Monthly Archives: August 2006

Chick Lit Is Hurting America

31 August 2006

The truth is that chick lit is bad for America because it’s bad for ambitious, literary writers, male or female. And that means it’s bad for all of us. As America increasingly devalues intellectual rigor, education and compassion, it becomes harder and harder to find a good book. And believe me–the ex-fiction editor–it’s not because they’re not out there.

Read the rest of the article at the Weekly Dig.

Update (17 April 2008): One can no longer read the article there, as the link, which I have removed, has been redirected in puerile fashion for unknown reasons.

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The Writing of Naguib Mahfouz

30 August 2006

Today’s Talk of the Nation featured a segment on the life and writing of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, author of The Cairo Trilogy and numerous other works.

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Peeling the Onion

29 August 2006

The review in The New York Times of Gunter Grass’s autobiography concludes that:

The great Grass ought to have been open to a clear choice: saying whether he jumped or was pushed into all this. Instead, he fudges the story of his SS enlistment and kind of glides around the specifics.

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Reading Like a Writer

28 August 2006

A New York Times review by Emily Barton begins:

At the start of her new book on writing, Francine Prose dispatches with The Question–the five words that inevitably confront writers who teach, writers who don’t teach, and possibly even nonwriters who do neither: “Can creative writing be taught?”

Prose’s succinct answer is “no,” but she elaborates on it with characteristic humor, asking us to imagine “Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.” Repelled by that sort of poisonous atmosphere, I used to inveigh against writing workshops–right up until the day I started teaching one. Now, like many of my colleagues, I find myself wondering just how much success I (and my students) can reasonably expect.

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Fall Books

27 August 2006

The Washington Post‘s Marie Arana has compiled a list of the upcoming season’s highly anticipated titles.

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Camus Does Bush

25 August 2006

Mom dead. It was hard to believe. Just hate bad news like that. Damn liberal media stick it in your face. Had Bolten check it out on Fox News to be absolutely sure. He reported back and said, “Chief, do you remember what happened to Spot, when he stopped barking, forever? We have a similar situation here.” Good hire, El Bolto.

Read the rest of the piece at The New Republic.

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Mailer and Obama Back New Katrina Book

24 August 2006

Norman Mailer and Barack Obama have endorsed a new first-person history of Hurricane Katrina.

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Sad and Surreal

23 August 2006

E.L. Doctorow and Stephen King are up against former presidential candidate
Al Gore and a man who made a fortune writing about his dog for The Quills, a book prize that aims to bring some Oscar-style glitz to publishing.

So begins the Reuters article on Yahoo on this year’s Quills award.

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