Category: literary life

Author and biographer Ron Chernow is set to succeed Salman Rushdie as the head of PEN, the writers’ organization.

“I felt that with the enormous increase in interest in nonfiction, it would be good to have a major nonfiction writer,” Mr. Rushdie said in an interview at the organization’s offices on lower Broadway in SoHo, “especially in view of the problems we’ve seen arise there recently. And his Alexander Hamilton biography constantly reminded me of a time when the best writers in America were also changing American history.”

I have to say, I’m sorry to see Rushdie go. I thought he did a great job the last two years, particularly with the World Voices Festival. This year’s edition will bring many important world writers, among them Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gordimer, Amartya Sen, and Toni Morrison, to New York for readings. In addition, the festival will feature media stars and polar opposites Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan, so it should make for a very interesting discussion on reform in Islam. Unfortunately, however:

Since 2004, though, Mr. Ramadan has been denied a visa by the United States government on grounds of a Patriot Act provision that his writings “endorse or espouse terrorist activity.” Together with the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN has filed suit challenging that decision.

“I felt that more conservative voices were missing last year,” Mr. Rushdie said, “and Ramadan would certainly be one.”

But change is good, and it will be interesting to see what direction Ron Chernow will take the organization. The positions of vice-president and secretary will be taken over by Jhumpa Lahiri and Rick Moody, respectively.

Deborah Solomon interviews Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield, who has a new book out called Manliness.

Were you sorry to see Harvard’s outgoing president, Lawrence Summers, attacked for saying that men and women may have different mental capacities?

He was taking seriously the notion that women, innately, have less capacity than men at the highest level of science. I think it’s probably true. It’s common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are.

Ah, women. Those poor, poor deficient souls. How did we ever give them the right to vote?

Why would you bother to read books when they make such great home accents? This article offers ten helpful tips, including: “Stack books on the floor or in baskets. The casual arrangement makes them inviting.” Or: “A lamp that is too low for its location can be raised by placing it on a stack of books. Custom bases can be ordered to raise lamps, but a stack of books is a more personal touch.”

And, if using books as decor isn’t your thing, they also make great pret-a-porter.

Another week, another rave review of Gate of the Sun, this time from Ilan Stavans in the San Francisco Chronicle:

However, it took almost a decade for it to materialize, courtesy of Archipelago, a small publisher in Brooklyn. The reviews have been dazzling. I wonder, though. Why didn’t a Manhattan publisher bring it out? Are they asleep at the weal? [sic] Or is it that they’re exercising a form of mercantile censorship by shying away from works of unquestionable credentials with unavoidable political bent? Do they fear an unpleasant reaction from their clientele? It is no secret that Americans are consistently misinformed about Muslim society. Isn’t a book like “Gate of the Sun” the perfect excuse for a deeper analysis?

More here.

The Guardian has a profile of Yemeni poet Ali Al Ryami, who was recently blacklisted in Oman for speaking out against human rights abuses.

Al Ryami’s background in experimental theatre has also played a major role in shaping his poetry, according to one of his translators, Hafiz Kheir. In the carefully composed work that Kheir has seen, “he often manages to create imaginary spaces of inner worlds, while retaining a restrained language that resists the temptation of ‘freewheeling lyricism’ that renders a lot of his contemporaries’ works either too vague or in some cases clearly ostentatious”.

Kheir places Al Ryami within contemporary Arabic Free Verse, a wide and diverse body of poetic endeavours which emerged in the early 1960s and helped to free modern Arab poets from the limitations of traditional forms.

I think the article is great. I just wish we would hear about Arab poets and writers all the time, not just when they’re banned or arrested or fatwa-ed.

The 2006 Salon du Livre will take place in Paris starting tomorrow. Of interest: Celebrations for the centenary of Senegalese poet (and statesman) Leopold Sedar Senghor, the father of Negritude, are planned as well.