Category: literary life

What do novelists and psychics have in common? In a brief essay for The Guardian, Hilary Mantel answers:

Which other self-employed persons stand up in public to talk about non-existent people? Novelists, of course. We listen to non-existent voices and write down what they say. Then we talk with passion and conviction about people no one can see. Our audiences are complicit, of course, whereas the audiences for professional psychics are ambivalent. They teeter on the edge of delusion and the edge of derision. For the psychic, it’s a no-win situation. If she gets it wrong, she’s rubbish. If she gets it right, she’s a cheat. One of the things I learned while writing the book is that scepticism can be held as firmly, devoutly, illogically as any religious position. Elaborate edifices of fraud are proposed – so elaborate, so unlikely, that it’s easier to believe that, after all, the dead are speaking

Mantel’s Beyond Black, which features a medium, has been praised by readers I trust, so I will have to add it to my TBR pile.

Opium Magazine celebrates its fifth year with a series of events in New York this weekend. On Friday, February 3rd, our pal Jim Ruland will be reading alongside Sam Lipsyte at the Happy Ending Lounge. (Details here.) And then on Saturday, February 4th, an all-star gathering of humor writers will take place at the Slipper Room. Readers will include Jonathan Ames, Diane Williams, Jonathan Baumbach, Amanda Filipacchi, Dennis DiClaudio, Tao Lin, Shya Scanlon and Todd Zuniga himself. (Details here.)

The San Francisco Examiner asked several working writers about their favorite authors. Daniel Handler has a more…muscular approach:

I just saw Jim Shepard read from his novel Project X (Vintage) at the Make Out Room, and he killed. There were a bunch of writers there, all reading to raise money for a progressive candidate, and we were all excited to read with Jim Shepard but we could tell that most of the audience hadn’t heard of him, and the more we talked him up the more I could see people getting nervous that he was a “writer’s writer” –that is, some difficult, pretentious guy that only other writers like. But then he took the stage and in 20 seconds I saw several cynical hipsters laughing so hard they had to put their drinks down and hold their stomachs. And, I should add, it’s a novel about a high school massacre. As I told the crowd that night, I want you to buy a book by Jim Shepard and read it, and if you don’t like it come to me. I’ll give you your money back and then I’ll kick your ass.

Read others’ recommendations here.

Reza Aslan was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote the paperback release of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam earlier this week. You can watch the video on the show’s site. (Speaking of Aslan, I was surprised to find out a blurb from my Oregonian review had been used for the back cover. I liked the book quite a bit, and if you haven’t already read it, you really should.)

As has been widely reported, Patrick O’Keeffe took home the $20,000 Story Prize on Wednesday night, for The Hill Road. The other finalists were Jim Harrison for The Summer He Didn’t Die and Maureen F. McHugh for Mothers & Other Monsters. More at the Guardian.

“Tomorrow is Too Far,” a new short story by Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie, appears in the current issue of Prospect. Here is the opening paragrah:

It was the last summer you spent in Nigeria, the summer before your parents’ divorce, before your mother swore you would never again set foot in Nigeria to see your father’s family, especially not Grandmama. You remember the heat of that summer clearly, even now, thirteen years later, the way Grandmama’s yard felt like a steamy bathroom, a yard with so many trees that the telephone wire was tangled in leaves and different branches touched one another and sometimes mangoes appeared on cashew trees and guavas on mango trees. The thick mat of decaying leaves was soggy under your bare feet. Yellow-bellied bees buzzed around you, your brother Nonso and your cousin Dozie’s heads. Grandmama let only your brother Nonso climb the trees to shake a loaded branch, although you were a better climber than he was. Fruits would rain down, avocados and cashews and guavas, and you and your cousin Dozie would fill old buckets with fruit.

Read the rest here.