News

The Guardian has a little fun with the news that Patricia Cornwell’s The Trace finally knocked off Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code from the No.1 spot.

Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn has received a career achievement award awarded by PEN. Other award winners are listed in this Seattle Times article.

This is what the Tehran Book Fair is like, according to the Daily Star (via Agence France-Presse.)

Scooby Doo, where are you? If you’re at Tehran’s book fair and looking for something for the kids, you’ll find the stand right next to Islamic Jihad’s and around the corner from the stands of Hizbullah and Hamas. Iran’s massive annual literary fest has something for everyone: Thomas the Tank Engine, interior decorating, Microsoft Windows programming, “How to Kill an Israeli” and Jean-Paul Sartre.

“We have a stand here every year,” explained a young man at the Hamas booth, which featured T-shirts emblazoned with the portrait of their late spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, replica suicide bomber headbands and posters featuring mugshots of Palestinians who “blew themselves to bits.”

The literary message, explained the Hamas rep, was that “they blow themselves up so others can have a better life.”

The man at the Islamic Jihad booth was offering a history of Palestine pamphlet and a rather bloody CD-Rom on “Martyrdom-Seeking Operators.”

Publishers from the United States are also represented at the packed book fair at Tehran’s sprawling international exhibition center, albeit by their Iranian import agents, and drawing large crowds.

Ugh.

L.A. Observed reports that the L.A. Times will finally get rid of the silly subscription wall over its Calendar section, calendarlive.com. The only question I have is: Does that mean that one will be able to go directly from Mark’s LATBR thumbnail to the actual reviews?

Link cribbed from Publisher’s Lunch.

“I love basically anything published by The New York Review of Books, classics reprinted in beautiful covers, but this one was a particular find: The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott,” Greer says. “I’ve always been a fan of “tell not show” fiction, which is just to say careful storytelling like Ford Madox Ford, and here is perhaps the shortest, most subtle piece of observed life you can come across outside the works of William Maxwell. It is nothing more than an afternoon spent in the company of a wealthy Irish couple who happen to have, tethered to the wife’s arm, a peregrine falcon. Our narrator watches the next two or so hours with an intensity that lets nothing beautiful show without a shadow of ugliness, and nothing vulgar appear without an examination of its worth. In other words: it’s life. Barely anything happens, nothing is learned. And then it’s over. What is revealed is just complexity of a marriage, and the violence of our animal selves, and the ignorance of youth, and jealousy, and how to cook a pigeon. And somehow always the falcon sits trembling, hooded, on her arm.”

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the collection How It Was for Me, and the novels The Path of Minor Planets and The Confessions of Max Tivoli. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. He lives in San Francisco.