Guess what? I’m traveling again; I’m going to Portland to visit my sister. I’m also trying to finish a new piece before I start teaching in January, so things are a bit hectic at the moment. Posting is likely to be light over the next few days.
My friend D. emailed me to say that my book appeared in the best-seller list compiled by the Moroccan magazine Le Journal. It’s really lovely to see the Moroccan edition (published by Le Fennec) getting into the hands of readers.
Over the past year, novelist Cliff Garstang has been commenting on short stories published in the New Yorker, and now he promises he will reveal his five favorites soon. I canceled my subscription to the magazine when I moved back to Morocco to finish my book, and I was often grateful to be able to read the stories online, although I didn’t always keep up with them, so I just spent the past hour browsing though the posts and reading (or rereading) some of the pieces.
I hadn’t heard of this author scam before.
Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, which appeared in the United States in a translation by Fady Joudah almost a year ago but has not gotten a single review in a newspaper or magazine, was written up this weekend in the Guardian. Here’s what Fiona Sampson said about the book:
This most public of Palestinians is the master not of reductive polemic but of a profoundly lyric imagination, one that draws together the textures of daily life, physical beauty – whether of landscape or of women – longing, myth and history. Using poetry complex with personal experience, he has recreated an entire society’s sensibility.
Read it all here.