News
The National Book Critics Circle has announced finalists for its award. In the fiction category, the shortlist includes:
- E.L. Doctorow, The March
- Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
- Andrea Levy, Small Island
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
- William Vollman, Europe Central
In general non-fiction, the finalists are:
- Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
- Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
- Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
- Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees
- Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War
In the “autobiography” category, Joan Didion was, of course, nominated, as were Orhan Pamuk (for Istanbul) and Vikram Seth (for Two Lives).
If you’ve been to the movies recently, you may have noticed trailers for Something New, a romantic comedy starring Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker that will be released February 3rd. What you may not know is that the film is directed by a young Moroccan-American filmmaker, Sanaa Hamri. Hamri came to the United States at age seventeen to start college. Shortly after graduating, she began working in the music video industry, making a name for herself by directing videos for Mariah Carey, Prince, India.Arie, Dr. Dre, Jay Z., Jadakiss, Sting, Destiny’s Child, and others. “Something New” is her feature film debut. You can watch the trailer here.
Related:
Wikipedia: Sanaa Hamri
Wafin: Sanaa Hamri
Amanda Filipacchi’s Nude Men may be the funniest novel I’ve ever read and you’ve never heard about. Please, introduce this to your mother’s book-club: the story of 29-year-old Jeremy Acidophilus and the eleven year-old girl who seduces him. Not sold yet? How about this: it includes a dancing magician. C’mon. Just listen to Acidophilus, who at the start of the novel believes his lunch at a crowded Manhattan café ruined when a beautiful woman asks to share his table. “I am a man without many pleasures in life,” he says, “a man whose pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another reading while eating.” After that, what writer could deny Filipacchi a lunch companion?
Stephan Clark’s fiction has been published by, or is forthcoming in, The Cincinnati Review, The Portland Review, Night Train, Barrelhouse, Fourteen Hills and Drunken Boat. He is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship in Ukraine, where he’s researching and writing about the “mail-order bride” industry.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
As has been widely reported, Oprah Winfrey’s new book club selection is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir (or novel, depending on whom you’re talking to) of his life during the Holocaust. The choice of another creative non-fiction book has already led some people to wonder if Oprah’s defense of James Frey was “pre-emptive”. Meanwhile, at the New York Times, Edward Wyatt points out:
The selection of such a high-profile memoir seems likely to extend the debate over the nature of memoir and truth that flared last week around Ms. Winfrey’s previous book club choice, “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey. After an investigative Web site reported that substantial parts of Mr. Frey’s account were contradicted by the police and legal records, Mr. Frey admitted that he embellished certain parts of his life.
Ms. Winfrey defended him, however, saying that “the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me.”
Read it all here.
The weather forecast predicts snow this week, in several parts of Morocco–the Rif Mountains, the Atlas Mountains and even in some lower-altitude areas near Marrakesh.
I have very fond memories of Immouzer–my family used to spend summer vacations there when I was a little kid, and I can still remember the taste of the apples from the trees in the hotel garden (picked surreptitiously, while my parents unpacked.)