Amiry Memoir
NPR’s Liane Hansen talks to architect and memoirist Suad Amiry about her new book, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, which humorously describes what life in Ramallah is like.
NPR’s Liane Hansen talks to architect and memoirist Suad Amiry about her new book, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, which humorously describes what life in Ramallah is like.
PhRMA, a lobbying group for drug manufacturers, recently commissioned a thriller that would hype the dangers of buying prescription drugs from Canada. Slate‘s Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer report:
The original plot of The Spivak Conspiracy, the book’s working title for a time, revolved around an attack on the United States by villainous Croatian Muslims, whose weapon of choice is tainted drugs sold to Americans through Canadian pharmacies. It’s against the law to reimport American drugs. But some drugs cost as little as one-tenth of their U.S. price when purchased in Canada, and a lot of Americans have been hopping over the border to fill their prescriptions or buying drugs from Canadian pharmacies via the Internet. Last year, they bought nearly $1 billion worth of imports, cutting into the drug companies’ profits.
Except the writers didn’t deliver the novel the lobbying group expected. (It did not mesh with PhRMA’s aesthetic sensibilities, I’m sure.) So the two authors rewrote their novel…and made a drug company the villain. Needless to say, PhRMA is not happy. More here.
The latest installment of the Lannan Foundation’s Readings and Conversations series features Edwidge Danticat with Junot Díaz this Wednesday, November 30, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Details here.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I’m a huge fan of both Danticat and Díaz’s work. If any of you are able to attend, do please write in and tell us how it was.
The latest installment of Powell’s Bookcast features Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, Uzodinma Iweala, and local boy Marc Acito.