News

I’m waiting for the movers to show up and won’t be able to blog through the rest of this week, so I apologize for the lack of posts. I should be back in these parts on Tuesday, when my internet connection is installed.

For Italian readers: My book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is published in Italy by Fusi Orari this month.
I’ll be in Italy in early October for the Internationale Festival in Ferrara, followed by readings in Cagliari and Rome. You can check my events for more details.

We went to Powell’s last night, and being in those aisles almost brought me to tears. The Blue Room! The literary magazine rack! The Cavallini notebooks! I picked up two travel books by Pico Iyer (The Lady and the Monk and Video Night in Kathmandu), a used hardcover, in excellent condition, of Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi’s A Season in Mecca, Coetzee’s memoir Youth, and a few other titles for fall. Few places give readers so much opportunity as Powell’s to explore and try something different. I don’t know what I’m going to do without it.

I’m in Portland this weekend to prepare for the move to Los Angeles, but I wanted to let you know that I’ll be on NPR’s Weekend Edition tomorrow (Sunday) morning to talk about summer reading. You can tune into your local NPR station or listen online tomorrow.

More sad news: Qurratulain Hayder, whose 1959 novel A River of Fire was favorably compared to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, has also passed away.