Jarrar, profiled. And vindicated.
The day after Randa Jarrar’s father disowned her over her novel, A Map of Home, she won the Arab American Book Award. (Via.)
Resurrecting the acclaimed & forgotten Guillermo Rosales
The work of Cuban writer Guillermo Rosales, who arrived in Miami during Mariel and killed himself in 1993, is being reissued.
Zioncheck, the film
Stephen Gyllenhaal is adapting Phil Campbell’s Zioncheck for President. He was drawn to the book’s weird moments.
Scene from the era of the supposed Death of Reading
Apparently someone forgot to inform my neighborhood that reading is dying. On my way home tonight, I came upon a small crowd that had assembled to dig through the library’s recycling.
“Are those novels?” the woman walking next to me asked, her voice rising excitedly, as she stopped to [...]
On being written about in childhood
Shirley Jackson’s daughter Joanne said her mother’s family memoirs interfered with her own memories.
The mystery of the Newtons, including my father
I’m not sure what it means when I fixate on genealogical research, as I have been recently, but I have learned to recognize flare-ups of ancestry.com obsession as a warning sign.
Normal people are not awake after midnight, scouring the 1800 U.S. Census for clues about one Jesse Newton, [...]
Variations on the right to remain silent
“Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation.” Anne Carson on the language of gods in Homer.
On the melding of fact and invention in fiction II
In A.S. Byatt’s forthcoming novel, The Children’s Book, a children’s author visiting a museum in search of inspiration for a magical story she’s writing hears a great anecdote but has “the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of [...]
Hectic summertime
The heat of August is upon us, but none of the languor for me. I’m buried in deadlines, my stepdaughter, A., is visiting, and she, Max, and I head to Tampa tomorrow for a quick visit with my father-in-law, who’ll soon be undergoing another cycle of chemo.
A., brilliant [...]
Wilde reading
On Oscar Wilde’s library: “he always came to life via books, literally seeing reality through them.”
Hermione Lee on biography
Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf biographer Hermione Lee discusses her new book, Biography: A Very Short Introduction.
Wurlitzer’s Nog
Michael Miller praises Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Nog, the novel that led Pynchon to declare “The novel of bullshit is dead.â€
Taking a short vacation
I’m away at my sister’s, going on long walks through the woods and fixating on things other than books. Back soon.