News

Regular readers of this blog know about my love for Ahdaf Soueif’s work (In The Eye Of The Sun is a favorite of mine and I often re-read her short stories for pleasure or for observation.) So I was thrilled to see an interview with her in the Guardian.

MM: Where are we situated today?

AS: Well, I had believed that we had entered a historical stage which was genuinely post-colonial: a free space where the ideological, emotional, philosophical underpinnings of inequality had been repudiated, rejected by the west, our past colonial masters. In the 60s, it seemed that, along with racial discrimination, the subordination of women and queer-bashing, colonialism had become profoundly unacceptable. And now we discover that this sense of a new-found equality was not, in fact, well-founded. That the idea of there being enormous essentialist non-negotiable differences between cultures and peoples is actually one that remains powerful and might be the idea that is going to shape the world in the decades to come.

U.S. authorities have released an Afghan detainee from the camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but have kept his poems and essays. The article does not indicate that any charges have been filed against the man.

Richard McCann, whose Mother of Sorrows has just come out, is interviewed over at The Happy Booker. Here’s a snippet:

I have read that [McCann’s current project, The Resurrectionist] touches on some autobiographical facts of your life, yet you decided to write this as fiction, not memoir. Where do you draw the line? And is it necessary for the reader to draw the line? Have you deliberately blurred this line and should there even be a line?

I never really “decided” between fiction and memoir. I started, as I always do, with facts; eventually, I saw I had deviated far enough from the starting points as to have made a work of fiction. There was a cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of years ago that I loved: a man is standing in a bookstore in which the sections are marked with titles like “Memoirish” and “Fictionish,” as opposed to “Memoir” and “Fiction.” That’s a bookstore, I suspect, in which my work belongs.

I’m back from the L.A. Times Festival of Books and have some pre-posted items below about panels, readings, and events I attended during the weekend. Things are likely to be slow here for the rest of the day as I catch up with email, mail, work, and more work, but check back again in the early afternoon for new stuff.

On Sunday afternoon, I went to the Memoir: Family Matters panel, which featured Diana Abu-Jaber, Karen Stabiner, Michael Datcher, Debra Ginsberg, and Louise Steinman. I confess I rarely read memoirs these days as I’m so pressed for time and want to keep up with fiction, but I went to the panel because I did read an advance review copy of Abu-Jaber’s book The Language of Baklava. It’s about her growing up in upstate New York and in Jordan, experiencing both societies, and about all the conversations that happened at mealtimes, when her father served tasty meals and shared stories with his family. Abu-Jaber and other panelists read from their books and fielded several questions that also seemed to revolve around whether truth was best represented in fiction or memoir.

Later that afternoon, I checked out the PEN/Emerging Voices event and listened to fellows read from their work. I particularly enjoyed Alia Yunis’s story (about an overweight teenager growing up in 1980s Lebanon, who worries about cute boys and calories even as a bomb explodes outside her apartment.) I look forward to reading some of her work in print.