The shelver at Seattle’s University Bookstore (“I am the shelver. I shelve books.”) has posted a photo he took at last week’s Bumbershoot festival of Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, and, uh, me. Hmm. Someone needs to figure out how to use a digital camera.
A reminder to readers in the Knoxville area: I will be reading tonight at the University of Tennessee. Here are the details:
Laila Lalami, author of this year’s Life of the Mind book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, will speak on Wednesday evening, September 13, at 7:00 in Cox Auditorium, Alumni Memorial Building. Her presentation will be followed by a booksigning.
More here.
Last weekend, Martin Amis published a long essay in the Observer about the “Age of Horrorism.” I have a response of sorts up on the Guardian Comment Is Free. Here is an excerpt:
Radical Islam is wholly deserving of the contempt that Amis shows it, and yet I remain unconvinced by his assurances of respect for Islam. Indeed, most of his essay is couched in classic “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, using terms that have become so hackneyed in our global culture as to lose meaning. Amis argues that the world has entered “an age of terror,” where the West, a place “where there are no good excuses for religious belief,” is under threat from the east, a region where “almost every living citizen…is intimately defined by religious belief.” Furthermore, the specific culprit within the east is “Islam,” but within the west it is “30 years of multicultural relativism.”
You can read more here.
David Friend’s Watching the World Change is a collection of photographs and commentary about iconic immages from the September 11 attacks. You can view a few of them here, and listen to an interview with him and some of the people who took the photos on NPR.
I’m in Knoxville, Tennessee, this week, to attend a couple of events for UT’s Life of the Mind program. The entire class of 2010 was assigned my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, to read over the summer and to discuss during fall welcome week. So many young minds, so little time.