Category: literary life

The Lit Blog Co-Op has made its summer 2006 selection. Hop on over to the site to find out which book got lit bloggers all excited.

The Oregonian‘s Jeff Baker reports on the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, which took place here in Portland last week. Some of the writers attending this year have shared their impressions on their blogs. See, for instance, what Katrina Denza had to say.

A preview of the film adaptation of Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building is available at Outtherenews. The film–the Arab world’s biggest production–came out in Egypt earlier this month, and there was some brouhaha over its depiction sex, homosexuality, political corruption and so on. (Despite all the hype, this isn’t the first time gay characters have been frankly portrayed in an Egyptian film, of course. Youssef Chahine has done so several times in the past.) There are also some interviews with the screenwriter and the stars. (By the way: Oh my God, what happened to Nour Cherif? He’s hardly recognizable!)

My friend Rick has been raving about Shahrnush Parsipur’s Touba and the Meaning of Night, which has just been released here in the States. This novel was written when Parsipur, already an established writer in Iran, had spent a few years in prison for her work. (She was to be incarcerated again, and her books periodically banned.) You can read an interview with her here.

Hirsh Sawhney interviews novelist Hanif Kureishi for the Brooklyn Rail. A snippet:

Rail: Is the best writing from very private parts of our individuality?

Kureishi: Well, the best speaking, the best writing and the most authentic stuff is the stuff that’s most urgent. You meet someone on the street, grab them and say, “I really want to tell you something; it’s very important that you know this.” When I was very isolated in the suburbs because of race and my family and the fascism in the street and all the shit I was going through, it seemed very important that I said these things to other people, so they would know me and they would understand.

More here.

First it was George Lakoff, and now it’s Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley, who has come to tell us that “the challenge facing liberals and Democrats is to recapture that ordinary language” that has been hijacked by Republicans. But, as Stanley Fish writes in the NYTBR, Nunberg’s Talking Right is long on explanations and short on solutions: “A book that promises to teach liberals how to defeat the political right ends up being a paean to its resourcefulness.” Ouch.

Meanwhile, Ron Charles has nothing but praise for T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk, calling it “[Boyle’s] most exciting novel yet.” I really like Boyle’s work, particularly his short stories (his latest collection, Tooth and Claw, is out in paperback, by the way), so I look forward to reading the new novel.

Elsewhere, Doris Lessing re-reads Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “Many novels,” she writes, “do not gain by relating them to their times. Others, usually the polemical kind, may only be understood in context, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one. To read it unenlightened, particularly the feverish third version, can only leave the reader wondering what on earth is all this urgent preaching about, particularly now, when it is hard even to remember what a mealy-mouthed society Lawrence was writing in.”

French-Algerian writer Faíza Guène’s debut novel, Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, which is finally out in the U.S., gets a generally positive review in the S.F. Chronicle. Critic Christine Thomas finds that “[e]ven if the book doesn’t quite pull off its aim, it makes a strong impression.” Also in the Chronicle, a review of Fouad Ajami’s The Foreigner’s Gift. Wow, he took his lips from Bush’s ass long enough to write a new book?