News
This week, I’d like to give away a copy of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun. You can read all about this remarkable new novel in this earlier post here at Moorishgirl.
The second person (sometimes, it pays to be second) to correctly answer this question gets the book: When and where was Elias Khoury born? Please use the subject line “Gate of the Sun” in your email, and please also include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.
Update: The winner is Mohammed S. from Mississauga, Ontario.
Book fans from all over the country are now reading and recording books (classics, mostly) for sites like Libravox. Xeni Jardin reports on these podcasts of audiobooks for NPR.
Over at the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan looks at this year’s Oscar nominees, and is thrilled to find so many independent features, like Brokeback Mountain, Good Night and Good Luck, Crash, and Capote. In addition, notes Turan, the Academy seemed to embrace rather than shun controversy, picking Steven Spielberg’s Munich for one of the Best Picture slots. And, he adds:
As to the commentators who hyperventilated over “Munich,” they are likely to have full-blown coronary attacks once they get a look at “Paradise Now,” the exceptional Palestinian film that is one of five nominees for best foreign-language film.
Though the category is a real tossup (all five Oscar nominees are strong enough to have U.S. distribution deals already in place), this powerful and provocative drama about the nightmare of terrorism is as involving and relevant a film as the year has produced.
Seriously, go see Paradise Now.
Natasha Hildenbrandt shares details of her writing group over at the Times.
We meet after work, once a week, in a conference room we pay to use, united by a common desire to write, the need for a deadline, the appreciation of feedback from one another.
We’re used to getting together to read, so why not to write? A group means that you don’t have to abandon your life for a year for a creative writing course. It helps you to keep the juices flowing while finding the encouragement and mutual respect that are their own reward.
This sounds entirely exotic to me, as I can only write if I am left alone, but Hildenbrandt speaks very highly of her writing group, and even offers up tips for others who wish to do the same. Then she asks several authors about their reading groups, or at the very least their first readers.
Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent has been selected for Reading in the Rain, a community-wide reading program in Eugene, Oregon. Click on the “Events” tab to find out about the public readings and discussion groups that will be held throughout the month. Abu-Jaber also contributes an op-ed to the Register-Guard about her own arrival in Eugene, in 1990, to take up a position at the university.