Month: April 2003

has been announced. No surprises: Donna Tartt, Zadie Smith, Carol Shields, Anne Donovan, Shena MacKay, and Valerie Martin.

“In 1857 a young Chinese man named Chen Pan decides to leave his country and immigrate to Cuba. He’d been promised that the drinking water there “was so rich with minerals that a man had twice his ordinary strength (and could stay erect for days) … that the Cuban women were eager and plentiful … that even the river fish jumped, unbidden, into frying pans.” He was also promised plenty of work. So he boards a ship, and after a three-month voyage that he barely survives, finally arrives at his new home, halfway around the world.”
The Atlantic‘s Jessica Murphy interviews Cristina Garcia, the author of Monkey Hunting which, like her previous novels, explores issues of Cuban identity.

ABC News finally caught on to what the literary world has been talking about for weeks: that librarians are almost single-handedly challenging restrictions on the right to read stemming from the PATRIOT act.

But Castro’s regime has a problem with that. Since the Cuban government went on a dissident hunt in the last few weeks, several journalists and writers have been incarcerated, among them Raul Rivera. This is a letter he wrote a while back, which the New York Times is reprinting.
Link via Bookslut.