Laila Lalami

Over at Salon, Juan Cole waves a placard that says, “They lied! they lied!”

And we now know, thanks to a leaked British memo concerning the head of British intelligence, that the Bush administration — contrary to its explicit denials — had already made up its mind to attack Iraq and “fixed” those bogus allegations to support its decision. In short, Bush and his top officials lied about Iraq.

Seriously, was there any serious doubt even in March 2003? I suppose this is interesting only to those who had their hands over their eyes and kept asking for a smoking gun. Can you breathe now, with all that smoke?

Over at the Telegraph, Philip Henscher reviews Tim Winton’s The Turning, and wonders:

What is this book? Is it a novel? Is it a collection of stories with recurrent characters? Well, it might just be an example of a new literary genre. Genres don’t come into existence every day, but in the past few years a good number of writers have started exploring the previously blank territory that lies between the collection of short stories and the novel proper. It starts to look like a new form altogether.

Why worry what to call it? I mean–Shouldn’t we be asking if it’s any good? But Henscher’s point isn’t really about quality. It’s more about a trend he’s noticed over the last 10 years:

first noticed that something was in the air when I started being asked to judge competitions for novels, about 10 years ago or so. In one competition after another, a book came up for consideration and someone on the panel would say: “This is a terribly good book: but isn’t it really a collection of short stories, rather than a novel?” Judging the 2001 Booker Prize, for instance, we finally shortlisted two books of this sort – Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Ali Smith’s Hotel World. Another writer on that shortlist, David Mitchell, clearly finds the form congenial; his first book, Ghostwritten, and his third, Cloud Atlas, are constructed out of a succession of near-unrelated narratives.

These, and others, such as Rachel Cusk’s beautiful The Lucky Ones, shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel prize, don’t follow exactly the same tactics. The Dark Room is three separate stories, bound together by a single theme; despite their lack of connection, you couldn’t really excerpt one of them for an anthology. Hotel World is a single narrative, told from such different perspectives that the reader does have the sense of starting freshly with each episode.

This resonates particularly strongly with me because my debut book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, has been described by one reader as “neither fish nor fowl,” an expression I tried my hardest to take as a compliment. My publisher has billed it as a short story collection, but in its overall themes it feels more like a novel where the chapters build on one another. Even while I was focused on details of the individual narratives, I always had the overall picture in mind. So it’ll be interesting to see, when the book comes out, whether this is something that readers and reviewers respond to.

Rejection is part of the writer’s life and so Catherine Wald’s book, The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph by Twenty Top Authors is of particular interest to those who’ve experienced the sting of the unsigned rejection (or, worse, an empty SASE.) My personal favorite remains one by C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic, which managed to be both flattering and insulting in just two lines. This week’s giveaway is for you writers. The first person to email me a request at llalami AT yahoo DOT com will receive the book. Good luck.

Update: The winner is L. Alves from Brazil.

Shaun Bythell, the Scottish bookseller mentioned in this post about book burning, wrote to me to explain why he’d chosen this method for disposing of unsold volumes:

There was a good reason for burning the books, and it wasn’t based on censorship or oppression. At the moment we currently send the stock we cannot sell to charity shops but some of it is in such bad condition they won’t take it – this we put in a skip and it ends up in a landfill site.

Of course book burning is not a more environmentally friendly solution than landfill but this is where most second-hand books with no value currently end up. My argument for having this event was based on the fact that if the alternative fate of the books was to rot in a hole in the ground why not do something more interesting and use them to make a fire sculpture as a publicity stunt to get people talking about the problem, and to raise the profile of Wigtown as Scotland’s National Book Town. Richard Booth who set up Hay on Wye as Booktown about 30 years ago once told me that he got far more press coverage from declaring war on the Welsh Tourist Board than from setting up a successful Book Town, and to some degree I agree that the media engages far more enthusiastically with a controversial story which polarises opinion than one of small rural town which is enjoying economic regeneration. So, yes it was a publicity stunt rather than a practical measure and it has worked – a full page in the Financial Times, half a page in the Sunday Times, a quarter page in the Sunday Herald and a five minute interview on Radio Scotland all of which mention Wigtown and discuss the issue of “dead” books.

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Chiamasta is a three-day literary festival celebrating South Asian writing, and it takes place May 20-23, 2005. Here’s the blurb I received by email.

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) invites you to our third annual literary event, celebrating the works of South Asian writers.

In this event, we explore and celebrate chiasmata, spontaneous connections that spawn diversity and birth the motley spaces we inhabit. Spaces between the old and the new, the established and the subversive, the familiar and the novel. Spaces that serve as bridges towards a new self.

Participants include Amitava Kumar, Abha Dawesar, Ginu Kamani, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Meera Nair, Tahira Naqvi, S. Mitra Kalita, Bushra Rehman, Shahnaz Habib, Prageeta Sharma, Alka Bhargava, Anna Ghosh, Pooja Makhijani and Neesha Meminger.

