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.