Category: literary life

After the Booker Prize, it’s time for the Orange Prize to do a “best of the best” selection. The honor went to Andrea Levy, for Small Island.

It used to be Google vs. Authors’ Guild, but now the focus may change to Google vs. Yahoo. As has been reported elsewhere, Yahoo and its partners (librarians and non-profit groups) plan to digitize and make available copyrighted content, with the difference that the program is Opt-In (as opposed to Google’s Opt-Out) and that the full content of the text will be available (as opposed to Google’s snippets.)

Brian Sholis of Art Forum writes in to let readers know about a Bookforum benefit for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. This will take place October 10 at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York. Details here. The event will feature readings by writers Robert Stone, Donna Tartt, Roy Blount, Valerie Martin, Nancy Lemann, John Barry, and Mike Tidwell, and will be hosted by the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s Chris Rose.

The Financial Times‘ John Sutherland examines the use of language in recent fiction, looking for specific idiolects and daring word usage.

My previously mentioned piece on Salman Rushdie appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here’s the opening paragraph.

In the first few pages of Salman Rushdie’s new novel, “Shalimar the Clown,” a man tells his daughter a bedtime story, a tale of animal-headed humans and flying monsters. But Max Ophuls is no ordinary man, and the story is not so much a children’s story as a parable about power that lyrically describes the deals one must make with various devils if one is to enter the house of power. Rushdie has had years to think about power — the power of an ayatollah in Iran, the power of right-wing Muslims in Britain, the power of agents from Scotland Yard, and the power he now possesses, as a result of the fame that found him in February of 1989.

When he was younger, Rushdie told the audience at a Portland appearance last week, he wanted to have some power because he believed a writer should be able to use it to speak out on the big issues of the day. He could never have imagined how he would come about his own power. “Be careful what you wish for,” he joked.

Due to space limitations, I couldn’t fit all of the many interesting notes I had made during the interview, among which the fact that Rushdie has considered writing under a pseudonym. He told me an anecdote about how Doris Lessing had tried it herself in the 1980s. She sent a manuscript under the name Jane Somers to her publisher, who then called her and said, “Doris, what are you trying to pull?” Nevertheless, the publisher decided to honor her wishes. When the book appeared, critics said that it read “like a bad Doris Lessing novel.”

Although Rushdie didn’t say as much, he may well have ruled out the idea of a pseudonym. Still, a change is definitely in the cards for him. At the behest of his eight-year-old son, his next novel is likely to be a children’s book, like his earlier Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Over at AGNI, Myfanwy Collins has an essay, titled “Tobacco Road,” about how, when she was a child, a couple next door offered to adopt her:

They lived next door and had decided that they would like me to be their daughter. Over drinks one night at the round table covered in a plastic cloth in my soon-to-be stepfather’s kitchen, they suggested to my mother that they might adopt me. I was on the nubby couch in the other room, wearing my cap-sleeved yellow nightgown, up later than I should have been, watching ‘The Love Boat’ and breathing in secondhand smoke and stale breath.

You can read the rest of it here.