A new book is about to give Pashtun culture something to be known for, besides war and terror: poetry. The BBC reports that the collected works of poet Rahman Baba have been translated by English teachers Robert Sampson and Momin Khan Jaja. The book doesn’t appear to be available from online retailers, though a small selection of Baba’s poetry appears in this book.
The first issue of new mag Barrelhouse is now available for sale, and features work by Stephan Clark, Stacey Richter, David Barringer, and the ubiquitous Steve Almond.
Storysouth has announced its list of notable online stories of 2004. Ten stories will be selected from this list on March 1, at which point voting will be opened to the public. Good luck to all.
Writer Jim Ruland, who guested here a few weeks ago despite, he said, “being neither moorish nor a girl,” has a piece on NPR about the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Ruland attended the SBVT reunion last January in Orlando, Florida, with one member of the group: his father.
Rosemary Goring wonders whether romance novels shouldn’t be subjected to the same level of criticism as literary fiction.
Some say [romance novels] need no publicity, being destined for the top-10 lists without a cheep from the literary pack. Others believe they should be reviewed on the same terms as any other novel. The problem is, these books rarely attempt to do anything new. Their success lies in their formula. The settings may change, and the names of their characters, but the ingredients are so familiar and well-used, it’s surprising there are any of them left in the fridge.
It seems unfair to analyse such novels by the standards used to evaluate more artistically ambitious works. And yet should they slip by, year after year, without scrutiny?
She takes a closer look at Josephine Cox’s The Journey.
“I first read Moghul Buffet by Cheryl Benard eight years ago and I have yet to come across a novel that has made me laugh so hard,” Kamal says. “It’s part detective story, part social satire, and part bildungsroman. There’s a lusty Muslim cleric and a gay Indian actor, there’s an American businessman convinced he’s out to be murdered and an American woman married to a Pakistani feudal lord, there’s a bunch of future Talibans involved at the moment in doing good and a policeman who constantly misinterprets clues: how all these characters come together is ingenious and delightful. I read this at least once a year simply because it’s one of the best stories around.”
Soniah Kamal‘s short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologized in the US, Canada, Pakistan and India. Her debut novel An Isolated Incident is scheduled for release with Penguin in the fall. She also blogs at drunkonink.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
The Guardian’s Tim Adams talks to Kazuo Ishiguro about his latest novel, Never Let Me Go.
Kathy herself first surfaced in Ishiguro’s notes almost 15 years ago when he had a sense of a book about a group of young people with a Seventies atmosphere. ‘They hung around and argued about books,’ he says. ‘I knew there was this strange fate hanging over them, but I couldn’t work out exactly what it was.’ He used to tell his wife Lorna he was writing a campus novel and she was suitably horrified by the idea. It was only relatively recently, when he was listening on the radio to various programmes about biotechnology, that the particular fate of his sketchy students became clear to him.
Warning: Article contains a couple of spoilers.
Here’s something different. Gemma Bovery, a comic book by British writer Posy Simmonds, is largely based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
Originally published as a comic strip in the Guardian, it’s the story of Gemma Tate, a London magazine illustrator who marries a man named Charlie Bovery and moves with him to a village in Normandy. Gemma and Charlie have just enough money to drop out of the corporate grind and style themselves as “creative,” but she soon grows bored with the aimlessness of their lives.The narrator of “Gemma Bovery” is Raymond Joubert, another dropout from the rat race, an intellectual who has chosen a “simpler” life as an artisan – the village baker. But being a very good baker is not enough to occupy his mind, for Joubert grows obsessed with Gemma – in part because her name and her evident marital frustration and boredom with provincial life remind him of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. And his obsession with this parallel between literature and life contributes to the calamity that overtakes Gemma and Charlie Bovery.
Sounds like fun.
The Denver Post has an excerpt of Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist, a book that I have been dying to read ever since I heard about it. It’s a biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish millionaire who escaped revolutionary Russia, transformed himself into a Muslim prince, and wrote Ali and Nino, which became a huge bestseller in pre-WWII Europe.
On a cold November morning in Vienna, I walked a maze of narrow streets on the way to see a man who promised to solve the mystery of Kurban Said. I was with Peter Mayer, the president of the Overlook Press, a large, rumpled figure in a black corduroy suit who wanted to publish Said’s small romantic novel Ali and Nino. Mayer tended to burst into enthusiastic monologues about the book: “You know how when you look at a Vermeer, and it’s an interior, and it’s quite quiet, yet somehow, what he does with perspective, with light, it feels much bigger-that’s this novel!” A love story set in the Caucasus on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Ali and Nino had been originally published in German in 1937 and was revived in translation in the seventies as a minor classic. But the question of the author’s identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot. In the jacket photograph of a book called Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus, the mysterious author is dressed up as a mountain warrior-wearing a fur cap, a long, flowing coat with a sewn-in bandolier, and a straight dagger at his waist. Mayer and I were on our way to a meeting with a lawyer named Heinz Barazon, who was challenging Overlook over proper author credit on the novel.
Read the rest of the first chapter here.
I wouldn’t normally have paid much attention to this book list, billed as “reading list to while away waning winter” but the choice of a favorite Amin Malouf book, Leo Africanus, changed my mind. It’s an imaginary, lyrical biography of a real, historical figure, Hassan Al-Wazzan, a 16th-century Moorish ambassador. Al-Wazzan was caught by Sicilian pirates on his way back from a pilgrimage to Mecca and was given as a gift to Pope Leo X. He became the renowned geographer Leo de Medici, or Leo Africanus, and was witness to a number of historical events.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faces criminal charges in Turkey over statements he made about the Armenian genocide to a Swiss newspaper. Pamuk’s statements (that “30,000 Kurds and over 1 million Armenians had been killed in Turkey”) are considered controversial in Turkey, the only country that continues to deny the genocide and in fact alleges that it was the Armenians who exterminated the Turks.
It’s particularly ironic that Pamuk should be molested about this, since his latest novel, Snow, features several references to the genocide. Given Pamuk’s worldwide reputation, and Turkey’s desire to join the EU, it’s unlikely that the charges will actually be followed up, but we’ll keep an eye on this story.
Links via Maud.
