Laila Lalami

It’s a holiday weekend and I’ve got family in town and loads of stuff to do still, so I’m taking Friday and Monday off. Be back Tuesday. In the meantime, check out Birnbaum’s interview with Ben Jones (The Rope Eater).

The latest shortcut to publishing stardom: Renaissance mysteries. At the center of this new genre is the work of two friends who were interested in The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a manuscript published in Venice in the 15th century. Dinitia Smith explains it all here. The Rule Of Four has debuted at Number 6 in the NY Times bestseller list.
Link via Bookninja.

The Scotsman has a long, whitewashed profile of Bernard Lewis, the man whose scholarship is relied upon by the Bush Admnistration.

Lewis speaks in richly fruity tones that, to American ears, signify an old-style English charm and elegance: to British ears, his voice is a reminder of a distant imperial age. “There is,” he says, “a certain melancholy pleasure in having been right when so many were wrong.”

What he considers to be “right,” he doesn’t say. Later on, the neo-cons’ favorite author says:

“I’m cautiously optimistic about what’s happening in Iraq,” he says, although warning that democracy will take time to be built and must be allowed to develop in a specifically Iraqi rather than American fashion.

I suppose that speaks for itself.

Kamala Markandaya has passed away a few days ago and Outlook India has a profile.

Indo-Canadian poet and academic Uma Parameswaran, who has studied Markandaya’s oeuvre and interviewed her, is of the opinion that she was “a pioneer member of the Indian Diaspora, and her best novel, The Nowhere Man (1972) foreshadows many diasporic issues with which we are preoccupied today”.

Here‘s the article.

The L.A Weekly has just published its literary supplement, and offerings include reviews of MG favorite Purple Hibiscus, David Bezmozgis’ story collection Natasha and Other Stories, and Lisa Glatt’s A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That.

Link via Mark.

Leave Maud alone, people.

YPR says that this week, it will present ” presents Interviews with Interviewers, wherein we’ll be interviewing interviewers on the art of interviewing interviewees. If you think that sounded stupid, be grateful we’re not Prince, or you’d have read ‘NtervU’ six times in the preceding sentence.” Duly noted. The first person to submit to the NtervU is Robert Birnbaum. Sample quote:

Y.P.R.: Who do you wish would interview you?
R.B.: The question of who I would like to interview me sounds like a form of who would I like to play me in the movie of my unwritten-but-tending-toward-self-glamorization memoir, Three Hands Clapping. If Robert Duvall were playing me then I would like Jennifer Connelly playing Joan Didion interviewing me. In real life, I would hope that Cynthia Ozick could be interested enough in me to want to have a conversation.

Read the conversation here.

In Imad Rahman’s debut collection, I Dream of Microwaves, B-movie actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, has just lost his role on America’s Most Wanted (playing Manuel Gutman, a convicted felon who had “crossed the line from gun-toting menace to shotgun-wielding assassin”), and his prospects are so poor that his next job is to play a Bosnian refugee in order to get his wife Eileen’s philanthropic grandmother to part with her money.

Abdul-Jabbar’s wife convinces him to act the part because, she says,

Americans have no sense of international politics, of global community, of social duty outside their neighborhoods. The world falls apart and we dream of microwaves.

Eileen takes off for South America shortly thereafter, and Abdul-Jabbar drifts from one job to the next, dressing as Zima Zorro to hawk booze to customers, renting his wife’s home out to pornographers who want to “combine fucking with intellectual social commentary,” posing as a repo-man for a video-rental company, taking a part in Apocalypse Now: The Musical, and so on.

There are some wonderfully realized moments in the book. The opening story, for instance, works both as an ironic send-up of how we look at minorities and as a reflection of the struggle to fit into expectations. And Rahman displays a biting sense of humor throughout.

Eventually, however, the one-liners and absurd set-ups are all that keep the stories going, each new joke trying to top the one before it. Substance recedes to the background in favor of pop-culture references, and the reader ends up alienated.

I really wanted to like this book. So few short-story collections are published these days that I often start them with a favorable stance. But this Eugene Ionesco-style universe didn’t quite work for me.

I suppose you already know this, but just in case you didn’t, if defamatory material is found through Google, it doesn’t mean you can sue it. On second read, there’s also this little tidbit that may be of interest to bloggers.

By contrast, the defamation liability risk of selection sites such as The Drudge Report — that is, sites that offer collections of specially culled links to other sites — remains uncertain. Someone who chooses a link may count as having published the material to which the link leads — and may be held to have the state of mind to be held liable for the choice. This argument has been used in the context of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and could be used in the defamation context, as well.

It should be interesting to see how things develop.
*Thanks Maud.

Many of those questioning the White House line on Berg were fringe, yes, but they fed on the doubts of a mainstream no longer sure what to believe. Last week, the U.S. either bombed a safe house for terrorists, or an Iraqi wedding. Ahmad Chalabi is either an asset and one of the fathers of the new Iraq, or a spy. And Donald Rumsfeld either authorized the kind of torture meted out at Abu Ghraib, or knew nothing.

The Village Voice’s Kareem Fahim on those conspiracy theories that have been making the rounds of the blogs.