News

I’m currently about halfway through Reza Aslan’s No god but God, so I was quite interested in today’s New York Times review of the book. Unfortunately, the review struck me as hasty and a tad careless.

Diana Abu-Jaber talks to Small Spiral Notebook’s Felicia Sullivan about her food memoir, The Language of Baklava. You can also listen to a recent interview with Abu-Jaber on NPR’s All Things Considered.

I quite enjoyed Chris Lehman’s essay over at Maudnewton.com. The essay was originally commissioned by the NY Times, but was never published, until today. It begins thus:

Superlatives are an unofficial American birthright. Bestness, like bigness, is the turbo-charged engine propelling not just the American advertising world, but the literary one. Almost since there has been a self-conscious American literary culture, it has been busily investing itself with outsize claims for its stature, a reflex that feels very much of a piece with the foundational hubris of conquering an inhabited continent and proclaiming it, and all the new Anglo arrivistes governing it, a “New World.”

Hence an annual ritual, as reassuring in its own way as the return of the swallows to Capistrano: Houghton-Mifflin issues collections of writing that a stable of star subeditors hired for the occasion deems the best in its field.

Lehman looks at the Best Of franchise, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best American Essays, and I found his criticism, particularly of this year’s edition of BASS to be fair and well-grounded.

The Gangster We Are All Looking For is poetry stretched long to tell a tale of immigration, heartache, and a touch of dysfunction,” Halaby writes. “Narrated by a young Vietnamese girl working herself into American culture, living in San Diego, this is the story of a family coming to grips with its past and present. Le thi diem thuy’s language is graceful, lyrical, and honest, (especially toward the second half of this short book) and you are left with a picture of a family, perhaps what is now a typical California family.”

Laila Halaby is the author of the novel West of the Jordan, which won the PEN Beyond Margins Award and a silver medal for literary fiction from Foreword Magazine.

Over at Backstory, Roxana Robinson, whose latest book is the short story collection A Perfect Stranger, shares the process of writing her short stories.

There’s a certain convention that holds in this country, concerning fiction writers. By its terms, they’re more or less expected to write short stories while they’re learning their craft, and then, later, they’re expected to write novels when they’ve become accomplished. Underlying this convention is the premise that the short story is the easier form of the two, and one suitable only for beginners.

In fact, I’d argue that the short story form is the much more demanding of the two.

In the essay, Robinson talks specifically about her story “The Face Lift,” which was published in The Atlantic in 2000.