Check Out Check-In
Elizabeth Skurnick (a.k.a. The Old Hag) has just published her first poetry chapbook, titled Check-In, which won the Caketrain chapbook competition last year. Get that credit card out.
Elizabeth Skurnick (a.k.a. The Old Hag) has just published her first poetry chapbook, titled Check-In, which won the Caketrain chapbook competition last year. Get that credit card out.
In case you were hiding under a rock: The Booker shortlist was announced on Thursday, and the finalists are:
John Banville, The Sea
Julian Barnes, Arthur and George
Sebastian Barry, A Long, Long Way
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
I just started On Beauty (about which I’ll have more later).
Lorraine Adams has won the VCU first novelist award for Harbor, her novel about an Algerian stowaway who finds himself in the middle of a terrorist cell. The award is open to all first-time novelists, and the submission period begins in October.
While in Cleveland to accept an award, novelist Edwidge Danticat told the Plain Dealer that Hurricane Katrina reminded her of Jeanne, which devastated the Haitian city of Gonaives:
“There, again, the people most vulnerable were the most affected. It’s extraordinarily striking to hear people of the first world called refugees in their own country. People try to distance themselves from the dispossessed, asking, ‘Why didn’t they get out?’ – the same question asked of Gonaives.”
Over at NPR, writers Fannie Flagg and Richard Ford offer call in to offer comfort to the survivors. (Scroll to the last few minutes of the program.)
Elsewhere, Poet Ishmael Reed calls the media on its handling of race during the hurricane and on other major current issues.
I wish that some of these smug individuals [those who profess ‘tough love’] would serve as block captain in an inner-city neighborhood for a year, as I have since 1989. They would discover that the official indifference and apathy and neglect expressed toward the black residents in New Orleans happen on a smaller scale to black neighborhoods throughout the nation. That nation is not color-blind. It’s colored blind.
Novelist Julia Alvarez writes in the Washington Post about writing, post September 11.
At different points in the writing of my new novel, which has been the hardest for me to write so far, I kept telling a friend who hears about all my writing woes that I didn’t think I could finish it. Now, I’m no stranger to the Furies of self-doubt, which have always been after me, and the race is always on as to whether they or I will make it through the next paragraph and the next. But since Sept. 11 these Furies seemed to have multiplied in number. What was my fear exactly? That I couldn’t put my arms around the whole thing. That I would yield to the temptation to leave things out, to tidy things up. That I would lower the blinds and write the very same novel I would have written before Sept. 11.
The Levantine Cultural Center, in conjunction with PEN, will hold readings of the anthology of Iranian literature, Strange Times, My Dear, which I’ve talked about at length in a previous blog entry. In today’s edition of the L.A. Times, Susan Carpenter talks about the event, and gives some background on the legal fight that had to take place to enable the book’s publication.
In addition to featuring readings from the book, it will include a performance by L.A.-based Farsi jazz vocalist Ziba Shirazi and Middle Eastern cuisine. Iranian comedian and actor Maz Jobrani will be the host.
“A lot of people fled Iran for freedom of speech, and here we are in America suffering what we left there for,” Jobrani said. “Being a comedian and knowing that it’s important to be able to say what we want to say, and also having come from Iran, where there’s censorship, it kind of made me think: If that’s happening here in the U.S., it’s something we need to bring to people’s attention.”
“For PEN, this [event] is part of our main mission of freedom of speech and freedom to write,” said Adam Somers, executive director of the L.A.-based PEN USA. “It’s part of our mission to nurture the literary community, in this case the Iranian community, as well.”
Southern California is home to the largest Iranian population outside Iran. It’s been estimated that 600,000 to 800,000 Iranians live here.
Read it all here.