James Kelman argues against Scottish genre fiction

Citing the bestselling Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling and detective pageturners of Ian Rankin, James Kelman has accused popular genre fiction writers of warping the world's perception of Scottish literature. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Kelman--who is Scotland's only Booker Prize winner--said that the success of "mediocre" writers has overshadowed the more talented output of literary authors and has turned Scotland into a factory that churns out conventional fiction for mass consumption.

Kelman's remarks have, of course, been met with much derision from both writers of such fiction--who question the ability of so-called "literary writers" to produce enjoyable stories--and readers, who often enjoy gripping yet "easy" tales. Neither is the divide restricted to Scotland fiction; the United States, for instance, has its own distinction between the Dan Browns and Clive Cusslers and the Philip Roths and Thomas Pynchons of the book universe.

Kelman's How Late it Was, How Late, which won the Booker in 1994, met its own share of scorn and criticism, with one judge threatening to resign and critics labeling it "crap" and "literary vandalism." The stream-of-consciousness novel is written in a working class dialect of Glasgow and follows a few days in the life of an uneducated ex-convict.

The Guardian offers an excellent examination of Kelman's remarks:

As a manifestation of the old 'genre v real literature' chestnut, the debate should be just as interesting to those outside of Scotland. Kelman, committed to experimental form and language, sees genre fiction as redundant, compromised by commerciality. Mina, while still calling Kelman a "beautiful writer", regards his stance as a mere "play for status"; a failure of the writer's duty to entertain.

There is another to level to this, however, about the ways in which any country's indigenous literature – especially those of smaller or post-colonial nations – is threatened by the commercial imperative to produce page-turning, airport-friendly thrillers. A third level concerns the collusion of the literary establishment in this. It's certainly the case that the books editors of broadsheet newspapers will bemoan the fact that we're not all reading Tolstoy, while providing acres of coverage to crime writers. Genre fiction doesn't need highbrow attention in order to sell by the bucketload, yet editors must cover it precisely because it is so visible. This crowds out more risk-taking writers, for whom a single review from a perceptive critic can provide a career breakthrough.

It is galling, then, that a country like Scotland, home to an enormous, bristling, experimental tradition which includes James Hogg, Alexander Trocchi, Hugh McDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, James Robertson and Kelman himself, is marketed to tourists as the home of Rebus and Potter.

West Texan novelist dies at 83

Elmer Kelton, a Plains novelist and writer of modern westerns, died on August 22 at age 83.

A survivor of the harsh droughts of the 1950s, which killed, defeated, or cast off many ranchers and farmers from West Texas, Kelton became an advocate of self-sufficiency and stoic resilience. The Time it Never Rained, published in 1973 and winner of both the Spur Award and the Western Heritage Award, is perhaps his greatest novel, an account of one rancher's battle against crippling elements.

Kelton won seven Spur Awards from 1957 to 2002. He also won three Western Heritage Awards, and in 1977 won the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature, an honor he shares with Louis L'Amour, Dee Brown, and John Ford.

Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder writes about his life and contributions:

Elmer Kelton died last week. He was 83 years old, and in his time he wrote the best books about the treeless land and the work that men and women faced when they moved beyond the 98th meridian.

Elmer Kelton was born at Horse Camp in Andrews County, Texas, to Mr. and Mrs. R. W. “Buck” Kelton. He grew up on the McElroy Ranch in Upton and Crane counties where he learned to do ranch work. Early on, Kelton realized he lacked cowboying talent. "I was the oldest of four boys and by far the worst cowboy," Kelton said. "I rode a horse like all the rest, just not as well, so I took a lot of refuge in reading. Westerns were my heritage. . . . By eight or nine, I decided if I couldn't be a cowboy, I would at least write about it."

...

Self-sufficiency was the recurring political theme in Kelton’s stories. Charlie Flagg warned about taking anything from government. Wes Hendrix, in The Man Who Rode Midnight, stood in the way of a lake planned by the town of Big River. The town saw a future in ski boats and vacation homes. Hendrix thought a life built on cattle and sheep was just fine, and the two, the rancher and the town, settled into a prolonged battle over the meaning of progress.

''When other people can ruin your life, it doesn't matter if it's big government or big business,'' Kelton told me once. ''Above all, I cherish freedom.”

Venezuela's Brain Drain

Newsweek has reported on the effect of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's "twentieth-century socialism" on the educated classes of Venezuela and surrounding Latin American countries. Fleeing cronyism, corruption, cutbacks, censorship, recriminations, and inflation, many of the thinkers and achievers of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and nearby nations have fled to countries such as the United States, where they believe their talents and skills can find appreciation and funding. More than one million emigrants including scientists, writers, engineers, media producers, and professors have left Venezuela in the decade of Chavez's rule, and many more express an adamant desire to do so in the near future, citing the worldwide recession and lack of visas as the only obstacles.

A recent study by Vanderbilt University in Nashville showed that more than one in three Bolivians under 30 had plans to emigrate, up from 12 percent a decade ago, while 47 percent of 18-year-olds said they planned to leave. Many established professionals have already made up their minds. "I ask myself if I'm not patriotic enough," says Giovanna Rivero, an acclaimed Bolivian novelist who is leaving for a teaching job at the University of Florida and has no plans to come back. But "Bolivia is coming apart. There are people who've known each other all their lives who don't talk to one another anymore."

In Venezuela, Chávez has pushed hard against anyone who refuses to accept his party line. Daniel Benaim was one of Venezuela's top independent television producers, turning out prime-time entertainment and game shows for national channels with Canal Uno, a leading production house. "We had 160 employees and a 24/7 operation," he says. But after the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, the government cracked down on independent media, and programming budgets dried up. In a month, Canal Uno was down to four employees and heading for bankruptcy. Benaim redirected his business to serve the international advertising market and raked in prestigious international awards, including multiple Latin Emmys. But opportunities for non-Chávistas in Venezuela had withered. One by one, he watched the people he trained over the years leave the country. "I used to give angry speeches about the brain drain. Now I have to bite my tongue," says Benaim, who is also moving to the U.S. "We had the best minds in the business, and now there's nothing for them here."

One of Benaim's associates was Gonzalo Bernal Ibarra. He, too, had soared up the career ladder in broadcast television and until recently ran a campus network that reached 100,000 students. Everything changed in late 2007, when Chávez lost a referendum to rewrite the Constitution and began to crack down on his media critics, including Bernal. Strangers in jackets with weighted pockets—dress code for Chávez's military-intelligence police—began to follow him day and night. Then Congress was set to pass a bill obliging schools to teach 21st-century socialism. "I didn't want my kid learning that crap," says Bernal. Even shopping became a trial as spiking inflation and government price controls emptied the supermarkets of basic goods like milk, eggs, and meat. One day in late 2008, Bernal opened a bottle of whisky and held a yard sale. "I got drunk and watched my life get carted away," he says. He now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, with his wife and 6-year-old daughter, and is trying to adapt. "I was living in the most beautiful, wonderful, funny country in the world. Now a third of my friends are gone. In another 10 years, Venezuela is going to be a crippled country."

The "brain drain" bodes poorly for Latin American literature in the region, as writers can hardly find time, resources, or encouragement in such an environment. Tellingly, one of the most recent Bolivian novels to be translated into English, Juan de Recacoechea's American Passport, the best-selling novel of all time in Bolivia, chronicles a man's desperate attempt to leave his country. On the other hand, the exodus of intellectuals may result in a flowering of diasporaic, exile literature, as has been seen with South Asian novelists living in London and Canada and Iranian writers living in the United States.

