News

Nora McCrea’s interview with Diana Abu-Jaber and me appears on the website of 2 Gyrlz Quarterly.

Professor Nellie Y. McKay, who served as editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, passed on. The New York Times‘ obit highlights her important role in contemporary culture:

The anthology, published in 1997, was widely credited with codifying the black American literary canon for the first time. The book, which generated considerable attention in the news media, was assigned in college courses worldwide and also proved popular with a general readership. Nearly 200,000 copies are currently in print, the publisher said yesterday.

At more than 2,600 pages, the anthology spans black literature from the earliest Negro spirituals to late-20th-century writers like Gloria Naylor, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley. It was published in a second edition in 2004, adding the work of younger writers like Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead.

“It’s very necessary that we do this to establish the centrality of the African-American experience,” Professor McKay told The New York Times in 1996. “There needed to be a book that gave a coherent text of African-American literature.”

Read more on McKay here.

Sigrid Nunez‘s new novel, The Last of Her Kind, was reviewed this Sunday in the Washington Post.

Sigrid Nunez begins her fifth novel, The Last of Her Kind, with this intriguing sentence: “We had been living together for about a week when my roommate told me she had asked specifically to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own.”

Pairings of young women have had a long history in fiction — from Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair to Scarlett and Melanie in Gone with the Wind to the Vassar classmates in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, the prototype for so much women’s fiction to this day. Traditionally, a rather bland and conventional woman has been paired with a much more compelling rulebreaker who in the end must pay heavily for her transgressions either by losing her status in society — or by losing her life. In The Last of Her Kind, the formula receives a different spin, but it is still operative.

I was interested in the novel (which I have yet to read) because I was hoping for a fresh take on this pairing of young women in college, but the review isn’t fully positive. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think.

Speaking of censorship: Reader Elizabeth Angell sends word that there is now “an organized campaign in Turkey” to remove article 301 from the penal code. Article 301, you’ll remember, was the little law that makes it illegal to “insult Turkishness,” and which made it possible for a zealous prosecutor to bring charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk last year. Pamuk’s only “crime” was to talk about the genocide of Armenians in 1916. While the charges against Pamuk have now been dropped, other writers still stand accused under the same law. A repeal of article 301 would be a major win for freedom of expression in the Turkish republic. Here is the website of the campaign: 301 Hayir (in Turkish only.)

Related: Orhan Pamuk Goes On Trial.

What do novelists and psychics have in common? In a brief essay for The Guardian, Hilary Mantel answers:

Which other self-employed persons stand up in public to talk about non-existent people? Novelists, of course. We listen to non-existent voices and write down what they say. Then we talk with passion and conviction about people no one can see. Our audiences are complicit, of course, whereas the audiences for professional psychics are ambivalent. They teeter on the edge of delusion and the edge of derision. For the psychic, it’s a no-win situation. If she gets it wrong, she’s rubbish. If she gets it right, she’s a cheat. One of the things I learned while writing the book is that scepticism can be held as firmly, devoutly, illogically as any religious position. Elaborate edifices of fraud are proposed – so elaborate, so unlikely, that it’s easier to believe that, after all, the dead are speaking

Mantel’s Beyond Black, which features a medium, has been praised by readers I trust, so I will have to add it to my TBR pile.