Category: literary life
In the Washington Post, Ron Charles reviews DBC Pierre’s new novel:
Ludmila’s Broken English is the worst novel I’ve read since DBC Pierre’s debut novel, Vernon God Little. That nasty satire about the Columbine massacre won the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award in 2003 during a fit of British tastelessness. Pierre, an Australian con man whose real name is Peter Finlay, took the pseudonym DBC as a play on his nickname: Dirty But Clean. Now Ludmila’s Broken English presents a slightly different paradox: Dirty But Dull.
Read it all here.
Portland author Whitney Otto contributes an op-ed to the NY Times on the Opal Mehta scandal:
THE beach book, the novel that we take with us on a languorous summer vacation, when we demand that reading be a pleasure and not a chore, the one “serious” readers apologize for even though they shouldn’t, is known more formally as genre fiction. The thing that makes genre fiction so appealing is the exact same thing that can make it such a bore: it’s predictable. If the recent rash of novels classified as chick lit were laid end to end, you would have the literary equivalent of a tract-house development.
Sure, some of the houses are beige and others are cream, but they all have the same two-car garage, great room and marble counters in the kitchen. That’s why people buy them.
(via.)
The Nation‘s spring books issue is already available online. There’s lots to read here, so I’ll only single out a few of the essays. For instance, John Banville’s review of Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth and Ismail Kadare’s The Successor is an interesting piece on the convergence (or divergence) of art and politics. You might also enjoy reading what Alice Kaplan has to say about Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. (I’m dying to read this book. I have piles and piles of books that don’t interest me and which I didn’t request, but for some reason I never seem to get the books I really want.) And I know I’ve already mentioned Wole Soyinka’s memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, several times, but see what you think of Fatin Abbas’s take. Lastly, Reza Aslan reviews Shirin Ebadi’s memoir Iran Awakening, which was co-authored with Azadeh Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad). This is the book that caused Ebadi to sue the Office of Foreign Assets Control for the right to publish it in the United States (see this, this, this, and this.)
Pooja Makhijani sends word that the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) will hold its fourth annual literary event. A three-day series of readings, panels and workshops, “Mixed Messages” will explore non-mainstream genres, highlight writers who use new media, and focus on writing communities. Details:
M I X E D M E S S A G E S
May 19-21
Marymount Manhattan College
New York City
Participants include: Amitav Ghosh, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Amitava Kumar, Marina Budhos, Mitali Perkins, Sejal Shah, Ravi Shankar, Mahmud Rahman, Ayesha Pande, Vikas Khanna, Shashwati Talukdar, Ram Devineni, and many more.
A Stanford professor who supports Palestinians’ right to self-determination has found that his picture has been used on the cover of a book titled Campus Support for Terrorism, edited by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. (Horowitz is affiliated with Campus Watch, the group founded by Daniel Pipes.)
Many professors of Middle-Eastern studies have had run-ins with Campus Watch, but they usually choose to ignore the ‘watchdog’ group. In this case, however, Stanford Professor Joel Beinin has had enough. He is suing the publisher for using his likeness and for making false and misleading statements against him.
“I consider Beinin to be a supporter of terrorism,” Horowitz said. “I know that he supports the Palestinian Liberation Organization. I am going to guess that he supports the Palestinian Authority, which is Hamas.”
Beinin responded: “As usual, Horowitz is either flat out wrong or makes arguments from innuendo. I have never said that I support the PLO or any of its constituent organizations. I have argued that the U.S. and Israel ought to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, not because I support it but because it is the pragmatic way to make progress toward peace. I definitely do not support Hamas.”
Professors worry about the effort to assert political control over their teaching, research and public programs. They accuse the groups of conducting McCarthy-type witch hunts, the hysterical search for secret U.S. communists during the early days of the Cold War.
Ellen Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University and a scholar of McCarthyism, calls it “an assault on academia.”
You can view the legal complaint here (PDF.) (via)
The New York Times asked a large group of writers, editors and literary critics (about two hundred people) to name the “best work of American fiction of the last 25 years.” (A.O. Scott explains the process of selection in an essay for the Review.) The novel with the most votes: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The full list is available here. While I’ve read and like many of the books here, I just can’t get excited about this list. It strikes me as an exercise in futility, frankly, because each reader is different, and what seems excellent to some readers may seem terrible to others. (And I suspect there are people already working on their own, alternative lists, in reaction to this one.)