The Bay Guardian runs an overview of literary magazines based in San Francisco, including small mags like Instant City, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and Fourteen Hills as well as local giants like McSweeney’s and All-Story. And surprise, surprise, they turn out to be very different in format, sensibility, and choices.
Powells’ Dave Weich interviews Andrew Sean Greer, whose Confessions of Max Tivoli was a favorite here at Casa Moorishgirl. Here’s an excerpt:
Dave: I’m assuming it’s true that your initial inspiration was the Bob Dylan song ["My Back Pages"]?Greer: That’s not made up, though my friends joke with me; they hear me say it so often at readings that they now assume it is.
I had the idea singing that one line, I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now, and I wrote it down. I didn’t come back to it for a couple months because I was in the middle of a book.
It seemed at first like a bad idea, but when I came back to it and realized I had to write another book I was able to see what would be interesting to me about it, which wasn’t the science fiction idea of someone aging backwards but ideas related to second chances at love. And I could write about being different inside from the way you’re perceived on the outside. Also, I realized I could set it in a historical context, which was the terrifying part, really, not the aging backwards part.
It’s often hard for me to remember how it started out. I’m told that early drafts were incredibly different from the book that exists now, but I don’t remember. You start to think you just sat down and wrote the book, which I know is not true.
It’s been a month. The Indian Ocean tsunami has brought destruction of unbelievable proportions to twelve countries in Asia and Africa, killing at last count as many as 226,000 people.
I think about the dead, the missing, and the survivors, and I wonder what they would say if they could tell their stories. Would the nameless Indian boy comfort his parents? Or would he just cry with them, at the life that was taken before it could be lived?
What would fifteen year old Yeni Sofiana say? The only remnant of her life is a blue Indonesian ID, stuck on an iron fence like a punctuation mark. Is she alive? Or is she dead?
What would Baby 81 say? The poor baby can’t even speak yet. He’s only four months old. Would he recognize any of the nine families that have now claimed him as their lost child? What will the Sri Lankan judge who must decide his fate face do?
Andrea Levy’s Small Island has just won the Whitbread Book of the Year, an award that pits Whitbread winners in all categories (fiction, non-fiction, children’s) against each other. The Guardian‘s John Ezard has a report.
[The win] marks a long hoped-for watershed in which, as she said in a recent Guardian article, “some of the bestselling books in this country have come from authors who would once have been seen as ‘minority interest’ and have now become publishing gold”.When her win was announced late last night, she said, in a reference to the Tory politician Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech in the late 1960s: “Most of all I would like to thank all those people in Britain who work hard to make sure the rivers in this country never run with blood, only with water.”
Levy also won the Orange Prize last year.
Nominations for the Academy Awards were announced yesterday. I was happy to see that among the nominated scripts in the Adapted Screenplay category was Sideways–a film I loved, but which some of my friends really hated. Mostly though, the list of nominees reminded me that I need to get out more. I haven’t yet seen Ray or Hotel Rwanda or Million Dollar Baby or Closer or even Kinsey, which has been out so long I doubt it’s even playing anymore.
The Guardian has an obit of Syrian poet and playwright Mamdouh Udwan.
Mamdouh’s work combines humour and tragedy. He was ferocious in his denunciation of corruption and despotism. He broke away from stereotyping Jews. In My Enemies they laugh and weep rather than threaten and fight. In this historical novel there is always a message for the present. His language was simple and direct and he was an enemy of official cant, “cruel dreams coupled with cruel bread”, as he put it in one of his poems. His plays present the dilemmas of contemporary citizens. One play, The Mask, has been performed in English, and explores the situation of a 30-something Damascus career girl living alone.
Here’s an interesting piece by AP reporter Hamza Hemdawi about Iqra’, a small Baghdad bookshop trying to do business in the midst of war.
The Baghdad of 2005 throws up an incongruous scene – American Humvees on the streets, one or two bombings a day, gunfire echoing in the distance, and election posters plastered on the walls promising anything from the departure of the Americans to better security and economic prosperity.Yet in Iqra’a, Arabic for “read,” the usual bookish atmosphere prevailed. The shelves were stacked with Shakespeare, Hemingway and Omar Khayyam. News in Arabic from the BBC filled the air as students hunted for bargains, often a book discarded by U.S. troops and sold to Iqra’a by base cleaners who haul them in by the box.
On sale was “Islam for Dummies,” with the name of its former owner, a Capt. Bossolo, scribbled on it.
Islam for Dummies in the soldiers’ trashbins. That’s got to be a metaphor for something.
Apparently, morning radio DJs are in a race to see who’s most racist, insensitive, and generally revolting. After the infamous Star & Buc prank call, a new low has been reached with the Miss Jones show’s “Tsunami Song,” which aired on New York’s Hot 97. You can listen to the clip here. The lyrics are sung to the tune of “We Are The World,” and deride the victims of the tsunami using racial epithets. But the media seemed to pick up on the story more quickly than before, with the Daily News, Newsday, and many others reporting about it. Hot 97 is a part of Emmis Broadcasting.
Thanks to reader Tito the tip. For more info, visit Hiphop blog.
“I’ve waited and waited for Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams to become a cult classic on college campuses, but it hasn’t happened – yet,” Charles says. “In this touching, weirdly funny historical novel, poor Gregor – the human-cockroach from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis – witnesses the great developments and tragedies of the first half of the 20th century. After escaping the Nazis, he scurries from the Scopes trial to Los Alamos, from the Japanese internment camps to the White House. Everywhere, he’s omnivorously attentive, his antennae sensitive to the pheromones of beauty and cruelty passing around him. It’s the kind of book from which one wakes clutching surreal scenes, desperate to tell others, delighted and baffled and horrified.”
Ron Charles is the book editor for the Christian Science Monitor and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
Nilanjana Roy’s latest column for the Business Standard is about that word that strikes fear in any expat author, or any author writing about the immigrant experience: authenticity. More specifically, Roy looks at Indian fiction that is written from within and without the continent and the resulting question that seems to be on readers’ minds.
The problem lies elsewhere, with the books about India and by writers of Indian origin that come to us on an ocean of advance publicity, gilt-edged, flagged for our consideration, endorsed by the Western world, stamped with the approval of publishing houses we should be able to trust, foreign editors whose names are legendary, authors who are living shrines.For far too long, the debate over the merits of “phoren” versus “desi” books has been hijacked by an obsession with authenticity. Is Monica Ali’s Brick Lane the Real Thing, or a simulacra? Are Rupa Bajwa’s shop assistants true to life? How much of Bengali culture can an NRI like Jhumpa Lahiri truly understand? Has Naipaul really understood the neo-revolutionaries with whom he explored India’s villages? Is Manil Suri’s Vishnu authentic, is Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s sense of history authentic, is Samina Ali’s Hyderabad authentic, is Vikas Swarup’s beggar-turned-quiz contestant authentic?
The only possible answers to these questions are the ones that writers give when pressed: a writer is free to imagine his or her version of reality.
What is the authentic India anyway-the city, the village, the slums, the farmhouses? And what part of the phrase “work of fiction” do you not understand?
And, she concludes (rightly, I think) that the only question that should be asked is: Are the books any good?