Literature of the Iranian Diaspora

In 1995, Shahriah Mandanipour and 22 other prominent Iranian writers were nearly killed when an assassination plot hatched by the government failed to send their bus plummeting into a ravine. Mandanipour now lives in the United States, where he is a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and his most recent novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which was written in America but is set in Iran, has recently been translated into English by Sara Khalili. Censoring is Mandanipour's first novel to appear in English translation, and it represents one installment of an emerging trend of Iranian diaspora writers, who catalog their memories of post-revolution Iran from their new places of refuge.

The "renaissance" features first- and second-generation hyphenated Iranians, among them Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis fame; Laleh Khadivi, author of Age of Orphans; and Porochista Khakpour, who wrote the post-9/11 novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects, set amongst Iranian Americans in New York City.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a multi-layered tale featuring a writers attempt to compose a straightforward romance while repeatedly being censored by government officials and his own anxiety.

From the article by David Mattin of The National Newspaper of Abu Dhabi:

It’s easy to see why censorship is important to Mandanipour; back in Iran he was banned from publishing entirely between 1992 and 1997:

“Censorship is emotionally crushing for the writer,” he explains, “because it weakens the connection that he has with his readers. Readers become less trusting of the writer, because they know he is being censored.

“Eventually, censorship enters every part of the writer’s life; even the way that he thinks. The writer begins to censor himself.”

That strange dance of speech and silence, Mandanipour says, came to overshadow his writing life in Iran:

“I would write entire short stories on my computer, and then delete them. If my house was raided, those stories might be used as evidence against me.

“With Censoring an Iranian Love Story, I wanted to show how it is impossible for a writer to write a straightforward love story in Iran. That story will always become something else, more complex.”

But Censoring will also provide western readers with an insight into daily life as it is lived in Iran. In particular, we witness the ever looming presence of the Basij “morals police”, and the ingenuity that young Tehranis exercise to circumvent their rules. The Islamic Republic decrees that unmarried men and women should not socialise together: in one passage, Sara and Dara meet in a hospital waiting room, where all those around them are too busy to notice their illegal encounter.

“Just as it is impossible to write a straightforward Iranian love story, it is impossible to live one,” says Mandanipour. “Iranians no longer have the opportunity to have a romantic life, and that can destroy love.”

London and Qatar team up for literary salon

Bloomsbury Publishing and Qatar Publishing have united to form the Bloomsbury Qatar Literary Salon, a series of ongoing events to be held in London and Doha, Qatar, at which Arab writers will be given the opportunity to discuss their work.

The first event, last Thursday, featured British-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, whose The Map of Love was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1999.

The second event, to be held in Doha on the first night of Ramadan Iftar, September 9, will feature readings by established and up-and-coming Arabian poets. Future events will follow approximately every two months.

Larry McMurtry may retire from novel writing

Claiming his well of fictional inspiration may be running dry, 73-year-old Texan novelist Larry McMurtry has stated at a recent gathering that his new book--to be released on August 11--will probably be his last novel.

Rhino Ranch will be the thirtieth novel in a corpus that includes Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, and Lonesome Dove, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Centering around an attempt to protect the endangered African black rhinoceros by importing it to the United States, Rhino Ranch will be the fifth installment in a series of novels set his native North Texas which began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show. Most of McMurtry's novels, which are often labeled as modern westerns, are set in Texas.

In addition to being a novelist, McMurty is a screenwriter--he co-won an Academy Award for his screenplay to Brokeback Mountain--and an avid reader and book collector. His collection of over 300,000 books can be perused and purchased at Booked Up in Archer City, Texas.

From the Dallas Morning News:

"It's a finite gift, for sure," he says of novel writing. "I'm about at the end of it. I can write certain things. I don't think I can write fiction any more. I think I've used it up over 30 novels. That's a lot of novels."

McMurtry made the remarks during a recent visit at his home in Archer City. He huddled almost an hour with invited guests from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which is sponsored by the author's alma mater, the University of North Texas.

"Most great novels are written by people between 40 and 60, or 35 and 60," he says. "Not too many great novels are written by people over 75. Hardly any. Maybe Tolstoy."

Hilary Mantell favorite to win 2009 Man Booker

Hilary Mantel has taken literary gamblers by storm; of the thirteen contenders on the Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist released this week, ninety-five percent of gamblers have placed bets on her Wolf Hall to take the big prize in October, leading oddsmakers to call Mantel's win a shoe-in.

Wolf Hall follows Thomas Cromwell's scandalous influence in the sixteenth-century court of Henry VIII. The book has received glowing attention from BBC2 recently, a possible source of its favoritism in the race.

The Derbyshire-born author has published twelve books--including a memoir and a short story collection--since 1985 and has been shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in recent years. Her stiffest competition this year is from South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee.

In September, the longlist will be reduced to six nominees, and from those six one will win the £50,000 prize at London's Guildshall on October 6.

The German experience in Colombia

Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has written a debut novel detailing the xenophobic accusations against and hardships of German immigrants in Colombia during the second World War, blending the historical story with more recent Colombian history. Titled The Informers and translated into English by Anne McLean, the novel has been given a very positive review by Larry Rohter of The New York Times.

Running like an undercurrent through “The Informers” is the violence that has pervaded Colombian life for decades, leaving survivors with the “fleeting altruistic regret one tends to feel when listening to news of someone else’s death.” A cavalcade of assassinations, kidnappings, bombings and other terrorist attacks perpetrated by guerrillas and drug lords are mentioned in passing, so casually that when one character is asked about the death of a lover, she replies: “There was a fight and guns came out and he got shot, nothing more. The most normal thing in the world.”

Mr. Vásquez also proves adept at capturing the sense of dislocation and vertigo experienced by those forced to separate from their language and culture. Novels about immigrants have become a genre of their own in recent years, usually centered on Latin Americans or Asians trying to make their way in the United States or some other industrialized country. Here, though, the positions are reversed, and while one Nazi supporter sneers at Germans in Colombia who “wanted to assimilate” and have “done so downward,” Mr. Vásquez clearly sympathizes with those struggling to adjust.

Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973, and Los informantes was originally published by Alfaguara in 2004, at which time it was hailed by the Colombian magazine Semana as one of the most important novels of the past twenty years. In 2007, Vásquez published a second novel in Castilian, Historia secreta de Costaguana, which has won awards in Colombia and Spain. Having studied at the Sorbonne of France, Vásquez now lives in Barcelona, where he works in journalism, translates the works of Victor Hugo, E.M. Forster and John Hershey, and has written a brief biography of Joseph Conrad, whose style and themes often draw comparisons to his own work.

Serpent's Tail press acquires rights to Italian Booker Prize winner

Serpent's Tail, an independent publishing house based in London, has acquired the worldwide English-language rights to Tiziano Scarpa's Stabat Mater, the winner of 2009's Premio Strega, the leading literary award in Italy.

The epistolary novel is told from the point-of-view of composer Antonio Vivaldi's teenage muse in eighteenth-cenutry Venice.

Hemingway tried to spy for the Soviets

New evidence examined in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev) suggests that Nobel Prize winning American author Ernest Hemingway was an unsuccessful spy for the Soviet KGB in the 1940's.

According to The Guardian:

Its section on the author's secret life as a "dilettante spy" draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name "Argo", and "repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us" when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to "give us any political information" and was never "verified in practical work", so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?

The wreckage of intervention

In a vivid article for The National, Christopher Stewart reports on the unstable conditions in seventeen-month-old Kosovo, the world's youngest independent nation. His compellingly detailed examination includes an interview with the poet Basri Capriqi, president of the Kosovo PEN.

