Laila Lalami

Today’s giveaway is Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally, an anthology of original work by women who immigrated to the United States during childhood, or were born to a foreign parent here.

Here’s how it works. Send me an email with the subject line “Waking Up American.” Please include your street address. We here at Moorishgirl operate on a first-come, first-served basis. Good luck to all.

Update: Natasha T. from Maryland wins the book.

I met Mandu Sen at a reading I gave in Boston earlier this month and we began corresponding shortly afterwards. She sent me this guest column about Amir Peretz, the Moroccan-born politician who’s been making headlines in Israel of late:

The rioters in France were not the only people from North Africa to make the news recently.

Amir Peretz’s election last week as the head of the dovish Israeli Labor party is a dramatic change in the Israeli political map. Or perhaps it is no change at all, but is yet another expression of the political chaos Israel has been in ever since the collapse of the Oslo agreements in 2000. It is hard to tell as of yet. He just won a vote among tens of thousands of voters. For his ascent to be a real and lasting change, he will have to win the vote of millions in a pending national election and create a functioning coalition in parliament (Most coalitions in Israel don’t function. Not well, anyway.)

What is certain is that it is interesting, very interesting, and to those of us who care about such things, even very exciting. See, people like Amir Peretz aren’t supposed to get so far in Israeli politics.

Amir Peretz was born to a Jewish family in 1953 in Bojad, Morocco. His family immigrated to Israel in 1957, part of a wave of immigration that brought hundreds of thousands of North African Jews to Israel. The Israeli government had a policy of sending new immigrants to temporary settlements in areas that they wanted to populate. Peretz’s family was settled in such a place in the South of the country, away from the economic and cultural heart in Tel Aviv. Like many of his background, Peretz’s father, who was a community leader back in Bojad, found employment only as a factory worker.

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Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation has been getting lots of buzz. The novel is about a precocious young boy who’s conscripted to serve in the army of an unnamed African nation, to fight in its civil war.

Beast has received rave reviews in the Washington Post, the New Zealand Herald, and, today, in the New York Times. A friend emailed me the other day to say he’d really enjoyed it, which piqued my interest. I’ll have to get through all this, first, though:

Portland writer and small press publisher Kevin Sampsell has written a guest column on author appreciation over at Beatrice. I want a Sam Lipsyte pin.

The winners of the National Book Awards have been announced. Unsurprisingly, the non-fiction award went to Joan Didion’s universally acclaimed The Year of Magical Thinking. In fiction, the winner was William T. Vollman for Europe Central. I bet Ed is happy with the choice.

Add Shi Tao to the long list of writers who are considered threats because of what they say:

The Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao will not be in New York on Tuesday November 22 to collect his Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Press Freedom Award – he is serving a 10-year prison sentence with forced labour in Chishan Prison, Yuanjiang City.

Read about it here.

As has been widely reported, the Whitbread Prize shortlist has been announced. The finalists are Nick Hornby, for A Long Way Down; Salman Rushdie for Shalimar the Clown; Ali Smith for The Accidental; and Christopher Wilson for The Ballad of Lee Cotton.

The Guardian seems shocked that Salman Rushdie made the cut. I suppose it’s become fashionable to knock him, but I really enjoyed Shalimar the Clown. With the exception of one or two missteps towards the end, I thought it was a far better book than much of what I’ve read this year.

By the way, the Whitbread also has a first novel category. The finalists for that are Tash Aw for The Harmony Silk Factory; Diana Evans for 26a; Peter Hobbs for The Short Day Dying; and Rachel Zadok for Gem Squash Tokoloshe.

This week, Morocco marked the fiftieth anniversary of its independence from France and Spain. The official ceremony commemorating the event was held at the Rabat Mausoleum, which is right next door to twelfth-century ruins from the era of Yacoub El Mansour.

My love for coffee is pretty well documented around these parts. I have a particular weakness for Cuban coffee, but was intrigued to learn about Canned Coffee. Check it out. Several writers have written reviews for them of various Japanese coffees (!).

The second half of my adventures with Pinky is now online.