MEMBER BLOG TAG: randa jarrar
| Monday, May 3, 2010 12:26AM | | | | Alias, Author | Tags: World Voices, aliases, pseudonyms, Bernardo Atxaga, Alina Brodsky, Randa Jarrar
| | | In my visits to the various agent blogs, I’ve read about pseudonyms as a solution to a bad sales history, the idea being that U.S publishers are more willing to take on a debut author than one whose previous book(s) tanked. So when the moderator of the Friday panel “Incognito: Writers and Their Aliases,” Arnon Grunberg, asked if using a pseudonym when not forced to do so is an expression of narcissism, I though no—for the desperate author, it’s survival. However, panelist Randa Jarrar argued that writing itself is an act of narcissism, in that we create a form of art that takes up many hours of other people’s time.
Jarrar, Bernardo Atxaga, and Alina Brodsky joined Grunberg in discussing the importance of names... | | | | | | | Friday, April 30, 2010 10:01AM | | | | The Invisibles | Tags: torture, ACLU, Freedom to Write Committee, fashion, Lawrence Weschler, Sofi Oksanen, Mohsin Hamid, Irakli Kakabadze, Alina Bronsky, valter hugo mae, Elias Khoury, Rodrigo Fresan, Aleksandar Hemon, Peter Schneider, Randa Jarrar, Katyn, General Medina, Uruguay
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“Face to Face: Confronting the Torturers”—streamed on the PEN Web site to audiences worldwide—was a 90-minute, late-night program of readings at Joe’s Pub, a cabaret venue associated with The Public Theater, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Squeezed against the bar or one of the little tables, one could settle into a “classic gimlet,” accompanied by a “classic bruschetta with tomatoes,” while imbibing 11 tales of classic horror. I was able to stay for all but the last of the readers (the American writer Randa Jarrar, who read “Revenge,” by the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali); I also never got to hear the promised remarks by Jameel Jaffer, of the co-sponsoring ACLU. Given the fact of the ACLU’s participation, I expected to hear... | | | | | |
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