Category: literary life

The May/June issue of the Boston Review is available online, with articles by Akbar Ganji, Hans Blix, Catherine Tumber, and others. The issue also includes the winning short story from the annual fiction contest, which was judged this year by the excellent George Saunders: “Transitory Cities,” by Padma Viswanathan. Here’s an excerpt:

(How did he come to bear others’ homes on his back?)

That question can only be answered by the one holding the strings ascending from Hram’s pivotal points, as from the joints of every bearer.

It’s not that Hram didn’t like bearing a building; he did. He received no acknowledgment—at least not from the tenants. He wouldn’t have wanted the residents of the building he bore to know that he chose where they would be when they walked out the front door of their apartment building in the morning, briefcase or tool kit or purse or newspaper in one hand, brown paper lunch bag in the other, ready to participate in maintaining the universe, their first task that of finding their way to the office or factory, which could be anywhere within their city.

Read this refreshingly imaginative story here.

My good friend Maaza Mengiste is featured in New York magazine as one of a handful of “future writing stars” from the city. An excerpt of her first novel is included with the profile. Check it out.

Pink-haired Carolyn Kellogg reviews Mary Otis’s debut collection, Yes, Yes, Cherries, finding that, despite the title, the stories “eddy around forlorn characters and their thwarted desires.”

Pankaj Mishra reviews Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man for the Guardian, placing it into the context of post 9/11 fiction by British and American novelists like Ken Kalfus, Deborah Eisenberg, Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, among many others.

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that “We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations.” On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. (…) Amis went on to claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west’s rich, more protected societies.

The shock of the attacks was probably greater for writers who had been ensconced deep in what DeLillo in his new novel Falling Man calls the “narcissistic heart of the west”.

Mishra also quotes from one of my favorite essays by Orhan Pamuk, the piece “The Anger of the Damned,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books in November 2001.

Neil MacFarquhar visits with poet and novelist Mohja Kahf at a reading in the Bay Area and writes about it for the New York Times.

A couple of my friends are mentioned in this Los Angeles Times piece by Josh Getlin, about the shrinking space reserved to book reviews in newspapers. The issue, as Getlin explains, quickly turned into a needless game of blame-the-lit-blogs. Take a look.

The inimitable Tod Goldberg offers a write-up of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which took place last weekend. Here’s a snippet:

A popular misconception about Los Angeles is that it’s a town full of illiterate, fame-obsessed aspiring screenwriters whose most intense relationship with literature is Starbucks’ employee relations manual. Well, perhaps that’s not the most popular misconception — there’s the one about how pictures of your shaved genitalia appearing in US Magazine is actually a wise career move — but time and again Southern California is noted for being the Capitol of Vapid; a place where Norbit’s opening weekend is considered the high watermark of cultural talk. And while this may be true for the ten percenters who clog Wilshire Blvd. and the mail room denizens who spend their off hours speaking in Variety‘s Esperanto while in line at Baja Fresh, the hidden truth is that Los Angeles is a book town.

The empirical evidence is provided every April when the Los Angeles Times hosts their annual Festival of Books and Book Prizes ceremonies, a three-day celebration of the written word on the campus of UCLA. An average year features 150,000 readers, 500 authors, a hundred moderated panels, countless book signings, those weird people who believe Ayn Rand is a religious icon, those weird people who believe Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ caterwauling alien/human hybrid child is the messiah, my gut filled with churros and at least three of the following spectacles..

You’ll have to go over to Jewcy to read the rest. And check out the posts over at Pinky’s Paperhaus and Galleycat.