Month: May 2005

Over at the Guardian, Caryl Phyllips reports on how he and Russell Banks climbled Mount Kilimanjaro earlier this year.

Russell and I first talked about this climb in Saratoga Springs during the 2004 summer programme of the New York State Writers Institute. One night, in a bar called The Parting Glass, we found ourselves bragging to each other, and the assembled writing students, about how we had both climbed Kilimanjaro. I had done so three times, and Russell once, but it was some time now since either of us had been on the mountain. Also, Russell had gone up the easier Marangu route, and over drinks I was trying to introduce him to the idea that the more difficult Machame route was the way to go. Predictably, by the time the barman called last orders we had talked ourselves into an expedition.

I read the article with a mixture of awe and dread. In one of my weaker moments, I promised Alex (an inveterate hiker/backpacker) that someday within the next ten years, I would hike up Kilimanjaro with him. We’re now three years into that promise, so I have some time yet, but I can’t imagine how I will do it–I can barely summon enough energy or excitement to do Mount Whitney. Besides, I find reading about the Kilimanjaro hike much more exciting.

Over at the Telegraph, Philip Henscher reviews Tim Winton’s The Turning, and wonders:

What is this book? Is it a novel? Is it a collection of stories with recurrent characters? Well, it might just be an example of a new literary genre. Genres don’t come into existence every day, but in the past few years a good number of writers have started exploring the previously blank territory that lies between the collection of short stories and the novel proper. It starts to look like a new form altogether.

Why worry what to call it? I mean–Shouldn’t we be asking if it’s any good? But Henscher’s point isn’t really about quality. It’s more about a trend he’s noticed over the last 10 years:

first noticed that something was in the air when I started being asked to judge competitions for novels, about 10 years ago or so. In one competition after another, a book came up for consideration and someone on the panel would say: “This is a terribly good book: but isn’t it really a collection of short stories, rather than a novel?” Judging the 2001 Booker Prize, for instance, we finally shortlisted two books of this sort – Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Ali Smith’s Hotel World. Another writer on that shortlist, David Mitchell, clearly finds the form congenial; his first book, Ghostwritten, and his third, Cloud Atlas, are constructed out of a succession of near-unrelated narratives.

These, and others, such as Rachel Cusk’s beautiful The Lucky Ones, shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel prize, don’t follow exactly the same tactics. The Dark Room is three separate stories, bound together by a single theme; despite their lack of connection, you couldn’t really excerpt one of them for an anthology. Hotel World is a single narrative, told from such different perspectives that the reader does have the sense of starting freshly with each episode.

This resonates particularly strongly with me because my debut book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, has been described by one reader as “neither fish nor fowl,” an expression I tried my hardest to take as a compliment. My publisher has billed it as a short story collection, but in its overall themes it feels more like a novel where the chapters build on one another. Even while I was focused on details of the individual narratives, I always had the overall picture in mind. So it’ll be interesting to see, when the book comes out, whether this is something that readers and reviewers respond to.

Rejection is part of the writer’s life and so Catherine Wald’s book, The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph by Twenty Top Authors is of particular interest to those who’ve experienced the sting of the unsigned rejection (or, worse, an empty SASE.) My personal favorite remains one by C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic, which managed to be both flattering and insulting in just two lines. This week’s giveaway is for you writers. The first person to email me a request at llalami AT yahoo DOT com will receive the book. Good luck.

Update: The winner is L. Alves from Brazil.

Shaun Bythell, the Scottish bookseller mentioned in this post about book burning, wrote to me to explain why he’d chosen this method for disposing of unsold volumes:

There was a good reason for burning the books, and it wasn’t based on censorship or oppression. At the moment we currently send the stock we cannot sell to charity shops but some of it is in such bad condition they won’t take it – this we put in a skip and it ends up in a landfill site.

Of course book burning is not a more environmentally friendly solution than landfill but this is where most second-hand books with no value currently end up. My argument for having this event was based on the fact that if the alternative fate of the books was to rot in a hole in the ground why not do something more interesting and use them to make a fire sculpture as a publicity stunt to get people talking about the problem, and to raise the profile of Wigtown as Scotland’s National Book Town. Richard Booth who set up Hay on Wye as Booktown about 30 years ago once told me that he got far more press coverage from declaring war on the Welsh Tourist Board than from setting up a successful Book Town, and to some degree I agree that the media engages far more enthusiastically with a controversial story which polarises opinion than one of small rural town which is enjoying economic regeneration. So, yes it was a publicity stunt rather than a practical measure and it has worked – a full page in the Financial Times, half a page in the Sunday Times, a quarter page in the Sunday Herald and a five minute interview on Radio Scotland all of which mention Wigtown and discuss the issue of “dead” books.

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Chiamasta is a three-day literary festival celebrating South Asian writing, and it takes place May 20-23, 2005. Here’s the blurb I received by email.

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) invites you to our third annual literary event, celebrating the works of South Asian writers.

In this event, we explore and celebrate chiasmata, spontaneous connections that spawn diversity and birth the motley spaces we inhabit. Spaces between the old and the new, the established and the subversive, the familiar and the novel. Spaces that serve as bridges towards a new self.

Participants include Amitava Kumar, Abha Dawesar, Ginu Kamani, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Meera Nair, Tahira Naqvi, S. Mitra Kalita, Bushra Rehman, Shahnaz Habib, Prageeta Sharma, Alka Bhargava, Anna Ghosh, Pooja Makhijani and Neesha Meminger.

What: Literary festival including two evenings of readings and discussion, a writing workshop for emerging writers, and a panel discussion of South Asians in publishing

When: May 20, 21, 22

Where: the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Queens Museum of Art

Please visit http://www.sawcc.org/chiasmat.html for further details.

For more information, and to reserve your spot for the writing workshop, email: sawccmail@yahoo.com

In a previous incarnation, I worked as a thesaurus editor for the Getty, so it was a special treat to hear about the Selected Shorts event at the Getty.

What: Selected Shorts: The Love Story Weekend
Where: The Getty Center, Los Angeles.
When: Friday
Who: A reading of Tessa Hadley’s “Mother’s Son” by Shohreh Aghdashloo (“House of Sand and Fog”) and “Cultural Relativity” by Regina King (“Ray”).

Enjoy.