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In the months that followed, Kosovo’s status as an autonomous province within the republic of Serbia was revoked, and ethnic Albanians were purged from public institutions – judges, prosecutors, police officers, teachers.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.