Last year I met the very talented Marlon James by accident at a PEN event. Afterward, he joined my friends Mark Sarvas and Amitava Kumar, and me, for a marvelous dinner at which I ate too little while drinking brown liquor. James and I talked about William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Jean Rhys, and I argued (passionately, but not, I . . .
Tayeb Salih, author of Season of Migration to the North, has died. Writer and critic Laila Lalami remembers him at her site.
The judges and brackets for the Fifth Annual Tournament of Books are out. I’m judging again. More on that soon.
My first contribution to NPR’s Books We Like is devoted to Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning. Most of us can’t bear to think of our parents having sex. Yet our very existence is proof that they do, or at least once did. Karan Mahajan’s entertaining first novel, Family Planning, takes this conundrum as its starting-point. Sixteen-year-old Arjun, the oldest of thirteen . . .
Dickens’ house for fallen women inspired a casebook that was probably among the papers he later burned. (Via.)