Category: literary life

If you’re new to Chinua Achebe, you might like this restrospective on his career, which appeared in the East Africa Standard.

In an essay addressing the decline of reading among college students, Mark Schurmann argues that “literature seems to come from the dysfunctional edges of culture and society” and therefore “it’s society’s outcasts who will continue to treasure and reproduce literature.” Agree? Disagree? Let us know.

In an opinion piece that appears in the Sydney Morning Herald, Salman Rushdie examines how the U.S. government’s corruption of language (referring to contract torture as ‘extraordinary rendition’) leads to greater perversions:

At the end of December, the German Government ordered the closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are told, Khaled al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan. “Aha!” we are encouraged to think. “Obvious bad guy. Render his sorry butt anywhere you like.”

What is wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, “The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone … When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the ’70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain – or kill – another human being without having to answer to the law.”

In other words, the question isn’t whether or not a given individual is “good” or “bad.” The question is whether or not we are – whether or not our governments have dragged us into immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most important pillar of a free society.

Read it all here.

Amitav Ghosh’s new collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances, receives a rave review from Time magazine, which calls it, ” sober and highly dignified.”

How to be true to one’s divided inheritance has always been his driving concern.

In the collection of reports from troubled places assembled in Incendiary Circumstances, Ghosh begins to find an answer in everyday humanity and its resilience. Faced by those rioters in Delhi in 1984, some women stood up to them and, miraculously, reversed the tide of violence. Following the destruction of their country by the Khmer Rouge, a handful of survivors in Cambodia in 1981 put on a dance performance, piecing their lives together like “rag pickers.” Writers have to be solitaries, Ghosh recalls V.S. Naipaul saying, and yet, he seems to feel, to be useful they have to be participants, too.

More here.

As has been widely reported, The Smoking Gun went looking for James Frey’s mug shots from the arrests documented in James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces, and instead found a lot of inconsistencies, exaggerations, or lies. The story has since been picked up on various blogs and in the mainstream media, so there’s not much to add here, except to say many in the press are wondering what effect this will have on Oprah’s book club. (Her next selection is still due to be announced on the 16th.)

A similar problem occurred last year, with Norma Khouri’s Honor Lost, in which the author alleged that her best friend had been murdered in an honor killing in Jordan and that she’d had to flee the country. Turns out she had been living in Chicago the whole time. Why not write novels, people?

Coincidentally, novelist JT Leroy, who had posed as a transgendered, HIV-positive former prostitute, has been unmasked by the New York Times as writer Laura Albert. Public appearances by JT Leroy were fulfilled by Albert ‘s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop.

Novelist Louise Doughty has started a regular column in the Telegraph in which she will teach the art of writing. Doughty must not be new to teaching fiction because she is careful to point out that:

Forget for a moment the loneliness, paranoia and financial insecurity, Being a Writer is great fun.

But there is a catch. You have to write. This is something that would-be writers sometimes appear not to have grasped. Like many novelists, I often give talks at festivals and a common question is, ‘How did you get your first novel published?’

It’s a perfectly valid question but I often suspect the motivation behind it. What was your trick? is what they mean. Tell me your trick, because when I know it, I will be published too. The honest answer, I’m afraid, is, “I wrote a good book. And if you want to be a published writer, you will have to write one too.”

Good advice, that. Reminds me of the top FAQ on Elmore Leonard’s site: “How do I find an agent?” Leonard’s answer: “My advice is to learn how to write and the agent will find you.”