Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is one of the best graphic memoirs I have ever read, will appear at Powell’s City of Books tonight at 7:30pm. If I were in town, I’d be there. (I take some comfort in knowing Alex will get our copy signed, but it’s just not the same.) I’ll have more to say about this book in the near future, so watch this space.
I’m off to Washington, DC for a couple of events on Thursday and Friday. If you’re in the area come on by and say hi. And if time permits, I’ll try to post some re-caps.
As has been widely reported elsewhere, this year’s IMPAC Dublin award has been awarded to Colm Toibin for his novel, The Master.
“If you just look at who has won it before, you think, ‘God, I would really like my book to be in that list’,” Toibin said.
The author, who was serving as the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University in California when he learnt of the award, said he will return there in 12 months’ time.
“I’m going to take a year to get a new novel written. The great advantage of this is it really frees you, the money,” he said.
Previous winners include Orhan Pamuk, Tahar Ben Jeloun, and Edward P. Jones.
Zaman Online reports that Turkish novelist Elif Shafak (The Saint of Incipient Insanities) has, like Orhan Pamuk earlier this year, been accused of “insulting Turkishness”:
Ultra-rightwing Turkish Lawyers Association Chairman Kemal Kerincsiz, who is infamous for filing complaints against journalists and authors in the country, has filed a complaint against author Elif Safak for her book “Baba and Pic” (Father and Offspring).
Kemal Kerincsiz, who has sued famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and ethnic-Armenian writer Hrant Dink, has now also accused Elif Safak of ‘insulting Turkishness’ – over remarks made by Armenian characters in her latest book.
And this kind of ridiculous harassment is likely to continue as long as there is Article 301.
I’m always behind on everything I want to do, so I have only an anthropological interest in the species known as “slacker,” which is the subject of Tom Lutz’s new book, Doing Nothing. Apparently these slackers are here to stay. “They arise in force, [Lutz] suggests, whenever there are major social changes taking place. They are also clowns and jesters, who reveal the illusions we cherish about the work we do. They are the counterforce against which workers must contend, sometimes even within themselves.”
I hate gimmicky travel books, but I have to say I’m intrigued by Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. It’s the story of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002, with nothing more than a walking stick and a backpack. Call it bravado. Or foolishness. In his NYT review, Tom Bissell had this to say about it:
If, finally, you’re determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. “The Places in Between” is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.
One more to add to the list.