Laila Lalami

I could have sworn this had already been done, but maybe I’m mistaken: The Vagina Monologues has been staged in Arabic by Lebanese playwright Lina Khoury. You can listen to an interview with her on NPR.

Remember the babies-out-of-incubators stories that came out of Kuwait back in 1991? Or, for that matter, the reports in 2002 that Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger? Well, you can safely put that whole piece by Amir Taheri about Jews in Iran being forced to wear yellow insignia into that same folder labeled “Lies to Sell the War.” What’s fascinating to me is that Dan Rather was forced to quit CBS because of poor journalism, but odds are that Amir Taheri will continue to write for places like the Wall Street Journal or to appear on CNN. And he hasn’t even issued a retraction.

Earlier this week, Powell’s unveiled its special summer promotion: a series of collectible author trading cards. There are sixteen in all. Number 1 is Aimee Bender, 2 is John Berendt, 3 is Billy Collins. The others will be announced daily, on the Powell’s blog. I wonder who lucky number 7 will be…

Jim Ruland has a piece about Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman on NPR. He describes the novel’s tortuous history, and talks to its publisher as well as to a local bookseller about its newfound success.

Novelist and short-story writer Edwidge Danticat contributes an opinion piece to The Progressive about the immigration protests of last month, and what they say about our society:

At the heart of these protests is also the obligation of a country that needs, yet despises, those who comprise a large percentage of its fundamental workforce. Should we desire in our midst a group of people only when they’re willing to do for less pay the work that our own citizens find too grueling, too demeaning, or too hazardous? The moral question aside, what does it say about our own societal structure that we cannot within our own borders make these jobs more appealing and more humane for our own citizens?

The bottom line is we’d like our immigrants to be disposable, to work when we need them, then disappear when we don’t.

Please read it all here.

RAWI, the association of Arab-American writers, has announced the winners of its 2006 Literary Prose Competition. They are: Barbara Bedway for “The Hungers of the World,” Patricia Sarrafian Ward for “Remember,” and Nada Sneige Fuleihan for “Photo Opportunity.”

In latest issue of the London Review of Books, Daniel Soar suggests a wholly novel way of looking at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter to George W. Bush: arrange it alphabetically.

[The letter] addresses various specific issues – Iraq, Guantanamo, American double standards over human rights abuses – but more generally tries to appeal to a shared religious sense. That attempt was bound to fail, but what Ahmadinejad does share with Bush is a way with grand concepts. To avoid being confused by the letter’s unfamiliar catechistic structure, it helps to arrange its four thousand translated words in alphabetical order, which makes the whole thing read more straightforwardly. There’s a certain amount of fiery grandiloquence (‘abandon abduction abide ablaze’), but there are also moments of telegraphic irony (‘administration’s advised advocated affairs affected Afghanistan’) and moments of pathos (‘forcing foreign forgiveness’). An alphabeticised Bush also comes across much more poetically than the one we’re used to: in January’s State of the Union address his mention of ‘faithful faithful fallen fallen falling Fallujah’ was remarkably to the point. It isn’t so clear what he meant when he said ‘eliminate elite embryos’. Was this evidence of new thinking on Roe v. Wade?

Also check out Nicholas Spice’s review of Philip Roth’s new novel.

The New York Times features a profile of a Muslim woman…and she’s not veiled! And she works! And her husband’s a stay-at-home dad to their two kids! Oh, but wait. They have the profile because she’s just won Nick at Nite’s ‘Funniest Mom in America’ contest.

The May/June issue of the Boston Review is now out, and portions of it are available freely online.

I bookmarked Maud Newton’s interview with Rupert Thomson yesterday and now that the house is empty and I’m alone, I finally sat down and read it. I loved reading Thomson’s insights about his writing process:

I tend to write at least six entire drafts of a book, and sometimes as many as twelve. By a draft, I mean writing the book from beginning to end, no matter how long that takes. I will often go back and forwards as well, within a single draft. By the time I reach the third or fourth draft, I have a good idea of the final shape of the book, but I still might not have found that extra level that’s crucial if the book is to have the depth I want it to have. The best novels are like cities built on cities built on cities. Once you start digging, there’s no end to what you can discover.

The actual writing process feels a lot like sculpture. I start with something amorphous and vague — the equivalent of a piece of wood or marble — and do my best to find out what it’s supposed to be.

I feel like screaming, “I’m not alone! I’m not alone!”