Category: literary life

A new issue of Al Jadid magazine is up, featuring fiction by Diana Abu-Jaber and essays by Hanan Al-Shaykh, Etel Adnan, and Elmaz Abinader, among others.

Benjamin Schwarz, the Atlantic‘s literary editor, will move the magazine literary editorship to Los Angeles in September. And no, it’s not because of the weather, people. There are actually smart and talented and cool people and ideas in this town.

What’s it like for first-time authors? Alex Williams writes about it in this article. Here’s an excerpt:
“Amy Koppelman had always wanted to be a writer, even after all those years she spent slogging away on a first novel in her closet the only “office” space available in her cramped Upper West Side apartment. (…) For seven years, she hunched over her manuscript, a tale of post-partum depression and infanticide. The work spanned the course of two pregnancies and several thousand nagging doubts. Even after Koppelman, now 33, finally made the cut at Columbia in 1998, the doubts would grow so thunderous that she considered giving up and opening a coffee shop. During the darkest of those spells, she happened across a “Page Six” item in the Post concerning noise complaints in Cindy Crawford’s apartment building; it mentioned in passing that Koppelman’s idol, Joan Didion, served on the building’s board. Although she had never met Didion, Koppelman tracked down the handsome East Seventies prewar and left a copy of her manuscript with the doorman. Tucked in the package was a note, meekly asking Didion if she should just quit altogether. Three days later, Koppelman received a reply on solemn gray stationery that started, “Yes, you are a real writer . . . ” And so Koppelman pressed on. It was only when she tried to sell the book, however, that she learned what it means to be a “real writer” these days.” Read on.
Link via Moby.

Felicia is back from Russia. Go read her impressions.

Tim Adams read every novel in last week’s top 10 list to see what makes it rise above the rest. Read ’em and weep.

Three fiction books by three different Arab/Muslim Americans are reviewed in the Washington Post. The books in question are: Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and West of the Jordan by Laila Halaby. And, as is often the case with “ethnic” fiction, the review is not by a literary critic, but by a scholar in the field, in this case the Post’s Kabul correspondent.