What: Literary festival including two evenings of readings and discussion, a writing workshop for emerging writers, and a panel discussion of South Asians in publishing

When: May 20, 21, 22

Where: the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Queens Museum of Art

Please visit http://www.sawcc.org/chiasmat.html for further details.

For more information, and to reserve your spot for the writing workshop, email: sawccmail@yahoo.com

In a previous incarnation, I worked as a thesaurus editor for the Getty, so it was a special treat to hear about the Selected Shorts event at the Getty.

What: Selected Shorts: The Love Story Weekend
Where: The Getty Center, Los Angeles.
When: Friday
Who: A reading of Tessa Hadley’s “Mother’s Son” by Shohreh Aghdashloo (“House of Sand and Fog”) and “Cultural Relativity” by Regina King (“Ray”).

Enjoy.

Here’s a party we probably would be at if we were still in Los Angeles, but since we can’t, we’d love to hear from those who do go: Word Theatre celebrates Swink Issue #2.

Saturday, May 21, 2005
M BAR
1253 N. Vine St
SW corner of Vine
6:30 Cocktails
7:00 Buffet Dinner
8:00 Readings

Wilson Cruz (“My So Called Life”, “Party Monster”) reads Manuel Mu

Lola Ogunnaike’s description of Lit Lite, a weekly series where performers select and read from their favorite bad books, made me want to check it out. Recent selections include work by Ethan Hawke, Naomi Campbell, and Eve Ensler.

“I am unfortunately one of those lonely sad people that reads a lot,” said [Lit Lite creator] Mr. Hendrix in an interview, “and I’ve always been drawn to bad books.” Asked why he prefers cringe-inducing texts to works from the literary canon Mr. Hendrix said, “Good literature is a little bit boring and precious.” He pointed to Jonathan Franzen’s “Corrections” and the works of David Foster Wallace to illustrate his point, saying he would rather curl up with “I Was a White Slave in Harlem,” the autobiography of the drag queen Margo Howard-Howard. Speaking of slavery and drag queens. Originally, Flotilla DeBarge, a statuesque drag queen who bears more than a passing resemblance to the talk show host Star Jones, was to read that evening from “Swan,” a novel by the model Naomi Campbell. Ms. DeBarge and Mr. Hendrix decided that while Ms. Campbell’s book was awful, it was not gripping; instead they opted for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The show’s curators don’t just pick from the fiction shelves–their next selection is the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog (What? It has words?)

Morgan Spurlock (of Supersize Me fame) is producing a new TV show for the FX network. The reality series, called 30 Days, places people “in unfamiliar social circumstances” for a month and documents their reactions. One of the shows is about a “fundamentalist Christian” who is taken to Dearborn, Michigan for a month. Says Spurlock:

“We took a fundamentalist Christian from my home state of West Virginia, somebody who is very pro-war, pro-’us versus them’, that when you hear Muslim the only thing he thinks of is a guy standing on a mountain with an AK-47,” Spurlock said.

The man leaves his wife and children at home and goes to live with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States.

“He dresses as a Muslim, eats as a Muslim, he prays five times a day, he studies the Koran daily, he learns to speak Arabic, he works with an imam, a Muslim cleric, to learn the history of Islam, what are the five pillars, why are they important.”

“And the transformation this guy goes through in 30 days is miraculous, it’s incredible,” Spurlock said.

The documentary maker, who has visited more than 100 schools as part of his campaign to improve school food programs, says the television show is driven by the desire to make people think about societal problems.

Another show has Spurlock and his fiancee trying to survive on minimum wage for a month. Now that I’ll watch. Maybe I’ll set my TiVo.

B.M. Mooyart-Doubleday, who translated The Diary of Anne Frank from the Dutch, gets some recognition via a profile in the Journal Gazette.

For many readers of the diary of the teen hidden in an attic in her father’s office building in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Mooyart-Doubleday and Frank became one and the same – even though the former was hardly an experienced translator of Dutch.

Instead, she was a 31-year-old mother of two who had married a pilot in the Dutch equivalent of the Air Force and moved to Holland, teaching herself the language in the process.

Shortly after the war ended, she recalls, she received a letter from an old friend in London who worked at a small publishing house.

“He said, ‘We have had a man called Otto Frank come to our office telling us about his daughter’s diary, and we think it’s an interesting document, but we have no one in this office who reads Dutch,’ ” she recalls.

“So I jumped on my bicycle and bought the book and read it in one breath, and I was very moved, and I wrote back telling him I thought it was a very good book indeed.”

The book had been published in Dutch as “The Secret Annex” in 1947.

Mooyart-Doubleday received only 60 pounds for the translation, which she had to complete in a little over two months. French and German translations of the book, she says, did not sell initially, but the English translation did well.

The Anne Frank Museum has exhaustive information about her, and you can even take a virtual tour of the house and watch rare footage. By far the most moving moment of my trip to Amsterdam a few years ago was standing on the second floor of the building at 263 Prinsengracht and peeking out at the secret annex where the Frank family hid for two years.