Laila Lalami

Earlier this weekend, it was announced that Khouri’s publisher has decided to pull her books off the shelves permanently. But the latest from La Khouri is that she claims she has not received “any royalties from sales of the book.” The wording is quite careful–she gives the impression that she has received no remuneration for her previous lies. But notice how she doesn’t talk about her advance. On top of this, she now claims that she had intended for the proceeds to go to charity (where was this altruism a few months ago?)

Update: Khouri was interviewed on an Australian TV show yesterday. She maintains that her book was not fiction. She says she did have a friend who was killed, that she was in Jordan at the time of the killing, and that if she returned to her native country she could risk death. Meanwhile, her publisher is not satisfied with the evidence she turned in (photocopies of passport pages appeared to belong to her husband, not to her) and the decision to pull her book hasn’t been changed.

Update 2: The lovely Maud asks about my thoughts on this and I will try and string something coherent together for you, though not today as I’m feeling a bit under the weather.

Previous editions of the Khouri report: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

A new award for literature is being started in Nigeria by Dilibe Onyeama. It’s called the Niger Award for Literary Merit.

Some of these foreign awards are political. As long as we keep relying on foreign assistance to promote Nigerian literature, we are in trouble. We have to stop all that. It is necessary that we create the principle of self-help. An indigenous awards foundation that will motivate and inspire Nigerian writers. It’s high time we started looking inwards. We have to promote our writers by creating our own indigenous awards.

Read the interview with Onyeama here.

When author Lisa Scottoline found out about a little-known historical incident that touched her family, she decided to use it for her next book, a legal thriller.

This is what’s left from your grandparents,” he said. Enclosed in tattered pink cardboard covers were enemy alien registration papers, issued by the federal government in February 1942 to Giuseppe and Maria Scottoline, natives of Ascoli Piceno in east-central Italy but residents of a West Philadelphia row house for the previous 29 years and nine months. The documents included thumbprints and grim-faced headshots..
She was stunned, Scottoline said, until her father explained a little-known footnote to the history of World War II: Nearly 700,000 Italians living in the United States were required to register as enemy aliens, and 10,000 were forcibly relocated away from the coastlines, put under curfew or interned in camps.
She knew, of course, about the more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese resident aliens in California who had been imprisoned without due process during the war. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she graduated cum laude, she had studied the U.S. Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision that ruled favorably on the roundups. But she was unaware that Italians and Germans had received similar treatment.

There’s a lot more to this fascinating story here.

The Racketeers have picked a top ten list of books for 2003 and The Observer‘s Stephanie Merritt notes that the list has only three women–Margaret Atwood, Monica Ali, and Donna Tartt. That only leaves two questions: Isn’t it a bit late to pick books for 2003? And who the heck are The Racketeers? Oh wait, it turns out they’re a group of men who meet in pubs to talk books. I’m tempted to add “and who specialize in satire.” Check this out.

[Racketeer member Huw Parker] believes there are clear distinctions between male and female groups. ‘My wife thinks we talk about things very differently, which is true, although we do a lot of the same authors, male and female. We’re quite combative and argumentative and not very consensual. I don’t want to stereotype, but that’s perhaps more of a male approach. There’s a competitive element about the way we vote for which book to read next. And in a retentive male way we hold an AGM and give a prize to one of the authors, which is quite an arrogant thing to do.’ He said many men still felt the idea of a reading group was at odds with masculine values. ‘Blokes think you have to be “touchy- feely” about a book and say “how I feel” about it. We don’t do that really. We talk about the way it’s written and the ideas.’

Anyway, the group is getting an Orange Prize for book clubs.

Poetry that’s meant to make you sleep.

I had mentioned Ngugi wa Thiong’o's return to Kenya ten days ago, mostly to talk about the positive homecoming he’s been having, but now that he’s been the victim of violence, the NY Times catches up with him in this article.

On Wednesday night, while Mr. Ngugi was resting in a Nairobi apartment between speaking engagements, four robbers barged in and brutalized him, his wife and a friend. The attackers, figuring he was prominent, stole cash and jewelry as well as Mr. Ngugi’s laptop computer. One of the intruders burned Mr. Ngugi’s face repeatedly with a cigarette.
“Welcome to the new Kenya, sir,” wrote Lucy Oriang, a columnist for The Daily Nation, Kenya’s main newspaper. “In the old days, you struggled to stay a step ahead of political terrorists-cum-state agents. These days, you watch out for both political and criminal thugs.”

A few Ngugi books: Petals of Blood, Decolonising the Mind, and Weep Not, Child.

A.S. Byatt and others tell The Guardian where they go for rest and relaxation in the summer.

The good people of Edinburgh are trying to get it named by UNESCO as World City of Literature. They cite Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith and JK Rowling. They talk about Byron and Scott.

But it would be wrong to assume that everything is hunky-dory. Indeed one of the key motives behind the Edinburgh bid to become a World City of Literature was the widely perceived mistreatment of literature by the Scottish Executive which in 2000 omitted any mention of books and literature from its cultural review Creating Our Future Minding Our Past. Moreover, literature is by far the poorest funded of all the art forms by the Scottish Arts Council. Out of a total budget of 60 million, it receives just 2m, of which, for example, a ‘client’ such as the Edinburgh International Book Festival gets 132,000.

Read the entire article over at the Sunday Herald. In related news, the Edinburgh International Book Festival just kicked off this weekend.

The people whose candidate didn’t serve a single day in action, and may well have deserted his duties, have the gall to attack Kerry’s record of service in a new book.

I’m taking Friday off to attend to a looming deadline and there probably won’t be anything new here till Monday, or maybe Sunday night. Until then, please visit any of the fine folks on the right. Have a good weekend.