Laila Lalami

Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with the idea behind storySouth’s Million Writers Award. The editor, Jason Sanford, wanted to promote fiction published in online journals and this seemed like a good way to spread word of mouth. Now that the awards process is in its last stage, I thought it would be good to hear from the short-listed writers about their work. Nearly all the writers responded to my request for blurbs, so without further ado, here they are talking about their stories.

Sefi Atta: “A Union On Independence Day,” published in Eclectica.
I wanted to write this story in 1995, the year that the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged, after an infamous military prosecution that led to Nigeria

I’ve been following the news of the recent earthquake in Hoceima and surrounding villages (northern Morocco), and things are getting worse. Please, please, please donate money to the victims here.

The Guardian has an article on Channel 4’s Richard and Judy, essentially discussing the effect of TV promotion over book sales.

The town of Mitford, New Hampshire is planning to erect a memorial for Harriet E. Wilson, author of Our Nig, a scathing memoir of her life as a “free” black woman in the mid-1800s (this is the same Wilson whose book was “rediscovered” by Henry Louis Gates in the 1970s.)

Via Publishers Lunch I hear that Khaled Hosseini is the winner of the Borders Original Voices Award for The Kite Runner. You can read more about Hosseini over at his website.

Samuel Huntington is at it again. This time, he predicts gloom and doom because “unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves.” Link via A&L Daily.

If this is a trend, then it’s certainly a long overdue one:

Poets and writers are awakening to the notion that the man-versus-fat story encompasses all the original struggles of man - against others who loathe him, a God who seems to doom him and, perhaps especially, against the self that fails, despairs and, occasionally, wins. What better story can be told?

I don’t know about “better” story, but that’s certainly a good story that should have long been told, and a lot of people are doing just that. Beside Jen Weiner’s Good In Bed, the article mentions Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang’s collection What Are You Looking At (which features writing by the likes of Junot Diaz) and a bunch of other memoirs and fiction due to hit shelves soon.

If I were a book, I’d be Huckleberry Finn! (Link via Ed.)

And it’s about to be tr&egraves, tr&egraves gras, since it’s my birthday. So I’ll take off early today and see you back here tomorrow.

Reuters has an article on Kenya’s literary magazine, Kwani?

Kenya’s only literary magazine, Kwani? is part of a wider cultural revival giving the country a more assertive artistic presence in Africa, one often shaped by anger at a venal ruling elite that has presided over the country’s long decline.
At the heart of much of the new writing is the conviction that the country has barely begun to realize the promise of its independence from Britain in 1963, betrayed by the failures of a complacent over-40 generation mired in tribalism and corruption. (…) More than 2,500 copies have been sold at about $6 a copy, a vast amount in a poor country where few among the mostly rural population read for entertainment.

Visit Kwani’s website here.