Category: literary life

Busy week, kids. Tonight at Powell’s, Natasha Radojcic reads from You Don’t Have To Live Here, her novel about a young woman’s travels and search for redemption. (Details here.) Last year, Radojcic’s essay about her first few months in America had me nodding with amusement and recognition.

And then on Wednesday, Kevin Smokler will be in town to promote Bookmark Now, his anthology of essays about reading and writing in an age when both seem increasingly embattled. (Details here.) A couple of months ago, Smokler guest-blogged over at The Elegant Variation, and got some notice from discerning readers.

I’ll be attending both those events, so stop by and say hi.

Tayari Jones (author of The Untelling) talks about attending Bible school, while being raised atheist.

Link via Maud.

Peter Bergen, whose myopic NY Times Op-Ed following the London attacks enraged me, seems to have regained enough sense to file this piece at Mother Jones, recapping the administration’s policies between 2001 and 2003, and the foolish decision to go after Iraq.

What we have done in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams: We invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the heart of the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure that bin Laden has long predicted was the United States’ long-term goal in the region. We deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden has long despised, ignited Sunni and Shia fundamentalist fervor in Iraq, and have now provoked a “defensive” jihad that has galvanized jihad-minded Muslims around the world. It’s hard to imagine a set of policies better designed to sabotage the war on terrorism.

Funny, that’s what some people (deemed unpatriotic, if I recall) had warned of back in 2003, and what a majority of the U.S. public now thinks.

Dan Olivas informs us that he will be guest DJing on Pinky’s Paperhaus. What will he play? Tune in to find out.

Here’s an Op-Ed piece in the Times by Courtney Angela Brkic, on the revisionist trends still current in Serbia:

For years Belgrade has denied involvement by its citizens in Srebrenica and other massacres of the 1990s. The recent broadcast of a graphic video that showed Serbian paramilitary police executing six young men from Srebrenica should have made it very hard to sustain that revisionism. Amazing as it seems, however, the video was not enough to shatter what Serbian human rights activist Sonja Biserko has described as the country’s “state of collective denial.”

Fewer than half of Serbs polled last spring believed the Srebrenica massacre took place. And while much has been made of the video’s effects on a shocked Serbian public, it remains to be seen where that public will stand once the furor recedes. The Radical Party, which won 27 percent of the popular vote in the last national elections, making it the largest party in Parliament, has already criticized what it sees as the anti-Serb hysteria that “wishes at all costs to put the burden of all crimes on Serbia.” Graffiti has appeared in several cities praising the “liberation” of Srebrenica. Rumors circulate that the video was doctored, or that the men committing the crimes were acting independently.

She argues that the arrests of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic will not be enough, that all the people who contributed to the massacre should be turned over to The Hague. “The West should ask for no less than this when it considers Serbian requests for aid,” she says. Brkic is the author of Stillness: And Other Stories and The Stone Fields.

Over at the SF Chronicle, novelist Tom Dolby wonders whether writers should blog and whether blogging affects writing. Dolby guest-blogged at The Elegant Variation earlier this year.