April 30, 2008

Right of Response

It seems there is some sort of brouhaha over reviews of Martin Amis's new book, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom, a collection of essays about terrorism, jihadism, and other -isms. One of the earliest write-ups here in the United States was by Michiko Kakutani, who hated it:

Indeed “The Second Plane” is such a weak, risible and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.

A few weeks later, Jim Sleeper rose in defense of Amis:

It would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.

This weekend, Leon Wieseltier rendered this judgment:

I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful. But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amis’s work flourishes here too.

Now Jim Sleeper has another retort/defense. You can find out more about the literary quarrel from Ron Hogan at Galleycat.

I find these disagreements quite healthy, but also very amusing, as it seems no one thinks it necessary or useful to ask a reviewer of the Muslim persuasion to take a look at the The Second Plane, a book that is, after all, largely concerned with Muslims: their religion, their beliefs, their politics, their life in Britain, and the violent encounters of the jihadist among them with the West. When Amis says:

There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

and then proceeds to write a whole book in which he expands on these ideas, shouldn't the reading public have a chance to find out what one of the people he seems so concerned about make of his work?

April 29, 2008

Casa Fires

Last Saturday, a fire blazed through a mattress factory in Casablanca, killing 55 people and injuring dozens of others. The exit doors had been locked by the owner, who stated he did so in order to prevent theft of materials. He is now under arrest. Today comes news that another fire broke out in a different part of the city, in a carpet factory, killing 3 people. Inna lillah, wa inna ilayhi raji'oun.

Everyone knows that the law is regularly and spectacularly flouted in industrial outfits in the city. It remains to be seen whether measures will be taken or whether bribes will change hands. I'd say the latter, wouldn't you?

April 28, 2008

L.A.T. Fest

Thanks to those of you who came out to Korn Convocation Hall on the UCLA campus on Saturday. The place was packed, my panelists were great, and I had a wonderful time, even though I managed to get several sunburns. You can find full coverage of the fest at Jacket Copy, Counterbalance, and Book Fox. And of course don't miss Tod Goldberg's take on the weekend.

April 24, 2008

L.A. Times Festival of Books

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books takes place this weekend on the UCLA campus. On the schedule are panel discussions, readings, and even writing seminars. I will be hosting a panel on Saturday:

April 26, 2008
2:30 PM
Fiction: Not So Ordinary People
Tony Earley, Dinaw Mengestu, Stewart O'Nan, Ann Packer and moderated by Laila Lalami
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Korn Convocation Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, California

Come on by and say hello.

April 23, 2008

Iyer on Books and Music

A couple of days ago, the amazing Pico Iyer gave an appreciation on NPR of one of my favorite novels of all time: Graham Greene's The Quiet American. And then today he's sharing his music playlist with Dwight Garner over at Papercuts. Iyer's most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He'll be talking about it at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend. You don't want to miss him.

Xujun Eberlein's Apologies Forthcoming

As I'm sure you've realized by now, I'm spending much of this week chatting up some of my friends' books. Today, I was hoping you would take a look at Apologies Forthcoming, Xujun Eberlein's debut collection of short stories. Eberlein is an M.I.T-trained engineer who started writing in Chinese, but switched to English after moving to the United States in 1988. Her stories and personal essays have been published in Agni, StoryQuarterly, and Kwani, among other magazines. They often feature characters struggling with the effect of China's cultural revolution. Her collection of stories, which won the Tartt Fiction Prize last year, is due out in May.

April 22, 2008

Mary Akers's Radical Gratitude

Yesterday, I mentioned Mark Sarvas's debut novel, so today I'd like to give a shout-out to my friend Mary Akers, a novelist and short story writer from New York. She just published her first book, Radical Gratitude, a memoir co-written with Andrew Bienkowski, about his experiences in Siberia, where he and his family were exiled during Stalin's rule. The book has done very well in Australia (it's already on a second printing there) and is due out in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere very soon. You can read some of Akers's work in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Wisconsin Review, and Brevity.

