Month: May 2005

I missed Anne-Marie O’Connor’s article on Mid-East books when it came out in the Los Angeles Times last month, but here it is, reprised in the Register-Guard. It’s essentially about the current craze in U.S. publishing for all things Middle-Eastern:

Charlotte Abbott, the book news editor at Publishers Weekly, said the demand for [books on the Middle-East] has been driven by a widespread curiosity about Middle Eastern countries in the news since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Publishers really woke up to the fact that there really weren’t a lot of books that could satisfy that kind of hunger,” Abbott said. “Publishers went out and pursued acquiring those books.”

And so O’Connor briefly rounds up a whole bunch of current titles, including Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning, Mohammed Moulessehoul/Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Roya Hakakian’s Journey From The Land of No, and Afschineh Latifi’s Even After All This Time, among others.

Amid all this hodge-podge of fiction books and memoirs, the only clear point is that “the Mid-East is hot in publishing right now,” a point that I’ll concede easily enough, even if that attention seems myopic to me at times. What troubles me is the tone in the latter end of the article, which seems to intimate that there’s one or two interesting books coming out of a country:

In Saudi Arabia, a male author, Yousef Mohaimeed, has written a book called “The Bottle.”

This is just bloody ridiculous. People in the Arab world have been writing books long before the U.S. publishing industry took an interest in their stories.

Interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian, profiling young Japanese author Hitomi Kanehara, whose first, best-selling novel, Snakes and Earrings, has supposedly shocked the country with its “violent and graphic opposition to the traditional cultural expectations of how Japanese women should be.” Reporter Angela Neustatter writes:

Kanehara is part of a burgeoning subculture of contemporary women expressing the same loud, emphatic message through fashion, graphics, comics, subversive graffiti, photography and fiction. It underscores a growing generational divide, a significant shift in values and attitudes.

Only later in the article does the trend supposedly embodied by this new author get placed in a more historical context. Worth a look.

Moorishgirl pal and sometime guest blogger Jim Ruland has a piece on NPR’s Day to Day, called “Vets? No, But They Write What They Know.” In addition to being a fine writer and punk rock enthusiast, Jim is also a Navy veteran. In his most recent incarnation, he is teaching a composition class for Santa Monica Community College. He designed the course specifically for veterans, except that part was left out of the catalog description, resulting in an unexpected enrollment: most of the students were teenagers, most of them were female, none of them were vets. Listen to what happened next.

Over at the Herald, Alastair Mabbot discusses first books and their importance in the artist’s career.

It’s the music business cliche known to everyone: an artist gets his whole life to write a first album, but a few months to write the second.
That’s usually true of books as well. There’s a unique quality to debut novels, most of which were written with as much passion, intensity and conviction as an author can hope to experience, but usually without any hope of being published.
“This is something they might well have been working on for as long as they can remember,” says Pru Rowlandson. “Whereas, the second book, most of them manage to get out in a couple of years. It is also likely to be the most autobiographical thing you ever write.”

I guess I went about it the wrong way, then. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits isn’t autobiographical in the traditional sense (I’ve never tried to cross the Mediterranean on a boat, never hustled for a job, etc.) while the novel I’m working on now is much more personal. One of the two main characters is a Moroccan woman who comes to the United States to study, for example, and the other is a man with a very conflicted relationship with his father.