MEMBER BLOG TAG: alain mabanckou
| Thursday, April 26, 2007 12:18PM | | | | Best Ticket in Town | Tags: World Voices, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Steve Martin, Neil Gaiman, Alain Mabanckou, Saadi Youssef, Tatyana Tolstaya, Don DeLillo, Pia Tafdrup
| | | In an age of mass migration,when human herds cross borders in flight from conflict, poverty, disease, violence, what is home? How and where do we find it?
Nadine Gordimer, the penultimate reader in last night's PEN readings on "Writing Home," spoke of the millions of refugees from wars and conflicts. Silver-haired, dressed in gray, with a long white-bordered stole, she drew the photographers from the shadows at Town Hall. Just before reading the first sentence of her powerful story "The Ultimate Safari," she said, "Forget about me, the old woman. It's being narrated by an eleven year old girl." Her narrator's mother has disappeared and her father is in the civil war in Mozambique. With her grandparents and two brothers, she makes the... | | | | | | | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 10:18PM | | | | Provoking controversy | Tags: Dany Lafferière, Alain Mabanckou
| | | Dany Lafferière is king of one-liners, and cracks up the audience every time he opens his mouth. Alain Mabanckou looks up to him like he would a mentor, "like Richard Wright for James Baldwin. He's my Richard Wright, " adding with a modesty that he will exhibit all evening, "even if' I'm not Baldwin."
The two have known each other for ten years, and they were a good team to pair for this conversation mediated by Anderson Tepper of Vanity Fair, which was supposed to be about "subverting stereotypes" and "playing with language" - even if they ended up talking mostly about sex.
With his dry wit and impeccable comic timing, Laferrière was off to a good start when Anderson Cooper... | | | | | |
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