Laila Lalami

The Guardian has an interview with Joe Sacco, the author of the acclaimed Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde. Sacco takes issue with the term “graphic novel”:

“I have no problem with the term ‘comics’, but now we’re saddled with the term ‘graphic novel’ and what I do I don’t see as a novel,” says Sacco, in a conversation that started over a couple of Jamesons in a downtown Portland bar and resumed at his home the following morning.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com has his book categorized, among other things, as…a graphic novel.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile on Ayelet Waldman, who’s hoping to move from mystery to literary fiction with her new novel, Daughter’s Keeper. The article makes the inevitable Chabon references, but also mentions Waldman’s birth in Israel, her upbringing in the U.S, the years she spent in a kibbutz, etc. Of the Middle-East mess, she jokingly suggests:

“Green cards, green cards for all. The Palestinians and Israelis will open air- conditioning companies together in Los Angeles, and we will have an end to war.”

The idea for Daughter’s Keeper came to Waldman a few years ago, when she was working as an attorney in OC:

Waldman was defending a young man from Honduras named Felipe, just 20 years old and borderline retarded, who was mixed up in a methamphetamine deal.
“He’d gotten involved with a confidential informant who was a Mariel Cuban who had been found to be psychotic by the American physician who evaluated him when he came over on the boat-lift,” says Waldman, breathlessly. Arrested for dealing cocaine in the United States, he parlayed that into a career as a confidential informant.
“This is too much for fiction,” she says, “but he was also a Santeria priest. So people would come to him and say, ‘My uncle is dying of cancer, can you help us?’ And he would say, ‘OK, sacrifice this chicken, do this methamphetamine deal and I’ll cure your uncle.’ And then they’d get arrested, because he was an informer.”

You can also visit Ayelet Waldman’s site.

The Femina people are upset with the Goncourt judges.

How long has it been since your last confession? If, like me, the answer is something like “er…never” you might want to check out this*.

*Thanks, Leslie.

The Salt Lake Tribune has an article on writers’ websites (not necessarily blogs). The article hawks sites by the likes of James Patterson, Stuart Woods, and Catherine Coulter. No mention of other writers.

Writers’ sites vary a little in sophistication and a great deal in friendliness. Some writers cheerfully talk about where they get their ideas and answer questions from readers in an uncondescending way.
Woods is not quite as patient.
One reader asks Woods about a specific character, Stone Barrington, who is rich. The reader wonders whether Woods’ success and wealth have begun to “leak” into his fiction. “Why do you think Stone’s lifestyle and mine are the same?” Woods responds. “And if they are, whose lifestyle should I write about, if not my own? It seems to me that most people are interested in reading about characters who are richer than they are.”
Someone named Marie asks where she can get a complete list of his work. “Questions like this make me crazy, Marie,” Woods writes. “I have received hundreds of e-mails from readers asking me to send them a list, in chronological order, of all the books.”
He adds, “They are, apparently, too lazy to look in the front of the book they have just finished, or to consult the Web site, and they drive me nuts.”

Stuart Woods: Forgive your fans for existing.

The Goncourt jury skipped the shortlist this year and announced its winner: Jean-Pierre Amette for La Maitresse de Brecht, which tells the story of a woman sent to spy on Bertolt Brecht.

The Paris Review has started looking for a new editor.

“It’s going to be impossible to replace Plimpton,” said a friend of the editor who asked not to be identified. “The magazine just so reflected him

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The shorlist for the Governor-General’s Award has been announced, and beside the expected vets (Margaret Atwood for Oryx and Crake) and some quirky choices (Elizabeth Hay’s Garbo Laughs, Douglas Glover’s Elle, and Jean McNeil’s Private View), the surprise nominee is Edeet Ravel, an Israeli-Canadian writer whose first published novel Ten Thousand Lovers is “a tale of love and terrorism set in Israel in the 1970s.” Ravel is described as a woman who spends a portion of her time each year thinking of practical ways to promote peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

in Michigan… Several Democratic contenders met with Arab-Americans in Michigan a few days ago, but if the Arab American Institute gathering is anything to by, then Arabs (who tended to vote for Bush in 2000) are tilting to the left, and not just the Gephardt-Lieberman-Kerry types. They seem to like Howard Dean.

We’ve heard this complaint before: Readers in charge of the slush pile bitch and whine about the manuscripts they are forced to “read.” Grant Stewart was one of them:

Just to be clear, there’s never anything publishable in a slush pile. My job was just to make absolutely sure, then send the lousy stuff back whence it came. My only regret was I wasn’t allowed to enclose my own advice with the standard polite rejection. My ‘compliments’ slip would have read something like this: Dear Wannabe Novelist. Tips for your next submission (God help us). First, look at the covering letter you will send out with your opus. If it contains the sentence ‘This is my life’s work, it took me eight weeks!’, get out of my sight.

Except he came across DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (the Booker winner.) He writes about what it’s like for a struggling author to discover someone else’s gem of a book in the slush pile:

My second novel, The Octopus Hunter, was published, and sold as badly as my first. Then, to cap it all, even the slush betrayed me. They called him Pierre. I thrust the 30 sample pages in Clare’s face. “Read this now! It’s a masterpiece!! From the SLUSH PILE!!!” Clare loved it. Faber & Faber loved it and paid a small fortune to publish it.

Link via Moby.