Laila Lalami

Another re-read this week, Junot Díaz’s Drown, in honor of a writing workshop with the man himself, next week in San Francisco. Like Maud, I’m a fan of Díaz’s work, and in going through Drown again, I’m surprised at how much some stories have stayed with me since the book came out eight years ago. I remember reading “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” in the New Yorker and, at work the next day, striking up a conversation with a nerdy rocket scientist in line at the cafeteria. (I worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time.) I started telling this guy about this fantastic story, how Díaz’s use of language had opened up new doors for me, and the guy was like, hey, I’ll check it out. There aren’t many writers that trigger this reaction in me, this wanting to stop a stranger in a cafeteria. Unfortunately, new material from Díaz is hard to come by. There’s a non-fiction piece in this week’s New Yorker, for instance, but I’m not aware of any new fiction work in the last year or so.

Just back from a wonderful dinner with Mark. It was great to finally meet him after months of corresponding by email, and to discuss books, blogs, photography, politics, travel, and other shared interests.

A 1,400-volume collection of American Indian literature has been donated to the University of Illinois at Chicago and unveiled recently. Among the books, some of which date back to the 18th century, is a romance novel written by Potawatomi Chief Simon Pokagon in 1899. The collection also includes works by Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich.

A German journalist who’d been sent review copies tried to sell them on eBay to make “a little money on the side.” Needless to say, the booksellers were not amused, and neither, apparently, was the court.

Bookstatic! is a new literary board game, consisting of over 800 questions about literary matters. The press release says

The game was designed for the huge market of readers, book collectors, their friends and families.

I lost them at “huge market.”

You may already be familiar with Everyone Who’s Anyone, the (in)famous website where Gerard Jones makes public his rejections from literary agents and includes his smart-aleck replies to them. Now there’s Deb Central, where writer Deb Schwarz shares her rejection slips from literary journals, and where she can’t resist taking shots at some of the mags that have turned her down.

I let my subscription to the New Yorker expire last week and, sure enough, this week there’s stuff I actually want to read. Holiday remembrances by Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, and T.C. Boyle, among others. Excerpts: Zadie Smith’s “You Are in Paradise”

If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin. This may come in postcard form or as a valentine, as a framed print for your birthday or repeated many times across wrapping paper, but it will come, and it will always be a painting from Gauguin’s Tahitian period, 1891-1903. Chances are nudity will be involved, also some large spherical fruit.

Or check out Junot Diaz’s “Homecoming, With Turtle”

What I wanted more than anything was to be recognized as the long-lost son I was, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not after nearly twenty years. Nobody believed I was Dominican! You? one cabdriver said incredulously, and then turned and laughed. That’s doubtful. Instead of being welcomed with open arms, I was overcharged for everything and called un americano. I put us on all the wrong buses. If there was money to lose, I lost it; if there was a bus to catch, I made us miss it, and through some twist of bad luck all my relatives were in the States for the summer.

Links unabashedly lifted from Maud.

Aleksandar Hemon reviews Frederick Hitz’s The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage for Slate. Hitz’s research into spy literature leads him to conclude that “no fictional account adequately captures the remarkable variety of twists and turns that a genuine human spy goes through.” But, Hemon, argues, that is completely missing the point of fiction. Good spy novels, Hemon says (and I agree) present readers with problems that are primarily moral. Books by Graham Greene, John LeCarre, even Rudyard Kipling are brought to bear on this issue. Read the article here. Oddly enough, Hemon’s referred to as a novelist in the credits, rather than as a short-story writer.

Mohja Kahf is interviewed over at Nerve.

What about homosexuality?
In contemporary Muslim culture, there is pretty much no space for that range of experience. What many Muslims don’t understand is that the contemporary take on Islam is so much more intolerant than it was in previous eras of Islamic history. In the eighth century, an openly omnisexual poet wrote very explicit poetry and was given a place in court. In the eleventh century, Ibn Hazm in Islamic Spain wrote a love treatise that goes on and on about kinds of love, including same-sex.

Read the interview here. Kahf is the author of Western Representations of the Muslim Woman and E-mails from Scheherazad.

Here’s an article on Abu-Nuwas, the Arabic-speaking Persian poet who was a protege of the Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, and who wrote odes to wine. And men.