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.