new lit mag
Check out Land-Grant College Review. Their debut issue features the very talented Aimee Bender and Jonathan Tel, among many others.
Check out Land-Grant College Review. Their debut issue features the very talented Aimee Bender and Jonathan Tel, among many others.
For those of you in the Los Angeles area, here’s a reading you won’t want to miss: Abdellatif Laabi will be at Dawson’s this afternoon at 4 pm. The event is part of a series curated by my friend Andrew. Here’s the event description:
Poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist Abdellatif Laabi is one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed of contemporary North African writers. He was born in 1942 in Fes (Morocco). In 1966 he founded the magazine Souffles which would play an important role in the renewal of Moroccan cultural life. He created the publishing house Atlantes and also the Association de Recherche Culturelle – the activities of which did not please the Moroccan government of the time. Abdellatif Laabi was arrested and spent eight years in jail from 1972 to 1980. He settled in France in 1985. He has published Le Soleil se Meurt in 1992, L’Etreinte du Monde in 1993 and Le Spleen de Casablanca in 1996. His novel, Rue du Retour, has been translated into English and published by Readers International. In 1999 he was awarded the Fonlon Nichols Prize by the African Literature Association and the Wallonie-Bruxelles poetry prize. The World’s Embrace: The Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laabi (City Lights Books, 2003) consists of poems selected by Laabi from three books published in French over the past ten years. A novel, Le Fond de la Jarre, was published by Gallimard in 2002. The World’s Embrace from City Lights, is his latest book in English. For more on Laabi, see his Swarthmore entry. Some of his poetry (in French) is available here.
Doors open at 4. Readings at 4:30. Dawson’s Book Shop is located at 535 N. Larchmont Blvd between Beverly Blvd and Melrose Blvd in the Larchmont district south of Hollywood, CA. Bookstore Tel: 323-469-2186
Terry Gross interviews Diana Abu-Jaber on NPR. Abu-Jaber’s new novel, Crescent, came out a few weeks ago. It’s amusing (or sad, depending on your outlook) how little time is devoted to the novel and how much to all things Mid-Eastern, including the political.
Thanks to Neils for the tip.
The Observer‘s Sara Nelson tries to figure out why publishers won’t reveal their numbers:
“Nobody talks about publishing numbers because they are so unbelievably low. How many authors really make a living wage from their advances? How many books actually earn out, or pay their authors anything beyond the initial advance? And how many copies sold turn any particular book into a best-seller? Those are the questions all people interested in publishing think they want to know and their answers are the ones publishing executives go out of their way not to reveal. A book can be on the best-seller lists for a couple of weeks and have sold 30,000 copies. Within publishing, that’s a reasonably good showing, but compared to, say, the music or movie or magazine business, where sales are measured in millions, it seems like nothing. When told, for example, that last year’s hit novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, sold about 100,000 copies in hardcover, one editor of a huge-circulation monthly gasped and said, “If I only sold 100,000 magazines, I’d get fired.” The fact that very few people in this country read books is publishing’s dirty little secret, and it’s one executives are, understandably, desperate to keep.”
Another link from Moby.