Laila Lalami

The bags have been packed. The work turned in. The water turned off. So I’m going to be off, but tune in again next week, as I’ll probably have some new material live from Morocco.

The best news of the day: Chimamanda Ngodi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus has made the longlist for the Booker prize. I’ve been telling everyone to go get this book for a while (see my review here) and hopefully this nomination will get Adichie the attention her work deserves.

Gerard Jones, the man behind Everyone Who’s Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing is calling it quits.

The Halo Effect author M.J. Rose, who’d written an article wondering whether there are simply too many books out, shares some of the responses she’s received.

To date, I have gotten over 500 emails answering my questions. And responses are still coming in every day.
So far, 60% of you said you are overwhelmed.
30% said no, there are not too many books but there are too few book reviews in the media and too few central sources to find out about books in a meaningful way.

And the most interesting stat is that 70% of respondents said they rely on word-of-mouth. This is quite sobering especially in light of all the brouhaha about declining newspaper coverage of books in general and fiction in particular.

I was thrilled to hear that Hicham El Guerrouj won the gold in the 1500 meter race. If you’re unfamiliar with him, well, let’s just say that he’s the greatest mile runner of all time and this win means so much because of his previous losses in Sydney in 2000 and Atlanta in 1996. But his perseverance has finally paid off and I can only imagine what his homecoming will be like. Well, maybe I won’t have to imagine it. I’ll be going to Morocco in a couple of days, so I’ll see for myself.

Soon. I have to pack for my upcoming trip and I’m running out of battery anyway. But I’ll have something up later today or tomorrow, and hopefully will get someone to guest blog. (And, if interested, email me.)

The Telegraph has a longish profile of David Lodge, covering his latest novel on Henry James, his own academic career, and his struggle with having a child with Down Syndrome.

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.

At one point or another, nearly every child has the fantasy that she is adopted, that her real parents are kinder, more illustrious people than the ones with whom she’s stuck. Freud dubbed this the “family romance” and said that most children grow out of it. But in Scott O’Connor’s Among Wolves the child Blaylock doesn’t outgrow the family romance.
The story opens when the teenage Blaylock, now employed as Diggity Dawg in a Florida theme park starts his shift. He has his eye on a man who’s watching him from afar, smoking a pipe. That image triggers flashbacks to childhood, to the time when he started to suspect that his family wasn’t his ‘real’ family, that his mother, father, and sister Margot were replaced by strangers. The novella reaches its climax in a flashback, when Blaylock goes to a nursing home to visit the neighbors’ grandfather and, upon his return, finds his house empty, his family gone. O’Connor handles the scene with deftness and sensitivity, allowing us, for a brief moment, a look into this boy’s heart.
Unfortunately, that is the only place in Among Wolves when you’ll get to see anything the way Blaylock does. There are purposefully no details of time or place in this novella, and why they’re missing is anyone’s guess. It may be that the author felt that the lack of specificity makes for a more universal experience but, in fact, the absolute opposite effect is achieved. Too often, O’Connor’s spare, minimalist style gets in the way of telling his story. Among Wolves has an interesting premise, but O’Connor’s stylistic choices don’t do it full service.

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.