For those who are curious: A podcast from the Mutanabbi Street reading organized last November by the Los Angeles Public Library has been made available. (I read a poem by Mutanabbi himself, and another by Mahmoud Darwish, in Arabic and then in English translation.)
What a delightful surprise: This year’s Reading the World initiative includes a collection of poems by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Gabriel Levin, Yahya Hijazi, and Peter Cole. (Cole, you’ll remember, is a certified Genius.) The book is called So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005. Here is a sample poem by Taha Muhammad Ali. (Original Arabic here). I dare you not to cry when you read it.
John Sutherland on Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Enchantress of Florence:
If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.
The full review is up here. The Man Booker will be awarded sometime in October 2008.
What a thrill it was to hear the good news: Junot Díaz has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Last week, the novelist Tayari Jones (The Untelling, Leaving Atlanta) wrote on her blog about the horrific crimes that took place in Dunbar Village last year. The victims, a Haitian immigrant and her twelve year old son, were treated with such depravity that I had a hard time believing that the four accused were between 14 and 18. Jones wrote of her outrage at the NAACP’s demands to release the teens; she asked fellow writers to help raise money for the victims.
The eBay auction is now up: You can bid on a manuscript critiques by George Saunders, Nichelle Tramble, Sarah Schulman, Joy Castro, Martha Southgate, D. Nurkse, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, and me. Some authors are offering book proposal evaluations and even novel critiques. There are also lots of autographed books on offer. Please hop on over to eBay and make a bid.