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As many as twenty-two people are feared dead in the latest immigration tragedy off the coast of southern Spain. I’m sure the response will be “let’s build higher fences,” like that’s going to make any difference.

“One of my favorite modern works, Notes of a Desolate Man by Chu T’ien-Wen, perfectly captures the alienation and internal ruminations of many gay men; that it was written by a Taiwanese woman is no less remarkable, although Chu T’ien-Wen–acclaimed in her homeland as a novelist, intellectual, and screenwriter–has long been one of the best-kept literary secrets (at least in the West, surely due to so little of her work having been translated here). Free-flowing, non-narrative in the traditional sense, rich with metaphors and allusions, the narrator, Shao, reflects on, among other things, the death of a childhood friend from AIDS, Fellini, Levi-Strauss, and, ultimately, himself.”

Mitch Cullin is the author of seven books including A Slight Trick of the Mind and The Cosmology of Bing. His novel Tideland is now a motion picture by Terry Gilliam. Besides writing, he continues to work on projects with his partner Peter I. Chang, among them a documentary about Hisao Shinagawa and the forthcoming Howe Gelb concert film This Band Has No Members.

• The Seattle P.I.‘s John Marshall has put together a list of books for holiday giving.
• Korash Huseyin, the editor of the Kashgar Literature Review, was sentenced by the Chinese government to three years’ imprisonment for writing a political fable.
• Anne Marie O’Connor has a lengthy profile of Marjane Satrapi in the Los Angeles Times.
• The Lit Saloon computes the ratio of fiction to non-fiction book reviews in the NYTBR, and finds it wanting.
• Of Gabriel García Márquez’s new novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Michiko Kakutani writes: “[It] is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years. It turns out not to have been worth the wait.”
• Syrian poet Adonis will visit Iran to give readings. He will travel with Venus Khoury-Ghata, his translator into French, and a fine poet in her own right.

Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my views on the novel and its relation to the world at large, so I quite appreciated Walter Mosley’s essay in the Washington Post this weekend, in which he says of the writer’s task:

The mastery of language is our duty. We enter this world by placing one word after another in comprehensible and unique ways. And then, of course, there’s what the author is willing to talk about. When politics enters our writing, we are often asked by our representatives, our teachers, and sometimes our audience to step back from outspoken and controversial opinions about how this world works. Many times I’ve been told by people I respect, “There’s too much emphasis on race in this book,” or “The government and the police aren’t really like that.”

I am asked not to stand down but to stand back — behind the line of good taste.

“Books are entertainments,” I am told. “No one wants to hear your ideas about how the world works or what’s wrong with America.”

Of course they don’t. The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink. If writing was always only a good adventure with a teary or cheery ending, books would not be worth the effort to read or to write.

Novels are about the world we live in. No one is suggesting that they should be propaganda for oil companies and fast food concerns. Or there to justify unjust wars or the American Way. Nor should they be apologies for anarchic maniacs who seek in their distress to destroy an entire world. But to the extent that these things are in our world, we should write about them.

Read the rest of this excellent essay here.