Activists, professors and authors Abdelhay El Moudden and Abdelahad Sebti have launched an online Moroccan literary magazine called Ribat El Koutoub. It features book reviews, interviews, articles, and literary news. Check it out.
Maud Newton has a wonderful review in Sunday’s NYTBR of Ellen Litman’s Last Chicken in America. Here’s how it opens:
That people won’t read story collections is an axiom at publishing houses and a common notion in newspaper idea pieces. Whether it was ever true I tend to doubt, but it certainly isn’t now. Evidence springs effortlessly to mind — Junot Díaz, ZZ Packer, Lorrie Moore and George Saunders are just a few of the youngish writers beloved first for the short fiction that started their careers — yet the distrust persists.
When a good novel fails to find an audience, it’s the fault of bad marketing, unappealing cover art or a public too dim to appreciate literary fiction. But if short stories don’t sell, publishers blame the form. The resulting skittishness may account for the rise of the “novel in stories,” a hybridized creature typically denoted, as in the case of Ellen Litman’s “Last Chicken in America,” by an italicized subtitle.
The worst of these books are chilly and labyrinthine. You follow dour characters down corridors of plot, theme or emotion that threaten to lead to some destination, but never actually do. Litman’s elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is the converse of such aimless solemnity. It’s warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.
More here.
Monica Ali wrote a piece for the Guardian in which she derides the media (including the newspaper that published her article) for giving so much attention to the handful of people who protested the making of her book into a film. Here’s a very quotable excerpt:
As seems to be the way with these things, press coverage began (in this newspaper) with the reporting of the views of a couple of self-appointed “community leaders”. I love it when a journalist does this. I think of him stumbling around Tower Hamlets, waving a notebook and echoing the old colonial cry from down the ages: take me to your leader.
Of course, writers who have ancestral roots in Muslim nations are used to this: Any kind of a protest over a supposedly offensive book is blown way out of proportion in the West, and the author turned into a martyr, whether she likes it or not.
See also:
Department of WTF.
Tempest in a Teacup.
Doris Lessing! I sort of suspected it would be an English-language writer this year, but honestly I had not even thought of Doris Lessing. It’s nice to be surprised, don’t you think? Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has already posted links to reviews, interviews, and commentary, which you should check out.
Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has posted some links over the last couple of days about odds and guesses leading up to the announcement, in a week or so, of the Nobel Prize in literature. Last year, I correctly predicted that the prize would go to Orhan Pamuk, and this year I am not getting a strong feeling, but I’m still going to give it a try. I think it will go to Cormac McCarthy. You heard it here first.
First Lines is a Cornell University site that collects opening lines from many classic novels, and lets you guess which books they came from. Warning: It’s pretty addictive.