News

Moorishgirl has landed on Flavorpill’s F-list, a compendium of everything that’s f-ing exciting at the moment. (Scroll down to the “blog” category.)

Novelist Louise Doughty has started a regular column in the Telegraph in which she will teach the art of writing. Doughty must not be new to teaching fiction because she is careful to point out that:

Forget for a moment the loneliness, paranoia and financial insecurity, Being a Writer is great fun.

But there is a catch. You have to write. This is something that would-be writers sometimes appear not to have grasped. Like many novelists, I often give talks at festivals and a common question is, ‘How did you get your first novel published?’

It’s a perfectly valid question but I often suspect the motivation behind it. What was your trick? is what they mean. Tell me your trick, because when I know it, I will be published too. The honest answer, I’m afraid, is, “I wrote a good book. And if you want to be a published writer, you will have to write one too.”

Good advice, that. Reminds me of the top FAQ on Elmore Leonard’s site: “How do I find an agent?” Leonard’s answer: “My advice is to learn how to write and the agent will find you.”

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, one of the most talked about movies of the year, fortunately also happens to be one of its best. Like Annie Proulx’s short story by the same title, the movie resists the temptation to plead or lecture, opting instead to tell a love story the way its characters live it.

This is no small feat. The vast majority of film representations of gay characters tend to suffer from what director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) once called the “Sidney Poitier Syndrome,” meaning that gays are either perfect individuals who suffer from society’s persecution, or else its weak, yet noble victims who are saved by the straight man. What Brokeback Mountain achieves is nothing short of miraculous: showing us gay characters as complex human beings.

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Over the holiday break, new reviews of my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, appeared. You can read the opinions of Emily Lodish in The Nation, Thrity Umrigar in The Boston Globe, and Michael Upchurch in The Seattle Times. Snippets from all reviews are available at my author site.

Hope was also a notable book of 2005 in Las Vegas City Life and a top 10 northwest book in the Oregonian.

And last, Najlae Benmbarek’s article about Hope appears in the Moroccan weekly La Vie Economique.

After slapping novelist Orhan Pamuk with a lawsuit over his remarks regarding the genocide of Armenians, and after the international outcry that ensued, the Turkish government appears to think it has found a solution. Justice Minister Cemil Cicek has called on Pamuk to apologize for his remarks. In exchange for this apology the Minister is dangling this carrot: Charges will be dropped.

I doubt Pamuk will take the Minister up on the offer, so we will all have to wait until the public hearing on February 7th to find out more. If the case goes forward, it might shed more critical light on the ridiculous law that makes it a criminal offense to “insult Turkishness” and thus, possibly, hopefully, force its repeal.

Read older posts about Pamuk here.