Laila Lalami

Kathryn Masterson’s Chicago Tribune review of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits has been reprinted in the Detroit Free Press and the Ventura County Star.

The AP reports that 22 Emirati men have been arrested at a “mass homosexual wedding” in the UAE. The men face jail time as well as government-mandated “hormone treatments.”

As many as twenty-two people are feared dead in the latest immigration tragedy off the coast of southern Spain. I’m sure the response will be “let’s build higher fences,” like that’s going to make any difference.

Ron Charles’s review of Thomas Christopher Greene’s foodie novel I’ll Never Be Long Gone is written like a recipe, but it also contains a moral:

It’s galling that some authors, such as, say, Anita Shreve, must constantly defend themselves from the pejorative “romance” label no matter how well they write, while romantic fluff like this can pass itself off as “literary fiction.” It’s the same in the kitchen, of course: Women just cook, but men are chefs.

Check, please.

From the Observer:

Our interview with American literary sensation Benjamin Kunkel (Review, last week) was accompanied by a panel of quotes from US reviews, supplied by his publisher. One, from Entertainment Weekly, read: ‘Kunkel has succeeded in crafting a voice of singular originality’ and omitted the next line ‘ - one you want to punch in the mouth.’

Ouch.

• Rodney Welch reviews Yiyun Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, for the Washington Post, comparing it favorably to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.

• Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe has launched a website.
• Jordan Rosenfeld reviews Daniel Olivas’ Devil Talk for Northern California’s KQED.
  

It’s a short week here at Moorishgirl. Aside from consuming gargantuan-sized meals, I plan on spending the next few days working on my novel. Have a happy Thanksgiving. I will see you back here on Monday, when I will have more lit news, cultural commentary, book reviews, recommendations, and giveaways.

The Dreams
Naguib Mahfouz
American University in Cairo Press
112pp.

Dreams are strange and wonderful things. Our own dreams, that is. Other people’s dreams, of course, are just fucking irritating. “And so then this huge purple-and-green snake rose up out of the stick of butter! And the snake had the face of Tom Cruise! Except it wasn’t Tom Cruise, it was my sister! And then the stick of butter turned into an M1 Abrams, and all of a sudden I’m on a battlefield, kind of like Vietnam except not exactly, more like Ecuador, maybe? Are there battlefields in Ecuador? Anyway, so then…”

Which is why I got a little nervous when I read in Raymond Stock’s translator’s introduction to The Dreams that the mini-narratives in this, Mahfouz’s latest book, are all based on dreams that Mahfouz himself actually had, and then developed into fiction. Cue the butter-snakes, I thought.

I needn’t have worried. Mahfouz has written more books than most people have read, has shown time and again that he knows his way around the narrative block, and well and truly earned his 1988 Nobel on the strength of both his early historical work (most notably the Cairo trilogy–Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) and his later, more allegorical and/or experimental work, including Miramar, The Journey of Ibn Fatouma and Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth.

(more…)

“One of my favorite modern works, Notes of a Desolate Man by Chu T’ien-Wen, perfectly captures the alienation and internal ruminations of many gay men; that it was written by a Taiwanese woman is no less remarkable, although Chu T’ien-Wen–acclaimed in her homeland as a novelist, intellectual, and screenwriter–has long been one of the best-kept literary secrets (at least in the West, surely due to so little of her work having been translated here). Free-flowing, non-narrative in the traditional sense, rich with metaphors and allusions, the narrator, Shao, reflects on, among other things, the death of a childhood friend from AIDS, Fellini, Levi-Strauss, and, ultimately, himself.”

Mitch Cullin is the author of seven books including A Slight Trick of the Mind and The Cosmology of Bing. His novel Tideland is now a motion picture by Terry Gilliam. Besides writing, he continues to work on projects with his partner Peter I. Chang, among them a documentary about Hisao Shinagawa and the forthcoming Howe Gelb concert film This Band Has No Members.

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

• The Seattle P.I.’s John Marshall has put together a list of books for holiday giving.

• Korash Huseyin, the editor of the Kashgar Literature Review, was sentenced by the Chinese government to three years’ imprisonment for writing a political fable.
• Anne Marie O’Connor has a lengthy profile of Marjane Satrapi in the Los Angeles Times.
• The Lit Saloon computes the ratio of fiction to non-fiction book reviews in the NYTBR, and finds it wanting.
• Of Gabriel García Márquez’s new novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Michiko Kakutani writes: “[It] is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years. It turns out not to have been worth the wait.”
• Syrian poet Adonis will visit Iran to give readings. He will travel with Venus Khoury-Ghata, his translator into French, and a fine poet in her own right.