As has been widely reported, the longlist for the Booker Prize was announced. I was pleased to see Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist included, but surprised that J. M. Coetzee’s new book, Diary of A Bad Year, was not. Still, it’s nice to see younger authors get a shot. (The shortlist will be announced on September 6 and the winner on October 16.)
Alain Mabanckou’s new book, Lettre à Jimmy, has just been published by Fayard in France. As the title suggests, it’s essentially an homage to James Baldwin in epistolary form. If you read French, you can check out an excerpt on Mabanckou’s blog.
Over at Slate, Reza Aslan reviews two books that collect Osama Bin Laden’s speeches, looking for clues as to the terrorist leader’s arguments. The first is Messages to the World, translated by James Howarth and edited by Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence, and the other, newer volume is The Al Qaeda Reader, edited and translated by Library of Congress scholar Raymond Ibrahim. Here’s a quote from Aslan’s review:
[F]ar from debunking al-Qaida’s twisted vision of a world divided in two, the Bush administration has legitimized it through its own morally reductive “us vs. them” rhetoric.
In the end, this is the most important lesson to be learned from these writings. Because, if we are truly locked in an ideological war, as the president keeps reminding us, then our greatest weapons are our words. And thus far, instead of fighting this war on our terms, we have been fighting it on al-Qaida’s.
Don’t believe me? Ask Bin Laden:Bush left no room for doubts or media opinion. He stated clearly that this war is a Crusader war. He said this in front of the whole world so as to emphasize this fact. … When Bush says that, they try to cover up for him, then he said he didn’t mean it. He said, ‘crusade.’ Bush divided the world into two: ‘either with us or with terrorism’ … The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouths.
Odd, indeed.
By the way, earlier this year, the Boston Review published an excellent essay by Khaled Abou el Fadl about the Lawrence book, which you can still find online here.
Manuel Muñoz, whose short story collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue was recently short-listed for the Frank O’Connor prize, has a pretty cool op-ed in the New York Times about the politics of naming. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s intriguing to watch “American” names begin to dominate among my nieces and nephews and second cousins, as well as with the children of my hometown friends. I am not surprised to meet 5-year-old Brandon or Kaitlyn. Hardly anyone questions the incongruity of matching these names with last names like Trujillo or Zepeda. The English-only way of life partly explains the quiet erasure of cultural difference that assimilation has attempted to accomplish. A name like Kaitlyn Zepeda doesn’t completely obscure her ethnicity, but the half-step of her name, as a gesture, is almost understandable.
Spanish was and still is viewed with suspicion: always the language of the vilified illegal immigrant, it segregated schoolchildren into English-only and bilingual programs; it defined you, above all else, as part of a lower class. Learning English, though, brought its own complications with identity. It was simultaneously the language of the white population and a path toward the richer, expansive identity of “American.” But it took getting out of the Valley for me to understand that “white” and “American” were two very different things.
You can read the piece in full here.
I missed this piece when it appeared in last weekend’s Guardian Review, until a reader kindly sent me the link: Maya Jaggi’s profile of Elias Khouri. Here’s a snippet:
Khoury may be well placed to assess the aspirations and tensions among Palestinians in Lebanon’s 12 camps, who remain “in closed ghettos, separated from Lebanese society”. As a young Lebanese at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut in the 1970s, he spent years gathering from refugees their personal histories of the mass expulsions that attended the creation of Israel. He felt the stories should be given to an Arab Tolstoy, and imagined himself in the role (“everybody laughed”), but says, “I never dared write it then because I didn’t know how.”
More here.
This is not the kind of thing you want to learn when you’re printing draft after draft of your book: Office printers are ‘health risk.’