Category: literary life

Azadeh Moaveni is interviewed over at MWU! about her new book, Lipstick Jihad, which, you guessed it, has a veiled woman on the cover. At least this one’s talking on her cell phone though, instead of looking frightfully and submissively at the camera. (I kid, Azadeh, I kid.)

MWU!: In the past decade, several books have been published by either Western journalists or Iranian-Americans about their experiences in Iran. What would you say distinguishes your memoir?
Moaveni: It’s an exciting time to be an Iranian writing about Iran because there is so much to write about. Azar Nafisi’s book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, has had a tremendous impact on the interest in the topic. Also, many of these accounts do not cover much the developments after 1997. My book picks up where others have left off. The election of President Khatami created a dramatic opening in debate which changed the Islamic Republic from below. There was a convergence of the election with the maturing of a post-Revolution generation huge in number, fearless of authority, informed about politics and engaged politically. This youth became the cultural force for changing Iran from below.

Moaveni appears on March 4th in NYC, where you can listen to her read from her memoir.

The latest in Robert Birnbaum’s interviews is with Robert McCrum. They talk about “Scotish roots, the Battle of
Culloden, his stroke and the aftermath, his career arc, why he likes PG Wodehouse, how he came to write a biography of Wodehouse, writer’s societies, fantasy literary dinner parties, short biographies, Glenn Baxter, Jonathan Ames’s “Wake Up Sir!”, The Observer, recent Nobel Prize winners, “facts too good to check”, London, Martin Amis, reading Proust, Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, VS Naipul, The New York Times, and Nick Hornby” among other things.

Junot Diaz, whom I adore and admire, will be reading at Disney Hall tonight in Los Angeles. You know I’d be there if I still lived in L.A., so please check him out and report back to me so I can do some vicarious living.

The finalists for storySouth’s Million Writers’ Award have been announced. They are:

• Terry Bisson “Super 8” (Scifiction.com)
• Jai Clare “Bone on Bone” (Agni)
• Xujun Eberlein “Second Encounter” (Paumanok Review)
• Alicia Gifford “Toggling the Switch” (Narrative Magazine)
• Richard Grayson “Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn” (Fiction Warehouse)
• Trebor Healey “The Mercy Seat” (Blithe House Quarterly)
• Dave Housley “Ryan Seacrest Is Famous” (Barrelhouse)
• Joan Shaddox Isom “Remade Tobacco” (Eclectica Magazine)
• Corey Mesler “Madame Sabat’s Grave” (Pindeldyboz)
• Chika Unigwe “Dreams” (Eclectica Magazine)

Please take the time to read these fine stories, and then vote for your favorite here.

Harold Pinter tells the BBC he’s stopped writing plays for now.

Pinter told Front Row presenter Mark Lawson that his energies were “going in different directions, certainly into poetry”.

“But also, as I think you know, over the last few years I’ve made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies,” he said.

“I’m using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very worrying as things stand.”

In the UK, the Conservative party is proposing a crack down on book deals by convicts, and that gives the Guardian an opportunity to look at a bunch of famous books written while their authors were behind bars.