Laila Lalami

Audrey Niffenegger talks to the Globe and Mail about how she got the idea for the book.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is the story of Henry DeTamble, a librarian with Chrono-Displacement disorder, a rare genetic condition that transports him through time and space, mostly to periods within his own life. It’s during one of these jaunts that the Mobius strip of cause and effect takes shape: A married, middle-aged Henry first meets his wife Clare as a six-year-old girl. The book chronicles their tortured relationship through past, present and future.

She also talks about what happened after Brad and Jen took an interest in her work.

Michael Chabon’s novel in progress is about a little know fact of U.S. history: that, in 1939, the U.S. Interior Department recommended that the Alaskan territory be settled with laborers from around the world, including Jewish refugees. The bill never passed, but Chabon’s book, tentatively titled Hotzeplotz, asks what if? What if Jews had indeed been allowed to immigrate to Alaska?
Link via The Elegant Variation.

can be found here. And again Jeffrey Eugenides seems to be a favorite.

Letters to George Bush on the occasion of his damage-control trip to Britain. Some are models of conciseness, such as the one by DBC Pierre:

Dear Jorge,

Look out! Behind you!!

Hahahahahahahaha, only kidding.

Love,

DBC Pierre
Novelist

Or take, for example, Salam Pax’s missive, in which he calls George habibi. Other letters in the batch are poems by Harold Pinter and Andrew Motion, admonitions to get real, or pleas to come off it. For good measure, there’s even one or two letters thrown in in support of Bush.

Amy Tan’s workspace. She’s got built-in shelves. And within arm’s reach, too! That’s something I’ve always wanted, so when we move to Portland in early January I’m hoping we’ll find a place that has some.

The longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has been announced, with A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, and Jeffrey Eugenides making the cut, among many others. The (hefty) prize is international: It’s open to any author, for a work in any language, and nominations are made by librarians around the world. This makes for an eclectic longlist, with such selections as Tahar Ben Jelloun for This Blinding Absence of Light, or Ismail Kadare for Spring Flowers, Spring Frost. Last year’s winner was Orhan Pamuk for My Name is Red. Visit the IMPAC website for the full longlist.

Howard Kurtz has a wrap up of books about presidential hopefuls John Kerry, John Edwards, and Howard Dean. The book on Kerry is about his tour of duty in Vietnam and portrays his ambivalence at the effects of the war. Edwards’ book portrays him as a lawyer fighting for the little guy. And the book about Dean is a chronicle of the Vermont governor’s rise and his sometime problematic relationship with the media. Kurtz spends the better part of the article talking about Dean, though: Is he or isn’t he electable?

This one made me laugh because of all the trouble the writer took to disguise his email as a comment, complete with a fake IP (plucked from NASA, of all places) and which promises that:

it’s going to be the Muslims against Christianity, and one day, we’re going to incinerate all you bastards –make your home a glass parking lot with your stinking sh*t eating grin looking up wondering what the hel* happened!

There are now 250 million copies of the Harry Potter books in print. J.K’s Rowling in money. Heh. Sorry.

The Guardian has an interview with Hanif Kureishi, the acclaimed author, playwright and screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic, The Buddha of Suburbia, etc.) His latest book is about a woman in her seventies, sex life included. The interview tackles the inevitable subjects of race (which I believe Maud already excerpted) and gender, as well as his writing routine.

He gets up early and writes every day. He writes loads, he says. “That’s all I do all day. I’m always writing. I’m an obsessive. It’s not because I’m a disciplined person. It’s because I’m crazy about it.” His most depressed period, he says, was when he had just left university and was waiting to see if any real writing talent might emerge; if it hadn’t, he says, he would have had to become an academic. But it did, and he started writing plays for the Royal Court theatre. One of the characters in The Mother is a failed writer, a woman whose ambition is unmatched by ability and who Kureishi depicts, in this pathetic state, with a little too much relish.

You can also visit Kureishi’s website.