Some articles from the July/August issue of Poets and Writers are now available online, including a profile of Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart and an interview with Chris Abani about his novella Becoming Abigail. You might also like to read C. Max Magee’s piece on the new book-cataloguing website Library Thing, which brings joy to book nerds everywhere.
Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, a rather damning portrait of the Bush administration, has been getting loads of attention, but I must say I wasn’t particularly interested because, really, how many times does one have to be told about the lies and corruption and belligerence of this administration? That’s precisely the point that Gary Kamiya addresses in his review for Salon:
At this point, one could forgive readers for asking, “How many more damning portraits of the Bush administration do we need?” From yellowcake to Joe Wilson to Abu Ghraib, the list of Bush scandals and outrages is endless, but nothing ever seems to happen. As the journalist Mark Danner has pointed out, the problem is not lack of information: The problem is that Americans can’t, or won’t, acknowledge what that information means.
More of this thorough review here.
I have a very special giveaway for one lucky reader this week: A signed first edition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. This graphic memoir tells of Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her closeted gay father, Bruce, and of the discovery of her own sexuality. It’s set in a small Pennsylvania town, where Bruce Bechdel ran a funeral home (the ‘fun home’ of the title), where he taught high school English, and where he spent years restoring his house, an 1857 Gothic revival house. It’s an honest and bittersweet portrait of a father-daughter relationship, and easily the best graphic memoir of this year.
The title page reads “To a Moorishgirl.com reader” and is signed by Alison Bechdel. (You can thank Alex for this. I was in DC that night, giving a reading myself, but he took an extra copy and had it signed.) The first reader to write gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Bechdel.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded. Update: The winner is Sheila O. from Jackson, MS.
The board of the Miami-Dade County school district has voted 6-3 to remove certain books from its libraries, including one titled Vamos A Cuba! which depicts Cuban children wearing communist uniforms. The district’s position is that the books are “inappropriate for young readers because of inaccuracies and omissions about life in the communist nation.” Wow. Don’t you feel safer with these people guarding your kids’ virtue? The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association have filed a lawsuit.