Thanks to those of you who came out to Korn Convocation Hall on the UCLA campus on Saturday. The place was packed, my panelists were great, and I had a wonderful time, even though I managed to get several sunburns. You can find full coverage of the fest at Jacket Copy, Counterbalance, and Book Fox. And of course don’t miss Tod Goldberg‘s take on the weekend.
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books takes place this weekend on the UCLA campus. On the schedule are panel discussions, readings, and even writing seminars. I will be hosting a panel on Saturday:
April 26, 2008
2:30 PM
Fiction: Not So Ordinary People
Tony Earley, Dinaw Mengestu, Stewart O’Nan, Ann Packer and moderated by Laila Lalami
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Korn Convocation Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, California
Come on by and say hello.
A couple of days ago, the amazing Pico Iyer gave an appreciation on NPR of one of my favorite novels of all time: Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. And then today he’s sharing his music playlist with Dwight Garner over at Papercuts. Iyer’s most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He’ll be talking about it at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend. You don’t want to miss him.
As I’m sure you’ve realized by now, I’m spending much of this week chatting up some of my friends’ books. Today, I was hoping you would take a look at Apologies Forthcoming, Xujun Eberlein‘s debut collection of short stories. Eberlein is an M.I.T-trained engineer who started writing in Chinese, but switched to English after moving to the United States in 1988. Her stories and personal essays have been published in Agni, StoryQuarterly, and Kwani, among other magazines. They often feature characters struggling with the effect of China’s cultural revolution. Her collection of stories, which won the Tartt Fiction Prize last year, is due out in May.
Yesterday, I mentioned Mark Sarvas‘s debut novel, so today I’d like to give a shout-out to my friend Mary Akers, a novelist and short story writer from New York. She just published her first book, Radical Gratitude, a memoir co-written with Andrew Bienkowski, about his experiences in Siberia, where he and his family were exiled during Stalin’s rule. The book has done very well in Australia (it’s already on a second printing there) and is due out in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere very soon. You can read some of Akers’s work in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Wisconsin Review, and Brevity.