I spend most of my days alone in my office, so it’s quite nice to venture out of the house and attend a cocktail party, particularly when that party happens to be the Oregon Literary Arts reception. The event was thrown to honor this year’s recipients of OLA fellowships in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. You can see a list of all the authors here.
The Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival opens this weekend. It will shows feature films and documentaries from and about Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen, with co-productions from Canada, France, Mexico, and the U.S. Yousry Nasrallah’s film adaptation of Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun will be shown, as well as the critically acclaimed Moroccan film The Grand Voyage. Check out the rest of the schedule.
A writer using the pseudonym James Pinocchio has just released his debut, um, novel, called A Million Little Lies, USA Today reports:
In A Million Little Lies, written surprisingly well by the pseudonymous James Pinocchio (real name: Pablo F. Fenjves), we meet a tortured young man who wakes in the back of a Manhattan cab with a combination lock puncturing his left ear - like Frey, who wrote that he woke up covered in vomit and blood, with four teeth missing and a hole in his cheek. Pinocchio is in great pain and has no memory of how he pierced his ear. He shows up at his parents’ posh home, only to be shipped off to rehab.
This morning the Christian Science Monitor announced that reporter Jill Carroll was released. Finally there is some good news from that God-forsaken mess known as the “liberation” of Iraq. It is a relief to know that this brave woman will at last be reunited with her loved ones.
I cannot, however, rejoice fully, knowing that there are many more hundreds of victims of kidnappings–some of them reporters like Jill, others embassy staff, and still others just faceless, nameless people that happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. This stupid war has got to stop.
A new book by Natalie Zemon Davis chronicles the life of Hasan Al-Wazan, the 16th-century traveler (and author) whose life inspired Amin Maalouf’s amazing novel Leon L’Africain (or Leo Africanus.)
Using hazy and sometimes contradictory evidence, Davis beautifully renders the chapters of Al Wazzan’s life: his birth in Islamic Granada in the 1480s; his family’s flight as Christian armies expelled the Moors from Spain; his education in the madrassas of Fez, Morocco, and his years traveling as a diplomat in North Africa and the Levant, among the Berbers, Arabs, Jews and black Africans who populated those lands. She writes of his kidnapping by Spanish pirates who offered him as tribute to Pope Leo X in Rome; his christening as “Giovanni Leone” by the pope; his life of independent scholarship in Bologna and his departure from Italy after nearly a decade, during which he produced “The Description of Africa” and other works.
Read Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s review of Trickster Travels in The Los Angeles Times.
Speaking of visual art: Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada will have her first-ever solo show in New York at The Kitchen, a non-profit space on 19th Street in Chelsea. You can view details of the show, which opens next week, by visiting the website and clicking on “calendar,” and then “exhibitions.”
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the ‘Without Boundary‘ show currently on view at MoMA. Now in a New York Observer piece, Tyler Green reports that some of the artists connected with the show are unhappy about it, including Shirin Neshat, who says:
“My immediate reaction was, how could anyone today discuss art made by contemporary Muslim artists and not speak about the role the subjects of religion and contemporary politics play in the artists’ minds?” Ms. Neshat said. “For some of us, our art is interconnected to the development of our personal lives, which have been controlled and defined by politics and governments. Some artists, including Marjane Satrapi and myself, are ‘exiled’ from our country because of the problematic and controversial nature of our work.”
Green points out that it’s “highly unusual” for artists included in a MoMA show to criticize “the most powerful art museum in the world.” You can read more about the artists’ frustrations and MoMA’s stance on the merging of art and politics here.
Boldtype #30 is now available, and the theme for this issue is “Secrets.” In the magazine, my pal Mark Sarvas reviews Sheila Heti’s Ticknor, which he’s recommended to me several times by phone, and which I plan on reading soon.
As has been widely reported, Luis Alberto Urrea’s excellent novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, has been awarded the Kiriyama Prize. The book is now out in paperback, so you really have no excuse anymore for not reading it.
Related: Review: The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
As our nation is in the grips of its once-per-decade, obligatory-hand-wringing about immigration, Sonia Nazario’s book couldn’t come at a better time. Nazario, you’ll remember, was the Los Angeles Times journalist who covered the story of a young Honduran boy’s journey to North Carolina to find his immigrant mother. The CSM has a positive review of the book, Enrique’s Journey.
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