To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the very cool Los Angeles-based Levantine Cultural Center, Jordan El Grably is editing an anthology on the theme “Iconoclasts and Visionaries.” You can find details here.
Jess Row (The Train to Lo-Wu) examines the rather recent and rather disturbing tendency to approach gender roles from a decidedly traditional outlook (Caitlin Flanagan, Harvey Mansfied, et al.). Row wonders why these anachronistic tomes haven’t been met with other books, books that celebrate “contemporary relationships and gender roles without panic, dread, or shame.” So he turns to Iron John, by Robert Bly.
There’s a great interview with Stephen Dixon on Failbetter. Here’s an excerpt, in which Dixon discusses genre boundaries:
Both I. and End of I. read like collections of interrelated stories, but McSweeney’s released them as novels. Was this a marketing decision? How do you view them? Does the genre distinction matter to you?
The genre distinction doesn’t matter to me much. To me, an interrelated collection of stories about the same character or characters can also be called a novel. You get a full life in these collections, which you also do in a novel, and other similarities. In 1979, Harper & Row published my work Quite Contrary. I insisted it was an interrelated collection of stories; they, maybe for marketing reasons, said it was a novel. God knows why I was so insistent on calling it an interrelated etc. etc… They added the subtitle The Mary and Newt Story as a compromise. I wish I’d gone along with their suggestion about calling it a novel, because I now see that’s what it is.
The interview is freely available online.
Yesterday, I linked to an essay in the SF Chronicle by Ilan Stavans, in which he criticized the Library of America for not including Latinos in its two-volume anthology on civil rights. Earlier today, I received this email from Carol Polsgrove, who served on the advisory board for Reporting Civil Rights:
The reason Library of America’s two volume anthology Reporting Civil Rights did not include Latinos was that this volume was devoted explicitly, as the dust jacket says, to “the struggle of African-Americans for freedom and equal rights.” Let’s hope the Library of America takes Ilan Stavans’ criticism to heart, however, and publishes future volumes that expand our too limited view of American history.
Dr. Polsgrove is also a professor of journalism at Indiana University.
In The Guardian Comment blog, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a post about her love for Nigeria, despite of, or perhaps because of, all the problems she sees:
The road is full of huge potholes and I get a little jumpy, and wonder what it takes to fill them up. This is why religion is a thriving business: people travel from a town to another without a mishap and it becomes a miracle, a testimony in church, another reason to give money to the pastor.
We stop to buy a newspaper. The major headline is of another man who has been arrested by the anti-corruption body, EFCC. We wonder what he has done to offend the president; everybody knows the EFCC investigates people with who, as we say, the president has a quarrel.
On the back page, there is the fiery face of the leader of the Nigerian Labour Congress, a man I much admire, who quaintly calls himself “comrade”. The federal government has decided to sack 33,000 workers, a “right-sizing” they say, rather than a downsizing. There is a resigned bitterness in my parents’ tone when we talk about this. They are retired university staff, both owed years of pensions. Now they are paid 60% of their pensions each month. Last month, they went for a verification exercise, where poor and unpaid pensioners were made to travel to Enugu and stand in the sun for hours to be counted, to prove that they were not “ghost” pensioners. Two men died after that. One was a lecturer, the other was an electrician at the university who had often done the electrical work in our house. Yet as our car swerves to avoid the potholes on the road, I think how I love being home. I love this flawed place. I love that this is where my belonging is least contested; this is where I care the deepest.
Adichie’s new novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, comes out in the U.S. in the fall.
Peter Orner’s debut novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, is reviewed over at the Star Tribune.
Peter Orner’s “The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo” is a departure in two ways. First, anyone who read his exquisite debut collection, “Esther Stories,” will be flat-out flabbergasted that he has leapfrogged from urban Jewish Chicago to the veld of Namibia in 1991.
Moreover, this is not a story about Americanness — or the complicated ways in which a particular kind of white American posture of helping clashes with African ways. Rather, it’s a kind of “Winesburg, Ohio” that just happens to be set in the shadow of the Erongo Mountains.
Intrigued? More here.