Category: literary life

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, a writer, and we found ourselves doing that thing that writers often do: sharing horror stories about the book world. Here is one (among many) I told her. Several years ago, at a summer writers’ conference, I met a magazine editor who happened to be from the same city I lived in at the time. The editor said she was looking for slush pile readers, and I naively expressed some interest in helping out, on a volunteer basis. She sized me up, then asked, “How old are you?”

I didn’t quite understand why she asked me my age, but I answered, almost mechanically, “Thirty five.”

“Oh,” said the magazine editor. “Well, if you would like to volunteer your time, we really need help with office work.”

In a swift second, I had been reclassified from a potential reader of undiscovered gems to the person who stuffs rejection notices in envelopes. Needless to say, I never submitted any work to her. Eventually, I published a bunch of stories, then a book, and then another book. The kicker? A few years later, the editor, too, published a book. Then her publicist emailed me to ask me whether I could review it.

As some of you may know, A Public Space, the magazine founded in 2005 by Brigid Hughes, occasionally publishes ‘Focus Portfolios,’ which introduce the reader to the literature of a particular country. Issue 9, edited by the scholar Brian Edwards, is about Cairo. You can read Edwards’ introduction, Cairo 2010: After Kefaya, online. Contributors to the special issue include Mansoura Ez Eldin, Ahmed Alaidy, Magdy El Shafee, Muhammad Aladdin, Mohamed Al-Fakhrany, Ibrahim El Batout, Omar Taher and Khalid Kassab.

The picture above was taken at the British Museum, which is, sadly, as close as I ever came to seeing Cairo antiquities.

The American Scholar has a rather interesting piece about Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s constant struggles with money. I am not entirely convinced by the mathematical conversions of Fitzgerald’s income into today’s dollars, but the article provides some good insight into how the novelist and short-story writer handled in real life something that constantly occupied him in his fiction:

In “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1920, three months after marrying Zelda, he ran out of money. “This particular crisis passed” when he discovered the next morning that publishers sometimes advance royalties. As he put it, “So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave.”

You can read the full article here.

Photo of Robert Redford in the film adaptation of The Great Gatsby: Forbes.

Who says Twitter is useless? Although I find the ceaseless posting somewhat overwhelming, I have also come across some really interesting material there. Yesterday, for instance, I discovered (via Maud Newton’s feed) this incredible 1963 footage of James Baldwin visiting San Francisco. Because the sound quality is not perfect, the film has been subtitled (with a few typos). You can watch the clip here, on the website of San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive.

When I heard that Ralph Nader had written a book called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, I thought, based on its title, that it had to be some sort of satire. But, according to the publicity materials posted by Nader’s publisher, Seven Stories Press, the book is about a group of fabulously wealthy individuals who decide that it is time to make good on the promise of “liberty and justice for all.” Led by the billionaire Warren Buffet, they start working for the common good: workers’ unions, clean elections, human rights, and so on. So Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us is really a fantasy, but its sheer length (780 pages!) causes NPR’s Alan Cheuse to call it “an unconscionable attack on America’s trees.”

Perhaps anticipating the confusion, Nader has said that this book is not a novel. It is “a fictional vision that could become a new reality.” Me, I’m just curious how he plans on getting those super-rich to read his book.

The Dutch translation of my novel, Secret Son, is being published this week in Amsterdam, under the title De Geheime Zoon. Since this blog has a fair number of Dutch readers, I thought I’d mention this. Go out and get it! I won’t be traveling to the Netherlands this time, but I hope that readers who read the book will report back with their thoughts.