The New York Times has come up with its ten ‘best books of 2005‘. On the fiction list: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. On the non-fiction list, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking made the cut.
PhRMA, a lobbying group for drug manufacturers, recently commissioned a thriller that would hype the dangers of buying prescription drugs from Canada. Slate‘s Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer report:
The original plot of The Spivak Conspiracy, the book’s working title for a time, revolved around an attack on the United States by villainous Croatian Muslims, whose weapon of choice is tainted drugs sold to Americans through Canadian pharmacies. It’s against the law to reimport American drugs. But some drugs cost as little as one-tenth of their U.S. price when purchased in Canada, and a lot of Americans have been hopping over the border to fill their prescriptions or buying drugs from Canadian pharmacies via the Internet. Last year, they bought nearly $1 billion worth of imports, cutting into the drug companies’ profits.
Except the writers didn’t deliver the novel the lobbying group expected. (It did not mesh with PhRMA’s aesthetic sensibilities, I’m sure.) So the two authors rewrote their novel…and made a drug company the villain. Needless to say, PhRMA is not happy. More here.
Bud Parr (of Chekhov’s Mistress) has just launched a lit blog aggregation service called Metaxucafe. I gave up trying to figure out how to pronounce it, but I’m already reading it.
Have you noticed how someone will mention something to you–a movie, a book, a song, an event–and then the very same day you’ll notice an item about it in the newspaper? I was just talking to a friend about the Daughters of Abraham, and then I saw this article in the CSM about them. It’s a four-year old book club that brings together Jewish, Christian and Muslim women. It now has eighteen members.
The latest installment of the Lannan Foundation’s Readings and Conversations series features Edwidge Danticat with Junot Díaz this Wednesday, November 30, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Details here.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I’m a huge fan of both Danticat and Díaz’s work. If any of you are able to attend, do please write in and tell us how it was.
Nominees for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award were announced on Friday. Among the finalists: John Updike and Paul Theroux. You can read the terrible extracts over at the Guardian.