Publishers Weekly has put out a list of the best books of 2003. Here’s the fiction and the non-fiction lists. I was excited that Persepolis made the cut in the Comics list. And from the department of Go Figure, the religion rundown doesn’t have anything on Islam.
The November/December 2003 issue of The Barcelona Review is up.
Jennifer Howard mentions Moorishgirl in this Sunday column for the Washington Post. I found the article entertaining, if uninformed. Others weigh in with their thoughts. What irks me is that she didn’t mention I was a writer. Sniff.
Who needs character development and careful plots when you can write about suicide pilots and Jihad? Who needs book tours when you’ve got Sean Hannity and other conservatives plugging your book? Who cares if your novel is “an act of terrorism on the reader’s brain” when you can make the NY Times Bestseller list? Read more on Joel C. Rosenberg’s novel here.
In this profile, Anne Donovan, the author of Buddha Da, which was nominated for a Whitbread Award earlier this week, talks about her decision to use Glasgow dialect:
Her decision to write in the Glasgow “patter”, which could have thwarted her rise, has in fact propelled it, with the Whitbread judges describing it as “humorous and heartfelt, both original in style and rich in language and dialect”. “It
I’ve just heard that Moroccan author Mohammed Choukri passed away this weekend at his home in Tangier. A contemporary and friend of Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles (with whom he later had a falling out), and others, Choukri is probably best known for his semi-autobiographical novel Al-Khubz Al-Hafi, which dealt with his adolescence during the famine of the 1940s and his experiences with drugs, homosexuality, and prostitution. The novel was translated into English by Bowles and into French by Tahar Ben Jelloun (himself an accomplished writer and Goncourt Prize winner.) The novel was intermittently banned in Morocco. In my hometown of Rabat, you could walk down to Kalila Wa Dimna and ask for the novel and sometimes they would carry the French version (never the Arabic one), and other times not, depending on how “subversive” the government judged it to be. Since 2001, however, I’m told that the book is widely available, in both the original Arabic and in translation. Choukri is also the author of Streetwise, as well as a non-fiction book on Jean Genet’s life in Tangier. His loss is unendurable.