track). There's also clearly a political will, on all sides of this issue, to finally address the dossier.

But, and there is a but, the report leaves open two questions. Firstly, I've seen press reports that suggest that there are cases that have not been investigated, and the worry now is that they probably won't be. Secondly, although many of those responsible have now passed on, others are alive and kicking, leading a life of relative ease, while their victims have to live with the horrors of the past.

Adichie in Prospect

"Tomorrow is Too Far," a new short story by Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie, appears in the current issue of Prospect. Here is the opening paragrah:

It was the last summer you spent in Nigeria, the summer before your parents' divorce, before your mother swore you would never again set foot in Nigeria to see your father's family, especially not Grandmama. You remember the heat of that summer clearly, even now, thirteen years later, the way Grandmama's yard felt like a steamy bathroom, a yard with so many trees that the telephone wire was tangled in leaves and different branches touched one another and sometimes mangoes appeared on cashew trees and guavas on mango trees. The thick mat of decaying leaves was soggy under your bare feet. Yellow-bellied bees buzzed around you, your brother Nonso and your cousin Dozie's heads. Grandmama let only your brother Nonso climb the trees to shake a loaded branch, although you were a better climber than he was. Fruits would rain down, avocados and cashews and guavas, and you and your cousin Dozie would fill old buckets with fruit.

Read the rest here.

Google + Chinese Government = Happily Ever After

If you're the kind of person who gets warm fuzzies whenever you think of Google, consider this: The company has decided to abide by China's censorship laws--blocking out certain search results, as well as disallowing the use of blogs and emails on its systems.

Which, of course, raises the question: Was Google's decision to resist the U.S. government's request for information on its users motivated by concern for free speech, or rather by the desire to look good to its young, educated clients here in the U.S.?

Giveaway: The People's Act of Love

This week I'm giving away a copy of James Meek's The People's Act of Love. Set in 1919 Siberia, the novel follows a gulag escapee who unwittingly wanders into a village where followers of a mystical Christian sect cohabit with Czech soldiers desparate to get home from the war.

The fifth (yes, fifth) person to correctly answer this question gets the book: What is the name of the Siberian town in which the story is set? Please use the subject line "Meek" in your email, and please also include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: Pete A. from Joliet, Illinois has won the book.

RAWI 2006 Competition

I've received word that RAWI, the Arab American Writers' association, is organizing a literary contest for 2006. Short stories, essays, memoir, drama, vignettes, and prose poetry will be considered. The deadline is March 20, 2006, and the competition will be judged by Joseph Geha and Sahar Kayyal. Send your (new, unpublished) entry to Alice Nashashibi, 95 Mercedes Way, San Francisco, CA 94217. Good luck to all.

Another Day in Afghanistan

Residents of Kandahar have reported another unwarranted arrest, this time of a local poet.

Dozens of US soldiers stormed the mosque on January 10, during the Eid Muslim holiday, and showed every worshiper to several masked men who were accompanying them, two witnesses said on Monday.

They then rounded up five men, including poet and high school student Sayed Ahmad Qaneh and four of his relatives, the witnesses said. One of the group, an old man, was released the following day.

The U.S. authorities in Kabul have said they have no information about the detention of the poet, who also runs a small bookshop in Kandahar.

¡No Me Digas!

Gabriel García Márquez says he has stopped writing. In an interview with Barcelona-based La Vanguardia, he revealed he hasn't written a single line in 2005, and doesn't know if he will again.

