Laila Lalami

Michael Chabon’s comic book creation for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is coming out, and it’s titled The Escapist.

The Boston Globe’s best-of list starts with the prize-winners before making its own picks. And then in this list, four authors (Tom Clancy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Jane Roberts Woods, and Clive Cussler) choose their favorites.

The next few weeks promise to be hectic as we pack and move. We’ve packed the study, our enormous amount of sports gear, most of the dishes, about half of the small appliances, and others odds and ends. (Thanks, Dad!) Now we have to start all the logistics. I’m trying to keep a list of the magazines we get so I can do changes of address, and given the vertiginous pile on the coffee table, it might be time to streamline. We still have to get a firm date from the movers, and then things will be put in motion. By the way, email me if you live in Portland. I’ve got questions for you.

The winner is Mountains of the Mind by Robert McFarlane. I suppose the news makes this group at least very happy.

The Winter issue of Crab Creek Review is available now. Moby has a guest column from small press publisher Robert Lasner of IG Publishing. Michael Silverblatt will host Edward P. Jones next week, so be sure to tune in.

So Brick Lane‘s been out in Britain for almost a year, and now a British group (the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council) is upset that Monica Ali’s book portrays them as “backward, uneducated, and unsophisticated.” They must have been reading a different book. The one I read was a humanistic portrayal of one woman’s transplantation from a Bangladeshi village to a secluded life in Brick Lane and one man’s opinions of his fellow immigrants, contradictions and reverse racism included. (In fairness, there are Bangladeshis who did like the book.) Yes, the chapters with Hasina’s letters (the least successful parts of the book, IMO) made this reader wince, but there was much else I liked. The group goes as far as to use the three words that no South Asian, Muslim, Arab, or Middle-Eastern group should consider using in a letter of protest without due cause: The Satanic Verses. Ugh.

Over at YPR, Ken Krimstein has the shortened, unauthorized German translation of The Catcher in the Rye.

Ja, so, dis is der story uf me, a young mensch who vanders arount New York mit dem red hat on mein kupf. So, der is all diese peoples, they really, how you say, pissing me off. Ich bin ein pissed off teenager, if you know vat I’m saying to you? So, anyhow, ich see all these ducks in Central Park, very beautiful, ja. And I am so, so angry at dis and dat. Vy? Vy ist me so wery angered? Because they ist der phonies! They ist der shams. Der phony, phony phony! All mit der smiling and laughing! Vat ist dis here, 99 Luftballoons? Mein Gott! So, ja, I making up mein mind I’m no more going back to my Pensey school. Nein! Mit more of dem phonies. Sorry to Charlie! Then, you understand, der ist ein carousel, going round unt round. And there ist dis catcher, he’s grabben der kinder auf der rye. So, that’s it. Ja? Now, what you say we dance? Unt an ein, and a zwei… Oom pah pah, oom pah pah!

Link via Maud.

So I’m back. I had promised myself I would get away from the computer, but alas the flesh is weak, so I ended up in one of those Internet cafes to check email once or twice. Okay, well, maybe every day. So.