Month: July 2005

Maud Newton‘s latest book review appears in the New York Times. It’s a critique of Josh Emmon’s The Loss of Leon Meed, which she finds “promising but rickety.”

Novelist Edwidge Danticat contributes an Op-Ed piece to the Albany Times Union, in which she compares the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 with that of Iraq. The war that was supposed to bring democracy to the Carribbean island lasted 19 years, though its effects would last many more years. Now, Danticat writes,

Few Americans are aware their country once occupied ours, and for such a long time. This is not surprising, for as one Haitian proverb suggests, while those who give the blows can easily forget, the ones who carry the scar have no choice but to remember.

While it takes American leaders and their armed enforcers just a few hours, days, weeks, months to rewrite another sovereign nation’s history, it takes more than 90 years to overcome the devastations caused by such an operation, to replace the irreplaceable, the dead lost, the spirits quelled, to steer an entire generation out of the shadows of dependency, to meet fellow citizens across carefully constructed divides and become halfway whole again.

Read the entire piece here.

I’ve been raving about Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel, Desertion for quite a while on this blog, so it was a delight to see it get a nice write up in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Scostman has a lengthy profile of Edinburgh-based Sudanese writer and inaugural Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela, whose new novel Minaret comes out here in the States in October. Yes, the inevitable comparison to Zadie Smith is made. (Reporters seem unable to avoid it whenever they see a black or mixed-race writer.)

E.L. Doctorow’s City of God has been translated into Persian.

AK Comics, the Egyptian company that started a series of comic books on Mid-East superheroes was present at Comic-Con, and drew some attention from convention goers.

Related:
Mid-East Superheroes