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One of the fall 2006 books I was most excited about is Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Set in the 1960s, during the aborted attempt to set up an independent state in Biafra, the book tells the story of three characters whose loyalties to their ideas, ideals, and one another, are tested. There’s thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a houseboy for a university professor, Olanna, the professor’s mistress; and Richard, an Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s twin sister. You can read some of the early (and mostly excellent) reviews of the book: Janet Maslin in the New York Times, Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle, Merle Rubin in the L.A. Times.

Some related links:
Adichie’s website.
Debbie Elliot’s interview with Adichie on NPR.
Adichie writes about the books that have influenced her in the Guardian.

Last year, when the Turkish government’s case against novelist Orhan Pamuk was thrown out of court on a technicality, many had hoped that Article 301–the law that makes it illegal to “insult Turkishness,” whatever that means–would also be purged from the penal code. It has not.

Now it is the turn of novelist Elif Shafak to go on trial for something she has written, and which has irked the establishment. What makes her case even more remarkable is that, this time, the supposed “insult to Turkishness” comes from a fictional character in one of her novels, Father and Bastard (English title: The Bastard of Istanbul.) The character speaks about the (otherwise well-documented) genocide of Armenians by Turks in 1915, and apparently it is illegal to imagine such a scene in a novel. Shafak’s trial opens today in Istanbul. It also bears mention that the writer was pregnant during all these stressful weeks; she delivered just five days ago, and now she must attend the trial against her.

Shafak is only one among many (eighteen, to be precise) writers and journalists who are being harrassed via Article 301. You can read more about the cases here.

The amazing George Saunders has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. His reaction: “I feel smarter already!”

(via.)

There’s an excellent and thorough essay by Tony Judt in the current issue of the London Review of Books about liberals’ failure to stand up against Bush’s foreign policy, against his attack on civil liberties, and, more generally, against power. Here’s a taste:

Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security.

A highly recommended piece.

The young Jewish and Arab women portrayed in Wandering Star are so convincing that it’s easy to forget that the book was written by a sixty-something-year-old French man. J.M.G. Le Clezio also understands that while in wartime it is most often the men who go off to fight and die, it is the women who bear the brunt of their battles.

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