This week is Fall Fiction Week over at Slate. There’s a great exchange between Gary Shteyngart and Walter Kirn on the future of American fiction, reviews of new books by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Edna O’Brien, Richard Powers, Lynne Tillman, and Charles Frazier, and a survey of overlooked fiction by bloggers and booksellers. Find out which book I recommended.
This November, in addition to the gubernatorial election, Oregonians have to decide whether to renew the library levy. More than half of the funding for Oregon libraries comes from this levy. The people campaigning against this levy and against funding include Friends for Safer Libraries, whose website describes a library as “a playground of books [that] becomes a minefield of harmful visions.” So now going to the library is like going to Iraq? Anyway, please vote yes on the levy, so that libraries can keep their funding.
Department of I told you so: The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Orhan Pamuk, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” It’s clear the judges have been sensitive to all the recent controversies that have been framed as exemplars of an age-old “clash of civilizations,” but they also understand that it’s not an inevitable state, since they’ve at least added the word “interlacing.” And Pamuk himself is not one for essentialist views, as you can see from this lovely essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in November 2001: “The Anger of the Damned.”
In any case, this is a wonderful and richly deserved distinction, and I couldn’t be more pleased. You can find all of Pamuk’s recent books online or at your favorite bookshop: My Name Is Red, Snow, The White Castle, The Black Book, and his most recent, a memoir, Istanbul: Memories of the City.
Some Pamuk-related links:
Orhan Pamuk goes on trial
Pamuk update
Pamuk in trouble?
The MG review of Snow
Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul
Photo: M. Euler/Scanpix
I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to find out that the 2006 Booker Prize has gone to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. What impressed me most about this amazing novel were its wonderfully complex characters, caught in an age of globalization that, while it has made some winners, has created many more losers. I loved how there is no sugar-coating of the immigrant experience (an unfortunately common fault, I think, in recent novels.) It’s a brave book, a smart book, and I hope the prize will get it all the readers it truly deserves.
Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Newsweek seems to be convinced that Orhan Pamuk will take the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. I would not be surprised at all if he wins.
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I have been thinking a lot about African literature–and not because I just got back from a symposium on the subject at Wellesley. I have been fortunate enough to have had conversations with many different people–fellow writers, but also critics, academics, editors, agents, publishers, booksellers–and the different perspectives seem to confirm some trends in the field that I’d like to write about someday, very soon. But first I have to stay focused on the last couple of chapters of my novel.