Category: literary life

So Brick Lane‘s been out in Britain for almost a year, and now a British group (the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council) is upset that Monica Ali’s book portrays them as “backward, uneducated, and unsophisticated.” They must have been reading a different book. The one I read was a humanistic portrayal of one woman’s transplantation from a Bangladeshi village to a secluded life in Brick Lane and one man’s opinions of his fellow immigrants, contradictions and reverse racism included. (In fairness, there are Bangladeshis who did like the book.) Yes, the chapters with Hasina’s letters (the least successful parts of the book, IMO) made this reader wince, but there was much else I liked. The group goes as far as to use the three words that no South Asian, Muslim, Arab, or Middle-Eastern group should consider using in a letter of protest without due cause: The Satanic Verses. Ugh.

Over at YPR, Ken Krimstein has the shortened, unauthorized German translation of The Catcher in the Rye.

Ja, so, dis is der story uf me, a young mensch who vanders arount New York mit dem red hat on mein kupf. So, der is all diese peoples, they really, how you say, pissing me off. Ich bin ein pissed off teenager, if you know vat I’m saying to you? So, anyhow, ich see all these ducks in Central Park, very beautiful, ja. And I am so, so angry at dis and dat. Vy? Vy ist me so wery angered? Because they ist der phonies! They ist der shams. Der phony, phony phony! All mit der smiling and laughing! Vat ist dis here, 99 Luftballoons? Mein Gott! So, ja, I making up mein mind I’m no more going back to my Pensey school. Nein! Mit more of dem phonies. Sorry to Charlie! Then, you understand, der ist ein carousel, going round unt round. And there ist dis catcher, he’s grabben der kinder auf der rye. So, that’s it. Ja? Now, what you say we dance? Unt an ein, and a zwei… Oom pah pah, oom pah pah!

Link via Maud.

I’ve got a story up on Pindeldyboz this week. Enjoy. I will see you back here in a week or so.

I’m not sure if this is admirable or compulsive: Irving Tobin reads the entire New York Times (minus the Sports, Escapes, and Circuit sections.)

[His wife] introduced him to the Times. Soon he had to cut out his other reading. Then tax season came along. Every year, he fell behind, losing almost two months in March and April.

James Sallis writes about forgotten writers.

Why should Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) be remembered, and Kenneth Fearing (1902-61) wholly lost? What immortal hand or eye laid the blessing on F. Scott Fitzgerald while passing over John O’Hara? Why Thomas Wolfe and not Dawn Powell? And what ever happened to Philip Wylie? How many of us, for instance, inveterate readers all, know the name Calder Willingham?

Besides being an exercise in drudging up obscure writers, the article doesn’t really offer up much of a response to the question of why some are remembered and others aren’t.

The New Yorker‘s Louis Menand has a piece on John Updike on the occasion of the publication of Updike’s anthology The Early Stories. Menand prefaces his review with a discussion of short stories.

A short story is not as restrictive as a sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. Its aim, as it was identified by the modern genre