Category: literary life

As I’m sure has been widely reported by now, the National Book Critics Circle award winners have been announced. The prize in fiction went to E.L. Doctorow’s The March. (The novel also recently won the PEN/Faulkner award.)

Jay Parini traveled to St. Bartholomew’s Church in Burwash, deep in the countryside of east Sussex, to celebrate the life of Kipling with a small circle of other Kipling enthusiasts. Parini writes about his journey in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, briefly glimpsed from inside the hatch on Lost, has sold more copies after its appearance on the show than in the last six years. Those of you who have read it: Any interesting theories you’d like to share? And, more importantly, how can I get my book in the hatch?

As has been widely reported, E.L Doctorow’s The March has won the PEN/Faulkner award. The oher finalists were William Henry Lewis, for I Got Somebody in Staunton; Bruce Wagner, for The Chrysanthemum Palace; James Salter, for Last Night.; and Pacific Northwest author Karen Fisher, for A Sudden Country.

Governor Ted Kulongoski has named a Lawson Inada the new poet laureate for Oregon:

Inada is an emeritus professor of writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has taught since 1966. He was interned during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. Inada is required to give as many as six public readings in urban and rural settings across the state.

Inada is a third-generation Japanese American, born in 1938 and raised in Fresno, Calif. He was one of the co-editors of the anthology “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers.” In his autobiographical volume, “Legends from Camp,” he wrote about his boyhood experience of internment during World War II.

The last appointee for the poet laureate position was William Stafford, who left sixteen years ago.

Ziad Hayder Rahman, a London-based lawyer who claims to be the inspiration for the character Magid in White Teeth, has said that Zadie Smith’s take on race relations in Britain was “divorced from reality.” Rahman is the brother of Jimmi Rahman, whom Smith dated at the time, and to whom she dedicated the novel.

Rahman’s own experience in Britain was not as racism-free as Smith makes out. Growing up in the East End he was bullied and beaten, insulted in the street and once had coffee thrown at him from a moving car. When he went to Oxford University he was chased out of the bar and even had a swastika daubed on the door of his room, prompting him to change colleges.

Smith wrote the novel at the age of 24, after reading English at Cambridge, and after it was published in 2000 it was celebrated for its optimist portrait of a “post-racial” country.

Rahman, however, accepts Smith’s right to artistic license. “I recognised myself in White Teeth but I also recognise that it is work of fiction,” said Rahman.

Rahman says that the book doesn’t reflect his anger at “being alienated from British society” or his problems with “the Asian community with which I’m in profound disagreement”. This reaction to White Teeth appears in a new book by Claire Berlinski, titled Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too. Berlinski’s book has been praised by neo-con cheerleader Daniel Pipes.

Related: “Zadie didn’t tell the real race story.”