Laila Lalami

I have a brief column on the current infatuation with ‘ethnic’ authors over at Moby.

I missed this in last week’s Washington Post: The Writing Life, this time by Mark Haddon. In other news, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has won the Guardian’s children’s fiction prize.

Jonathan Yardley reviews Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter. Shah is the acclaimed journalist who went undercover a few years ago to investigate the condition of Afghani women under the Taliban (the resulting documentary was Beneath the Veil). Shah’s book is about her search for the mythical Afghanistan of her father’s stories:

“The people of Kabul,” Shah writes, “call the capital Kabul jan: beloved Kabul. We call it that too, for this is where we belong.” But belonging to a place isn’t easy if you’ve never been there, if all you know about the place is the myth that has grown out of all those stories you heard. Since childhood Shah has been haunted by “the questions that for years I haven’t even dared to ask my own heart. Does the Afghanistan of our myths really exist? Are we still Afghans? And if I am not an Afghan, what am I?”

Yardley gives the book a positive review, as have others.

Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues has been staged for the first time in Pakistan:

[Producer] Risbi said the show, which features three women talking about their vaginas and is split into sections such as “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?” and “The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could,” had received a “mixed reaction.”
“I think a lot of people were outraged,” she told BBC World Service’s Everywoman programme.
“A couple walked out saying ‘why can’t we use other parts of a woman’s body apart from the vagina.’

The full text of the poem George Bush wrote his wife is here. Would you care to take a stab at a parody?
Via TLL.

AlterNet has an unfair and unbalanced list of 50 reasons why you shouldn’t vote for Arnold, though, really, only one should do: Pete Wilson runs his campaign.

Via Publishers’ Lunch I hear that The Da Vinci Code will be made into a movie, which will be directed/produced by middle of the middle of the mainstream team of Ron Howard/Brian Grazer.

in the Guardian today.

My preferred method is Cuban coffee: Make espresso with 4 spoonfuls of La Llave coffee. When the coffee is ready, add 4 spoonfuls of sugar in the carafe. Mix well. Makes 4 cups. But you’ll only need one.

David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who is known for his liberal views, and whose new book Enemy Aliens, about the USA PATRIOT Act, is now in bookstores, knows how to throw a book party: He invites the man who is credited with crafting much of the controversial law. That man is Viet Dinh, another Georgetown University law professor. The article tries to be funny by setting up the debate between those two. Worth a read for the contrast between the two professors’ views on civil liberties.