Laila Lalami

Over at the Nation, Katha Pollitt has put together a list of worthwhile charities, at home and abroad, for you to consider. She explains each charity’s work, and why your money is needed. Hop on over there.

Bud Parr (of Chekhov’s Mistress) has just launched a lit blog aggregation service called Metaxucafe. I gave up trying to figure out how to pronounce it, but I’m already reading it.

Have you noticed how someone will mention something to you–a movie, a book, a song, an event–and then the very same day you’ll notice an item about it in the newspaper? I was just talking to a friend about the Daughters of Abraham, and then I saw this article in the CSM about them. It’s a four-year old book club that brings together Jewish, Christian and Muslim women. It now has eighteen members.

“I’ll recommend two books,” Turow writes via email. “Frances Sherwood’s The Book of Splendors, a fantasy about the golem of Prague, published a few years back to almost no notice, and Scott Simon’s Pretty Birds, which is a magnificent novel about the Bosnian war from the point of view of a 16 year old female sniper. It’s a significant book which didn’t get its full due.”

Scott Turow is a writer and attorney. He is the author of seven best-selling novels, including his first, Presumed Innocent and his most recent novel, Ordinary Heroes published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in November, 2005.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

The latest installment of the Lannan Foundation’s Readings and Conversations series features Edwidge Danticat with Junot Díaz this Wednesday, November 30, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Details here.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I’m a huge fan of both Danticat and Díaz’s work. If any of you are able to attend, do please write in and tell us how it was.

Nominees for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award were announced on Friday. Among the finalists: John Updike and Paul Theroux. You can read the terrible extracts over at the Guardian.

Would any of you kind souls out there happen to have a subscription to the New York Review of Books? I see that the December 15 issue has an essay by William Pfaff on the riots in France, which starts thus:

The rioting in France’s ghetto suburbs is a phenomenon of futility

Also in the New York Review of Books, but this one’s freely available: Joseph Lelyveld’s review of Captain James Yee’s For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire. Yee was the Muslim chaplain assigned to the naval prison at Guantanamo Bay. Last year, he was accused of being a spy for Al Qaeda, and then later cleared of all charges. The review offers a revolting account of what life is like in America’s shameful prison.

The latest installment of Powell’s Bookcast features Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, Uzodinma Iweala, and local boy Marc Acito.

The Guardian asked forty-three poets and writers (among whom: Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie, John Banville, AS Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Chuck Palahniuk, Zadie Smith, Tariq Ali, and Helen Oyeyemi) to select their favorite books of 2005. A worthwhile read.