That’s it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday. Do come back next week, when I will have another underappreciated book recommendation, possibly a book review, and more news and commentary.
I was away last weekend and couldn’t be at Wordstock, but Jeff Baker’s wrap-up of the book festival in the Oregonian gave me a flavor of what I’d missed. This part, though, made my jaw drop:
The consensus around the convention center was that Wordstock’s first year was a smashing success for the community and the community of writers that calls the Northwest home.“I’m really, really glad Portland has a book fair again,” said Ursula K. Le Guin. “It’s something we really needed. Look at the turnout!”
Le Guin’s presentation demonstrated the challenges any first-ever event faces. A healthy crowd of about 80, including a dozen children, tried to listen to the 75-year-old Le Guin while a few feet away, almost 2,000 people laughed and applauded as Vowell read from her new book “Assassination Vacation.” The effect was somewhat jarring, but Le Guin shrugged it off.
Call your agent, Ursula. You need to get on NPR.
Samir El-Youssef has just won the Tucholsky Award, given by PEN to “writers, journalists and publishers who face persecution, threats or exile from their home countries.” Most recently, El-Youssef co-authored a collection of stories with Israeli author Etgar Keret, titled Gaza Blues.
Blah, blah, blah…”a new, good imperialism“…blah, blah, blah.
Yet another indicator of the “winner take all” model in bookselling: grocery stores now account for a non-neglibible percentage of book sales, and those sales tend to be focused on “big books” that are already bestsellers.
Supermarkets, long the domain of paperback romances, pulp thrillers and astrology guides, are the new frontier of book selling. Chains like Wegmans, Kroger and Albertsons have greatly expanded their book sections, adapting the techniques that move large amounts of Velveeta and Count Chocula and applying them to Nora Roberts and John Grisham.Grocery stores have gone beyond the traditional spinning racks of pocket-size paperbacks, adding mahogany fixtures, sitting areas and cafes, and often placing their book sections in the center of the store, where shoppers are likely to stroll. Eye-catching displays of new hardcovers are sprinkled throughout the stores, encouraging impulse purchases: a big display near the entrance, cookbooks near the spice aisle and, in summer, beach reading near the seasonal displays of sunscreen.
Read the rest here.
Chang-rae Lee, currently in Seoul to promote Aloft and A Gesture Life, says that his next novel will be about the “lingering tragedy” resulting from the Korean war.
“It will be about a refugee girl raised in America after the war, a soldier and an aid worker during the war,” Lee said during a media meeting held yesterday at the Press Center in central Seoul. He said the book will be published in about two years.
Looking forward to it.
Lauren Sanders and Bee Lavender will be reading from With or Without you and Lessons in Taxidermy, respectively, as part of their tag-team West Coast tour. Here are the details:
Fri. April, 29. 7 pm.
Reading Frenzy,
921 Southwest Oak Street
Three small publishing houses have formed an alliance with two corporate imprints in order to launch Reading The World, an initiative that will give works in translation a special promotional display in about 80 independent bookstores.
(Thanks to Janey for the link.)
Over at Salon, Marjane Satrapi (whose novel Embroideries I loved) talks to Michelle Goldberg about sex, divorce, abortion, and, well, embroideries (no, not that kind. Read the book, you’ll figure it out.)
Do you have any advice for secular Americans who are faced with living in a country that’s increasingly governed by religious fundamentalists?If I have any advice, it’s that every day that you wake up, don’t say, “This is normal.” Every day, wake up with this idea that you have to defend your freedom. Nobody has the right to take from women the right to abortion, nobody has the right to take from homosexuals the right to be homosexual, nobody has the right to stop people laughing, to stop people thinking, to stop people talking.
If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.
Read the rest here. (You’ll have to watch a Salon ad. Worth it, though.)
Regular readers of this blog know about my love for Ahdaf Soueif’s work (In The Eye Of The Sun is a favorite of mine and I often re-read her short stories for pleasure or for observation.) So I was thrilled to see an interview with her in the Guardian.
MM: Where are we situated today?AS: Well, I had believed that we had entered a historical stage which was genuinely post-colonial: a free space where the ideological, emotional, philosophical underpinnings of inequality had been repudiated, rejected by the west, our past colonial masters. In the 60s, it seemed that, along with racial discrimination, the subordination of women and queer-bashing, colonialism had become profoundly unacceptable. And now we discover that this sense of a new-found equality was not, in fact, well-founded. That the idea of there being enormous essentialist non-negotiable differences between cultures and peoples is actually one that remains powerful and might be the idea that is going to shape the world in the decades to come.
