News

That’s it for me this week. I’ll be in Los Angeles for a few days, attending the L.A. Times‘ Festival of Books, having drinks with friends, and generally causing mayhem.

I’ll be doing some live blogging and a Q&A from the Swink booth, from 3 to 4 pm on Saturday, April 23. I’ll try to bring my camera along and take pictures.

I’ll also be reading at Jim Ruland‘s Vermin on the Mount series on the same day. (The event is co-sponsored by Swink.) Partners in crime include Steve Almond, Ben Ehrenreich, Julianne Flynn, Lisa Glatt, Dylan Landis, Alex Lemon, and my friend Mark Sarvas of TEV. If you’re in town, join us, why don’t you? And come say hi to us afterwards. The Mountain Bar is located across from the Wishing Well at 473 Gi Ling Way in Chinatown. Call 213 625-7500.

The shortlist of the Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced. The finalists are:

• Doreen Baingana (Uganda) for “Tropical Fish.” (This story is part of her excellent debut collection, which I hope to feature on Moorishgirl very soon.)
• Jamal Mahjoub (Sudan) for “The Obituary Tangle.”
• SA Afolabi (Nigeria) for “Monday Morning.”
• Ike Okonta (Nigeria) for “Tindi in the Land of the Dead.”
• Mutual Naidoo (South Africa) with “Jailbirds.”

The Guardian has further details about the finalists. I’m a little disappointed that North Africa is left out of the running (yet again) but still delighted by the choices.

This is an interesting, long-ish interview of Salman Rushdie (I didn’t have a problem accessing it but if you hit a subscription wall, use bugmenot.com). Rushdie talks about novelists as “bloody-minded” people, magical realism, the fatwa, why it was a victory for him, his new book, Shalimar the Clown, and a bunch of other things. Here’s a snippet.

R: [O]ther than the occasional rhetorical noise coming out of Iran – which there are unpleasant people there who occasionally say unpleasant things – there haven’t been any real, actual threats for probably seven years now.

W: Well, it’s interesting that during the years that there were threats you were still able to put out some really, well-written, critically acclaimed books. I’ve always been curious as to how that period of seclusion affected your writing habits.

R: Well, you know, I think that writers are quite often disciplined people. And I think that one of the things as a novelist that you do have is the discipline of a daily habit and a daily routine to do your work. You know, just simply because a novel is a long piece of work that if you don’t have the kind of discipline, it never gets written. I think most novelists that I know, in some degree, are very good at simply buckling down and simply getting on with it. And one of the feelings that I had very strongly during those years was that I wished to simply continue down the path I’d set for myself as a writer. And in a way, it was an aspect of my resistance, you know, to not be silenced, to not in anyway be deformed by it as a writer. I though it would have been easy for me to not write or to writer very embittered books or to writer very frightened books. And all of that seemed to me to be a terrible defeat. And I thought the best thing I can do is to go on trying to write the kind of books that I’ve always wanted to write. And go on being myself. And I guess I found in myself the bloody-mindedness to do that (laughs).

Read the rest here.

The Book Babes devote their latest column over at the Book Standard to the LBC.

MG friend Joshua Roberts, who has a new story in AGNI 61, sends along a notice of the magazine’s release party, which will take place Thursday, April 21, 2005, at 7:00 p.m. at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (949 Commonwealth Avenue.) Readers include Suzanne Berne, Gail Mazur, Ben Miller and Lan Samantha Chang. For details, go here.