Bad Day For Memoirists

After revelations that crucial portions of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces were either fabricated or largely exaggerated, and after reports that the writer J.T. Leroy was a middle-aged mom, and not, as she had claimed, a transsexual teenage ex-prostitute, a third writer has found himself in hot waters, so to speak. The L.A. Weekly reports that the writer who goes by the name of Nasdijj, and whose account of a life spent on Navajo reservations, dealing with alcoholism, childhood sexual abuse, and other horrors, may not be Native American at all. Suspicions about him started as far back as 1999:

[A]s his successes and literary credentials grew in number so did his skeptics - particularly from within the Native American community. Sherman Alexie first heard of Nasdijj in 1999 after his former editor sent him a galley proof of The Blood for comment. At the time, Alexie, who is Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, was one of the hottest authors in America and was widely considered the most prominent voice in Native American literature. His novel Indian Killer was a New York Times notable book, and his cinematic feature Smoke Signals was the previous year's Sundance darling, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and winner of the Audience Award. Alexie's seal of approval would have provided The Blood with a virtual rubber stamp of native authenticity. But it took Alexie only a few pages before he realized he couldn't vouch for the work. It wasn't just that similar writing style and cadence that bothered Alexie.

"The whole time I was reading I was thinking, this doesn't just sound like me, this is me," he says.

Alexie was born hydrocephalic, a life-threatening condition characterized by water on the brain. At the age of 6 months he underwent brain surgery that saved his life but left him, much like Tommy Nothing Fancy, prone to chronic seizures throughout his childhood. Instead of identifying with Nasdijj's story, however, Alexie became suspicious.

"At first I was flattered but as I kept reading I noticed he was borrowing from other Native writers too. I thought, this can't be real."

The L.A. Weekly article suggests that Nasdijj is in fact a white man from Lansing, Michigan named Tim Barrus. It's easy enough to imagine that Barrus turned in a novel that he called a memoir, and since publishers do not fact-check memoirs, no one saw anything suspicious. But how could the public have been fooled for so long? Alexie provides a possible answer:

On many issues, preachy whites simply lack the political and cultural cachet of someone perceived to be Native American.

"My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian," says Sherman Alexie. "For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I'm so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow."

Read the rest of the article here.

January 25, 2006

LBC Goings-On

Have you been reading the Lit Blog Co-Op this week? If you haven't, here's what you've missed: a podcast interview with Ander Monson, the author of Other Electricities, a discussion about the book, a review, and, finally, an appearance by the writer himself. Next week will be devoted to All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. So tune in!

Katrina Denza's Lit Mag Roundup 1.0

The Lit Mag Roundup is a new, quarterly feature at Moorishgirl.com, in which North Carolina-based fiction writer Katrina Denza shares her literary discoveries of the season.

I bought my first literary journal subscription in 1999. A longtime reader of novels, that was the year I'd begun to explore writing. I don't remember where I first saw an issue of Story, but after I read a copy, I fell in love with the short story form and subscribed. I still have on my desk an old issue of the now-defunct magazine, edited by Lois Rosenthal and Will Allison, and featuring stories from Tim Gautreaux, Matt Cohen, Ingrid Hill, and the late Carol Shields, to remind me of when my excitement for short stories first ignited.

Now, my bookshelves are filled with literary journals. I subscribe to at least twenty a year, and piled in stacks all over my house are samples from over sixty journals. They are as important to me as the short story collections and novels with which they share shelf space. This is all well and good for me, but if I were to ask some stranger on the street if he's heard of a particular literary journal, most likely his answer would be no. I wonder how it is that such amazing work is left to collect dust in the few bookstores that carry them, or kept insulated in the academic world. If books are the showy muscles of the literary world, then journals are the blood: hidden, self-renewing, and essential.

The vast array of print journals is staggering. Some are associated with universities, others are independent. Some journals such as Zoetrope: All Story; Orchid; Land-Grant College Review; and One Story print all fiction. Many journals, like Missouri Review; AGNI; The Kenyon Review; Virginia Quarterly Review; and others of similar quality offer an excellent mix of fiction, essays, poetry, art, author interviews, and book reviews. Some focus on poetry (Borderlands, Poetry, and Beloit Poetry Journal). Still others specialize in offering short-shorts (Vestal Review, Brevity, Quick Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly) or a mix of poetry and prose poetry (Cranky, The Bitter Oleander, Parting Gifts). There are journals that showcase women (Iris, Calyx, Emrys Journal) and others that feature stories about, and for, mothers (Brain, Child and Literary Mama). Most are glossy covered, some are stapled together, some have unique packaging (McSweeney's), and one even has an artful hand-bound format (Spork). The choices seem unlimited, something for everyone.

