News

Rejection is part of the writer’s life and so Catherine Wald’s book, The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph by Twenty Top Authors is of particular interest to those who’ve experienced the sting of the unsigned rejection (or, worse, an empty SASE.) My personal favorite remains one by C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic, which managed to be both flattering and insulting in just two lines. This week’s giveaway is for you writers. The first person to email me a request at llalami AT yahoo DOT com will receive the book. Good luck.

Update: The winner is L. Alves from Brazil.

Shaun Bythell, the Scottish bookseller mentioned in this post about book burning, wrote to me to explain why he’d chosen this method for disposing of unsold volumes:

There was a good reason for burning the books, and it wasn’t based on censorship or oppression. At the moment we currently send the stock we cannot sell to charity shops but some of it is in such bad condition they won’t take it – this we put in a skip and it ends up in a landfill site.

Of course book burning is not a more environmentally friendly solution than landfill but this is where most second-hand books with no value currently end up. My argument for having this event was based on the fact that if the alternative fate of the books was to rot in a hole in the ground why not do something more interesting and use them to make a fire sculpture as a publicity stunt to get people talking about the problem, and to raise the profile of Wigtown as Scotland’s National Book Town. Richard Booth who set up Hay on Wye as Booktown about 30 years ago once told me that he got far more press coverage from declaring war on the Welsh Tourist Board than from setting up a successful Book Town, and to some degree I agree that the media engages far more enthusiastically with a controversial story which polarises opinion than one of small rural town which is enjoying economic regeneration. So, yes it was a publicity stunt rather than a practical measure and it has worked – a full page in the Financial Times, half a page in the Sunday Times, a quarter page in the Sunday Herald and a five minute interview on Radio Scotland all of which mention Wigtown and discuss the issue of “dead” books.

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Chiamasta is a three-day literary festival celebrating South Asian writing, and it takes place May 20-23, 2005. Here’s the blurb I received by email.

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) invites you to our third annual literary event, celebrating the works of South Asian writers.

In this event, we explore and celebrate chiasmata, spontaneous connections that spawn diversity and birth the motley spaces we inhabit. Spaces between the old and the new, the established and the subversive, the familiar and the novel. Spaces that serve as bridges towards a new self.

Participants include Amitava Kumar, Abha Dawesar, Ginu Kamani, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Meera Nair, Tahira Naqvi, S. Mitra Kalita, Bushra Rehman, Shahnaz Habib, Prageeta Sharma, Alka Bhargava, Anna Ghosh, Pooja Makhijani and Neesha Meminger.

What: Literary festival including two evenings of readings and discussion, a writing workshop for emerging writers, and a panel discussion of South Asians in publishing

When: May 20, 21, 22

Where: the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Queens Museum of Art

Please visit http://www.sawcc.org/chiasmat.html for further details.

For more information, and to reserve your spot for the writing workshop, email: sawccmail@yahoo.com

In a previous incarnation, I worked as a thesaurus editor for the Getty, so it was a special treat to hear about the Selected Shorts event at the Getty.

What: Selected Shorts: The Love Story Weekend
Where: The Getty Center, Los Angeles.
When: Friday
Who: A reading of Tessa Hadley’s “Mother’s Son” by Shohreh Aghdashloo (“House of Sand and Fog”) and “Cultural Relativity” by Regina King (“Ray”).

Enjoy.

Here’s a party we probably would be at if we were still in Los Angeles, but since we can’t, we’d love to hear from those who do go: Word Theatre celebrates Swink Issue #2.

Saturday, May 21, 2005
M BAR
1253 N. Vine St
SW corner of Vine
6:30 Cocktails
7:00 Buffet Dinner
8:00 Readings

Wilson Cruz (“My So Called Life”, “Party Monster”) reads Manuel Mu