Category: literary life

Over at Salon, Laura Miller praises Tony D’Souza debut novel, Whiteman. “If you read a lot of debut novels, you know there’s a category of these books written by earnest young men who have done stints with the Peace Corps or other NGOs working in developing nations,” she writes. ” (…) As you can tell, I’m pretty jaded about this particular species of first novel, and it must be admitted that Tony D’Souza’s “Whiteman” would seem to fit the formula uncomfortably well. Yet somehow, this novel beats the odds: It manages to be quirky, seductive and funny, but most of all it has captured a shard of the host country in a way that NGO novels rarely do. ” Read it all here.

Over at Salon, Michelle Goldberg interviews Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who’s currently in the U.S. to promote her memoir, Iran Awakening:

In February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested $85 million for a plan to promote democracy in Iran, partly by funding reformists and dissidents. Has this increased the suspicion and harassment of reformists in Iran?
I think that this is not in favor of democracy in Iran. The people who live in Iran will never dare accept any foreign money, because this would be the first proof of treason.

In January, you co-wrote an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times saying that America was undermining Iran’s “fledgling democratic movement” by demonizing the country. As the conflict between our governments heats up, what effect has it had on your country’s reformists?
It’s very well known that any time a country is under threat from outside, the government uses it as an excuse and starts talking about the necessity of preserving national security, and therefore individual liberties suffer.

A recent article in Time magazine suggested that the administration might ratchet up the conflict in order to get Americans to rally around the president again. How worried are Iranians about the possibility of an American attack?
Some people are worried. People are very critical toward the government, but I think that if there is an attack against Iran, people will forget about their criticism, and they will rally with the government. Any attack on Iran will be good for the government and will actually damage the democratic movement in Iran.

Read it all here. (You have to watch an ad before you can access the article.)

Related: Reza Aslan’s review of Ebadi’s book, in the Nation.

Edwidge Danticat talks to Sarah T. Williams about the influence of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God on her adolescent self and on her writing life.

While Danticat navigated family, culture, language and the streets of Brooklyn, Hurston’s book appeared as a bridge between time and place. Because Hurston had spent many years in Haiti researching folklore and culture, “I felt she knew something about me,” said Danticat, “something about the soul of Haiti.” (…)

The novel gave Danticat permission to use her own storytelling voice. “Some things were for the kitchen,” she said, “and some things for the books. The way we spoke to our grandmother was not the way we wrote. Reading [Hurston] allowed me to use the voice in my head, the voice with which I spoke.”

Danticat has written the introduction to one of the book’s editions.

MG pal Mark Sarvas reviews Sheila Heti’s Ticknor for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Biographer George Ticknor’s friendship with his great subject, historian W.H. Prescott, was the foundation of his 1864 Life of William Hickling Prescott, a popular and critical success. Pulling this obscure page from the archives, Heti has turned their friendship on its head, transforming it into a darkly funny anti-history, a hilariously biting study of envy, bitterness and promise unfulfilled. In her masterfully reimagined landscape, her Ticknor – quite unlike his real-life counterpart – is a thwarted second-rater, all talk and very little action, forever toiling in the shadow of his wildly successful childhood friend.

Read on.

Nearly thirty years ago, while camping in Cline Falls, Oregon, two 19-year-old Yale undergraduates were assaulted by a man dressed as a cowboy. He drove over their tent in the middle of the night, and then attacked them with an ax, causing severe injuries. Many people within the community had strong suspicions about the man’s identity, but none of them came forward. The crime was never solved. Now one of the women, Terri Jentz, has written a memoir about her ordeal: Strange Piece of Paradise. When Jeff Baker interviewed Jentz for the Oregonian a couple of weeks ago, she told him she didn’t identify the cowboy in the book because she didn’t want to feed into a celebrity culture of “charismatic villains.” Rather, she wanted the incident to be viewed in the larger context of how violence is dealt with by communities.

Also in the Oregonian, George Rede, who thirty years ago covered the case as a young reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, shares his thoughts in an opinion piece:

[H]ere’s my mea culpa. I wish I had done more to write about the Cline Falls attack as more than just a crime story. I wish I had thought to report with more context to the broader issue of random violence.

I wish I had thought to interview the crew of young emergency room nurses who saw themselves in Terri Jentz and her college roommate.

I wish I had pried myself away from the office phone in Bend and driven up the road to Redmond to interview townspeople who had suspicions about one of their own.

I wish I had been more aggressive in asking state and local police about their investigative methods and lack of suspects.

For God’s sake, I wish I had gone out to Cline Falls to see the crime scene for myself. It astounds me that I didn’t — and that my editors didn’t suggest or insist that I do so.

Lastly, in the New York Times, Mary Roach has this to say in her review: “Imagine that it had been Truman Capote himself who’d been savaged in Holcomb, Kan., and that he had survived to describe his ordeal. That is the level of command and sinew at work in the writing.”

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Amitav Ghosh’s essay collection Incendiary Circumstances, and I have to say I was disappointed that it didn’t get much attention from the press. So it was a delight to read Thrity Umrigar’s review of the book in the Boston Globe. The essays, she writes, “cover different countries and crises, but each is enlightened by Ghosh’s signature intelligence and humanity. This is a writer who delights in human complexity, who avoids generalities and seeks out the small truths that illuminate the larger story.”