News
Writer and blogger Michael Standaert’s investigative book on the Left Behind series will be released by Soft Skull Press in the fall, PW reports.
“The Left Behind books are functioning not just like a Christian John Grisham but as a highly organized effective tool for evangelizing and generating a great deal of money to support a network of organizations that are doing a lot of things the booksellers wouldn’t like,” says Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash. “We want to be able to let independent bookstores know what is going on behind these books that they’re selling.”
Asked whether the booksellers who stock the book aren’t already aware of, and have come to terms with, the contents of the book, Nash says that it will sway others with new facts about LaHaye, such as his connections to Jerry Falwell as well as with an organization to build a third temple at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The book is called Skipping Toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire.
As TEV reported late yesterday, Andrew Sean Greer has just won the Young Lions Award, awarded by the New York Public Library to an emerging author under the age of 35. Greer won for his wonderful book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. The finalists were Marc Bojanowski for The Dog Fighter, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum for Madeleine Is Sleeping, Stephen Elliott for Happy Baby, and Aaron Gwyn for Dog on the Cross.
Over at Beatrice, Diana Abu-Jaber recaps her recent book tour for the promotion of her food memoir, The Language of Baklava. (Part 2 of the recap is here.)
April 24th: I’m in Los Angeles and about to go to the LA Times Festival of Books, but first I must take an opportunity to squawk about how I’m always getting ripped on by the Arab critics. Today, the Washington Post ran a review of The Language of Baklava. So that’s great! But darn it all, they gave it to an apparently Arab reviewer who openly admits that she didn’t like my second novel, Crescent. (So why did she agree to review my new book?) Thus ensues the usual disparaging review in which I’m generally accused of inauthenticity. Depressing on too many levels to ennumerate. Ugh. I hope the Angelenos are nice to me today!
The review in question, by food writer Anissa Helou is available here, and while I can’t comment on the recipes (I can’t cook to save my life), it does seem that Helou is so focused on minute details that she’s missing the larger point of the memoir, which is really about the stories that are told around the meals.
Jai Singh reviews Iraqi blogger Riverbend’s book, Baghdad Burning for the San Francisco Chronicle while Jami Attenberg takes on blogger Wendy McClure‘s memoir, I’m Not The New Me. She finds it “funny and affecting.” By the way, McClure will be reading at Powell’s on Wednesday night.
Meridian is starting a poetry anthology called Best New Poets. Nominations can be made by writing programs and literary magazines, or you can enter yourself.