Category: literary life

I can’t believe Margaret Atwood is reading to my unborn child. It gets annoying very quickly after that. I nearly choked on the last line.

Ala Bashir, Saddam’s personal physician, has a book deal with a Norwegian publisher.

Jayson Blair has found a publisher for his memoir. He tells Variety that he will continue to write. “The game plan after this is to move to fiction.” Maybe he thinks he’ll be right at home there. Fool.
Via Publishers Marketplace.

It’s called chick-lit here, and sastra-wangi in Indonesia. It’s written by women, and features female heroines. The book covers have “dreamy black and white photos of these writers.” If this sounds familiar, then so should this complaint:
“[The marketing] may help sell the books, but it does little to reveal their literary merits. And that’s a problem for 32-year-old first time novelist Nukila Amal, who’s resisting the “sastra wangi” tag. “That label is really negative,” she said. “Writers should be categorised in genre or style and spirit, not on their physical appearance.” For that reason Nukila decided against using her photo on her novel Cala Ibi (Hummingbird). ”
Read the BBC article here.

MobyLives is back. Go get your fix. He’s a got a guest column by Steve Almond on book blurbing and a link to an article about the recent excavation of a mass grave which might contain the remains of Federico Garcia Lorca.

Clive James gives his two cents on “snarky” reviews (the most recent example of which is arguably Laura Miller’s review of Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary.) He offers something that, human nature being what I is, I think every writer should consider: “When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When you say it in words better than his, you have succeeded. It would be better to admit this fact, and admit that all adverse reviews are snarks to some degree, than to indulge the sentimental wish that malice might be debarred from the literary world.” Via Publishers’ Marketplace online newsletter.