Month: August 2003

Doris Lessing calls Tony Blair a “rabbit” and reminisces about a meeting with Henry Kissinger during which he talked about a “kitten bomb.”

is here. Sample item: “General Richard Sanchez said that he was scaling back aggressive roundups of Iraqis in the search for Saddam Hussein and Baath Party loyalists because he was afraid that “maybe our iron-fisted approach to the conduct of ops was beginning to alienate Iraqis. I started to get those sensings from multiple sources.” Someone give this man a prize.

Orhan Pamuk writes about Istanbul for the BBC’s Sense of the City series.

I just found out that my friend Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has made the 2003 O. Henry awards for her story “The American Embassy,” which appeared in the Canadian journal Prism International. You can read an excerpt of the story here.

Here are a few places where you can read the writing of the lovely and amazing Ngozi Adichie: “Half of a Yellow Sun” in the current issue of Zoetrope All-Story (it originally appeared in Lit Pot.) “Heart Is Where the Home Was,” a non-fiction piece for Topic Magazine. And of course the novel Purple Hibiscus, which comes out in October.

Wole Soyinka describes adapting and setting up the satirical play “Ubu Roi” by Alfred Jarry, and its relevance for a Zimbabwe ruled by Robert Mugabe (and, indeed, for the Uganda of Idi-Amin or the Zaire of Mobutu or, or, or…)

Looks like Esquire reversed its decision to have Jayson Blair do a review of “Shattered Glass.”