By Timothy Hallinan BANGKOK: Well, as a place to live, it is undoubtedly the most cheerful big city on earth. The Thai people somehow ingest the heat, the gasoline fumes, the permanent Gordian knot of traffic, the heartbreaking poverty, and through some form of internal alchemy turn it into broad, beautiful smiles and almost infinite compassion for the befuddled, sweating …
Is Yale’s Cartoon Controversy Just More Publishing Cowardice?
Sherry Jones, author of The Jewel of Medina, discusses self-censorship and publishers who stand up against threats to freedom of speech and freedom to publish.
In Afghanistan, Women Writers Confront Taboos and Terrorism
By Masha Hamilton I woke up one day this week to an email from my colleague in Kabul. Many of the women who write for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project blog, he said, would probably not be participating for a few days. Typically once or twice a week, the AWWP writers send in essays, poems, and news reports from computers …
The Summer of Stieg: How Larsson Conquered Spain and Latin America
By Adriana V. Lopez MADRID: This past June, I boarded a plane at Madrid’s Barajas Airport bound for Bogotá, Colombia when I noticed several women on the plane with the same book. When you’ve worked in publishing, and by serendipity spot more than one person reading the same book in a public setting, and in one condensed space, it can …
The Hunted Evolves Faster than the Hunter: The Problem of Censorship in Iran
By Arash Hejazi My name is Arash Hejazi. I am an Iranian doctor, novelist and founder and editorial director of the Tehran-based Caravan Books Publishing House. Sadly, I’m now better known for my association with the brutal murder of Neda Agha Soltan — as the doctor who tried to save her life and then went out into the world to …
Clarice Lispector’s Biographer on the Thrill of the Hunt
By Benjamin Moser UTRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS — Nobody’s ugly at two a.m., so the t-shirt slogan goes. One evening a few years ago, I was sitting in my Dutch garden, talking to some friends about Clarice Lispector, the Jewish-Brazilian mystic writer. Having recently left the security of my publishing job in order to devote myself full-time to writing, I’d been …
Accra Provides Mysterious Milieu for Ghanaian-American Novelist
By Kwei Quartey ACCRA, GHANA: About 10 years ago, I wrote a novel set in Africa. An agent to whom I sent the first pages turned it down and told me, “There are two places on earth that no one has the slightest interest in reading about: Afghanistan and Africa.” What a difference a decade makes: Khaled Hosseini’s smash hits …
Mexico Deemed Too Dangerous for Novelist to Tour
By Dylan Foley MEXICO: In his new novel Into the Beautiful North, the Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea has created a satirical tale about three teenage girls who, after seeing a screening of the classic Steve McQueen classic film The Magnificent Seven, leave their small southern Mexican town of Tres Camarones — itself overrun by drug dealers and corrupt cops …