Category: literary life

The latest installment of Powell’s Bookcast features Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, Uzodinma Iweala, and local boy Marc Acito.

The Guardian asked forty-three poets and writers (among whom: Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie, John Banville, AS Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Chuck Palahniuk, Zadie Smith, Tariq Ali, and Helen Oyeyemi) to select their favorite books of 2005. A worthwhile read.

Ron Charles’s review of Thomas Christopher Greene’s foodie novel I’ll Never Be Long Gone is written like a recipe, but it also contains a moral:

It’s galling that some authors, such as, say, Anita Shreve, must constantly defend themselves from the pejorative “romance” label no matter how well they write, while romantic fluff like this can pass itself off as “literary fiction.” It’s the same in the kitchen, of course: Women just cook, but men are chefs.

Check, please.

From the Observer:

Our interview with American literary sensation Benjamin Kunkel (Review, last week) was accompanied by a panel of quotes from US reviews, supplied by his publisher. One, from Entertainment Weekly, read: ‘Kunkel has succeeded in crafting a voice of singular originality’ and omitted the next line ‘ – one you want to punch in the mouth.’

Ouch.

• Rodney Welch reviews Yiyun Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, for the Washington Post, comparing it favorably to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.
• Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe has launched a website.
• Jordan Rosenfeld reviews Daniel Olivas’ Devil Talk for Northern California’s KQED.
  
  

• The Seattle P.I.‘s John Marshall has put together a list of books for holiday giving.
• Korash Huseyin, the editor of the Kashgar Literature Review, was sentenced by the Chinese government to three years’ imprisonment for writing a political fable.
• Anne Marie O’Connor has a lengthy profile of Marjane Satrapi in the Los Angeles Times.
• The Lit Saloon computes the ratio of fiction to non-fiction book reviews in the NYTBR, and finds it wanting.
• Of Gabriel García Márquez’s new novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Michiko Kakutani writes: “[It] is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years. It turns out not to have been worth the wait.”
• Syrian poet Adonis will visit Iran to give readings. He will travel with Venus Khoury-Ghata, his translator into French, and a fine poet in her own right.