Laila Lalami

[Louis de Berni&egraveres is] currently working on another novel, and two short story collections, but is not one of your “method writers” who rise at 5:30 every morning to read their mail, work out at the gym then hammer out their daily 3,000 words. “I only write when I feel moved by the spirit,” he declares, and when I mention that many writers insist that the only way is daily hard graft, sorting the gems from the dross, he is unrepentant. “I think that

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When Arab-Americans can vote? That’s their last weapon, these evil, evil ay-rabs. They will use that vote, they will take over the country, they will eat your young, blah blah blah.

This week’s offerings from Pindeldyboz include fiction by Myfanwy Collins, Jeff Barnosky, M.O. Walsh, Ruth Almon, and Wendy Ogden.

The latest issue of The Barcelona Review is now up, with work by Leelila Strogov, Simmone Howell and Connla Strokes, plus a retrospective on Manuel Vazquez Montalbon.

Granta has highlights from its “Over There” issue available freely on the Web. The editors asked a bunch of writers to talk about how America sees the world (you’ll want to read this in conjunction with their previous issue, which was on how outsiders see America.) I wanted to direct readers to Murad Kalam’s piece, where he talks about the time he spent in Egypt and his disillusionment with the Arab-Muslim world (or what he’s seen of it.) I have to say I do agree with him about the “tyranny that now masquerades as Islam” though I wish he had elaborated a bit more on that and tried to tease the political from the liturgical.

In today’s Slate,Aimee Nezhukumatathil has a poem titled “Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.”* It opens thus:

On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students Don’t be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled

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An eleven-year-old boy from New York was suspended from school for writing a story after the Halloween films in which he cast himself as Michael Myers and his classmates as other characters. The school allegedly made him take psychology tests without permission and later suspended him. It gets ugly from there.

I received five hits from a Paris Hilton Video blog. WTF?

If you landed here from this Scotsman article, welcome. I do wish to reassure you that there is no competition here at Moorishgirl with other literary blogs (there’s plenty of room for everyone). Also, I’ve moved out of L.A. and now live in scenic Portland. Lastly, I think David Sexton meant to refer to this discussion at the end of the article, when he spoke of reviewing the past year in books.

The Washington Post has a brief article on the NBCC Nominees. Edward Jones’ The Known World, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing and Tobias Wolff’s Old School were the fiction selections.

You can write an op-ed today that runs tomorrow, set up a Web site that sells toys in a day or two, get a million signatures and recall a governor in a couple of months. But for some reason, it takes two years to get a book published.

Andy Kessler rails about the amount of time it took him to get his book published, and what he did about it. His is a tale that is becoming increasingly common, it seems: an author self-publishes, sells copies through word-of-mouth and round-the-clock self-promotion, and then finally someone buys the paperback rights. But that still won’t make the paperback version come out any faster.

I’d love to hang out a bit longer today, but can’t as I have to update my resume and start looking for a job. All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my sabbatical. E-mail me if you know of any leads in Portland.