Category: literary life

Percival Everett has a new novel out next month called The Water Cure, described by publisher Graywolf Press as the “chilling confession of a victim turned villain.” Here’s what they say about it:

Ishmael Kidder is a successful romance novelist. His agent is coming to visit her usually productive client. But Kidder’s eleven-year-old daughter has been brutally murdered, and it stands to reason that he must take revenge by any means necessary. The punishment is carried out without guilt, and with the usual equipment—duct tape, rope, and super glue. But how will he explain the noises in the basement to his agent? How does he know he has the right man?

Everett read an excerpt from The Water Cure at last year’s Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and I remember it vividly; it was a scene in which the father finds out that his daughter is missing, and goes to his ex-wife’s house to wait for the police. Heartbreaking, terrifying, and yet at the same time laced with the usual Everett humor.

(Via TEV)

I often get asked to name literary influences and favorite authors, and I’ve never quite figured out how to answer either question. Everything I read, experience, or witness influences my writing in some way, so it’s difficult to say something neat and predictable, like “My writing owes a debt to X literary movement.” And naming favorite authors is equally difficult because so few writers publish consistently significant books over the years.

One author whose books I often include in my ‘favorites’ list is J.M. Coetzee. I admire the breadth of his work (novels, criticism, translation), and it’s something I aspire to myself. I love his use of language (I don’t know if it’s because he was trained as a linguist (as was I) that I am so sensitive to his choices.) I like that he never forgets that the story should always come first. Each book of his is a reason to celebrate, as far as I’m concerned.

Recently, the New York Review of Books published an excerpt from Coetzee’s new book, Diary of a Bad Year (which will be released in December 2007, according to Amazon). The excerpt is, quite simply, incredible. I can’t wait to get my hands on the novel.

I’ve been enjoying Paper Cuts, the book blog started by the NYT‘s Dwight Garner. It’s varied, it’s well written, and it’s got a point of view. Now it looks like the Chicago Tribune has also joined the blogging world through Trib Books. Nice to see newspapers’ book sections trying to reach readers via this medium instead of sitting back and accusing blogs of stealing their readership/lowering standards/putting them out of business/etc.

Edwidge Danticat has an op-ed in the New York Times about the cost of a recent immigration crackdown on families all over the United States. Do read it.

A few months ago I received a copy of Dave Eggers’ new novel What is the What, and, after leafing through it, I set it aside to read later. Except that later never came. Something about the book made me uncomfortable, and the encomiums it has received in the press haven’t really changed my mind. London Review of Books contributing editor Thomas Jones expresses that discomfort better than I could:

The book itself makes no attempt to explain how such a hybrid came into being. Readers are twice reassured in small type that ‘all proceeds . . . will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in America; to rebuilding Southern Sudan, beginning with Marial Bai; to organisations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur; and to the college education of Valentino Achak Deng.’ But Eggers is repeatedly referred to as ‘the author’, and his is the only name on the cover or the copyright page (the subtitle, ‘The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng’, appears only on the title page). This may make sense from the point of view of publicity and sales – Eggers’s name sells books, and selling more books raises awareness of and more funds for the causes that matter most to Achak – but it also inspires unease: Achak may benefit from the text, but he doesn’t own it; he has become a character in a fictionalised version of his life story that legally belongs to someone else. Practically speaking, this hardly matters: the motives for and consequences of Eggers’s actions are unquestionably benevolent, and the book could not have taken the form it has without Achak’s consent and blessing.

And yet, that a story so concerned with so many different forms of dispossession should itself be subject to a variety of appropriation is not unproblematic, and requires a more positive justification than mere silence. Eggers, unlike many of Achak’s American friends and benefactors, does not feature as a character in What Is the What. No doubt it was important to avoid distracting readers with anything that could be mistaken for cute metafictional trickery, one of the less interesting but more remarked-on aspects of Eggers’s first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a lightly fictionalised account of bringing up his younger brother after the deaths of his parents from cancer. But in What Is the What, Eggers is conspicuous by his absence from the narrative, which leaves you wondering how his name came to such solitary prominence on the cover, how the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng came to be ‘Copyright © Dave Eggers’.

Read the rest of this otherwise positive review here.

The Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded every two years to “a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage,” has been given to Chinua Achebe. I adore and admire Achebe, and could not be happier with the judges’ choice.