When I started to run out of Mark Twain’s nonfiction earlier this year, I turned to a fellow Twain maniac* for help. He sent me off in search of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday (1981). The book opens with some hilarious rants on censorship — “There is never any shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though . . .
In my mind, I’m the one in the Western who takes a bullet in the arm and then gets back up on his horse and rides into the desert to hunt down the guy who shot him. And who knows? Hot-tempered and vindictive as I can be, if somebody pissed me off enough, it could happen. Where more commonplace pain . . .
Laila Lalami’s brilliantly cutting “The Missionary Position” — a look at the condition of Muslim women and the reactionary female activists that the West has chosen to exalt — appears in The Nation at last. (I read an early draft a couple months ago, and since then I’ve been making like a kid on a long car trip, emailing Lalami . . .
John Freeman remembers his affection, as a new college graduate living far from his girlfriend, for James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. “I fell into the novel as if it were a manhole someone hadn’t covered over,” Freeman says. So deep was his identification that, when he reads commentary on the book now, he worries “that I somehow straighted a gay novel . . .
Nobel laureate José Saramago discusses his politics with Stephanie Merritt. [T]he image of the venerable novelist shut away in his island retreat, disengaged from the world, could not be further from the truth. Saramago is about to leave Lanzarote for two months of travelling, as he does most years, in part to promote the new novel, but mainly to speak . . .