Laila Lalami

I find myself these days taking a lot of notes for my new novel, but not quite daring to start the process of writing it. I am not sure why. I wonder if it is just a fear of new beginnings, or if it is something else. The truth is, I don’t mind too much. I’m rather enjoying this state of being in between books. There is pleasure in the pathless woods, Byron once wrote. And I suppose I am not in a rush to find a path yet for this new novel.

I am doing a reading tonight with Chris Abani and Rob Spillman, to help promote Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Literature. Here are the details:

Monday, June 15, 2009
7:00 PM
Reading with Chris Abani, Laila Lalami, and Rob Spillman
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, California

The anthology includes work by J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, and many others. I have an essay in it about North African literature. If you live in L.A., come on by and say hello!

I have an opinion piece at The Nation about the proposed $800 million cuts to the budget of the University of California. Here is how it begins:

In the fall of 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor of California, he famously told Fox News, “The first thing that you have to do is not worry about should we cut the programs or raise the taxes and all those things.” He did, in fact, appear to worry about these things a great deal, though he seemed consistently to reach the wrong conclusions. Schwarzenegger’s first act in office was to repeal an unpopular but highly effective vehicle-licensing fee, which would have generated $4.2 billion a year and would have helped to close the $8 billion deficit the state was facing. Because of California’s Proposition 13, which requires a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for any increases in tax rates, the state had very few easy options for increasing its revenue. Now, after five years of Schwarzenegger’s leadership, the deficit has ballooned to $24 billion.

And of course you can read the whole piece at the magazine’s website.

Gaiutra Bahadur reviewed my novel, Secret Son, for the New York Times this weekend. The paper ran a long excerpt from the first chapter. There are also reviews in the Brooklyn Rail (by Paul Charles Griffin) and in the summer issue of the Harvard Review (by Laura Albritton).

While I was in New York last month, I did an interview with Ed Champion for The Bat Segundo Show; that podcast is now available here.

I’ve been back for a few days now, but it seems all I’ve been doing is trying to catch up on all the work I had set aside before leaving, hence the lack of posting. The interview I did for KQED is now archived online. Recent reviews of Secret Son include pieces by Lara Killian in Popmatters and James Gibbons in Bookforum. An excerpt of my novel also appears in the Spring issue of the London-based Banipal magazine.

I had another great reading for Secret Son earlier tonight. Great audience, great questions. One elderly Moroccan woman, who had come out with her entire family, said that she had wanted to let out joy-cries when I started to speak. But her family told her that it wasn’t such a great idea, and that perhaps the bookstore customers might get alarmed. (!) It was also great to see some friends and readers I hadn’t seen since I toured for Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, four years ago.

In other news, the interview I did with Voice of America when I was in DC is now available online. And at NPR, Maud Newton recommends the late Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, a novel that is now part of the New York Review of Books Classics series, and for which I wrote an introduction.

My final stop on the Secret Son tour will be in the Bay Area today. Here are the details:

Monday, May 18, 2009
7:00 pm
Reading and signing
Barnes & Noble
6050 El Cerrito Plaza
El Cerrito, CA 94530

Please come by and say hello!

I want to say a big “Thank You” to all my friends who came out on Thursday night for the reading at Skylight. You know who you are.

I’ll be reading from my new novel, Secret Son, here, at home, in Los Angeles. Here are the details:

Thursday, May 14, 2009
7:30 PM
Reading and signing
Skylight Books
Los Angeles, California

Please come by and say hello!

I read from Secret Son at Books & Books in Coral Gables tonight. It was my first time at this bookstore and I really loved it. They have a wonderfully laid out space, with lots of room to walk around, and these really cool leather pouffes you can sit on if you want to get started reading, plus a little cafe, a lovely courtyard, and they even put up a sign before the reading begins! Thank you to everyone who came.