Category: literary life
The Independent has an interview with Juan Goytisolo. I had no idea he’s been living in Marrakech these past few years. The article describes Goytisolo’s upbringing, his friendships with people like Jean Genet (who brought him to Tangier) and his years of exile from Spain. An excerpt:
Sexually explicit, a bitter denunciation of Francoist Spain, Marks of Identity was banned in his native country, like all his works until the dictator’s death. Later, in Count Julian (1970) and Juan the Landless (1975), he took his highly personal weave of autobiography and literary parody even further. “It’s impossible to understand Spanish literature, this neo-Latin language, without taking into account Arabic literary models. In Count Julian, I celebrate the homosexual traitor who sold his land to the Moors, and reclaim that Moorish heritage, buried for centuries.”
But to argue that Spanish identity begins not with the Reconquista and the Empire has wider implications. “How can Giscard d’Estaing seriously suggest that Europe is a Judaeo-Christian society?” Goytisolo asks. “I owe so much to the Parisian quarter of Sentier, a neighbourhood where over 40-odd years I saw successive waves of Jewish, Armenian, Turkish, Pakistani and African emigrants arriving. All I had to do was walk out of my door and see people from every continent, speaking every tongue.”
Independent link from Kitabkhana. Goytisolo links at Amazon.
The Christian Science Monitor has an article on literary New Orleans.
Some key Williams haunts not far from the bustling Cafe Du Monde are marked with plaques: 722 Toulouse, his first address; 632 St. Peter Street, where he is reputed to have been inspired to write “A Streetcar Named Desire” after hearing “that rattletrap of a streetcar that bangs up one old street and down another”; and 1014 Dumaine, where Williams lived following his literary success.
Other literary haunts include houses, hotels, and restaurants frequented by the likes of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.
Moorishgirl is one of five weblogs the Complete Review deems “Best Literary Blogs.”
Update from the Duh Department: On second look, the Complete Review has a full rundown of many excellent lit blogs, including Bookslut, Maud Newton, Moby, Kitabkhana, Old Hag, TMFTML, Sarah Weinman, Mark Sarvas, and ma preferee du moment La Muselivre.
To say that Michiko Kakutani hated Vernon God Little would be to put it mildly:
While British critics enthusiastically compared “Vernon” to classics like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Catcher in the Rye,” the book actually reads more like Beavis and Butt-head trying to do Nathanael West. It has moments of genuine horror and pathos, but for the most part it is a lumbering, mannered performance, a vigorous but unimaginative compendium of every clich
Yet another article about chick-lit, this one spurred by the recent deal that Pamela Anderson signed to write two novels. The book, Anderson said, will be “sunny and silly.” If you can manage to read past that, there’s an argument there somewhere about the Lilith Fair of Literature and how it’s hurting writers who are trying to explore women’s experience, but end up compartmentalized in one of the lite lit rubrics.
Link via A&L Daily.
Agni 58 is out now, and you can order it here and for those of you in New York, the publication party will include readings by Sue Miller, Mark Slouka and Alice Mattison.