Edinburgh’s bid for designation as world city of literature has received backing from its own bestselling author–J.K. Rowling. Muriel Spark, Ian Rankin, and Alexander McCall Smith also threw their support behind the idea.
Edward Wyatt has an overview of several new fiction and non-fiction titles written by porno stars, erotica by precocious teenagers, and self-help guides.
The current crop of books was spawned by the success two years ago of “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” by Catherine Millet, a French art critic. The book, published by Grove Press, received mediocre reviews but spent nine weeks on the Times best-seller list, bringing a new air of respectability to the genre.
I can attest to the popularity of Millet’s book–nearly every other day I get traffic from people looking for excerpts. The new books do have at least one that I’m really interested in reading (for the articles, of course) XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, with an introduction by Gore Vidal and an essay on the intersection of pornography and culture by Salman Rushdie.
e.e. cummings’ former home was recently sold, but the poet’s cousin says she hopes the new owner will turn it into a writers’ retreat.
Alice Walker has written a poem in support of PETA‘s campaign against KFC. Sample lines:
“It is dark and hot; there is no fresh air. It stinks. As soon as you are born, part of your mouth, your tender beak, is burned off. This indescribable pain is your introduction to life. It will be a short life.”
The PETA release calls the poem “riveting.” I haven’t heard of poetry described that way, but maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff.
In addition to athletics, the Olympics used to include arts and literature competitions. This tradition, discontinued since 1952, is being revived by the city of Hamburg,which hosted literature games. They even and announced a winner to coincide with the Athens games. But, oddly, the competition is called the “international Eleven-Minutes-Sports-Novel Contest.” What’s next? The international Three-Second-Triple-Jump-Poem contest?
The Age has a wrap-up of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and it seems that Carlos Ruiz Zafon was quite the hit. I think one of the best parts about Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind is its first chapter, the moment when the cemetery of forgotten books is introduced. At the festival, Zafon shares how he got the idea for this unusual bookstore.
Crucial to his novel, which has a love of reading and a mystery at its heart, is a ‘cemetery of forgotten books’ that was inspired by a visit to a labyrinthine Los Angeles second-hand book warehouse.
Ruiz Zafon found an old Theodore Dreiser novel and out slipped a love letter from the 1920s. His immediate thought was the book had not been touched since then, prompting thoughts on the destruction of ideas, notions of identity and the past. And so he dreamt up ‘the cemetery’.
Lizzie reviews Justin Cronin’s The Summer Guest for the Washington Post.
The Khouri story gets weirder by the day, and I laughed like a hyena when I read this. It appears that the woman who’s forged the story of honor killings also allegedly forged the signature of an elderly woman on documents, allowing her to take control of the woman’s home and savings. The police want to talk to her.
Previous editions of the Khouri report: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.
The Scotsman has a very enjoyable interview with Amos Oz.
[His political stance] has brought Oz an influx of regular hate mail and he has been spat upon in the streets.
“It has only happened once or twice,” he says, dismissively. These “total strangers” don’t like the sound of Oz’s voice or what they read as they stumble, baited, nakedly angry and insecure, upon his articles in right-wing Israeli journals. Oz likes to brave that lion’s den. As he told me once: “I want to address those who disagree with what I believe in, rather than reaching the converted.”
Oz is also in The Guardian this weekend, with an excerpt from his novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness.
The manuscript was given to me a few weeks ago. It is a novel written by my father, a legacy of words, a protracted will, perhaps – I don’t know yet what it contains, only that it is called An Indian Adolescence. My father, who was a civil servant in the Pakistan embassy in London, wrote novels, stories and plays all his adult life. I think he completed at least four novels, all turned down by numerous publishers and agents, which was traumatic for our family, who took the rejection personally. But Dad did publish journalism about Pakistan, and about squash and cricket, and wrote two books on Pakistan for young people.
It turns out that Kureishi père was also a writer. It’s a bit long, but a fascinating read and an insight into Hanif Kureishi himself.
