Category: literary life

From the Mail and Guardian comes the news that the Bush administration is urging Arab governments to fund Hamas:

The United States is urging Arab states to continue funding a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, even though Washington is threatening to cut its own aid. Western diplomats said on Monday that President George Bush’s administration has already contacted Arab governments that give the Palestinian Authority support and requested them to continue their funding.

The US position behind the scenes contrasts with its public stance, in which Bush has said he will cut aid to the Palestinian Authority unless Hamas renounces violence and stops demanding the destruction of Israel.

The US plea to the Arab world is because it does not want the West Bank and Gaza to descend into chaos as a result of choking off aid. It also fears that if it stops funding the Palestinians, countries such as Iran or Syria could step into the breach, enhancing their image in the Islamic world just as Washington seeks to isolate them.

In other news, Sharon’s Kadima Party officially launched its electoral campaign today.

As has been widely reported, playwright Wendy Wasserstein has died.

Wasserstein’s writing was known for its sharp, often comedic look about what women had to do to succeed in a world dominated by men.

“She was an extraordinary human being whose work and whose life were extremely intertwined,” said Bishop, who produced most of her works, first at Playwrights Horizons and later at Lincoln Center Theater. “She was not unlike the heroines of most of her plays _ a strong-minded, independent, serious good person who happened to have a wicked sense of humor.”

Wasserstein found her greatest popular success with “The Heidi Chronicles,” which won the best-play Tony as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989. Its insecure title character (played by Joan Allen) takes a 20-year journey beginning in the late 1960s and changes her attitudes about herself, men and other women. Equally popular was “The Sisters Rosensweig,” which moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway in 1993, and concerned three siblings who find strength in themselves and in each other.

Wasserstein was only fifty-five years old. She will be missed.

The Book Standard‘s Kimberly Maul reports that children’s author Harriet Ziefert’s latest book, A Snake Is Totally Tail will not be released in April, because it bears striking similarities to another children’s book by Judi Barrett.

When Kirkus Reviews children’s editor Karen Breen received a review copy of the book, she told Kirkus sibling publication The Book Standard that she immediately recognized close similarities between it and Barrett’s book and that she was sure that title had been used before. Comparing the advance readers’ copy of Ziefert’s book to Barrett’s, it’s obvious right away that 12 of the 23 lines in Barrett’s version are repeated in Ziefert’s, including identical concluding lines: “A dinosaur is entirely extinct. This book is finally finished.”

In response to The Book Standard’s inquires, Blue Apple Books released a statement in which Ziefert says, “I have no recollection of ever seeing Ms. Barrett’s book—though it would be foolish of me not to consider the possibility that I might have seen it decades ago and that its structure and some of its language imprinted themselves somewhere on my subconscious.”

In 11 of the 12 instances in which an animal is mentioned in both books, the language is duplicated word for word, for instance: “A crab is conspicuously claws,” “a duck is quantities of quack” and “a porcupine is piles of prickles.”

You can read the full article here.

Professor Nellie Y. McKay, who served as editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, passed on. The New York Times‘ obit highlights her important role in contemporary culture:

The anthology, published in 1997, was widely credited with codifying the black American literary canon for the first time. The book, which generated considerable attention in the news media, was assigned in college courses worldwide and also proved popular with a general readership. Nearly 200,000 copies are currently in print, the publisher said yesterday.

At more than 2,600 pages, the anthology spans black literature from the earliest Negro spirituals to late-20th-century writers like Gloria Naylor, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley. It was published in a second edition in 2004, adding the work of younger writers like Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead.

“It’s very necessary that we do this to establish the centrality of the African-American experience,” Professor McKay told The New York Times in 1996. “There needed to be a book that gave a coherent text of African-American literature.”

Read more on McKay here.

Sigrid Nunez‘s new novel, The Last of Her Kind, was reviewed this Sunday in the Washington Post.

Sigrid Nunez begins her fifth novel, The Last of Her Kind, with this intriguing sentence: “We had been living together for about a week when my roommate told me she had asked specifically to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own.”

Pairings of young women have had a long history in fiction — from Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair to Scarlett and Melanie in Gone with the Wind to the Vassar classmates in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, the prototype for so much women’s fiction to this day. Traditionally, a rather bland and conventional woman has been paired with a much more compelling rulebreaker who in the end must pay heavily for her transgressions either by losing her status in society — or by losing her life. In The Last of Her Kind, the formula receives a different spin, but it is still operative.

I was interested in the novel (which I have yet to read) because I was hoping for a fresh take on this pairing of young women in college, but the review isn’t fully positive. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think.

Speaking of censorship: Reader Elizabeth Angell sends word that there is now “an organized campaign in Turkey” to remove article 301 from the penal code. Article 301, you’ll remember, was the little law that makes it illegal to “insult Turkishness,” and which made it possible for a zealous prosecutor to bring charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk last year. Pamuk’s only “crime” was to talk about the genocide of Armenians in 1916. While the charges against Pamuk have now been dropped, other writers still stand accused under the same law. A repeal of article 301 would be a major win for freedom of expression in the Turkish republic. Here is the website of the campaign: 301 Hayir (in Turkish only.)

Related: Orhan Pamuk Goes On Trial.