Laila Lalami

Subcommander Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, is co-authoring a detective novel with best-selling crime writer Pablo Ignacio Taibo. NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro has the scoop. And the NY Times has a piece about it as well.

The first six chapters of the book, titled “Awkward Deaths,” are to be a sort of Ping-Pong game, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos is to write chapters one, three and five, introducing his detective, Elias Contreras. Mr. Taibo would write chapters two, four and six, using the protagonists in his previous books, Detective Hector Belascoaron Shayne. In the seventh chapter, the two detectives must meet at the Revolution Monument in Mexico City, where Pancho Villa and Lazaro Cardenas are buried.

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An Azeri translation of Mein Kampf by a newspaper editor in Azerbaijan has infuriated Jewish groups there and resulted in the impounding of all unsold copies.

Azadliq newspaper said it had taken Mr Zeynalli more than two years to translate the book and that local press have been publishing it in fragments for the past two years.

But by publishing the book in full, Mr Zeynalli may have broken a national ban on Hitler’s anti-Semitic text.

Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union and took part in World War II against Nazi Germany.

on Tom Wolfe, for I Am Charlotte Simmons. According to the Reuters piece, Wolfe nabbed the award for this passage.

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue,” one of his winning sentences begins.

“But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns — oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest — no, the hand was cupping her entire right — Now!”

And what could be sexier than otorhinolaryngological caverns?

The Daily Star runs a profile of French sensation Faiza Guene, whose book Kiffe Kiffe Demain has already sold 70,000 copies so far.

The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Guene, a writer and aspiring filmmaker, grew up in Les Courtillieres, one of Paris’ large public housing projects in the northeastern suburbs. Her novel, “Kiffe kiffe demain (More of the Same Tomorrow),” recounts the life of a heroine named Doria. (The title loses a lot in the English translation – “Kif kif demain” would be the correct spelling but Guene changed it to reflect the verb “kiffer,” slang for liking something, so the title would have an upbeat connotation.) The book was published in August 2004. It was an instant hit.

The book is due to come out in the States with Harcourt in Spring 2006.

Related posts: 1 and 2.

Thanks to Jonathan for the link.

Jennifer Traig’s memoir of her troubles with OCD, Devil is in the Details was published earlier this fall, and garnered her some very good reviews. She’s taking over Mark Sarvas’ blog, The Elegant Variation for the day, as part of her virtual book tour. Be sure to stop by and read her posts.

Something to look forward to: Salman Rushdie is said to be working on a new book about Machiavelli, the Hindustan Times says. Rushdie was in Kolkata for a talk and book signing.

Link from TEV.

The controversy over whether Federico Garcia Lorca should be exhumed is still raging in Spain. The poet and playwright, who was shot dead in 1936, in the early days of Spain’s civil war, has come to symbolize General Franco’s faceless victims.

Part of the lore surrounding Garcia Lorca is that his burial place is a mystery. In fact, the family and most experts agree on the general location, a ravine in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada near the village of Viznar, about five miles from Granada. It was a killing field, historians say, littered with the corpses of hundreds of people.

In a sense, the family argues, the mass grave itself is a fitting monument, a place of natural beauty that bears witness to an awful chapter of repression and political murder.

But others maintain that it takes someone of Garcia Lorca’s stature to finally bring attention to Franco’s victims, the vast majority of whom were buried anonymously, their families left to decades of uncertainty and shame. By contrast, pro-Franco dead have been honored by memorials and statues paid for by a string of governments.

What’s it like being a writer in France? You starve (the way you would here, but there you do it on brie and baguette), you produce (at the rate of one book a year), people actually read your books (and you’ll get reviews). If you make it big (or are re-discovered after you’re dead), they bury you in the Pantheon and have headlines about how your loss leaves them in despair. Exaggeration? Only slightly.

Cristina Nehring’s NY Times piece, though, essentially states the fact that France is a nation of bibliophiles, but doesn’t go much beyond that. She picks a few titles from this year’s rentre litteraire, declares them “disconcertingly weak,” generalizes to the rest of current French fiction, and ends with a bit of shoulder shrugging.

Iraqi novelist Alia Mamdouh has won the 2004 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for literature for The Loved Ones, first published by Saqi Books in 2003. The Loved Ones is due out in translation in 2005 but one of Mamdouh’s earlier novels, Mothballs, is available online.

Antony Beevor, Ali Smith, David Almond, Ian Rankin, and Margaret Atwood reflect on their first books. My favorite is probably Margaret Atwood’s piece about how she “published” her first collection of poems, at the tender age of 21. The book was printed in a cellar, and Atwood herself set the type, though she had to do each poem separately because there was a shortage of letter As.

Then how did I get the nerve? I actually went around to various bookstores and got them to place the book. Bookstores were different then: small, individually owned, run by kindly gnomes with a tolerance for eccentricity. They must have thought that I was a fool or a lunatic, or in the Toronto parlance of the day different, but this did not seem to bother them. As the book was small, it sold for 50 cents. I should have kept 249 of the things, as the price has now gone up considerably.

The title of this tiny but peculiar effort was Double Persephone; the poems rhymed and scanned, and were about sex and death, with some rebirth tossed in: my optimism was showing early. As I recall, the word chthonic was in them, so it was pretty deep stuff.

What do I think of them now? They weren’t very good, but at least they were oh, killing term promising. I’ve been cheered up since by reading the juvenilia of other poets whose mature work I admire: Tennyson, for instance, has one that begins, ‘Airy, fairy Lilian’.

Best advice for young writers? This is a risky business. You’re on a tightrope. Below is Niagara Falls. Courage. One step at a time. Don’t look down.

The others are also quite good. Do take a look.