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Today I am waiting to have a desk delivered to the house. I know what you’re thinking: “What? You don’t already have one?” I do indeed have a desk, but this what it looked like earlier today, and I need the extra space for my novel. I am expecting to get my manuscript back from Antonia Fusco, my editor at Algonquin, this week, and I want to have the space for it, without the piles of books waiting to be read, the files, the papers, the laptop, etc. I want to lay out my chapters, my time line, my character bios, my maps, and everything else. I felt a little silly ordering a whole desk just so I can have some extra space for my novel until I remembered an old, old interview with Joan Didion I’d read in the Paris Review. Here’s the excerpt I’m thinking of:

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any writing rituals?

DIDION

The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. . . . Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.

One ought to do whatever works-sleep with the manuscript if one needs to, even. This is the last stretch for me, so I might as well give my novel all the space it needs.

I have a new short story in the fiction issue of the Italian weekly magazine Internazionale. It is titled “Il destino nelle onde,” and it is illustrated by Guido Scarabottolo which is very, very cool. (Thanks to Italian reader Patrizia for the info about the illustration!) Other writers in the fiction issue include Elif Shafak, Zadie Smith, Miranda July, and a few others. The English-language version of this story should be coming out in the spring, but more on that once details have been firmed up.

My review of Sinan Antoon’s debut novel, I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, appears in the January 21 issue of The Nation magazine. Here is how it opens:

Legend has it that in the eleventh century, when the very eccentric and possibly demented Caliph El Hakim needed some money, he wrote a letter to the governor of Jerusalem asking that a tax be levied. The governor wrote back that this was impossible–most of the people were poor, many of them monks who lived in caves in Wad er-Rabâbeh. El Hakim asked his scribe to write a letter with the command “Count the men.” Whether the scribe made a mistake or whether the letter was intercepted, no one really knows. But by the time the letter arrived in Jerusalem it read “Castrate the men.” In Arabic, the difference between the two verbs hasaa and khasaa is a single dot.

The history of the Arabic language is full of such tales, in which a dot can change the meaning of a word entirely. In fact, the original Arabic alphabet consisted of consonant letters only, some of which corresponded to multiple sounds.

And it is that aspect of the language that Antoon’s novel exploits, to great literary effect. You can read the review here.

I have two new posts up at Words Without Borders, one in which I discuss some of the literary influences at play in Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King, and a second one about Toni Morrison’s introduction to the novel. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this novel as much as I did.

I spent the last couple of weeks reading fiction; finishing two pieces that are due to appear in January; preparing syllabi for the two classes I am teaching at UCR this winter; corresponding with friends via email and letters; opening holiday cards and wishing I had the time to write some myself; being mystified at the re-casting of corrupt former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto as a martyr of democracy; meeting my friend C. at a Japanese restaurant that we spent a half an hour trying to find, a place that had no apparent sign or light (my husband began to wonder, as finally we pulled up in front, if a secret handshake would be necessary in order for us to gain admittance); discovering, much to my surprise, a photo of me in an advertisement in the New Yorker; discussing Morocco with a professor of anthropology; catching up on movies (Atonement, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, etc.), cleaning my study and filing away the mountain of papers on my desk; and enjoying a homemade Cuban meal for New Year’s Eve. Happy New Year, everyone.