The BBC is asking different writers to talk about the city they live in, the fiction it has produced, and literary works set there. Aleksandar Hemon talks about Sarajevo. The program also includes Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul and Zadie Smith on London.
The AP reports that George Plimpton is writing a memoir, due out in 2006 by Little, Brown. He’ll have a lot of ground to cover: his attempts at sports, his friendships with literary and political legends, those rumors about the Paris Review being a CIA cover, etc. Well, maybe he won’t cover that last one. Still, should be interesting.
I dug out Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. I’d already read (and loved) “Eli the Fanatic,” and so I started the book from the end, reading the short stories first, before going on to the novella Goodbye, Columbus.
A few years ago, in a rush to find something to read on a plane, filmmaker Mark Moskowitz decided to pick up his old copy of Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer, a book that had been lying around, unread, on his bookshelf, for more than two decades. He fell in love with the book, and decided to track down the author and his book. The author seemed to have disappeared, and there were only a few copies of the book still in print, which Moskowitz bought (all of them.) Then Moskowitz channelled this new obsession into a documentary about Dow Mossman, called Stone Reader, which became a cult favorite in the US. The BBC has just purchased the movie and the Guardian’s Andrew Anthony reviews it. If you haven’t seen this documentary, here’s its website, where you can find screenings near you.
She’s been very active on her blog lately and she’s also had the coolest people do guest stints on Fridays. Hop on over and visit.
Dr. Zhivago and other books critical of the Soviet era are being removed from Russian schoolchildren’s reading lists.