Capriqi was a youthful 31 in 1989, when Slobodan Milosevic made his infamous speech at the field of Black Birds, invoking the Serbs’ defeat there at the hands of the Turks in 1389 to incite anti-Albanian sentiments among the thousands of Serbs in his audience.

In the months that followed, Kosovo’s status as an autonomous province within the republic of Serbia was revoked, and ethnic Albanians were purged from public institutions – judges, prosecutors, police officers, teachers. Out of a job, Capriqi watched as street signs, storefronts and newspapers all came printed in Serbo-Croatian and any Albanians deemed enemies of the state were arrested and tortured. Capriqi retreated into literature, reading books to remind himself that there was a sane world beyond the horizon, and writing what he terms “antinationalist poetry. Everyone else was writing about being brave and fighting. I wrote: ‘I’m scared like a duck. I’m afraid.’” ....

"Our thought was to achieve this through passive resistance, like Gandhi. The sad truth is that nothing in this region could be resolved without war. Other places broke up without bloodshed, like the Soviet Union, but this region is different.” Capriqi paused and fiddled with a pencil. “After the war, the intellectuals felt lost. Our peaceful project had failed. We felt sorry that our ideas had failed. I came to think that war was probably the only way, but that is very sad. It has changed things.”

Capriqi’s most recent book of poetry, Taming the Snake, published in 2005, is a veiled critique of what has happened to Kosovo. “It is about taming the beast and restoring humanity to the land,” he said. “There is a lot of that to be done here, taming and restoring. I just don’t know anymore. I had high hopes, but this is not exactly the Kosovo I imagined. I’d like to be optimistic, but it is hard. Some of the people in power are warriors, not politicians,” he said.

Scream Literary Festival honors fallen books

Chelsea Miya of NOW Toronto reports on the Scream Literary Festival, a conference of Canadian writers, publishers, graphic novelists, poets, and artists that satirically eulogizes the death of the book. The festival, which began on July 2, will last until Sunday the 11th.

The Scream Literary Festival brings together some of the best Canadian authors, poets and artists. Hymns, readings, performances, and workshops explore the imminent demise of books and book culture.

Because it’s not just the books themselves that suffer.

Beneath Toronto’s storefronts is a graveyard. From the recently demised David Mirvish Books to Yorkville mainstays the Book Cellar and Britnell’s, Bloor Street is a virtual cemetery of loved and lost bookstores.

“When people hear dead bookstores, they think we’re poking fun,” said Carey Toane, who organised the July 4 Bankruptcy Walking Tour — a memorial trek for the lost.

“But it was a serious walk. We left flowers. People talked about their memories. When you ask writers and fans of literature they all have a favourite independent bookstore. It’s the only place you can find small press books, so when they disappear so does a huge chunk of Canadian culture.”

The Revenge of Print

Publisher Eric Obenauf, writing for The Brooklyn Rail, muses on the possible near death and hopeful rebirth of the book and print media market in the modern United States:

Such efforts expose a key fundamental flaw within the mindset of modern corporate publishing: the perceived role of the book in today’s society. In the past, because of the necessary evolution required to actually create one, coupled with an ambition to deliver a valuable artifact to the world, a book was imagined by publishers as a means to both inspire and inform culture. Now the opposite is occurring. In a flagrant attempt to compete with Internet culture, to crash books into the marketplace on hot button topics from steroids to celebrities, from political scandal to political ascension, corporate publishers aim now to meet immediate demand. If a book about teenage vampires becomes a bestseller, then the hustle is on to find and market a series about pre-teen vampires. And because of this constant rush to the market with books that have the shelf-life of a bruised tomato—in hardcover, with supplemental cardboard cut-outs that stand in chain store windows and usher customers down narrow sales aisles—this ideology has influenced the ebb and flow of the industry. A worthy book that has been crafted over several steps and patiently delivered with care is outshined by a gossip memoir by a B-list celebrity’s cat-sitter.

Norway names 2009 the Year of Hamsun; Israelis protest Nazi-sympathizer

Norway, which was recently appointed to head the twenty-six-nation-member Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, has turned heads by designating 2009 "Hamsun Year" in honor of Knut Hamsun and naming a cultural center--due to be opened in August--after the writer.

Knut Hamsun, who died in 1952, is considered to be Norway's most talented writer for his psychologically-riveting, realist novels The Growth of the Soil and Hunger. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 and was called the "father of modern literature" by Yiddish Nobelist Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was, however, a Nazi sympathizer, a supporter of the Quisling occupation, and the author of an Adolph Hitler eulogy. Jewish and non-Jewish protestors in Israel and Norway have called the commemoration of Hamsun irresponsible and contradictory.

"Knut Hamsun wrote magnificent literature, and also an obituary for Adolf Hitler," Bodil Borset, the designated director of the Hamaroy Hamsun Center responded last month in Aftenposten, the country's second largest newspaper. "He was among our greatest authors and a Nazi sympathizer. Can we reconcile this?"

The center, Borset said, would be "more than happy" to invite Zuroff and Gerstenfeld to attend a conference next year on the Hamsun Center's activities.

"Borset appears to believe that Hamsun's literary brilliance warrants the celebration of his birth, regardless of his active support for a regime which annihilated innocent civilians," Zuroff wrote in reply. While expressing willingness to attend, Zuroff insisted the event is held as soon as possible, while Norway still chairs the Task Force, so that it may have "practical consequences."

Norwegian representatives of the cultural center have invited Israeli thinkers to debate the author's legacy next year, at a time which Israelis deem too late to be relevant.

Macondo vs. McOndo: goodbye to South American magic realism?

Edmundo Paz Soldán, a Bolivian author who has won the National Book Award in his native country, is scheduled to lecture in Alberquerque, New Mexico, US, on the "McOndo Movement," a twelve-year-old literary style in hispanic literature that contrasts the more common magical realist style by being more firmly rooted in the gritty, modern, real world.

Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet coined the term McOndo. "My own world," he wrote, "is something much closer to what I call 'McOndo' ? a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes, and condos." In 1996 Fuguet co-edited (with Sergio Gómez) the anthology "McOndo," whose title combined McDonalds with Macondo, the fictional town created by Nobel Prize writer Gabriel García Márquez in his famed classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Interest in McOndo writing has grown ever since.

Despite the popularity of surrealist works by Juan Rulfo, García Márquez, and Borges, Paz Soldán insists that McOndo writing is a literary mindset that can be embraced by today's readers.

EC Osondu wins "African Booker"

The £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing, called the African Booker, was awarded to EC Osondu for his short story "Waiting," a sparse and resonant tale about a young boy in a refugee camp.

Osondu, a Nigerian native who now lives in the United States, published the story in Guernicamag.com in October, 2008. In addition to the prize money, he will receive a one-month residency at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, US, with all expenses paid.

The prize, in its tenth year, recognizes the best English-language short story written by an African author. Patrons of the award include Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, and Wole Soyinka.

Algeria welcomes Pan-African festival

The second Pan-African Festival since 1969 began July 5 in Algiers, Algeria, and will run until July 20, celebrating the arts, music, literature, and culture of fifty-one diverse African nations.

The first festival forty years ago celebrated the end of colonialism, but this free, non-commercial event will focus on a rebirth of artistic pursuits, the African cultural renaissance, with 500 musical performances, 41 plays, 9 art exhibitions, and several conferences featuring thousands of intellectuals, performers, and artists. Over two hundred literary titles will be republished and made available to attendees.

