News

Opium Magazine celebrates its fifth year with a series of events in New York this weekend. On Friday, February 3rd, our pal Jim Ruland will be reading alongside Sam Lipsyte at the Happy Ending Lounge. (Details here.) And then on Saturday, February 4th, an all-star gathering of humor writers will take place at the Slipper Room. Readers will include Jonathan Ames, Diane Williams, Jonathan Baumbach, Amanda Filipacchi, Dennis DiClaudio, Tao Lin, Shya Scanlon and Todd Zuniga himself. (Details here.)

The San Francisco Examiner asked several working writers about their favorite authors. Daniel Handler has a more…muscular approach:

I just saw Jim Shepard read from his novel Project X (Vintage) at the Make Out Room, and he killed. There were a bunch of writers there, all reading to raise money for a progressive candidate, and we were all excited to read with Jim Shepard but we could tell that most of the audience hadn’t heard of him, and the more we talked him up the more I could see people getting nervous that he was a “writer’s writer” –that is, some difficult, pretentious guy that only other writers like. But then he took the stage and in 20 seconds I saw several cynical hipsters laughing so hard they had to put their drinks down and hold their stomachs. And, I should add, it’s a novel about a high school massacre. As I told the crowd that night, I want you to buy a book by Jim Shepard and read it, and if you don’t like it come to me. I’ll give you your money back and then I’ll kick your ass.

Read others’ recommendations here.

Friends, I’m happy to report that Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits has gone into its second printing. (Time to get your hands on the signed first edition. Ha!)

Reza Aslan was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote the paperback release of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam earlier this week. You can watch the video on the show’s site. (Speaking of Aslan, I was surprised to find out a blurb from my Oregonian review had been used for the back cover. I liked the book quite a bit, and if you haven’t already read it, you really should.)

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s new novel, Partir, is about young Moroccan men who want to leave everything behind to immigrate. Sound familiar? I think there’s really a Zeitgeist in Moroccan art at the moment around the issue of immigration. Photographer Yto Barrada, filmmaker Yasmine Kassari, and rai musicians have all dealt with the issue in recent work.

Yahoo! news has a brief article (in French) about Partir. No word on an English translation yet. Ben Jelloun’s latest novel to appear here in the U.S. is The Last Friend, which comes out in February.