I came to this session because of my interest in the Spanish Civil War. This was my father's war; when the brigadistas had their reunion in Spain a few years ago, I attended this moving event with members of my family.
Javier Cercas read from his book SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS a passage in which the a republican fighter escapes the Fascists, and a Fascist soldier who discovers him does not turn him in. Cercas read in Spanish; the passage was then read in English by Amanda Vaill.
She started her interview by asking him how he began writing novels, but this soon led to an interesting discussion of how his main character, often named Javier, is like him and not like him. Cercas...
At the 92nd Street YM-YWHA on Friday, the novelist and essayist Shirley Hazzardengaged the novelist Richard Ford in a conversation about reading and writing that was so warm, and literate, and amusing, and inspiring that it provoked something I don’t often encounter at literary events: a standing ovation. At her entrance, Ms Hazzard supported herself with a cane, but as she limped nobly to her chair, she brought us into her fold. “Excuse me,” she said, turning our way before she was even seated. “I’ve got a game leg.” That is, she was bonding with her audience at 60 m.p.h., even before Mr. Ford—who walked out with the assured gait of Clint Eastwood—could get a word in edgewise. Now, Mr. Ford is...
Most of all I loved Jonathan Ames' Harry call, with which he opened and closed this session -- heartfelt, warm, loud, vibrating...
he organized the session aroung "origin stories" -- what started the three visual storytellers -- Emmanuel Guilbert, David Polonsky, Shaun Tan -- on their way. In one case, it was the contact sheet -- seeing side by side the photos led to the idea of the story in p ictures. Interesting, Guilbert pointed out that drawing and photosgraphs are always trying to kill each other. So they need their correct space.
Polonsky pointed out the challenge of illustrating someone else's memory. Shaun Tan, author of "The Arrival," said that to tell a good immigrant story, you would have to go to a country...
What wit! from his boots to his expressive face and anecdotes, Neil Gaiman is surely one of the most entertaining of performers and well as writers. I loved his telling about his reading while walking along as a child (of course we all did that) and bumping into a lamp post to which he would apologize (we didn't think of doing that, alas). And about the local librarians worried that he would let on he was a feral child entirely raised by them: they would get used as a day care center.
He enjoyed, said he, writing comics, because they had only been around 100 years instead of 3000, so there were no rules, and he was therefore free. The ultimate compliment paid...
Pakistan: the world’s most dangerous country, read American papers.
America: the world’s most dangerous country, read Pakistani papers.
A Pakistani novelist, a Vietnamese short-story writer and a Syrian-born poet/translator spoke with eloquent hope about the idea that, scattered across the globe, we are more alike than we are different. But their conversation shined a spotlight on opposing worldviews that stem from varied cultural, historical and religious backgrounds.
Perhaps the clearest examples of those discordant views during the panel titled “East-West Storytelling” came from Nadeem Aslam, author most recently of The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan, and also of Maps for Lost Lovers, about Pakistani emigrants living in England. He mentioned that he reads here in our newspapers about the most dangerous country...
Using words to talk about words is trickier than you might think when the topic is writing stirring, meaningful novels. There’s a mystery to the process, which perhaps is as it should be.
“The best part of a novel is what you can never express in words,” said Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad, part of a panel of four award-winning, renowned, and very thoughtful novelists discussing Where The Truth Lies: A Conversation on the Art of Fiction. The best gift fiction can give its readers is the possibility of understanding human motivation beyond what he referred to as “darkness.”
Kentucky-born American author Roxana Robinson picked up that theme and pushed it further, noting that writers often write into their own personal darkness. “You’re part...
It’s an issue authors have wrestled with through the ages: what responsibility do they have to respond to the political struggles of their community, their country, their world? The answer suggested during Friday’s panel was: if you can even ask that question, you’re damn lucky.
Award-winning Pakistani-born author Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, Maps for Lost Lovers) said for him, ignoring political issues would be impossible. “It is possible in a place like America to live a life with no interest in politics,” he said. “But in some parts of the world, politics is visceral; politics is real. Even if I wanted to, I could not separate my personal life from my political life in the place I come from.”
So would you if you were at last year's event. I saw Rick Moody interview Israel's Edgar Keret, I was a witness to Chenjerai Hove's fist fight with Nuruddin Farah. (They were discussing tribal wars; I'm sure they're still cleaning up the blood). And I was at Housing Work Book Store where they offered free condoms to the audience. That's right. You could pick up a condom on the way out.
"What a great idea," I thought. "Everybody knows that bad literature is contagious. We simply have to protect ourselves against the STD of airport reading."...
Xiaolu Guo's imagined heroine travels in, through, and by English, no matter where else her Continental rail pass happens to take her (France, Portugal, Germany, etc.). That much seems predictable in Guo's novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers.
But the fact that we readers also become her committed fellow-travelers seems more remarkable to me. Guo successfully recruits us into her modern, epic liguistic foray. This is a testament to the imaginative power of a fictional dictionary that is composed of, and dedicated to, redefining, with a Chinese inflection, English words and phrases, such as these: alien; hostel; Vegetarian Platter; fog; beginner; pronoun; homesick; misunderstand; fertilize; instruction; pub; cabbage; privacy; intimate; free world; heaven; romance; migraine; self; possess; departure.
Xiaolu Guo's novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, can set us writhing and twitching with thought. For this is a novel, unlike all the others, that is written as a dictionary.
Still, Guo and her novel novel are not the only reason to twitch, or to think. A small, nervy cadre of past dictionaries and other dictionaryesque books might tempt almost as much: The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce; The Dictionary of Received Ideas by Gustave Flaubert; The Jazz Dictionary by H. L. Mencken; Rational Meaning by Laura Riding Jackson; The Secret Lives of Words by Paul West.
Recent manifestos of conscious word-mongers have also found publication. This past year alone has seen the issuing of The Secret...
Xiaolu Guo's linguistic marriage of two tongues and their temperaments corresponds, in her novel, to the mating of a British man and a Chinese woman. Her book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, might be called mongrel, but is it promiscuous in the Johnsonian sense? Maybe not. Eventually, her lovers part, after Z. has an abortion and after her application for an extension of her visa to stay in England is denied by the Chinese government. This was never to be a sunnily post-romantic, twenty-first-century tale of girl-meets-boy, nor a serene account of language-meets-language. Instead, the mergers are difficult, fractious, violent, incomplete, short-term, as notable for their conflicts and contradictions as for anything shared harmoniously in common.
Tom Reed grows up in a church family and follows his father’s footsteps into the ministry only to realize he made a big mistake. As the young rector of a dying parish in a remote part of the state he conducts lots of funerals, gives sermons that nobody listens to, and hears the confessions of the parish’s compulsive penitent. After a series of run-ins with the laymen who govern the church about issues such as flying the American flag on the front lawn and letting the youth group use the church for a rock concert, Tom feels increasingly isolated and unhappy. However, he puts off taking any steps that would upset his father, who is in a nursing home. Tom’s struggle to free himself from...
The young men of The New School’s maintenance staff—seeing that the Tishman Auditorium was only a third filled by 8:30 p.m., when the Granta reading by some of “The Best of Young American Novelists of 2007” was supposed to begin—tied off the last three rows of seats with Tyger Twine in order to push the audience forward and make it look more like, well, an audience. As it turned out, the concern was a little premature. By 8:45, when Granta editor Ian Jack walked up to the podium, so many people had suddenly arrived that the latecomers hopped over the Twine to fill the back rows. The audience seemed to be mostly men and women in their 20s and...