All African nations except Morocco will participate in the events, with additional support from the United States and Brazil, who each have substantial African-born populations. "Lucy," one of the oldest preserved remains of human civilization, will leave her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for only the second time to be exhibited, and other attractions will include an extravagant parade and a fireworks display.

Algerian Minister of Culture Khalida Toumi told Liberté that Panaf 2009 is not a commercial operation, and that it is "the festival of the Algerian people".

"Everything must be free," she said. "The poster shows Africa in fireworks. And, well, that's the programme. All areas of culture will be at their dazzling best."

Vassily Aksyonov dies

The "anti-Soviet Russian" author of 23 novels, who in 1980 was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and spent much of the past three decades in the United States and France, died at 76 on June 6, following a heart attack in Moscow.

Vassily Aksyonov's novels include The Burn and In Search of Melancholy Baby. Publishers Weekly called his wartime saga Generations of Winter "nothing less than a War and Peace for the twentieth century" and compared the novelist to John Dos Passos and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His Voltairiens and Voltairiennes (Voltairian Men and Women) won the Russian Booker Prize in 2004.

Aksyonov was forced into exile in 1980 when his manuscript for The Burn was discovered by the KGB. He taught Russian literature at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when his citizenship was reinstated. His absence from his country had troubled him, but following the collapse of the USSR his once controversial works received newfound fame. In 2004, Generations of Winter was adapted into a television miniseries.

Aksyonov had been ill for some eighteen months.

On July 6, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, "His death is an enormous, irreplaceable loss for Russian literature and culture."

His funeral will be held on July 9.

The Bessie Head Literature Awards, 2009

The foremost literary award ceremony in Botswana, the Bessie Head Literature Awards, has announced its winners for 2009, with women leading the pack in all categories.

Cheryl Ntumy, a student at the University of Botswana in Gabarone, won the best novel award for her manuscript Crossing. In the short story category, Gothataone Moeng won for "Putting on Faces," and in poetry the winner was Luda Sekga for "He Was My Oppressor."

The awards, sponsored by Pentagon Publishers, honor the legacy of Bessie Amelia Head, a South African author who sought refuge in Serowe, Botswana, in 1964 and wrote many autobiographical novels set there. She is considered Botswana's most important literary figure.

The ceremony will be held in Gabarone on July 19.

Chris Eaton launches microfiction program on Twitter

In part inspired by Roch Carrier's short excerpt from the short-short story "The Hockey Sweater" on the Canadian five dollar bill, novelist Chris Eaton will begin a microfiction exercise on Twitter on July 4. He will publish twenty-one stories of 140 characters or less, and subscribers are asked to submit story responses to each one, which need not follow the same theme or plot but must contain at least one third of the same words as the original.

The twenty-one stories and the best of the responses will be published in a literary journal anthology entitled GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose.

Chris Eaton, author of The Grammar Architect and The Inactivist, is also the frontman of the alt-folk band Rock Plaza Central.

Greatest Maltese Novel?

L-Ghalqa Ta’ L-Iskarjota, a Maltese thriller about investigative journalists preparing a television program, has been hailed by the arts society of Malta as one of the greatest works ever produced on the Mediterranean island, a densely populated nation of 410,000; however, its author, Alfred Sant, is the much-maligned and controversial former prime minister of the Labour Party who has spent seventeen years in public office.

An interview with Sant by Raphael Vassallo of Malta Today illuminates the unique literary community of Malta, with its vibrant linguistic and artistic history despite notoriously close quarters.

The Palestine Festival of Literature

American author Claire Messud, whose 2006 The Emperor's Children was longlisted for a Man Booker Prize, has written a fascinating article for the Boston Globe about her recent visit to the Palestine Festival of Literature, a peaceful celebration of Palestinian letters held illegally in Jerusalem, where to use the word "Palestine" is a security risk and to be Palestinian is to be homeless, lost in time and space yet trapped in the void.

The author and lawyer Raja Shehadeh - a gentle man of Gandhi-esque demeanor, whose book “Palestinian Walks’’ won Britain’s Orwell Prize last year - led us on a walk in the hills outside Ramallah, to show us the land that he loves and upon which he has walked all his life. We scrambled up rocks among terraced olive groves to a stone shepherd’s hut, from which we could see the green and gold hills interlaced to the horizon. We picked our way along a dry riverbed, surprising a patterned tortoise, and on to a small village, where a mangy donkey gazed balefully from its tether and ruddy-faced children demonstrated their tree-climbing prowess.

So simple and beautiful, our walk was, alas, illegal: the olive groves of Raja Shehadeh’s childhood have been declared a militarized zone. We might have been arrested at any moment simply for standing in them. (Israeli settlers, however, are free to walk there; just as they are free to carry arms, and they do.) Part of being Palestinian is having your movements curtailed on every front.

What is a world where you cannot go for a walk, cannot assemble to read and discuss literature in public, cannot be certain of visiting your grandmother in a neighboring city? What is a world where you cannot lose your temper, cannot laugh in the wrong place?

Kureishi adapts The Black Album for the stage

The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi, a 1993 response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, has been adapted for the stage by the author and will premiere at the National Theatre in London on July 14.

The novel follows Muslim students of various degrees of faith and radicalism as they react to Rushdie's controversial novel in late-80's London. As in The Satanic Verses, Kureishi explores the acclimitazation and repulsion of Western culture by Muslims in an increasingly multicultural London, both the external clashes between warring cultures and the internal clashes of competing identities and values.

In an essay for The Guardian, Kureishi writes:

The fatwa against Rushdie in February 1989 reignited my concern about the rise of Islamic radicalism, something I had become aware of while in Pakistan in 1982, where I was writing My Beautiful Laundrette. But for me, that wasn't the whole story. Much else of interest was happening at the end of the 80s: the music of Prince; the collapse of communism and the "velvet revolution"; the rise of the new dance music, along with the use of a revelatory new drug, ecstasy; Tiananmen Square; Madonna using Catholic imagery in Like a Prayer; postmodernism, "mash-ups", and the celebration of hybridity – partly the subject of The Satanic Verses.

This was also the period, or so I like to think, when Britain became aware that it was changing, or had already changed from a monocultural to a multiracial society, and had realised, at last, that there was no going back. This wasn't merely a confrontation with simple racism, the kind of thing I'd grown up with, which was usually referred to as "the colour problem". When I was young, it was taken for granted that to be black or Asian was to be inferior to the white man. And not for any particular reason. It was just a fact. This was much more than that. Almost blindly, a revolutionary, unprecedented social experiment had been taking place. The project was to turn – out of the end of the Empire, and on the basis of mass immigration – a predominantly white society into a racially mixed one, thus forming a new notion of what Britain was and would become.

A novelist and screenwriter--and now playwright--Kureishi was born in London in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother. His 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia won a Whitbread Award for best first novel, and his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar at the 1987 Academy Awards.

Twittergate!

Alice Hoffman, the author of Practical Magic and the more recent The Story Sisters, blasted critic Roberta Silman for her unfavorable review in the Boston Globe. Writing on her Twitter account (in a post that has since been removed), Hoffman mourned the days when books were once reviewed by writers, calling Silman a "moron" and asking, "My second novel was reviewed by [Anne] Tyler. So who is Roberta Silman?"

Silman's fiction, however, has been published in The New Yorker. She has released three novels and a collection of short stories. And Hoffman's outburst has provoked only amusement from
Silman, a flood of support from readers, and an apology from Hoffman.

Silman's anger-inducing review praised Hoffman's earlier work while calling the latest novel "tired" and improvisational, a bit messy. Overall, the review was not very harsh or entirely negative.

