Laila Lalami

This week, I’d like to give away a copy of Mary Anne Mohanraj’s collection of short stories Bodies in Motion. The book tracks the lives of two generations of families in Sri Lanka and in America, and has received very favorable reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe.

This is how it works: The first person to send me an email at llalami at yahoo dot com with the subject line “Bodies in Motion” gets the book.

Update: The winner is Aziza K. of Chicago, Illinois. Congratulations!

Adam Langer’s latest column for the Book Standard is about author interviews. Who gives good ones? Who doesn’t? Langer sorts his answers into five categories: The Freewheeling Improviser, He/She Who Does Not Suffer Fools Gladly, The Unself-conscious Subject, The Consummate Storyteller, and The Genuinely Decent Human Being. Good stuff.

Doreen Baingana, the author of the lovely collection Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, writes in the Guardian about expectations made of African writers that they only about the tragic and the horrifying. But, she says,

Fiction writers have the language and leeway to play with received notions of truth; to form new stories out of raw material, like glass out of sand, creating something different and idiosyncratic.

Link swiped from Lit Saloon.

Here’s a brief article on blogs, courtesy of the Guardian. Among the findings cited: A new blog is created every second, but only 13% of blogs are updated once a week or more.

Frequent Moorishgirl contributor and Los Angeles-based writer Dan Olivas informs us that he will be reading and signing copies of his first children’s book, Benjamin and the Word. Details:

Venue: T

Lisa Glatt, whose story collection The Apple’s Bruise was reviewed here at Moorishgirl in June, is interviewed over at Bookslut. Here’s a snippet:

So no procrastination. You write when you sit and that

The Lives of Rain
By Nathalie Handal
Interlink Books
Paperback, 67 pp.

“The Doors of Exile,” the prologue-poem of Nathalie Handal’s accomplished and affecting debut collection, presents the bleak and disorienting nature of the Palestinian diaspora: “The shadows close the door / this is loneliness: / every time we enter a room we enter a new room / the hours of morning growing deep into our exile / prayers stuck in between two doors / waiting to leave to enter / waiting for memory to escape / the breath of cities.” For those in exile, there is no arriving, no here or there, only loneliness and a hope that memory-of something unspoken and unspeakable-will fade. And exile produces a multifaceted loss; it has more than one door. This poem sets the tone and theme for the collection.

Handal divides her book into three untitled sections. The first set of poems focuses on the nature and consequences of Palestinian displacement. In “Gaza City,” the narrator laments: “My hands and my cheek against / the cold wall, I hide like a slut, ashamed…. / Every house is a prison, / every room a dog cage.” This is the nature of being made unwelcome in one’s own home: the victim feels guilt, like a “slut,” nothing more than a “dog.”

With remarkable and brutal clarity, Handal shows us the longing created by war when she focuses on an individual’s suffering. “It’s been a long time-,” begins the narrator in “The Combatant and I,” remembering her absent lover, “where have you been, where are you?” She recounts her loss: “I miss your frowns, / the dark shadow of your oval chin. / I can’t breathe at night, can’t feel my legs. / Dreamed I stopped seeing. / Are you lost?” And she imagines his response: “I suppose you would say, / I should be happy that I can still love.”

(more…)

The August 2005 issue of Harper’s has a new short story by Naguib Mahfouz, titled “The Disturbing Occurrences.” Unfortunately, it’s not available online.

Monsanto Corporation has reportedly filed a request for a patent to a breed of pigs, seeking to control not just the method by which those pigs were bred, but the pigs themselves as well as their offspring. If the patent is granted, any farmers who breed pigs that are similar to the Monsanto pigs may owe royalties. Greenpeace reports:

There are more than 160 countries and territories mentioned where the patent is sought including Europe, the Russian Federation, Asia (India, China, Philippines) America (USA, Brazil, Mexico), Australia and New Zealand. WIPO itself can only receive applications, not grant patents. The applications are forwarded to regional patent offices.

The patents are based on simple procedures, but are incredibly broad in their claims.

In one application (WO 2005/015989 to be precise) Monsanto is describing very general methods of crossbreeding and selection, using artificial insemination and other breeding methods which are already in use. The main “invention” is nothing more than a particular combination of these elements designed to speed up the breeding cycle for selected traits, in order to make the animals more commercially profitable.

By the way, Monsanto is the same company that manufactured Agent Orange, which was used in Vietnam in the 1960s, and, more recently, the milk hormone rBGH, which has been suspected of causing cancer. They’re also the geniuses behind terminator seeds.

Link via Boing Boing.

Ghanaian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali, whose short fiction appeared in the New Yorker earlier this year, has a collection of stories out now, titled The Prophet of Zongo Street. It’s about a group of residents on a fictitious street in Accra who grapple with issues of family and faith. The L.A. Times‘ Merle Rubin reviews (and likes) it: Humor — and a dose of skepticism — about isms.