Claudia Roth Pierpont writes about the contemporary Arabic novel in this week’s New Yorker, highlighting Iraqi, Palestinian, and Egyptian examples.
Contemporary Arabic Novels
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How would you feel if your novels all fell apart at the end? The writer Ann Bauer knows this feeling, and it’s painful -- she says that her readers inevitably tell her the endings of her novels are all wrong. (You could also read our own Sonya Chung's essay on literary endings.)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Rakow; Hauser; Le Guin
Out this week: This Is Why I Came by Mary Rakow; The Baker's Tale by Thomas Hauser; and Late In the Day, a new collection of poems by Ursula K. LeGuin. For more on these and other recent titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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An American Tragedy
“As everyday existence becomes more punitive for all but the monied few, more and more frustrated, volatile individuals will seek each other out online, aggravate whatever lethal fairy tale suits their pathology, and, ultimately, transfer their rage from the screen world to the real one.” Gary Indiana reviews Masha Gessen’s The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy for the London Review of Books.
Unheralded Greats
Taylor Antrim takes a page out of Roxane Gay's book and "goes in search of great 2011 fiction unjustly ignored by The New York Times."
Amy Tan on Being the First for Some Readers
Nicole Chung interviews Amy Tan about her new memoir Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, one of the highlights is when Tan ponders being one of the 'first' authors that people name/read when they think of Asian-American literature. "But when ["The Joy Luck Club"] came out, it did feel like there were many expectations from all areas — not just in the Asian American community, but in Asian culture itself, and in any ethnic studies community. There were people who said 'At last!' and there were people who said 'How dare she?' [...] I wanted to say: I’m not writing sociology, it just so happens this is what happened in my own family."