Laila Lalami

Aleksandar Hemon and Colum McCann chatted by email about imagination vs. experience and a bunch of other stuff. The Guardian’s transcripts. (First in a two-part series.)

Update: read Part II here.

Another article wonders what happened to the To Kill a Mockingbird author. Leave the old woman alone, she doesn’t want to be found. Though maybe the other literary mavens in this Book magazine article want nothing better than to be found.

With the collapse of Iraq’s official media, the race for a share of the Iraqi audio-visual space has begun. The BBC’s Tarik Kafala describes it in this article.

“When Julie Shigekuni, author of the upcoming “Invisible Gardens,” was interviewing to teach a first-time course in Asian American literature at the University of New Mexico near her home, she says this is how she was asked about the insights she would bring to the class: ‘Amy Tan has already written the Asian American experience. Why should we hire you?’
Tan also haunts Mako Yoshikawa, author of the June release “Once Removed” (Bantam), an explosive novel about two estranged sisters, a Japanese American and her American stepsister, who find each other after 17 years. “I feel uncomfortable with the Amy Tan legacy,” Yoshikawa says almost reluctantly, like countless young women who say, yeah, I’m grateful to Betty Friedan and all, but jeez, isn’t it time to move on?”
Read That was ‘Joy Luck,’ this is now .

New IRS data show that the 400 richest Americans have gotten much richer and are paying far less in taxes. Elsewhere, Christopher Scheer catalogs ten lies that have been served up by the Administration about Iraq.

When do exaggerations turn into deception? NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof talks to NPR’s Terry Gross.

Kathryn Chetkovich writes about what it was like to be a struggling writer and to have Jonathan Franzen for a boyfriend. The green-eyed monster reared its head.
Link via Gawker.

Oh boy. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are writing an animated feature about terrorism. I can just imagine their future conversations with the MPAA.

Say you forgot the title of one of your favorite children’s books…well, you can use Stump The Bookseller. The fine folks at that site will solve the mystery.

EW’s It books list (which is in fact an It authors list) features no major surprises. They picked one or two authors each for novels, memoirs, short stories, and chick lit: Heidi Julavits, Augusten Burroughs, ZZ Packer, Anthony Doerr, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Sophie Kinsella.