No news, just reviews

Some of the more interesting book reviews and interviews I've read this weekend:

At SFGate, Carolina de Robertis reviews Sudden Fiction Latino, a comprehensive Norton anthology of flash fiction and microfiction from Latino writers throughout North, Central, and South America--from the internationally acclaimed Gabriel García Márquez to writers barely known in the United States, like Rodrigo Rey Rosa of Guatemala.

Robert McCrum of The Observer presents an amusing interview with Lorrie Moore, the American novelist and short story writer known for her brevity and tragicomic tone. Her latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, offers a glimpse into the lives of Americans in the years between September 11 and the United States invasion of Iraq and has been longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Shabnam Minwalla of The Times of India provides some context for the latest Stieg Larsson craze, offering a biographical sketch of the best-selling, deceased, Swedish crime novelist and providing reviews of his Millennium Trilogy--The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

A Saudi Arabian novel about divorce, sexual oppression, and superstition during the first Gulf War has recently been translated by Anthony Calderbank and published by the American University Press. Munira's Bottle by Youssef al-Mohaimeed and its translation are reviewed by Amany Aly Shawky at AlMasryAlYoum.

William Skidelsky of The Observer details the life and works of David Mitchell, a young British novelist whose complex, experimental, diverse novels have become a bestselling, postmodern sensation.

Brief Interview with Rana Dasgupta, winner of Commonwealth Writers' Prize

I like the following quotation from Rana Dasgupta, as posted by DNA India:

Having taken four years to write Solo — a novel about the life and daydreams of Ulrich, a one hundred year old man from Bulgaria, Rana says, “Solo was an extremely intense, internal journey which is hard to communicate about. The real work of writing is very solitary and a private experience. You are essentially living in a fictional world which exists only because you’ve made it up — there’s no one else living in that world and so you can’t really talk about it to anyone. So, until you finish the book, it’s a very isolated place.”

Solo won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book for Europe and South Asia on March 11.

"Lost Booker" will honor best work from missing year, 1970

In 1971, in an effort to increase the timeliness of the award, the Man Booker Prize rules committee adjusted its pool of eligible nominees to include contenders only from the current publication year. Since its inception only a few years prior, the award had recognized books published in the previous year.

As a result of the nomination shuffle, the books published in 1970 were never eligible for the prestigious prize. Almost forty years later, the Man Booker Prize will bestow a special "Lost Booker" upon one of six contenders who would have likely been nominated that year: Patrick White (Australia) for The Vivesector, Shirley Hazzard (GB/US/Australia) for The Bay of Noon, Muriel Spark (Scotland) for The Driver's Seat, Mary Renault (GB) for Fire From Heaven, Nina Bawden (GB) for The Birds on the Trees, and J.G. Farrell (GB) for Trouble. Only Bawden and Hazzard are still alive.

A popular vote through April 23 on the Man Booker website will determine the winner, who will be announced on May 19.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.