Over the past year, novelist Cliff Garstang has been commenting on short stories published in the New Yorker, and now he promises he will reveal his five favorites soon. I canceled my subscription to the magazine when I moved back to Morocco to finish my book, and I was often grateful to be able to read the stories online, although I didn’t always keep up with them, so I just spent the past hour browsing though the posts and reading (or rereading) some of the pieces.
I hadn’t heard of this author scam before.
Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, which appeared in the United States in a translation by Fady Joudah almost a year ago but has not gotten a single review in a newspaper or magazine, was written up this weekend in the Guardian. Here’s what Fiona Sampson said about the book:
This most public of Palestinians is the master not of reductive polemic but of a profoundly lyric imagination, one that draws together the textures of daily life, physical beauty – whether of landscape or of women – longing, myth and history. Using poetry complex with personal experience, he has recreated an entire society’s sensibility.
Read it all here.
My discussion of Camara Laye’s novel The Radiance of the King continues over at Words Without Borders. Here’s a snippet:
I want to start our discussion of The Radiance of the King by talking about the story itself. In the novel, Clarence, a white man of undefined origin and occupation, lands on the coast of Africa (which coast, you ask? We are not told) and in short order he loses all his money, in a gambling game, to a group of white men. He is evicted from his hotel, and the owner decides to keep Clarence’s trunk as collateral for the unpaid bill. Now Clarence is desperate; he wants to figure out a way to get his belongings, since his only possessions now are the clothes on his back, which are already showing signs of wear. He stumbles onto a street celebration for a local monarch, and immediately and rather arrogantly thinks that the king might hire him as an advisor, or at least vouch for him to the hotel owner, or, at any rate, know what to do to save Clarence from the misery in which he finds himself.
I love reading the profiles Maya Jaggi writes for the Guardian, don’t you? Her latest one is of Orhan Pamuk.
Sad news this morning: Novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books, has died.