Category: literary life

Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, recommends memoirs, novels, articles, websites, films, music, and art from and about Iran for the Washington Post.

Hanif Kureishi reflects on how his play, Borderline, which was staged 25 years ago, might still be relevant for Asians in Britain. The play dealt with riots, fascism, and feminism, all of which are still around, though the context for them has changed.

During the 10 years between the Southall riots and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, the community had become politicised by radical Islam, something that had been developing throughout the Muslim world since decolonisation. This version of Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. It came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted – and political conversations could only take place within its terms – it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what had protected the community from racism and disintegration came to tyrannise it.

You can read the full essay here.

Over at the Observer, Jason Burke catches up with Faïza Guène, the “voice of the suburbs.” (What? You didn’t know there was only one? Well, now you know.)

Guène’s parents came from Algeria and her family – father a manual worker, mother who has never worked (As if, Ed.)- is very close. The fact that many readers, especially in France, jumped to the conclusion that the broken family of the novel is her own irritates her – ‘I have written a novel, but I always end up being asked about social issues and so on.’ It is part of the stereotyping that much of the book is devoted to combating.

Though not intellectuals, Guène’s parents were ‘deeply respectful’ of books, she tells me. ‘I learned to read when I was very young,’ Guène says. But in Les Courtillières, the large, public-housing projects where Guène grew up and still lives, there were almost no cultural facilities at all. ‘Books are expensive things. My book in its first edition cost €18. If I hadn’t written it, I would not have bought it.’

Guène’s first book is due out in the United States in June, under the title Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (in an excellent translation by Sarah Adams, by the way.)

The SF Chronicle‘s Edward Guthmann interviews Junot Díaz, who was in town to support the staging of his short story, “The Sun, The Moon, The Stars,” at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. Of course, the subject of that long-awaited second novel came up:

As a Latin American author, Diaz feels a mandate to give young Latinos, especially Dominican Americans, a voice and a touchstone to measure their experience. The problem, he freely admits, is the fact that he’s an incredibly slow writer. “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” took a year. It’s been 10 years since “Drown” was published, and the novel he’s working on is in its fifth year of gestation.

Diaz sighs at the thought of his uncooperative work rhythms. “Who doesn’t want to be constantly working?” he asks. “I drove myself nuts for a couple years, gave myself a lot of hassle.” At the beginning of writing his novel, “I was a lot more deranged about it ’cause I didn’t have the sense that I was ever going to find my way through it. Then I finally began to embrace my inner slowpoke.

If you read this blog consistently, you know how much I adore and admire Díaz, so go on over there and read the piece.

As has been widely reported, Harvard sophomore and New York Times bestselling author Kaavya Viswanathan is facing charges that she plagiarized material from Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts for use in her novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life. (See the material side by side here.)

Over at Galleycat, Sarah points out that that there may have been more than one cook in the kitchen, what with the involvement of a “book packaging” company that helped Viswanathan make her work more “commercially viable.” Meanwhile, Maud links to a MeFi thread in which a former teacher of Viswanathan states, “I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful — I had given her low grades on her papers.” And, over at Lit Saloon, Michael quips: “Wonderful stuff — especially since the plagiarism seems so utterly pointless. God, we love the American publishing industry and what it leads to !”

Well, here is what it leads to: According to this article by Dinitia Smith in the Times, the “book packaging” company in question is 17th Street Productions, now renamed Alloy Entertainment. Smith writes that “Alloy, which referred questions to Little, Brown, holds the copyright to “Opal” with Ms. Viswanathan.” (Emphasis mine.) So who exactly wrote this book?

This week, the LBC is engaged in a discussion of Sheila Heti’s short novel Ticknor, which was nominated by MG pal Mark Sarvas. Of the book, Mark writes:

When George Ticknor’s Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti, whose debut short story collection, The Middle Stories, was published in this country by McSweeney’s, has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled.

As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott’s house (“But I am not a late man. I hate to be late.”), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject, a friendship that Heti has estranged from its factual moorings. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized — coveting his friend’s wife, writing letters that never get answered, working on essays destined to be rejected — always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back.

I recommend you stop by the site to read LBC members’ discussion.