Book Review: Shanghai Girls

Set in an extravagantly pseudo-Chinese neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1930s, a "China City" that catered to white tourists by showcasing the most cutesy (and usually inaccurate) of oriental curiosities, Shanghai Girls by Chinese-American novelist Lisa See documents the hopes and disappointments of two sisters who flee Japanese war atrocities in Shanghai only to meet alienation and prejudice on the "golden mountain" of the United States.

Robert Fulford of the National Post reviews the novel, praising it for its cross-cultural examination, exploration of identity politics, and readability while criticizing its "unremarkable" prose.

Fulford writes:

Her female characters alternately support and resent each other, in ways that suggest she's tapped into the rich vein of narrative uncovered in recent decades by Chick Lit authors. At the same time, she serves as advocate and analyst of the Chinese experience; she writes Identity Fiction, running parallel to Identity Politics. She knows precisely how hard life on this continent was for the Chinese and how to spell out the damning historical evidence. Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, while sometimes called a West Coast equivalent of Ellis Island, appears in Shanghai Girls without a trace of sentiment: It's depicted as the place where Chinese would-be immigrants were harshly imprisoned while bureaucrats tried to send them back home.

Argentine master turns 98

Ernesto Sabato, a Buenos Aires novelist whose work earned him the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1984, turned 98 on June 24.

He retired from public life some four years ago, though sources close to him report that he was in high spirits on his birthday, especially due to outspoken recognition from his friend the Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago.

Born in 1911, Sabato was an active physicist during World War II. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1940s, but an "existential crisis" in 1943 shifted him to a career in writing. Though the bulk of his work consisted of essays on science and morality, he published three successful novels from 1948 to 1974--a trilogy entitled The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs, and The Angel of Darkness. He is considered by some to be the greatest living Argentine writer.

From the Latin American Herald Tribune:

Sabato, who was born in Rojas, a small town of Buenos Aires province, in 1911, and has been quoted as saying that “art” saved him from suicide, has written three novels that deal with the psychological pressures that weigh on individuals in given situations.

The nonagenarian, who earned a doctorate in physics and worked at the prestigious Curie Institute in Paris before becoming disillusioned with science in the aftermath of World War II, also has written numerous philosophical and literary essays dealing with themes such as the dehumanizing effects of science and technology.

He became famous in 1961 with the novel “Sobre Heroes y Tumbas,” considered by many to be his masterpiece, while his final novel, titled “Abaddon, el Exterminador” (The Angel of Darkness) and published in 1974, won France’s prestigious Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book) prize in 1976.

Those two works completed a trilogy that also included his first novel, “El Tunel” (1948), a work that originally went unappreciated in his homeland but which “fascinated” French novelist Albert Camus.

"In Defense of Google Books"

Google is the one juggernaut corporation of the digital age which stands for many of the things I hate and yet which I don't hate at all. I don't know what I'd do without Google Maps, Gmail, Blogspot, Google Sites, and Google Books. I know it's monolithic, a monopoly, a triumph of technology over tradition... and yet, I love everything about it.

But apparently many people are up in arms against Google Books, and for probably all the wrong reasons.

Mark Gimein of Reuters lists some common arguments against Google Books and defuses them in his "Defense of Google Books."

There are a hundred other gems like the story of the Mahdi's peppered fingertips in Gen. Gordon's diary alone, and hundreds of millions of facts are now being uncovered and made accessible by Google's extraordinary project of digitizing millions of books. But these days, when you read about Google Books, you hardly ever-well, never-get to read anything as lively as those kinds of facts and insights. No, what you get, over and over again if you've followed the saga of Google Books, is the story of all the folks fighting The Coming Google Monopoly.

Adichie visits Dallas

Writing for the Dallas Morning News, Edward Nawotka was able to interview author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who was in Dallas promoting her new book, The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories about life in Nigeria during times of war and of peace.

"In the West we have constructed a narrative where the wars and poverty are meaningless, with no real political or historical context, which suggests misery is this atavistic thing," she said, "But what gets forgotten is at the same time all this is happening, people are falling in love, people are still living their lives. That is what I'm trying to do with my fiction, to tell the stories with a bit of complexity, with balance. There needs to be balance."

Adichie currently lives in the Washington, DC Metro area and divides her time between Lagos and Maryland.

Asturias Prize pushes Kadare closert to Nobel

Controversial author Ismail Kadare, whose surreal, Kafkaesque novels twice had him exiled to the countryside of his native Albania and who now lives as an expatriate in France, has received the Prince of Asturias award in the Letters category.

The 50,000 Euro prize, which has previously gone to Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Gunter Grass, Margaret Atwood, and Arthur Miller, is considered second only to the Nobel Prize. It honors a writer's complete corpus and can only be given once in each category.

Kadare has previously won awards such as the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, and he has long been considered a contender for the Nobel.

Vargas Llosa to receive honorary doctorate

At a reception on June 23, award-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa spoke about his career as a novelist and the tribulations involved in practicing the art.

The ceremony at the University of Granada in Spain was to celebrate the honorary doctorate the university bestowed on him today, June 24.

In his address he spoke of his two-year stay at Leoncio Prado Military School, and said it was there that he discovered “the truth” about his country: “the violence, the hurt, the bitterness and racism that so distanced Peruvians from each other.”

“My dad sent me to military school because he saw I had a literary vocation and thought the military could cure me of that sickness, but what he did was give me the subject for my first novel, ‘La Ciudad y los Perros’ (The Time of the Hero)”, he said.

Vargas Llosa, also honored with the Prince of Asturias for Literature and the Planeta, among other awards, believes that “this vocation should be a prize in itself for a writer who really loves literature, who wants to write not to be successful but to live according to his deepest desire.”

Tim Winton wins Miles Franklin Literary Award

An award recognizing the best Australian book or play has been given, for a record-breaking fourth time, to novelist Tim Winton for his short novel Breath, which is set amidst a surfing community in Western Australia.

Catherine Schine of the New York Review of Books has called Tim Winton "a practitioner of what might be called the school of Macho Romanticism, or perhaps better, Heroic Sensitivity," and he has been compared to Hemingway, Mann, and McEwan. His previous novels Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1992), and Dirt Music (2002) have also won Miles Franklin Awards, and Cloudstreet--about two working class families living together from 1943-1963--is considered by many Australians a favorite book.

Winton's The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music were also shortlisted for Man Booker Prizes.

Literary journals are the bellwether of literature

John Freedman, editor of Granta, comments on the literary journal's vibrant and innovative role in the community and blasts a directive made by the Canadian heritage minister last February stating that journals must sell a lofty five thousand copies in order to receive government assistance.

Calling the literary journal a daring and diverse object in the world of literature, Freedman accuses the publishing industry of underestimating the tastes of readers and overvaluing profits.

From The Independent:

Literary journals are the antidote to this wrong-headed attempt to try and engineer sales. Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.

Nadine Gordimer had her first publication in the Johannesburg magazine, Forum, but her career as an international writer began with an acceptance from the good ol' boys at the Virginia Quarterly Review. The illustrious – and sadly defunct – Story magazine was founded in Austria in 1931, before moving back to New York, where it introduced everyone from JD Salinger to Charles Bukowski. Arundhati Roy would not have been an unfamiliar name to anyone looking closely at television credits in India; but her fictional voice was launched first in Granta magazine, which circulates primarily in Britain and America, and where her name was indeed new.

It is presumptuous of any literary journal to claim that it has discovered any writers – novelists and poets are hardly nickel deposits, after all – yet a good journal can make it far easier to readers to discover a new writer's work. It can take a piece of writing regardless of where it comes from and what unusual shape its story takes, and ask readers to smash into it. For these reasons the ideal reader of a literary journal is one who yearns for the lash of the new, the way a boxer needs to be hit.