April 21, 2008

Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised

My friend Mark Sarvas has just published his first novel, Harry, Revised. It's about a recently widowed man who finds love at the most unexpected of times, and has to reinvent himself in order to win the woman for whom he's fallen. I read it when it was still in draft form, and I really liked how it dealt with the subject of grief without being stern or preachy. I admired the fact that it's a very sympathetic and complex look at a pretty pathetic man. And, of course, it's full of humor. Now that Harry, Revised is finally out in bookstores, I'm looking forward to reading the final version. Sarvas will be going on book tour at the end of the month, so check out his website for dates.

No One's Puppet

On Saturday I had an op-ed in The Boston Globe about the politics of fear in the current presidential election. Here's how it opens:

A FEW weeks ago, I received an e-mail with the subject line: "Excited about Barack Obama? Read this."

The e-mail contained a copy of a Jan. 22 Senate memo, signed by the presidential candidate, in which he asked the American ambassador to the United Nations to "ensure that the Security Council issue no statement and pass no resolution" about the situation in Gaza unless it included a full condemnation of Hamas.

At the time the memo was sent, Gaza had been closed by Israeli forces for several days, its only power plant had ceased operating, and its 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants had little or no access to food. The e-mail was sent to hundreds of Arab- and Muslim-Americans, and it ended with a bold, highlighted line: "Think again before you cast your vote for another AIPAC puppet," referring to the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

April 17, 2008

R.I.P Aimé Césaire

I just heard news that the Martinican man of letters Aimé Césaire, who authored the classic Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, who inspired such different people as Frantz Fanon and Leopold Sedar Senghor, and who created the undeniably influential but now occasionally derided concept of négritude, has passed away in Fort-de-France. He was 94.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy is due to attend the funeral on Sunday. I wonder if his speech will bear any similarities to the the one he gave in Dakar last summer.

New Granta

The magazine Granta, which recently changed editors, has a new issue out, and a newly refurbished site to go with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Online Only section has an opinion piece by Ngugi wa Thiong'o on the crisis in Kenya:

The title of Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, best captures the complex mixture of emotions I felt as I watched televised images of fire and death stalking Kenyan streets. An otherwise smooth election marked by a spirited competition of views among citizens went awry at the moment of tallying. The result of the tallying became a dance of absurdity, with claims and counterclaims of rigging by the main contesting parties: Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU). The chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), whose word would have helped those not at the scene make sense of it all, declared a winner, handed him the winner’s certificate and then said he knew the true presidential winner. The aggrieved party went to the streets but refused to go to the courts.

The dance of absurdity became a dance of death.

The article is available in full here. There is also a photo essay by Nick Danziger of the infamous French banlieues: The Paris Intifada. To read Andrew Hussey's article, though, you will need to be a subscriber.

World, Upside Down

Four million people have been displaced in Iraq, as many as a hundred and fifty thousand have been killed, food prices are causing riots around the world, the economy is in the can, crude oil is at $115 a barrel, and what do talking heads want to know? Why Obama doesn't wear a flag pin on his lapel.

LBF 2008

This year the London Book Fair hosted the Arab World as its special guest, so the focus has been on Arabic literature. The Guardian caught up with a number of Arab writers and asked them which works they think should be read today and The Independent's Boyd Tonkin has a very good overview of recent developments in the Arab literary scene. There's even a mention of the detective novel by Abdelilah Hamdouchi that I keep hearing about. It comes out here in the U.S. in May, under the title The Final Wager.

April 16, 2008

L.A.T. Festival of Books

I will be moderating a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which takes place on the UCLA campus in about a couple of weeks, so I have been busy reading the novels of Tony Earley, Dinaw Mengestu, Stewart O'Nan, and Ann Packer. Tickets will be available starting this Sunday, April 20, and they are free. (Wait--it says there's a nominal fee of $.75. Must be because Ticketmaster is handling the ticketing.) Here are the details:

April 26, 2008
2:30 PM
Fiction: Not So Ordinary People
Tony Earley, Dinaw Mengestu, Stewart O'Nan, Ann Packer and moderated by Laila Lalami
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Korn Convocation Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, California

Anyway, come to the panel. It will be fun. Do check out the event listing on the website. Several of my colleagues and friends will be moderating or participating in readings or panels, and I hope to make it to as many of them as I can.

