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When I was writing Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I could not possibly have imagined it would get the reaction it did from readers, or that it would be used in such varied classrooms as post-colonial North African literature and high school English. On Friday, I went to give a reading at Mercy High School, where the entire class of 600 students had read my book for the fall. What surprised me was how much and well the book was integrated into the curriculum. In drama class, students teased out personality traits for each of the main characters in my novel; in literature class, they looked for simile, metaphor, and other figures of speech; in French class, they translated some key quotes from the book; in ceramics class, they looked for Moroccan designs and used them to create artifacts, and they also chose scenes from some of the stories and recreated them in clay. Students were very familiar with the book by the time I came to read from it, and being in that auditorium with so many teenagers was truly one of the most fun experiences I have had on the road.

I am in San Francisco for the day to do a reading at Mercy High School, which has selected my book for a school-wide read. Sorry, no posts today.

The latest issue of the London Review of Books is available, and it includes an excellent essay by Hilary Mantel on two new books about the AIDS crisis in South Africa. The essay explores sociological, economic, historical, and cultural aspects of the epidemic in a country that struck down apartheid only a decade or so ago. A must read.

“By a miracle of publishing, Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1971 novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (a deeply cynical look at the Manhattan art world of mid-century) is available, barely, and it hasn’t lost a bit of its nasty comic brilliance. Begin, for instance, with the beginning: “What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the top of her stockings? It is an old story.” Sorrentino, who died not long ago, was always defiant, hugely incorrect, and unfailingly original; his Mulligan Stew remains a mildly insane and exhilarating satire about publishing (and literature itself), and his more recent Little Casino is a “deck” of fifty-two little linked stories, most of them terrific. But nothing was quite like Imaginative Qualities, which reads, still, as if it might have been written today or, perhaps, tomorrow.”

Jeffrey Frank is the author of four novels, most recently Trudy Hopedale, and co-author, with his wife Diana, of The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation From the Danish. He lives in New York, where he is a senior editor at The New Yorker.

Take a look at Meena; it’s a new literary magazine, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Alexandria, Egypt.