Category: literary life

The LA Weekly has an interesting piece (now also on Alternet) about a black man who takes a DNA test, and what the surprising outcome means for him: Black Like I Thought I Was. Here’s an excerpt:

Like most other black folk, [Wayne] Joseph grew up with an unequivocal sense of his heritage and of himself; he tends toward black advocacy and has published thoughtful opinion pieces on racial issues in magazines like Newsweek. When Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test he saw described on a 60 Minutes segment last year, it was only to indulge a casual curiosity about the exact percentage of black blood.
(…)
when the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he’d taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian

It’s a tradition, they do it every year. The Booker judges are saying that the bookies sometimes get it wrong.

Here’s a short piece on how the weather has been used in literature both as subject and to set the mood.

How much more of this crap about what Jhumpa Lahiri wears do we have to put up with? It gets a little bit better after the intro, but only barely.

From Publishers’ Lunch:

Grove/Atlantic has been teased for turning a cover credit on the NEW SALAM PAX: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi for a blurb from Slate contributor Peter Maass into the deceased author of Serpico Peter Maas instead.

And Spike Gillespie’s was surprised by the jacket for her SURRENDER (But Don’t Give Yourself Away); Old Cars, Found Hope, and Other Cheap Tricks from the University of Texas Press. A bumper sticker on her car that reads “George W. Bush Is a Punk-Ass Chump” was artfully airbrushed out, along with other small details. Editor-in-chief Theresa May tells the LA Times, “The image was manipulated and enhanced, but it had nothing to do with the fact that it was an anti-Bush statement…. We didn’t foresee that it would be controversial, because we didn’t think anyone would be paying attention.”

I’d link to the L.A. Times piece that was the source, but I can’t stand their pop-up ads.

“Transition to Glory” over at One Story.