April 15, 2008

New Tingis

Tingis, the Moroccan American magazine of ideas and culture, has published its new issue, which you can already preview online. Tingis, you'll remember, is edited by Anouar Majid, who is also the author of A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America. I keep meaning to write about this book, and I keep getting sidetracked by other assignments. Here's an interview with Majid on Bill Moyers' show, just to give you an idea about his work.

Anyway, the new issue of Tingis includes a neat article about the use of the star of David on the Moroccan flag (prior to the French occupation, of course, and the ensuing tribalism), as well as a short story by a young Arizona-based writer, Abdennabi Benchehda: "The Daughter of Dr. Butrus." Check it out.

April 14, 2008

Wasserman on Castro

I am running around this morning trying to finish off a few things that I neglected because of edits on my new book, but I wanted to direct you to this interesting piece by Steve Wasserman, in which he reviews Fidel Castro's autobiography.

April 11, 2008

New Anthology

One of the short stories from my collection has been anthologized in Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, edited by Aimee Liu and Stacey Bierlien. Other contributors include Nathan Englander, Ana Menendez, Josip Novakovich, Wanda Coleman, Tony d'Souza, Samrat Upadhyay, Mary Yukari Waters, Luis Alfaro, Amanda Eyre Ward, and many others. My copy just arrived in the mail earlier this week and I was pleased to see what a hefty, exciting book it turned out to be. There should be a reading/signing at BookExpo in May. I'll post details once I have them.

April 10, 2008

On Borrowings

Rabih Alameddine, whose new novel The Hakawati will be published in a couple of weeks, has a nice piece in the Los Angeles Times about English words borrowed from other languages, and how the connotations for those words change once they are incorporated:

English has yet to incorporate these words fully, and history suggests it might never do so. The language is filled with words that are culture specific: "sahib," "coolie," "effendi," "bey." The word "emir" simply means prince in Arabic, but in English it is a prince or ruler of an Islamic state. When my sister in Beirut tells her daughter a bedtime story, the emir kisses the sleeping princess awake. No mother in the U.S. or Britain would let an emir anywhere near a princess' lips. No princess will ever sing "Someday My Emir Will Come."

That in some ways is how it should be. Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.

I bring all this up, however, to get to the word whose connotation I would love to see changed -- "Allah."

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

And brilliantly he explains why. By the way, something tells me that many, many stories will be written about The Hakawati (The storyteller) so you'll want to get your copy soon.

(Photo credit: RAWI)

Mutanabbi Street Reading

For those who are curious: A podcast from the Mutanabbi Street reading organized last November by the Los Angeles Public Library has been made available. (I read a poem by Mutanabbi himself, and another by Mahmoud Darwish, in Arabic and then in English translation.)

April 09, 2008

Read This

What a delightful surprise: This year's Reading the World initiative includes a collection of poems by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Gabriel Levin, Yahya Hijazi, and Peter Cole. (Cole, you'll remember, is a certified Genius.) The book is called So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005. Here is a sample poem by Taha Muhammad Ali. (Original Arabic here). I dare you not to cry when you read it.

April 08, 2008

Best. Line. Ever.

John Sutherland on Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence:

If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.

The full review is up here. The Man Booker will be awarded sometime in October 2008.

Wao Wows Judges

What a thrill it was to hear the good news: Junot Díaz has won this year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

April 07, 2008

Help the Dunbar Village Victims

Last week, the novelist Tayari Jones (The Untelling, Leaving Atlanta) wrote on her blog about the horrific crimes that took place in Dunbar Village last year. The victims, a Haitian immigrant and her twelve year old son, were treated with such depravity that I had a hard time believing that the four accused were between 14 and 18. Jones wrote of her outrage at the NAACP's demands to release the teens; she asked fellow writers to help raise money for the victims.

