Laila Lalami

Nigerian writer Sefi Atta, who earlier this year was short-listed for the storySouth Million Writers Award has a new story up over at Carve Magazine. An excerpt:

We lived in the two-story house my father designed in Shapati Town, his hometown. Our plot had no street number, the street had no telephone lines. My father had had a brick wall built so high that armed robbers would need pole vaults to catapult themselves into the grounds. He must have envisaged them trying despite the odds. On top of his wall were broken bottle pieces; jewels on the crest of his architectural crown. In our garden was his concession to my mother, now an empty swimming pool, shaded by her favorite jacaranda and flame-of-the-forest trees. The pool was four feet at its deepest. My father, God rest his soul, could not swim. He had nightmares of dying by drowning–not by the bullet. That, he never expected in the fortress that was our home.

–From “The Lawless” by Sefi Atta.

The Denver Post tries to answer the question: How does one determine which books will have staying power?

Newsday has a long feature on the 92nd Street Y, describing the venue and its place in the literary ethos.

An interview with John Irving, and a profile of Edith Wharton.

Jen Weiner talks about being mistaken for Lauren Weisberger.

The Literary Saloon has several links about Amin Maalouf’s new book, Origines. I’m not sure when/if the book will come out in the States.

Turbanhead is providing a mirror site for pictures from the Iraq war. These were taken by a U.S. soldier and linked to by many other sites, including Metafilter. Warning: Graphic images.

And on the bleachers of a baseball field across the street from the Hugo House, Adams speaks with Sarah-Katherine Lewis, a self-described sex worker who writes an online journal. She reads an essay she has written about kissing. Lewis, 32, says she hopes to make enough money to earn a living as a writer by the time she’s too old to be a sex worker.

NPR’s Noah Adams talks to starving writers from Seattle.

There’s a nice write-up about Edward P. Jones and The Known World in The Salt Lake Tribune, similar in tone to others that have popped up about the author, and which uniformly seem to portray him as a writer’s writer.

The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, was named a notable book by the American Library Association, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and recently capped it all off by winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Lots of writers will say they don’t really care whether their work is reviewed (yeah, right) or whether they make a lot of money (yeah, right). Jones, though, really makes you believe in the pure and unadulterated allure of writing, in all its solitary grace and torment.

More about Jones here.