Category: literary life

Carl Fussman interviews Salman Rushdie for Esquire, using some sort of elicitation exercise. A sample:

I left college in 1968, and “Midnight’s Children” was published twelve years later. In between, I was essentially floundering about. I worked in advertising two or three days a week in order to have the other four or five to stay home and write. Advertising was very tempting because they were constantly trying to bribe me to do it full-time. When you’ve had no success as a writer, the bribes start looking good. You start thinking, Who am I kidding? I think I want to be a novelist, but I’m not getting anywhere, and meanwhile here are these people offering me a comfortable living to do something that I actually can do. “Don’t be an idiot!” a voice says. The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I’m going to damn well be this person that I’ve set my heart on being.

If you had to pick one book from the last sixty or seventy years, you’d probably pick “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

I’ll tell you what divorce hasn’t taught me. It didn’t teach me not to get married again.

Did he have to recline on a couch? I want to know. More along those lines here.

The Willesden Herald, a group blog from the Willesden neighorhood in London, is holding a short story competition that will be judged by none other than local lit star Zadie Smith.

For more details, go here (scroll down to November 17 entry).

In an essay contribution at Powell’s Dan Olivas addresses the issue of documenting hate in fiction.

Finalists for the 2005 Story Prize have been announced. They are Jim Harrison (The Summer He Didn’t Die), Maureen F. McHugh (Mothers and Other Monsters), and Patrick O’Keeffe (The Hill Road). The award will be judged by Andrea Barrett, Nancy Pearl, and James Wood; the ceremony will take place on January 25, in New York. Last year’s prize went to Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker.

A few years ago, when I was in grad school, I’d forcefully disagreed with someone during a seminar on linguistics. After the class, this woman walked up to me and said, “You’re so articulate!” I was about to say, “Thanks,” and move on, when she blurted out, “..for a Middle-Eastern woman.”

“Funny,” I thought. “You’re so ignorant…for a grad student. How did you get into the program?” But of course I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even point out that I’m not from the Middle-East. Gosh. Esprit d’escalier.

Everywhere one looks these days, there’s a book or an article about that subject du jour: Women and Islam. Newsweek‘s Lorraine Ali offers a different view:

Muslim women are feeling like pawns in a political game: jihadists portray them as ignorant lambs who need to be protected from outside forces, while the United States considers them helpless victims of a backward society to be saved through military intervention. “Our empowerment is being exploited by men,” says Palestinian Muslim Rima Barakat. “It’s a policy of hiding behind the skirts of women. It’s dishonorable no matter who’s doing it.” Scholars such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, an expert on Islamic law and author of “The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists,” says this is an age-old problem. “Historically the West has used the women’s issue as a spear against Islam,” he says. “It was raised in the time of the Crusades, used consistently in colonialism and is being used now. Muslim women have grown very, very sensitive about how they’re depicted on either side.”

By the by, Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft just came out in October with HarperCollins.

Not having read any of the Narnia books, I really had no interest in the movie. Still, for the sake of marital harmony in the Moorishgirl household, I might have agreed to go. That is, until I saw this:

Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman – he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials – has called Narnia “one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read”.

Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s earth.

It sounds pretty awful, but I’ll have to reserve judgment until I’m dragged to it this weekend.

Link from Jessa at Bookslut.