Pepetela warns of Angolan class divide

Comparing social unrest and extreme poverty to a volcano about to erupt, writer and former education minister Artur Pestana, known by the pseudonym Pepetela, described the injustice of widespread poverty in one of the world's most resource-rich nations during a book presentation on June 18.

Angola, one of the foremost producers of oil in Africa, ended a long civil war in 2002 and has been working on economic improvement ever since. Though oil executives stay in luxurious hotel rooms costing four hundred dollars a night, much of the country's 16.5 million population lives without running water or electricity.

Pepetela's work, highly regarded throughout the region, has long explored this contradiction.

In one of his famous short stories, entitled "This Country is Great" Pepetela tells the story of a young boy who comes home running to tell his mother that oil was squirting out from his neighbour's back yard. The boy later discovers that the oil came from a leak in a nearby refinery and is disillusioned when he realises that many of the riches his country possess are out of reach to the majority of the population.

Pepetela's comments echo those of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has ruled the southwestern African nation for 30 years and is expected to run in the country's first post-war presidential poll later in the year. Dos Santos has pledged to build one million homes for the poor in four years at a cost of $50 billion.

South Florida public schools expand curricula to encompass world literature

In an effort to include more diverse voices, many Florida public high school teachers now assign more works by contemporary writers from around the world, including bestsellers such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini from Afghanistan and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican-born Junot Diaz.

While the classics of English and American literature--Shakespeare, Milton, Hawthorne, and so on--still receive their due, more teachers are giving attention to other, often overlooked voices on this vast planet.

Patricia Mazzei of the Miami Herald writes:

[A] 1993 national study, the most recent survey of its kind, found that the most frequently taught works in high schools in 1988 were remarkably similar to those taught in 1963.

Newer novels that make it into the classroom tend to be coming-of-age stories and works from other cultures, Applebee said. There has also been a notable influx of books by women and minority writers, particularly in literary anthologies.

Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou are widely read, as are Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, and novels by Amy Tan, who told the story of a Chinese family's immigrant experience in The Joy Luck Club and also wrote The Bonesetter's Daughter.

Kadare wins Albanian award

Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker International Prize and nominee for a Nobel Prize in Literature, won a best book prize on June 11 at Albania's KULT culture awards for his novel The Wrong Supper.

The author, whose previous works include The Palace of Dreams and The Three-Arched Bridge, divides his time between Albania and France.

Sci-Fi Settings on Earth

The Shared Worlds summer writing program at Wofford College in South Carolina asked five best-selling and award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelists to select the five most fantastical, futuristic, and strange locations on today's earth. Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock respectively chose Reykavik, Iceland; Kingston, Jamaica; Venice, Italy; London, England; and Marrakesh, Morocco.

To quote LeGuin:

It isn't hard to imagine a city that's built on a marsh in a lagoon, and is slowly but inevitably sinking back into the marsh, but it's the details that count; and some of the details require an active fantasy. For instance, that all the main streets are water. Sidestreets are narrow and the bridges arched, so no horses, no motorized vehicles. For centuries and centuries all traffic is on foot and by boat; and the boats are special, long, narrow, driven not by oars but by poling, for the canal-streets aren't very deep. Then they allow motorized boats on the canals, and all of sudden there's pollution, noise instead of quiet, and also wakes, waves, swamping the streets and plazas, which are already going under water in storms. Long ago the city was a powerful community, wealthy, full of artists, and built beautiful palaces and churches along the canals and on the islands –high buildings that look as delicate and colorful as the creations of glass the city is famous for. Now these buildings are as battered and threatened by floods of tourists as they are by floods of water, and the city is forced to live as a sort of museum of itself, populated more and more not by its own citizens but by foreigners. What is it like, now, to be a Venetian in Venice?

Article 301 discussed in new Turkish book

A new non-fiction book explores the role of the Turkish media and government in the 2007 murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

Dink, who was editor-in-chief of Agos, was shot outside his office in Istanbul on Jan. 19, 2007. At the time he was on trial for violating Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which condemns insults directed toward Turkish identity. Dink had written and published a well-researched article suggesting that Sabiha Gokcen, the adopted daughter of first president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Turkey's first female pilot, was of Armenian origin, and this suggested link between the nation's founder and its opposed enemy was considered blasphemous.

The Hrant Dink Murder – The Media, Judiciary, State by judiciary reporter Kemal Goktas examines the murderous consequences of Article 301, which has also been used against novelists Elif Safak and Orhan Pamuk.

Irish novelist pens biography of Byron

Edna O'Brien has written a new biography exploring the personal life of nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron, entitled Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.

Heller McAlpin of the Christian Science Monitor writes:

O’Brien, a passionate, iconoclastic writer herself – her early, sexually frank “Country Girls” novels were banned and burned in her native Ireland when they first appeared in the 1960s – is well suited to her subject. She has pored over reams of Byron’s letters and journals and digested Leslie A. Marchand’s 1957 three-volume “Life of Byron” to present a vivid portrait of the man whom Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his scores of jilted lovers, called “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

As captured by O’Brien, Byron was at once brilliant, magnetic, and monstrous – an arrogant son; an insatiable seducer of both sexes; an incestuous adulterer; a spendthrift; a wildly original, popular, and vilified poet; a cruel and neglectful father; a passionate traveler; and a generous friend. He idolized Napoleon and loved Greece.

O’Brien notes, “The word Byronic, to this day, connotes excess, diabological deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner. Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless.”

But who's really read it?

The Irish Times explores the curious contradiction between the many Dubliners who love celebrating Bloomsday without ever having read Joyce's book.

“I met an Australian man earlier and he said he’s read it from cover to cover,” said Breda again, rolling her eyes. “For God’s sake, we have it in our bones!”

Wales Book of the Year awards given

The 2009 Wales Book of the Year awards have been given to Deborah Kay Davies for Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful in the English language category and William Owen Roberts for Petrograd in the Welsh language category.

Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful is Davies's debut novel, a collection of unified short stories about two wild sisters coming of age in the 1970's. Davies is also a published poet.

Petrograd is a novel about Russians in exile after the 1917 revolution. Roberts previously won the award in 1988 for Y Pla (translated to English as Pestilence, his only work to appear in English) and was short-listed again in 2002.

Posthumous Onetti story found

The magazine Turia will publish "El último viernes" ("The Final Friday"), a hand-written short story by acclaimed Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, who died in 1994.

The story narrates the meetings and interviews between a journalist and a police officer, and it explores Onetti's common theme of finding truth through fiction and lies.

Onetti's daughter found the story in a thick, unlined notebook. It was likely written in the 1950's, while the author was living in a barrio of Buenos Aires.

Onetti was well known for creating the Faulknerian universe of Santa Maria, a fictional coastal town of Uruguay, and peopling it with his own creations, politics, scandals, and history. Santa Maria first appeared in A Brief Life in 1950.

The one hundredth anniversary of Onetti's birth will occur on July 1.

Book Review: Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil

Raza Naeem of Frontline reviews Nadeem Aslam's 2008 novel The Wasted Vigil, about life in Afghanistan at the end of the twentieth century:

There have been notable attempts in the past, by novelists of Afghan origin, to chronicle the pain of their country, such as Atiq Rahimi’s beautiful, albeit short, novels Earth and Ashes and A Thousand Rooms of Dreams and Fear and pop-schlock attempts by Khaled Hosseini, the Hollywood darling, in The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. The noted Pakistani activist Feryal Gauhar made the American occupation of Afghanistan the theme of her recent novel, No Room for Further Burials.

