Category: literary life

The Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany had an opinion piece this past weekend in the New York Times:

PRESIDENT OBAMA is clearly trying to reach out to the Muslim world. I watched his Inaugural Address on television, and was most struck by the line: “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.” He gave his first televised interview from the White House to Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television channel.

But have these efforts reached the streets of Cairo?

Al-Aswany argues that Obama’s deafening silence about Israel’s air-, land-, and sea-based bombing of Gaza during the first three weeks of January has significantly drained any reservoir of goodwill he might have had in the region. Meanwhile, in the New York Times magazine, the Israeli novelist and screenwriter Etgar Keret contributes a short piece to the Lives section, about running into an old friend while in a bomb shelter. Here is the closing paragraph:

On the train from Beersheba I read a paper that someone had left behind on a seat. There was an item about the lions and ostriches at the Gaza Zoo. They were suffering from the bombing and hadn’t been fed regularly since the war began. The brigade commander wanted to rescue one particular lion in a special operation and transfer it to Israel. The other animals were going to have to fend for themselves. Another, smaller, item, without a picture, reported that the number of children who had died in the bombing of Gaza so far had passed 300. Like the ostriches, the rest of the children there would also have to fend for themselves. Our situation at the level of the matchstick Eiffel Tower has indeed improved beyond recognition. As for the rest, like Kobi, I have my doubts.

You can read both pieces here and here.

I’ve had a copy of the collected journals of Susan Sontag (Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963) in my office for a while, but somehow haven’t managed to get to it yet. Luc Sante’s thoughtful and generous review makes me want to read it. Here’s the opening paragraph:

You might say there are two kinds of writers: those who keep a journal in the hope that its contents might someday be published, and those who do not keep a journal for fear that its contents might someday be published. In other words, no journal-keeping by a writer who harbors any sort of ambition is going to be entirely innocent. The complicated, somewhat voyeuristic thrill the reader might derive from seemingly prying open the author’s desk drawer is therefore, to a certain extent, a fiction in which both parties are complicit.

This notion inescapably comes to mind when one reads the entries by the young Susan Sontag collected in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). Like any author’s journal worth reading, it contains items that anticipate prominent themes of her later published work, as well as others that seem terribly private. What’s unusual, maybe, is that sometimes the intellectual items sound more naked and the private items more hedged.

You can read the review in its entirety here.

I was in a faculty meeting yesterday when I heard of the passing of John Updike. Stunning news. He always seemed so full of life I had no idea he had been sick for some time.

The National Book Critics’ Circle has announced the finalists for its annual book awards.  I was thrilled and surprised to find out that I had made the list for the Nona Balakian, which is the award given for excellence in reviewing.  The other finalists are Michael Antman, Kathryn Harrison, and Todd Shy; the winner is Ron Charles of the Washington Post. I am absolutely delighted for him; this is a richly deserved honor for a wonderful book critic.

The finalists in the fiction category are:

Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Farrar, Straus
Marilynne Robinson, Home, Farrar, Straus
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, Riverhead
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, West Virginia University Press
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge, Random House

You can find list of all finalists in all categories on the NBCC page.

The L.A. Times Book Review asked a few writers to think about the significance of Barack Obama’s election for the arts in this country. Janet Fitch, Susan Straight, Rubén Martinez, Rebecca Solnit, and Ted Widmer contribute short essays. For his part, Ben Ehrenreich has a wish list for the president-elect. Here’s an excerpt:

2. An e-mail petition has been circulating urging you to create a Cabinet-level position for a secretary of the arts. Please consider nominating Iraqi journalist Muntather Zaidi. His shoe-pitching performance in Baghdad last month displayed a startlingly precise understanding of the proper relation of the artist to those in power.

You can read the whole piece here.

The City University of New York has started an online series called the Great Issues Seminar (which is part of a larger project at the graduate center), in which they ask academics and intellectuals to comment about a key text on the concept of power. They asked me to write about Edward Said’s Orientalism.  Here is the piece, for those who are curious.