Category: literary life

Louis Menand writes about the nightmare of citation for the New Yorker:

Few features of Word can be responsible for more user meltdowns than Footnote and Endnote (which is saying a lot in the case of a program whose Thesaurus treats

Michael Moore’s new book is available and you can read two excerpts: How to talk to your conservative brother-in-law, part I and part II. They also have another extract where Moore asks Bush seven questions. The questions are worthwhile, even if Moore’s arguments sometimes get lost in the middle of his rants.

I have a brief column on the current infatuation with ‘ethnic’ authors over at Moby.

I missed this in last week’s Washington Post: The Writing Life, this time by Mark Haddon. In other news, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has won the Guardian’s children’s fiction prize.

Jonathan Yardley reviews Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter. Shah is the acclaimed journalist who went undercover a few years ago to investigate the condition of Afghani women under the Taliban (the resulting documentary was Beneath the Veil). Shah’s book is about her search for the mythical Afghanistan of her father’s stories:

“The people of Kabul,” Shah writes, “call the capital Kabul jan: beloved Kabul. We call it that too, for this is where we belong.” But belonging to a place isn’t easy if you’ve never been there, if all you know about the place is the myth that has grown out of all those stories you heard. Since childhood Shah has been haunted by “the questions that for years I haven’t even dared to ask my own heart. Does the Afghanistan of our myths really exist? Are we still Afghans? And if I am not an Afghan, what am I?”

Yardley gives the book a positive review, as have others.

Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues has been staged for the first time in Pakistan:

[Producer] Risbi said the show, which features three women talking about their vaginas and is split into sections such as “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?” and “The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could,” had received a “mixed reaction.”
“I think a lot of people were outraged,” she told BBC World Service’s Everywoman programme.
“A couple walked out saying ‘why can’t we use other parts of a woman’s body apart from the vagina.’