Laila Lalami

I’ve got a story up on Pindeldyboz this week. Enjoy. I will see you back here in a week or so.

I’ll be logging off early today so I can go pack for our vacation. I won’t have internet access, so no posts for a while. Be good while I’m gone.

I’m not sure if this is admirable or compulsive: Irving Tobin reads the entire New York Times (minus the Sports, Escapes, and Circuit sections.)

[His wife] introduced him to the Times. Soon he had to cut out his other reading. Then tax season came along. Every year, he fell behind, losing almost two months in March and April.

Paintings by D.H. Lawrence, said to be more shocking that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, are exhibited in England for the first time. The central piece is said to be of a naked man peeing on dandelions. I’ll leave this one to Old Hag or TMFTML.

Congress to Universities: Teach what we like or we’ll take your funding away.

Link via The Morning News.

James Sallis writes about forgotten writers.

Why should Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) be remembered, and Kenneth Fearing (1902-61) wholly lost? What immortal hand or eye laid the blessing on F. Scott Fitzgerald while passing over John O’Hara? Why Thomas Wolfe and not Dawn Powell? And what ever happened to Philip Wylie? How many of us, for instance, inveterate readers all, know the name Calder Willingham?

Besides being an exercise in drudging up obscure writers, the article doesn’t really offer up much of a response to the question of why some are remembered and others aren’t.

The New Yorker’s Louis Menand has a piece on John Updike on the occasion of the publication of Updike’s anthology The Early Stories. Menand prefaces his review with a discussion of short stories.

A short story is not as restrictive as a sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. Its aim, as it was identified by the modern genre

Here’s an interview with Monica Ali. I think the online writing group she’s talking about is Zoetrope.

To all my family and friends. Best wishes and all that good stuff.

In the New York Times Books in Brief.