Month: April 2005

“Part-Bombay travelogue, part-investigative journalism, all-hilarity, Justine Hardy’s Bollywood Boy is one of my favorite books about my favorite movie-making machine and the *only* book about the industry’s light-eyed heartthrob, Hritik Roshan,” Pooja says. “While she makes no new observations (that songs and dance stand in for sex or that the industry has possible Indian Mafia connections, for example), the book is an account of a year-long comedy-of-errors in which Hardy tried to score an interview with Roshan. Along the way, she meets a handful of interesting characters, real people whose connections with Bollywood are deep and genuine. What’s so refreshing about this book – other than the fact that’s it’s one of few non-academic books on Bollywood – is Justine’s respect for India and its entertainment. She loves the kitsch and craziness as much as I do.”

Pooja Makhijani is the author of Mama’s Saris and editor of Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America.

I somehow managed to miss the news that Orhan Pamuk had a new book out. So the Guardian review of Istanbul was a delight and a surprise. It’s a memoir of Pamuk’s hometown.

Orhan Pamuk, an International IMPAC Award winner, inspires love and hostility in equal measure at home. Recently, the governor of S ordered that Pamuk’s books be collected from libraries and bookshops in his province and destroyed. Instant condemnation in the national press of this ‘barbarity’ demonstrated an enlightened majority asserting itself. The governor must have been furious when no books by Pamuk were found, for sale or burning. Subsequently, the author’s sales have soared.

It is fascinating, therefore, to uncover the boyhood and obsessions of this quiet, self-absorbed 52-year-old. The book centres around a solemn toddler trapped in the pressure cooker of his family’s squabbles. Each wing of the secular clan occupies a floor of the Fifties Pamuk Apt block overlooking the glittering Bosporus. The household is ruled from the bed of his overweight grandmother, who mourns her sons’ squandering of the family fortune, his aunts’ and uncles’ quarrels, his parents’ teetering marriage and the devotions of their Muslim servants.

You can read an excerpt here.

The first of the Loggernaut Reading Series took place last Thursday at Gravy, in North Portland, with Chelsey Johnson, Alicia Cohen, and Charles D’Ambrosio reading from their work. The Loggernaut website also features interviews, one of which is with the poet and translator Ammiel Alcalay. The conversation caught my eye because of Alcalay’s great choices in terms of Arab fiction that’s out there but not getting the attention it deserves:

This [what to recommend, Ed.] is a tough question because we really only have the barest minimum available in translation. Having said that, if one digs a little further, some things can be found. The poet and translator Khaled Mattawa has done some excellent work in translating the Iraqi poets Saadi Yousef and Fadhil Azzawi. Many works by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish are available, particularly his prose masterpiece Memory for Forgetfulness, in Ibrahim Muhawi’s extraordinary translation and presentation. There is an excellent Penguin book of Modern Arabic poetry translated by Abdullah al-Udhari that gives a very good overview; unfortunately, it’s out of print but can be found in a good on-line search. A recent bilingual edition of the great poet Adonis, translated by Shawkat Toorawa, presents a kind of model of how such things should be done. We have our own treasure, Etel Adnan, an Arab poet who happens to write in American English. Some Arab poets, like Abdellatif Laabi, have written in French, and his work is available through City Lights in a book called The World’s Embrace for which I wrote an introduction. In the UK, there is a superb journal called Banipal that only publishes contemporary Arabic literature in translation. It is the best place to get a wider sense of what is going on, to read younger, lesser known writers. Having said all of this, we are still very far from really getting into a deeper sense of what is going on.

More about Alcalay here.

Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network sends us this link to the latest e-panel he’s moderated. This one puts together two Southern women writers and two lit bloggers to discuss (what else?) labels. The writers are Quinn Dalton and Tayari Jones (both of whom have second books out shortly) and the bloggers are Carrie Frye (of Tingle Alley) and Gwenda Bond (of Shaken and Stirred). A small sample:

Quinn Dalton: I guess cross-shelving works well if they are going to stock more than one copy of your book.

Carrie Frye: I can see pros and cons. Malaprop’s has a huge Gay/Lesbian section, and it’s meant as a service to customers.

Dan Wickett: I think at times it makes it difficult to find certain authors.

Tayari Jones: Well, I think only difficult for people who don’t really look for these writers.

Gwenda Bond: Anything that helps the audience find the books. It’d be great if one big bookstore with no categories did, but in practice I doubt it would work.

Tayari Jones: It kills me how people say, I was looking for Toni Morrison and I had to go to the black section!” I always wonder how many years they’ve been shopping and only now realized that the “Literature” section has no diversity.

In related author news, Quinn Dalton recently contributed a guest essay on Beatrice.com about whether authors should hire indy publicists.

RAWI, the Arab American writers’ association, will host its first conference June 3-5 in New York City. The indomitable Helen Thomas, veteran White House correspondent, will give the keynote address. Panels, discussions, and workshops will be held on such varied topics as scriptwriting, language teaching, hybridity, and criticism. I will be moderating a panel on literary blogs and I still need one more person to round out the discussion. So, if you are a lit blogger, and are Arab American or interested in issues of concern to Arab American writers, send me an email with a bio at llalami AT yahoo DOT com.

Well, that’s it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday. I will be back on Monday with more news, a review, and another edition of Goodies to Go. Have a good weekend!