Amazon.com reviewers are getting increasingly noticed by publishers. This Boston Globe article profiles Amazon.com top seventh reviewer, Francis McInerney. Along the same lines, Book magazine had an article a while back on America’s “biggest readers,” and it featured Amazon’s top reviewer, librarian Harriet Klausner.
Morocco’s reaction to the bombings of last weekend: Speeding through Parliament new anti-terror laws that limit civil liberties. It took years of efforts by human rights activisists to gain those liberties under the old regime, and now that they are in place under the current king, they’re going to get severely curtailed. Will it help?
Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red has just won the very substantial IMPAC Dublin literary award.
..and in non-literary news from Turkey, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Ankara. Could it be that all those predictions about increased terror in the aftermath of the Iraq war are starting to come true?
The new Zoetrope All-Story is up online and it has a story by the amazingly talented Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie. The issue has tons of good stuff, so just read it all or better yet, buy the magazine.
A national coalition of publishers, authors, librarians, and booksellers has called on Congress to modify the Patriot Act to disallow inspections of patrons’ book-buying and -borrowing habits. Read the Boston Globe article here.
I never thought something like this could happen in Morocco, but it has: At Least 20 Die in Casablanca Blasts. One bomb was near a synagogue, one near the Belgian consulate, one near the Casa de Espana, a great restaurant that had become somewhat of a landmark. I actually had dinner there once many years ago.
I wonder whether this will finally turn whatever tide of support the fundamentalist fringe has at the moment in the country. Update from the BBC.
The Washington Post has a piece on young Egyptian writers who are bucking the nostalgia trend: Literary agents of change.
“By now, everyone is aware that America has become a two-tier society in which CEOs make 200 times more than their workers (it was only 40-1 in 1980) and political candidates woo wealthy contributors but scrupulously avoid even mentioning the poor. What makes the Bush administration distinctive is its embrace of a philosophy we might dub Populist Social Darwinism. It boasts of returning power to ordinary people (“we want to give you back your money”), then pursues policies that will produce a few highly visible winners and unravel the social safety net, leaving the majority of people to fend for themselves.”
John Powers explains his comparison of Bush’s policies with Darwin’s theories in his L.A. Weekly piece, George of the Jungle
Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who took great risk to help save PFC Jessica Lynch, has a book deal with Harper Collins for his take on the much talked about rescue.