Aslam’s novel overtakes all these in its sheer stylistic beauty, broad scope and historical approach. There is a seeming attempt to incorporate as many of the protagonists in the Afghan history of the last two decades as possible, with their respective responsibilities culminating in the wasteland that is Afghanistan today.

Common enemies and common ground

Jamil Zaki of The Huffington Post wrote a fascinating article about our psychological, instinctual habit of arranging ourselves into competitive, usually arbitrary groups and offers solutions for encompassing everyone into broader, more compassionate "human" groups.

Like other flavors of categorization, imagining that other groups lack complex feelings can be necessary to our survival, and - more darkly - to our ability to harm others during conflict. Fully processing the emotional states of everyone we see would make commuting in New York even more exhausting than it already is, and our natural aversion to suffering would prevent us from killing in war if we allowed ourselves to think about the other side's fear. By denying strangers, foreigners, and enemies human qualities, we can justify the extraordinary pain we may cause those people in conflict.

This isn't specifically about literature, but I thought it was relevant to this newsfeed since Bibliotrekking is about finding the universal human voice while paradoxically dividing voices into nations, cultures, regions, and languages.

Michael Thomas wins Dublin Literary Award

A debut novel about a financially-strapped, African-American Harvard graduate has won its author the most lucrative literary prize, the 100,000 euro Dublin Literary Award sponsored by IMPAC. Michael Thomas, competing against Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot Diaz, three other Americans, and writers from France, India, Norway, and Pakistan, is only the second American to ever win the wealthy prize, which is managed by the Dublin City Libarary association and nominated by public library systems throughout the world.

The first American to win was Washington, DC native Edward P. Jones for The Known World.

The prize has been awarded yearly since 1996 and supports the enjoyment of reading.

Thomas's book, Man Gone Down, was published by Grove Press in December of 2006 and is set in his native city Boston, though he currently lives in New York. The book previously received top ten status from The New York Times in 2007.

Call of the Wild adapted into 3D film

Jack London's famous novel about sled dogs in the Yukon, Call of the Wild, has been updated, geared toward teens, and made into a 3D film starring Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future) and directed by Richard Gabai (2005's Pop Star with Aaron Carter).

The movie, filmed in Montana, will open Friday in that state, Utah, Minnesota, Iowa, and Romania.

Though advance reviews are few, a screening by Deseret News critic Jeff Vice is particularly negative:

However, the rest of the movie is a real mess.

Director Richard Gabai and screenwriter Leland Douglas misuse the other cast members — who include veterans Wes Studi, Joyce DeWitt and Veronica Cartwright.

And an anti-smoking message — while appreciated — is delivered with such a heavy hand that the film starts to feel like a "Truth About Tobacco" infomercial.

London's naturalistic novel has been filmed at least nine times in the past 101 years, with a 1935 version starring Clark Gable considered the most successful.

@Bloomsday

So today is Bloomsday, the date on which all of James Joyce's odyssey Ulysses takes place in Dublin in 1904, and there are plenty of commemorative events happening all over the world, especially in Ireland's capital, from pub crawls to non-stop readings to vast dramatic reenactments.

But what I find most interesting are the fifty-four characters who will Twitter the simultaneous events of the dense "Wandering Rocks" chapter throughout the day. It's the most interesting use of the hot, new mini-blogging website I've ever heard, and it makes me second-guess the attention deficit of the Internet age.

An archive of the event can be found here.

Turkish novelists protest dam

Despite withdrawal of international monetary support, the Turkish government will proceed with construction of the controversial Ilisu Dam in the southeast of the country.

Novelists Orhan Pamuk and Yasar Kemal, as well as pop singer Tarsan, have protested its erection because they say it lacks sufficient funds, proper environmental planning, and a resettlement plan for the citizens of nearby Hasankeyf, a ten thousand-year-old city with a majority Kurd population. The city, which has spanned nine civilizations, will be largely destroyed by the proposed dam, along with its cave churches, mosques, and Islamic tombs.

The World Monuments Fund listed the ancient city as one of the hundred most endangered historical cities in 2008.

Murakami's 1Q84 flies off the shelves

The newest novel from Japanese author Haruki Murakami is expected to reach sales of one million by the end of the month, already surpassing the sales of his popular Kafka on the Shore.

The novel, which is said to encompass many of Murakami's essential themes and ideas, is an update of George Orwell's 1984, exploring thought control and cults in a futuristic Tokyo.

The success of the novel has also encouraged Japanese sales of Orwell's novel and Sinfonietta by Czech composer Leos Janacek, which is referenced in the book. Six thousand copies of the CD have been sold in the past week.

According to Reuters:

Murakami has been seen as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature for years — a topic widely covered by the Japanese media, as was his emotional acceptance speech last year for Israel’s Jerusalem Prize following the fighting in Gaza. These reports may have attracted a wider readership, Shinchosha’s Mori said.

Some say that the writers who debuted in the late 1970s to early 1980s, including Murakami, ushered in a new era in Japanese literature. Their work is urbane and written in a way not seen before in Japan, but perhaps more significantly, their sense of identity and consciousness is no longer bound by the family system that was so strong in Japan, or by the experience of losing World War II.

Israeli poets become meteorologists

To celebrate the beginning of Hebrew Book Week on June 10, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz commissioned almost all of its reports from famous and emerging Israeli poets and novelists, from breaking news to the weather forecast.

From Quill and Quire:

The results were interesting, to say the least. The weather report appeared as a sonnet, penned by Roni Somek, and Eshkol Nevo’s television review began, “I didn’t watch TV yesterday.” Other articles were more sober, including novelist David Grossman’s account of a night spent at a drug rehab centre for children.

J.M. Coetzee discusses new memoir

Despite his notoriously reclusive and private nature, J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist who has won two Booker Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 2003), made a public appearance at Oxford University to promote Summertime, a work of "fictionalized autobiography" set to be published later this year.

The South African reports:

Seeing Coetzee read on Thursday night thus presented a spectacle to make any postmodern literary critic lick their chops: an almost pathologically private man reading his own “fictionalised memoir”, with Summertime achieving a further distancing effect by means of the fact that the book takes the form of a series of interviews with people from Coetzee’s life carried out after Coetzee’s death. The surprise for those in the audience was how much of a showman Coetzee emerged as, when reading his own work, inserting moments of broad comedy into his performance that had the audience rocking with laughter. It was an incongruous moment: fellow South African writer Rian Malan claimed a colleague of Coetzee’s once testified that in a decade of working together, he had seen him laugh just once.

Curbside Press publishes Palestinian poetry

The Connecticut literary arts nonprofit Curbstone Press, whose mission statement involves "publishing creative literature that promotes human rights and inter-cultural understanding," specializing in "Latin American and Latino literature," has broadened its scope to release Rain Inside, a collection of poems by Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah.

The poems, translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London, capture life on the Gaza strip, often through surrealist and brutal imagery.

Two previous novels by Nasrallah have also been translated into English--Prairies of Fever and Inside the Night--though the majority of literature by him and his Arabic contemporaries remains unavailable in the Anglophone world.

Raymond Deane of the Electronic Intifada explores this dearth of Arabic translation and reviews the collection.

It is no accident that this sidelining has taken place in the Anglosphere, given the role of the US and UK in occupying Arab lands and propping up Israel. Imperialism/colonialism needs to demonize subject peoples as "uncivilized," a caricature that cannot be maintained without impeding access to those peoples' poetry. Providing such access is therefore a quietly subversive act.