Because I'm a visual person, I've picked up a journal solely on the vibrancy of the cover. Some journals I buy out of curiosity and a few get my subscription money simply because one of their fiction editors went out of their way to be encouraging or supportive of my work. A journal's reputation may induce me to pick up a copy or subscribe for a year, but it's not what keeps me going back for more. Here's what does it for me: excellent, attainable fiction and poetry, beautiful art, and an encouraging, courteous staff. There are many I love--it would be hard to name favorites. And like my books, I buy more than I could possibly read with the thought I'll get to them eventually. In this new year I plan on getting to know them better and sharing my discoveries. I'll begin with two recent examples of literary excellence:

The Kenyon Review is a great mix of fiction, essays and poetry. I read the Fall 2005 issue and found much to like. Editor David H. Lynn opens with his notes on the summer's workshops held in Italy. In Champa Bilwakesh's story, "The Boston Globe Personal Line," a widowed man teeters between succumbing to his loneliness and beginning a new relationship. "Digesting the Father," by Kellie Wells, is a knockout story with arresting language and images:

'Love,' she said, 'it's a balled-up fist you hit yourself with, but you like it that way cause the beauty of contusions is that they disappear.'

In Geeta Kothari's multi-layered, "Missing Men," a woman used to running from her past has to decide whether to continue to do so. Lily Tuck's "Lucky" draws a full circle of human connections, and Gregory Blake Smith's "The Madonna of the Relics," is set in Venice and tells of the difficulty an art restorer has with matters of the flesh. The poetry is vibrant and doesn't shy away from the political: David Wojahn's "Dithyramb and Lamentation," speaks potently of the ravages of war, the horrors of torture, and of the current administration's manipulations.

AGNI Magazine #62 is full of stunning and varied fiction. Gania Barlow's "Clytemnestra," is an atmospheric, haunting story of a woman's grief upon the death of her daughter. In Xujun Eberlein’s moving “Pivot Point,” an intellectually gifted but lonely woman, in love with a married man, becomes intrigued by the idea of suicide and the ending is left brilliantly ambiguous. Mary O'Donoghue's "Motorcross," highlights the difficulties a girl faces in growing up with a mentally and physically challenged brother and shows her eventual selfless triumph. Tova Reich's "Dedicated to the Dead," tells the story of a man who's convinced that "his karma is to be Jewish." Tom Whalen's "Conversation with Godard," is not to be missed, and Nicholas Montemarano slayed me with his brave story of a father's grief and guilt. The poetry is vivid and emotive, but Stephen Dunn's "The Soul's Agents," really spoke to the writer in me. Sven Birkerts begins the issue with his thoughts on Saul Bellow while vacationing in Italy; there's an insightful interview with essayist Edward Hoagland; and the art featured is gorgeous paper collage by Maureen Mullarkey.

Originally from Vermont, Katrina Denza now lives in North Carolina with her husband and two sons. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Lynx Eye; New Delta Review; SmokeLong Quarterly; Emrys Journal; RE:AL; Cranky; The Jabberwock Review; and The MacGuffin among others.

