Category: literary life

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (one of my favorite novels) turns 25 this year, and the author has provided a new introduction to the book.

Link via Lit Saloon.

Afghan poet Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, wrongly imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is trying to get the U.S. military to return his work.

Orhan Pamuk, who spoke out about the Turkish genocide (‘treatment’) of Armenians last years, talks with Aida Edemariam of the Guardian about the case against him:

Eventually he returned to face trial and a possible three years’ imprisonment. “Living as I do in a country that honours its pashas, saints and policemen at every opportunity, but refuses to honour its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons,” he wrote in the New Yorker four days before his court date, “I cannot say I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last ‘a real Turkish writer’.” The trial in December was adjourned within minutes when the judge passed the matter to the justice minister; in January, the justice minister passed it back to the court, which decided there was no case to answer. It has been said this was only because of the firestorm of international condemnation the trial provoked, yet though Pamuk now insists the case would have been dismissed regardless, it would be foolish to ignore the fault lines it exposed.

More here.

Thanks to David for the link.

Luis Alberto Urrea, whose The Hummingbird’s Daughter won the Kiriyama Prize last week, sits down with Dan Olivas for a follow-up interview over at TEV.

A writer using the pseudonym James Pinocchio has just released his debut, um, novel, called A Million Little Lies, USA Today reports:

In A Million Little Lies, written surprisingly well by the pseudonymous James Pinocchio (real name: Pablo F. Fenjves), we meet a tortured young man who wakes in the back of a Manhattan cab with a combination lock puncturing his left ear – like Frey, who wrote that he woke up covered in vomit and blood, with four teeth missing and a hole in his cheek. Pinocchio is in great pain and has no memory of how he pierced his ear. He shows up at his parents’ posh home, only to be shipped off to rehab.

More on this here.

A new book by Natalie Zemon Davis chronicles the life of Hasan Al-Wazan, the 16th-century traveler (and author) whose life inspired Amin Maalouf’s amazing novel Leon L’Africain (or Leo Africanus.)

Using hazy and sometimes contradictory evidence, Davis beautifully renders the chapters of Al Wazzan’s life: his birth in Islamic Granada in the 1480s; his family’s flight as Christian armies expelled the Moors from Spain; his education in the madrassas of Fez, Morocco, and his years traveling as a diplomat in North Africa and the Levant, among the Berbers, Arabs, Jews and black Africans who populated those lands. She writes of his kidnapping by Spanish pirates who offered him as tribute to Pope Leo X in Rome; his christening as “Giovanni Leone” by the pope; his life of independent scholarship in Bologna and his departure from Italy after nearly a decade, during which he produced “The Description of Africa” and other works.

Read Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s review of Trickster Travels in The Los Angeles Times.