London parks administration commissions Kuwaiti love story

As part of the Park Stories project administered by the Royal Parks agency in London, which supervises the eight official parks in the city, a story by Lebanese author Hanan Al-Shaykh about Kensington Gardens has been published in a bilingual edition with an English translation by Christina Phillips alongside the original Arabic.

Entitled Saaloon Tajmeel Lil-Baja ("A Beauty Parlor for Swans"), the story follows the secret marriage between a young Kuwaiti girl and her Lebanese lover, both of them now living in London.

Of the eight fictional stories in the series (each set in a different park), "A Beauty Parlor for Swans" is the only story written by a non-native. The daughter of a strict Shi'a Muslim family, Al-Shaykh left Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, lived in Saudi Arabia for a time, and now resides in London with her husband. She writes frequently of Arab women's issues, and six of her novels have been translated into English since 1992.

From the Saudi Gazette:

Al-Shaykh is one of the few Arab fiction writers to portray the lives of Arab émigrés in London. Her novel “Only in London” focuses on Arabs in London and much of the action takes place in the Kensington Gardens-Hyde Park-Edgware Road area. The English translation was published in 2002 by London publisher Bloomsbury, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Al-Shaykh’s novels and stories have been translated into some 16 languages. Her works in English translation include the novels “The Story of Zahra”, “Women of Sand and Myrrh” and “Beirut Blues”, and the short story collection “I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops”. “A Beauty Parlour for Swans” gives voice to the interior life of an Arab woman, and is written with the author’s characteristic perceptiveness, delicacy and unique humor.

"Orwell's Legacy"

John O'Connell of The National, in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of 1984, examines the book's influence on British and American society and media, the story behind its creation, and the book's role within George Orwell's broader, more diverse corpus of essays and nonfiction.

Orwell never intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as an explicit prophecy. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” he wrote, “but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive.”

So has it? Certainly, Britain has a culture of surveillance – CCTV, mobile phones and of course the internet, which despite its seemingly limitless freedoms is really a gigantic spying machine. Social networking is sounding the death knell of privacy. (In the book, two-way telescreens have been installed in the homes of every Party member and in every public place. They blast out propaganda but also monitor their viewers as they go about their business.) Newspeak’s cloudy legacy pollutes the media, although the linguistic contraction that Winston’s colleague Syme, editor of the official Newspeak dictionary, anticipates when he observes that “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words” hasn’t really happened. On the contrary, language, particularly corporate and military language, has expanded in an evil blossoming of vagueness and euphemism.

Book Review: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck

Donna Bailey Nurse of The Star reviews the latest short story collection from Orange Broadbrand Prize-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck:

This superior collection accentuates the intellect, insight and blistering honesty that have made Adichie a prominent writer of her generation. Many of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck contemplate the legacy of Nigerian independence: crime, political corruption, poverty and violence. Others interrogate the gender inequities that restrict the spirit of Nigerian women.

The result is a book impossible to put down. I tore through it like wildfire.

The collection debuts on June 16 and has received glowing advance reviews. Her previous novel Half of a Yellow Sun hauntingly and vividly depicted the Biafran War of the 1960's.

Vargas Llosa to Receive Spanish Award

On October 12 in Toledo, Spain, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa will receive the individual International Award of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which recognizes contributions to the Spanish language. Vargas Llosa previously won the Cervantes Award in 1994, considered the most noteworthy Spanish-language literature prize, and has long been considered a contender for a Nobel Prize.

President Arroyo of the Philippines will also be awarded the Don Quixote institutional prize for her efforts to reintroduce the Spanish language to her country's public school curricula.

University at Buffalo Opens Joyce Exhibit

On June 13 the University at Buffalo in New York unveiled an exhibit of "priceless manuscripts, photographs, paintings and personal memorabilia of the 20th century's most influential writer," James Joyce.

"Discovering James Joyce: The University at Buffalo Collection" is the world's largest collection of Joyce materials, including more than 10,000 pages of manuscripts and correspondence and a complete library of Joyce criticism.

The gallery will be showcased in Buffalo for free until Sept. 13 and will then embark on a national tour.

"Joyce and the Art of City Bus Dependence"

Colin McEnroe of the Hartford Courant tries--and hilariously fails--to bridge the gap of human connection using Irish literature as a stepping stone:

I was trying to think of something to say to her that would, you know, celebrate some kind of kinship between us, some kind of acknowledgment of what we had in common: each having paid $1.25 to travel from east to west and each having been willing (or commanded) to tackle certain difficult Irish novels.

And the only thing I could think of was, "Give my regards to Stephen Dedalus" (the protagonist of the book), and I was just NOT going to say that because it was stupid and weird.

Orhan Pamuk Re-Trialed

Nobel-Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk is to be tried a second time for violating article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which punishes "contempt of the Turkish national identity." The offense--telling a Swiss magazine interviewer "we Turkish have killed 30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians and nobody, apart from me, dares to speak about it in Turkey"--was dismissed by the Supreme Court in January of 2008 but is to be tried again under the assumption that the judges were incorrect the first time.

If found guilty this time, Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 for his "quest for the melancholic soul of his native city" Istanbul, may face fines running to millions of dollars, since every Turkish citizen will be entitled to seek compensation for defamation of the Turkish image.

Haruki Murakami and the Israeli-Palestinian Divide

Citing Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's English-language speech on Feb. 20 in Israel as recipient of the 2009 Jerusalem Prize, the Japan Times explores Israel's erection of a defense wall, its role in world affairs, and the human compulsion to divide and separate ourselves.

From Murakami's speech:

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. . . . Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. . . . Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell.

Galeano Exposes 5000 Years of History

The Uruguayan author of The Open Veins of Latin America, a 1971 exposé of the United States hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and Memory of Fire, a 1982-1986 three-volume epic spanning 500 years of colonization, violence, and revolution in the Americas, Eduardo Galeano released Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone on May 25. The vast and fanciful book attempts to examine all of human history in insightful and intimate ways.

From The Washington Post:

Among Latin American literary giants, Gabriel García Márquez is known for mesmerizing, Pablo Neruda for wooing. Mario Vargas Llosa educates. Jorge Luis Borges captivates. Then there is Eduardo Galeano, the galvanizer, firebrand, a writer who tells readers about history that other, more powerful people don't want them to know or understand.

Filipino Book Blockade Shot Down

On May 24, the Department of Finance of the Philippines ceased imposing taxes and duties on imported books, a situation which had existed since March in violation of the international Florence Agreement of 1950, a treaty which seeks to eliminate obstacles between developing countries and education by facilitating the flow of literature across borders.

Signed by the Philippines in 1979, the Agreement guaranteed tax-free access to foreign-made books, but the financial blockade on works of fiction such as Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series attempted to circumvent the agreement by arbitrarily distinguishing between non-educational books and true literature. Such moralistic distinctions only further the division between the literate privileged and illiterate poor.

From the Philippine Star:

It should never be left to government — and not even to literary critics — to decide which books are “educational” or of “social or cultural value” and which are not. Literary tastes and fashions change, as do societies themselves, and there is certainly more to literature than its moral content or the lack thereof, as important as this aspect may be to some readers and policymakers. Books facilitate cultural exchange, fostering in the reader a better understanding of the outside world and improving his or her ability to engage with that world.

As with democracy itself, literature must allow for a wide variety of subjects, themes, treatments, and styles, even the shallowest or most repugnant of which helps define a range of standards that can guide intelligent readers in forming their own informed assessments and conclusions. Thus, all books deserve equal protection and consideration under the applicable laws, as far as their tax-exempt status is concerned.