Latest Review: The Zafarani Files by Gamal al-Ghitani
The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files. Al-Ghitani has a couple other books available in English translation from the American University of Cairo Press, including Pyramid Texts and The Mahfouz Dialogs. Based on the strength of this particular novel, I have the ...
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The Zafarani Files
I picked this book up at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, the day after attending the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, where Gamal al-Ghitani (aka Jamal Al Ghitani) won the award for Literature. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, based on the description of al-Ghitani’s work given at the event and on the above ...
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I Mean, I *LOVE* Yu Hua's Brothers
From the Library of Congress (via The Elegant Variation): On April 23, 2009, a federal district court in the southern Russian province of Dagestan issued an unprecedented ruling, ordering a journalist of a local newspaper to pay compensation in an amount equal to US$1,000 to a writer who did not like a review of his book ...
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Rocco Landesman to Head the National Endowment for the Arts
It still has to be approved by Congress, but Rocco Landesman has been appointed to serve as the next chairman of the NEA, a post most recently held by poet Dana Gioia. I’m not much of a theatre-goer, so Landesman is new to me. Based on the info in the New York Times article, he sounds like a lot of fun: Mr. ...
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Fail, Fail Again
Just when you thought the Times had figured out how to correctly pair writers with appropriate topics . . . Kidding—the Times will never get that straight. Here’s some clips from today’s review of Lost‘s season finale: [. . .] the producers of “Lost,” who have devoted the show’s fourth and ...
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A Tribute to the Chinese Earthquake Victims
My friend Wen Huang — translator of Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker and Xianhui Yang’s Woman from Shanghai — contacted me this morning about the article below that Liao Yiwu wrote in remembrance of the one year anniversary of the devastating Beichuan earthquake. As referenced in passing in the piece ...
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Critical Flame
Daniel E. Pritchard has just launched The Critical Flame, a promising new online journal of book reviews and criticism with a goal of engaging with literature in a serious way: A life of constant education is a life lived well, and the heart of our continued education is a public discourse that is free from small-minded ...
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