January 24, 2006

William Lychack Recommends

Bill Lychack writes in to recommend The Lost World of the Kalahri by Laurens Van Der Post. Says he: "Surely, it must be true, everyone has a book that truly changes their lives. There's always a context to how this book finds you-a context which probably isn't that interesting or magical to anyone except yourself-so I'll spare you the story of how a stranger handed me this book, how forlorn and lost I must have seemed, how this strange quest of Van Der Post's spoke directly to me. But I would, if I could, give you a copy of the book, if I saw you in such a state right now in front of me. And I'd make you wait a moment until I found a brief passage I've all but memorized. I'd tell you that you don't need any context for it, but then I'd probably say that, in the book, Van Der Post, who'd dreamed from boyhood of finding the nearly-exterminated Bushmen, had just committed to organizing his expedition into the Kalahari desert of what is now Botswana: I'd tell you it's a spiritual quest for him and would read this to you:

In fact all the aspects of the plan that were within reach of my own hand were worked out and determined there and then. What took longer, of course, was the part which depended on the decisions of others and on circumstances beyond my own control. Yet even there I was amazed at the speed with which it was accomplished. I say 'amazed,' but it would be more accurate to say I was profoundly moved, for the lesson that seemed to emerge for a person with my history of forgetfulness, doubts and hesitations was, as Hamlet put it so heart-rendingly to himself: "the readiness is all." If one is truly ready within oneself and prepared to commit one's readiness without question to the deed that follows naturally on it, one finds life and circumstance surprisingly armed and ready at one's side.

"Then I'd hand the book to you and simply disappear, just as someone handed the book to me and never appeared again. And maybe you'd read it. And maybe it would speak to you the way it did for me. You never know. "

William Lychack is the author of The Wasp Eater, a novel.

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

January 23, 2006

The Cat's Away

I've pre-posted a few items for you to appear while I'm in Michigan. I will be back tomorrow, though posting is unlikely to resume until late in the day. Back soon.

Genocide in Slow Motion

Over at the New York Review of Books, Nicholas Kristof offers his thoughts on two recents books about Darfur, Julie Flint and Alex de Waal's Darfur: A Short History of a Long War and Gerard Prunier's Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. He cites the willingness of the media (his newspaper, the New York Times, included) to ignore the Nazis' extermination of Europe's Jewish population during the Second World War as being the rule rather than the exception. Most genocides (Armenia in 1915, Rwanda in 1994, Cambodia in the '70s, Bosnia in the '90s) take place largely unnoticed. In the case of Darfur, the genocide is attracting even less notice because it is taking place "in slow motion."

Kristof argues that the events now unfolding in Darfur, which have their roots in post-colonial problems and in political and ethnic differences, can be solved if the "cost" of conducting genocide is raised.

At one level, UN agencies have been very effective in providing humanitarian aid; at another, they have been wholly ineffective in challenging the genocide itself. That is partly because Sudan is protected on the Security Council by Russia and especially by China, a major importer of Sudanese oil. China seems determined to underwrite some of the costs of the Darfur genocide just as it did the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. But the UN's main problem is that it is too insistent on being diplomatic. (...) Sudan's leaders are not Taliban-style extremists. They are ruthless opportunists, and they adopted a strategy of genocide because it seemed to be the simplest method available. If the US and the UN raise the cost of genocide, they will adopt an alternative response, such as negotiating a peace settlement. Indeed, whenever the international community has mustered some outrage about Darfur, then the level of killings and rapes subsides.

The situation in Darfur has become too dangerous for even aid agencies to stay. If this goes on, the UN estimates that as many as 100,000 people will die per month. Meanwhile, politicians and pundits are discussing whether the term "genocide" really applies.

Pamuk vs. Turkish Government: Final Act

The Turkish government has dropped its case against Orhan Pamuk. The writer had been accused of "insulting Turkishness" because he had spoken about the (well documented) genocide of Armenians in 1915.

Though I'm sure, dear reader, that you're relieved to hear that such ridiculous charges have been dismissed, it isn't actually a victory for freedom of speech. Quite the contrary, it is a loss, because the law which made it possible to try Pamuk (article 301 of the new penal code) is still, apparently, in effect. While it is true that the law is open to interpretation (the prosecutor who brought charges against Pamuk was reported to be someone who was trying to make a name for himself) the fact remains that such prosecutions are likely to continue to happen. The difference is that we probably won't hear about it.

