The first installment in a series of bloggers reading through the shortlist of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Aaron Bady looks at Rotimi Babutunde’s Bombay Republic [pdf]. A full list of participating bloggers is available at the bottom of Bady’s post.
Blogging the Caine Prize
Brooklyn’s International High School
Students at Brooklyn’s International High School come from more than forty-five countries and speak more than twenty-eight languages. Their stories are now recorded in Brooke Hauser’s new book, The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens.
One Darkness to Another
“It’s the marriage of one kind of darkness to another… the black storm cloud of Neel’s pen is well suited to Dostoyevsky’s questions of God, reason, and doubt.” On Alice Neel‘s illustrations for The Brothers Karamazov, from The Paris Review. Pair with our own Kevin Hartnett’s much lighter take on the novel, “Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Even a Toddler Knows a Funny Name When He Hears One.”
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Literary Louisiana
In a piece for The New York Times Jennifer Moses takes a tour of south Louisiana, “a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese — prodigiously, and with world-class excellence — a place that calls on its writers’ talent and inspiration and, in turn, is reflected back into the world through their words,” and of the past haunts of Tennessee Williams, Anne Rice and Kate Chopin.
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Background Noise
We hear a lot about the books writers read while drafting their own novels and stories. But we don’t hear as much about the music, TV shows and other forms of art that kept them going throughout the process. At Page-Turner, Amy Bloom catalogues the influences on her latest novel.
Appearing Elsewhere
I have an essay in the September issue of Poets & Writers on “The Social Value of MFA Programs.” Sadly, P&W deems the piece too valuable to give away for free on the Web, so if you want to read it, you’ll have to go to your local newsstand and buy a copy.
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Saying Without Saying
Giles Harvey discusses the ways in which Anton Chekhov’s characters — as dramatized in his stories and a new stage production — “long to express their innermost desires … but instead they find themselves saying things like, ‘Why did I go out to lunch?’ “
Patron Saint of Decency & Feminism
Fanny Trollope, Anthony’s mother, taught America a thing or two about decency and feminism: her scathing pen wrote books about the excesses of American society and its alienation of women. Over at Bloom, Cynthia Miller Coffel writes about this trailblazing woman who should be considered “the patron saint of middle aged women writers.”
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Tune in next week
Emily Nussbaum on the poetry of cliffhangers, “which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliffhangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling.”