Laila Lalami

Ana-Marie Cox (a.k.a Wonkette) has just sold her debut novel. Publishers’ Marketplace reports:

“Wonkette” Ana Marie Cox’s novel DOG DAYS, a comic tale about “a young Washingtonian Bridget Jones-type,” to Julie Grau at Riverhead, reportedly for $275,000 (according to the NY Post), at auction, by the David Black Literary Agency.

I hope for her sake that Matthew Klam (who wrote sarcastically about her and other political bloggers in the NYT) won’t review it when it comes out.

Last April, the NEA announced that it was launching an initiative to help U.S. troops serving in Iraq write about their experiences. Dubbed “Operation Homecoming” the program enables soldiers to take writing workshops with established authors, and will publish some of their writings in an anthology next year. I’ve been apprehensive about this program from the very beginning, because I tend to be suspicious of any government oversight over art. Writing in Slate, Aleksandar Hemon makes the argument much more eloquently than I have in this blog. Here’s the money quote:

There is no doubt that some valuable writing both as history and literature could come out of Operation Homecoming. But even if the good people of the NEA and their writing instructors have nothing but the purest intentions in their hearts; even if workshops serve as some form of group therapy; even if the NEA received blanket security clearance from Wolfowitz and the Department of Defense to publish whatever would further the understanding of the war experience even if all that were the case, any account of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom that does not include testimonies of the freedom-shocked Iraqis cannot avoid being a lie. A similar lie is at the heart of the Vietnam War mythology, built around the fallacious belief that the main victims of the war in Vietnam were Americans, even if for every dead American soldier there were dozens of dead Vietnamese civilians. If in those workshops the American epic of greed and power is being translated into another self-help manual of national victimhood, then the result will be nothing but therapeutic propaganda.

Hemon link via Golden Rule Jones.

Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit lost the Booker to Alan Hollinghurt’s The Line of Beauty yesterday, but Dangor is a happy man.

Bitter Fruit has been selling in the tens of thousands since it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a level of commercial success he says he never expected. “My book was a little tiny book published in South Africa and the United States and now they tell me 30 000 copies sold in two weeks in the UK. That is significant.”

Last weekend, Edward Wyatt commented on the sales power of the Booker relative to American book prizes like the National Book Awards.

I was quite interested in Patrick Neate’s review of Soul City

It is increasingly difficult to read a novel on its own terms. Even if you tear off the dust jacket, scrub the author photo and ignore the promotional blurbs, someone, somewhere (whether professional critic, blogger or even the author himself) is just desperate to tell you whether this book and, especially, its writer are cool or not. The writer is not just a writer; he’s a brand with specific attributes. To consume his work is to make a statement about yourself as surely as if your chest were emblazoned with a fashion designer’s logo.

I guess Neate takes this mantra to heart, because his byline reads a simple, “Author of.” At any rate, he delivers an interesting review of Soul City, though he can’t help but engage in that very thing he warned about in his introduction: Comment on the author, not the work.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose new novel, Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes, appeared on the streets in Columbia before the official version is launched, may have the final word.

But the pirate copies are not the same as the final version of the book, 77-year-old Garcia Marquez’s first novel in 10 years, editor Braulio Peralta said.
“Check the pirate version that is coming out in Colombia compared to the legal version being launched today. All I’m saying is that Gabriel Garcia Marquez changed the last chapter,” Peralta told journalists.

The book appears to be available on Amazon.

There’s a shocker. A first edition of Mao Tse-Tung’s Little Red Book failed to meet its reserve price at auction.

Not having lived my adolescence in the States, I came to read some of the classic novels assigned in high schools here with a completely different eye than if I had had to read them for school. So I never had the sort of relationship with The Catcher in The Rye that other people my age may have. I read the novel as an adult and liked it, but I much preferred Salinger’s short stories (Nine Stories is one of my favorite collections.) Still, I think Jonathan Yardley is being a tad hysterical in his review of the book, particularly here:

Rereading “The Catcher in the Rye” after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger’s execrable prose and Caulfield’s jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.

There are lots of other novels more meriting of that kind of criticism, and if he can’t think of any, he’s welcome to dip into the ones being sent to us every day for review.

The Vatican’s newspaper,L’Osservatore Romano, isn’t very pleased with Elfriede Jelinek’s Nobel Prize, focusing in particular on her novel, The Piano Teacher, which was made into a movie a few years ago.

“Three hundred pages of brutal recklessness, perverse psychologies and destructive feminine genealogy, intended only to denounce the irremediable inheritance of evil, sin, violence in every form of love,” was how L’Osservatore Romano summed up the novel.
The newspaper criticized Jelinek’s works because “her topics are quickly channeled into descriptions of the feminine world, between scenes of crude sexuality, which are not conducive to an understanding of the emancipation of woman.” It assailed the work for “linking sex to pathology, power and violence.”

I’m always mystified when people think literature should present the world not as it is, but as it should be.

Jim Hanas reports that George Saunders will have a new collection of short stories out in 2006, titled The Red Bow.

Last year it was Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, this year it’s David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The most buzzed-about book for the Booker Prize lost to the quiet The Line of Beauty. Alan Hollinghurst’s novel is said to be the first winner to ever feature a gay man as the main character. Here’s a Guardian piece about it. The Scotsman asks whether the novel earned its win. (Their answer: Yes.) And some more details from the awards, courtesy of the BBC.