The Booker longlist has been announced. I’m thrilled to see that Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss has been included. Other nominated books of note: Hisham Matar’s In The Country of Men, Nadine Gordimer’s Get A Life, and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. I predict the prize will go to Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch.
The son of Israeli novelist and peace activist David Grossman has been killed in battle in southern Lebanon, AP reports:
Staff Sgt. Uri Grossman who served in an armored unit, was killed Saturday when an anti-tank missile hit his tank, according to the military. He was 20. Twenty-four IDF soldiers were killed on Saturday in the bloodiest day of battles.
Tearful friends and relatives gathered Sunday morning at the Grossman home in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Tzion.
A statement from the family described Uri as a young man with a wonderful sense of humor, who planned to travel abroad and study theater after his scheduled release from the army in November.
You can read the story in full here, including more about Grossman’s positions on this particular war.
Related:
Jess Row recommends David Grossman’s See Under: Love for MG.
George Bush is said to be reading Albert Camus’ The Stranger while on vacation. How appropriate. A novel about a Frenchman who kills a nameless Arab for no discernible reason, by an author who once said of the brutal French occupation of Algeria: “Je crois à la justice, mais je défendrai ma mère avant la justice.” (“I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”)
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Regis Behe talks to Nell Freudenberger about her debut novel, The Dissident, which is released this week.
Freudenberger also explores ideas about the ownership of art and how it is verified. In the early 1990s, the Beijing East Village artist’s colony became known for its photography and performance art. When Freudenberger visited Beijing, she found not only that the low-rent artists’ residences had been torn down and made into a park, but that some denied its existence, despite books that were written about it.
“It was interesting to think that if a few people feel that a place is there and they’re making work there, they’re referring to it as the East Village, it is there,” she says. “But for a lot of other people, it’s not significant enough to be a place. I guess ambiguous situations are what’s interesting in fiction.”
Freudenberger also discusses the question of creating art with characters from a different culture than her own.
Over at NPR, critic A.O. Scott, writer Ken Kalfus, and poet C.K. Williams discussed whether art can help make sense of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Coincidentally, a Washington Post poll reveals that 30% of Americans do not know what year 9/11 happened.
Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Eduardo Galeano, Gore Vidal, Arundhati Roy, Russell Banks, Thomas Keneally, Toni Morrison, and ten other writers have signed a petition against the current war in the Middle East.
The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner–and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis–there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.
That this “kidnapping” was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources–most particularly that of water–by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.
Read the rest here.