Category: literary life

I know I’m a day late to this, but, hey, I’ve got a novel to finish. Anyway. Some good news from across the pond: Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning, which is based on her blog, is in the running for the Samuel Johnson prize in the UK.

The small literary publisher Marion Boyars brought out Baghdad Burning last year, classifying it under biography and memoir. The publishing house says it knows Riverbend’s identity but respects her wish to remain anonymous.

It has already come third in the Lettre Ulysses prize for Reportage, winning £14,000, and was shortlisted for an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award.

Riverbend began the blog with the words: “I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.”

The Guardian has more.

Thanks to Danielle for the link.

I’ve been biting my tongue about this, but now that it’s been announced on Rockslinga, it’s safe to shout it from the rooftops: Randa Jarrar has sold her debut novel to The Other Press, with a publication date sometime in Fall 2007 or Spring 2008. Hop on over to her blog and say congrats!

Over at the Observer, Jonathan Haywood, director of the English chapter of PEN, writes about the responsibility and difficulty that writers face when they speak about repressive regimes.

When Orhan Pamuk was charged last year over remarks he made about the numbers of Kurds and Armenians killed in Turkey in the last century, he said that at least he could now hold his head up among his more inflammatory colleagues.

Having decided early on to concentrate on writing rather than go looking for trouble, Pamuk was a stranger to the legal system and his trial last December for ‘denigrating the Turkish state’ caught the attention of the world’s media. This attention, and the support of free-speech advocates, may have helped Pamuk get off, but it played into the hands of ultra-nationalists who claim that liberal writers are in the pay of outside forces.

The tall, bespectacled Pamuk has a donnish, distracted air. When I track him down to the kind of literary cafe that British writers can only dream of – hidden up three, tall flights of stairs in a seedy apartment block behind a locked door; walls of caricatures wreathed in the smoke of a thousand Turkish cigarettes – he is genial, but unwilling to talk of his recent experiences. Pamuk has told friends that he is caught between two poles. On the one hand, it his duty to write. On the other, he believes that authors must engage with the society around them.

I’m endlessly fascinated by this double-duty that writers in repressive states face. (In the immortal words of Tahar Djaout: “Silence is death. If you speak, you die. If you are silent, you die. So, speak and die!”) They have to create art and they have to be engagé. The rules of “engagement,” though, are not theirs to set. Some stances can earn them respect, and others can get them scorn, depending on the when and where of their actions, as both Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak have found. Read it all here.

Antonya Nelson has a new collection of short stories out, called Some Fun, and Joyce Carol Oates reviews it for the New York Times Book Review. “Rarely has the dysfunctional middle-class Caucasian-American family been so relentlessly dissected and analyzed, and rarely with such patience, sympathy and verve,” Oates writes.

Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, John Freeman reviews Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend. ” Readers who come to this novel under the impression that stories from the Muslim world will be prudish or full of allusion are in for a surprise,” Freeman warns. “This is a sexy, racy novel, energized — for a long stretch — by its two protagonists’ frantic search for a girl who doesn’t prefer sodomy to vaginal intercourse. None of their prospects wants to break her hymen.” And in this, the characters of Ali and Mamed are no different than many of the boys in my high school. I could tell you stories that would make you question what you think you know about sexuality in Morocco.

Andie Miller interviews Athol Fugard about Tsotsi for the Mail and Guardian. They discuss the writing of the book, how it was set aside for years, and then revived and edited, the film adaptation, the way in which Fugard writes about black experience, etc. Worth a look.