The eBay auction is now up: You can bid on a manuscript critiques by George Saunders, Nichelle Tramble, Sarah Schulman, Joy Castro, Martha Southgate, D. Nurkse, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, and me. Some authors are offering book proposal evaluations and even novel critiques. There are also lots of autographed books on offer. Please hop on over to eBay and make a bid.

April 04, 2008

Quotable: Joseph Conrad

From the second chapter of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, when Verloc first hears of Vladimir's plan to get the F.P. society to bomb a scientific institution of his choosing:

And Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr. Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organisation where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge. Once Mr. Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became too appalled to even try to protest. He listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention.

Does it, I wonder, remind you of someone?

April 03, 2008

What Freedom of Speech?

I have not seen much attention in the English-language press to the trouble that Rachid Niny, one of Morocco's most popular columnists, finds himself in at the moment. The facts of the case, as far as I can tell, are that Niny alleged in one of his articles that a prosecutor in Qsar el Kebir attended a gay wedding held in the house of a trafficker (there was no wedding, but a video purporting to show one landed on YouTube and created quite a ruckus.) The town's four prosecutors took Niny to court in the capital of Rabat and the judge found Niny guilty of slander, fining him 6 million Dirhams (approximately $850,000.)

All right. Time to pick your jaw off the floor.

This the largest fine ever in the history of libel judgments in Morocco. Undoubtedly, Niny ought not to have printed something for which he did not have proof. But let's face it: newspapers in Morocco indulge in rumors and blind items on a daily basis. This was a blind item, not a direct claim. What makes this affair murkier is that Niny was recently mugged at the train station in Rabat, and robbed of his cell phone and laptop. Coincidence? Of course not. In addition, Judge Alaoui, who presided over this case, is the same judge who found against Boubker Jamai last year, against the magazine Nichane, and several other journalists. The judgment is clearly meant to crush Niny's newspaper, Al Massae, which has become the largest in Morocco.

(Oh, and don't even get me started on why these prosecutors think it an insult to be called gay.)

I am baffled as to the thinking here: What is the point of it? Niny will simply leave the country, and go write for a magazine that is bigger and more powerful than Al Massae. I myself don't like his columns, except the satirical ones, and I think he is be a bit too cavalier with personal freedoms. The irony now is that he will need the help of all those freedom of expression activists he wasn't always so keen on. I hope they prevail, and that he will be able to continue to write and work in his own country.

Daily Oddities

I woke up this morning with Jacques Brel's "Ne Me Quitte Pas" stuck in my head, and an inexplicable desire to move to London. I wonder what short circuit led to that particular combination.

April 02, 2008

IMPAC Shortlist

I don't keep up with literary prizes, but I always look forward to the announcement of the IMPAC Dublin award, because the nominations come from libraries around the world; any book in any language is eligible so long as there is an English-language translation; and translators are recognized alongside the authors. This year's shortlist has just been announced, and the finalists are:

The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean)
The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne
De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage
Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones
Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua (translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger)
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (translated from the French by John Cullen)
The Woman who Waited by Andrei Makine (translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan)
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe

Notice that three Arab writers have made the cut (Rawi Hage, who is Lebanese; Yasmina Khadra who is Algerian; and Sayed Kashua who is Palestinian) but none of them write in Arabic. Hage lives in Canada and writes in English; Khadra lives in France and writes in French; and Kashua is a citizen of Israel and writes in Hebrew. So few Arabic novels are translated into English that when Arab writers are recognized in international awards, they tend to be those who write in other languages.

The judging panel includes Helon Habila, Patricia Duncker, Aamer Hussein, Eibhlín Evans, and Jose Luis de Juan, and the winner(s) will be announced June 12.

April 01, 2008

Me@Google

I was recently invited to give a talk for the Authors@Google series, and the video from this event is now available on the @Google site and on YouTube. Enjoy:

Hope in the Netherlands

I just heard that the Dutch publishing house Maarten Muntinga will be releasing a mass market edition of Hope, (or Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens, I should say) this month in Amsterdam. They also did a new cover, entirely different from the hardcover one of last year.

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My Events

05.31: Book Expo America
07.03-07.13: Warren Wilson
09.23-10.04: International Literature Festival Berlin

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