Vikram Seth's Two Lives

My review of Vikram Seth's Two Lives appears in Sunday's Boston Globe. Part memoir, part biography, the book tells the story of Seth's uncle Shanti, a World War II veteran who settled in London, and Shanti's German wife, Henny. Here is an excerpt:

Although Seth did an enormous amount of research for this book, the reader never gets very close to the inscrutable Henny. Seth's only sources for drawing this intriguing, mysterious woman are his and his uncle's memories of her, as well as her correspondence. But Henny's letters are, by her friends' own admission, rather distant, leaving Seth to speculate on her frame of mind, on her feelings for the German fiancé who abandoned her and for the man whom she married. Because Seth never interviewed her during her lifetime (one gets the sense she would have been too private to want to speak about such things) the resulting portrait doesn’t quite satisfy.

You can read the full review here. (You may be asked to register, in which case you can use bugmenot to get a free login.)

The Exiles of Molokai

I'd heard about The Colony, John Tayman's history of the Kalawao leper settlement on Molokai, in Hawaai, from a reader with whom I correspond on occasion, and I was very intrigued. Mary Roach's excellent review of the book in the Sunday NYTBR has certainly whet my appetite:

The kicker here, the monumental inequity, is that people with leprosy were exiled for no good medical reason. Leprosy is not an especially contagious disease. Only 5 percent of the population are genetically susceptible to it. And even they would probably emerge untainted: only a third of untreated leprosy patients have the disease in its active, infectious state.

Yet so great was the hysteria surrounding leprosy that hundreds, probably even thousands, of people who only appeared to have the disease were packed off to colonies. At one point, patients in Kalawao were allowed to request a rediagnosis. Ten out of the first 11 to do so did not have leprosy. A diagnosis of leprosy, accurate or inaccurate, amounted to a criminal conviction. By law, people deemed lepers could be hunted down, stripped of their rights and torn from their families. And most of them were - until well after effective treatment was established, in the 1940's. The story of Kalawao is the story of an injustice as deep and complete as any in human history.

"The Lepers of Molokai," an essay that Jack London wrote for Woman's Home Companion in 1908, and in which he "kept himself in check" about the horrors of the place, is available online here.

January 20, 2006

HODP Reading: Lansing, Michigan

That's it for me this week. I will be spending the weekend working on my novel, finishing Amitav Ghosh's excellent Incendiary Circumstances, and looking for comedy in Albert Brooks's latest film. On Monday, I will be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits in Lansing, Michigan. Here are the details:

Monday, January 23, 2006
3:30 PM
Reading and Discussion
Michigan State University
255 Old Horticulture
East Lansing, Michigan

The reading is free and open to the public. See you there!

Newton on Twain

Maud Newton contributes a column to the American Prospect on the continuing relevance of Mark Twain's satirical writing. For instance, she argues, King Leopold's Soliloquy presages

the Bush administration's doublethink rhetoric about the "progress" being made in Iraq. The king bemoans the "tiresome chatterers" who expose to the world his darkest motivations but don't balance them with the noble ones; who complain--just substitute "democracy" and "elections" for "religion" and "missionaries"--about "how I am wiping a nation of friendless creatures out of existence by every form of murder, for my private pocket's sake, and how every shilling I get costs a rape, a mutilation, or a life. But they never say, although they know it, that I have labored in the cause of religion at the same time and all the time, and have sent missionaries there -- to teach them the error of their ways and bring them to Him who is all mercy and love, and who is the sleepless guardian and friend of all who suffer."

You can read a portion of the article here. (The rest is for subscribers, I'm afraid.)

LBC Unveils Final Nominee

The fifth and last nominee for the LBC Read This! selection is unveiled today: It's Rupert Thompson's excellent Divided Kingdom. Check out what the nominating blogger had to say about it.