The current issue of Granta includes contributions from Kenzaburo Oe, Mary Gaitskill, Javier Marías, Will Self, Mahmoud Darwish, Lionel Shriver, William T. Vollmann, and more, and I’m looking forward to reading them, but when the package arrived yesterday I (of course) turned immediately to the (excellent) excerpt from Rupert Thomson’s forthcoming memoir. The piece, “Call Me By My Proper Name,” . . .
Mark Sarvas has posted a four-part interview with Joseph O’Neill. Look for a Netherland giveaway tomorrow.
Later this month and a couple times in the weeks following I’ll be reading from “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” my contribution to Love is a Four-Letter Word. Today at Paper Cuts, Gregory Cowles calls the anthology “pretty irresistible.” A “lot of it has to do with the tone,” he says. “[T]he usual regret, shame and pain are leavened here . . .
PEN condemns the murder of Russian journalist Natalia Estemirova, friend of Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006.