For NPR, debut novelist Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai discusses her book, The Mountains Sing, which follows four generations of a Vietnamese family and centers on a grandmother and granddaughter. By combining family lore with historical research, she tells a story of a family dealing with the realities of war. “I could only write The Mountains Sing having lived through difficult times,” she explains. “Only through experiencing by myself the challenges faced by the poorest of the poor, the most desperate, could I have that empathy.”
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on Writing with Empathy
The Year of Only Publishing Women
“When author Kamila Shamsie challenged the book industry to publish only women in 2018 to help address a gender imbalance in literature, just one publisher took up the challenge.” And Other Stories, an English publisher who publish translations and English language books, has decided to only publish women writers in 2018, according to the BBC. Pair with: an essay by our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee about the visibility and privacy of women writers.
War and Sociology
What can we learn about Leo Tolstoy by reading the German sociologist Max Weber? Let Jeremy Klemin from 3:AM Magazine explain. While we’re on Tolstoy, here’s a complementary piece that asks the age old question–who’s better: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?
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Contemporary Arabic Novels
Claudia Roth Pierpont writes about the contemporary Arabic novel in this week’s New Yorker, highlighting Iraqi, Palestinian, and Egyptian examples.
A Suitable Adaptation
“We are here to take creative risks and to do the sort of work that commercial broadcasters might be more reluctant to do. But we also have a real responsibility and a requirement to reflect a range of British communities.” Bestill our hearts, the BBC is adapting Vikram Seth‘s A Suitable Boy as its first period drama with a non-white cast, reports The Telegraph. Our own Lydia Kiesling described Seth’s epic as “a spectacularly romantic novel, weddings all over,” but noted sadly that “it portends falling in love with the man you can marry, in lieu of the one that you can’t.”
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Looking for a Job? In Space?
Water coolers across the nation were abuzz this week with news of the James Cameron-backed and billionaire-led initiative to begin mining resources from the asteroid belt. It’s the stuff of science fiction, and it may seem hard to believe, but the company’s actually already begun hiring prospective space miners!
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Not notable?!
A Nicholson Baker essay on Wikipedia and its pleasures (and its frustrations), has resurfaced in the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.