"I wasn't really attacking this man," Adichie said in an interview. "For me the story is about the larger question of who determines what an African story is. You have this workshop of African writers, it's completely organised by the British, then this person who has his own ideas ... imposes them on these young, very impressionable people. I remember feeling helpless. You're sitting there thinking, this is the result of 200 years of history: we can sit here and be told what our story is."
i-con noun a picture, image, or other representation of some sacred personage; a representation that stands for its object by virtue of analogy to it.
BURN THIS BOOK was born out of a speech last April that Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison gave at the PEN International Festival dinner. Morrison observed that night, "A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity." As she paid tribute to the difficulties and challenges writers face in many parts of the world, she also reflected on the steep price we all pay when voices are silenced. This powerful, incantatory talk sparked a notion for a book of essays that would explore the issue and impact of censorship in the world.
Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Toni Morrison's speech now opens this collection of extraordinary voices from around the world: John Updike (in one of his final pieces), David Grossman, Francine Prose, Pico Iyer, Russell Banks, Paul Auster, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ed Park, and Nadine Gordimer. The writers represent Nobel and other prize winners and they include writers who have had first-hand experience of censorship and its consequences.
About the Editor:
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of many novels, including, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and most recently, A Mercy. She has also received the national Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction.
About PEN:
PEN is the leading voice for literature and a major force for free expression and the unhampered exchange of ideas and opinions worldwide. Founded in 1921, it is the world's oldest ongoing human rights organization, and it currently has 144 PEN centers in 102 countries dedicated to protecting the right of all humanity to create and communicate freely. By mobilizing the world's most influential literary voiced and an international network of writers, readers, and human rights supporters, PEN makes a difference every day in the lives of writers who are facing persecution around the world.
Penelope Cameron, loving mother, devoted wife and generous philanthropist, has convinced her husband and four closest friends to sign an outlandish pact. If Penelope should die before her two daughters are eighteen, her husband will not remarry without the permission of Penelope’s sister and three college roommates. For years, this contract gathers dust until the unthinkable happens. Suddenly, everyone she loved must find their way in a world without Penelope.
Books are born in strange places. This one was conceived in the front seat of a car.
No, not that kind of conception. My friend Julianna was driving. Our daughters were chatting in the back seat. I was talking about an article I’d written for McCall’s about two young girls in Arizona whose parents had died within months of each other. “Did you know that in some states, if there isn’t a will, the kids can be sent to foster care?”
The girls in my story weren’t so unfortunate. Their mother had named her best friends, another pair of sisters, as the children’s guardians.
”Just make sure you chose someone to take over if something happens to you.”
From there we talked about difficult it would be to chose which couple among one’s siblings and friends would best be suited for the job. Where did one couple’s permissiveness slide into overindulgence, another’s consistency into unbearable strictness? The idea of dying was hard enough, but figuring out which couple would most love your kids in your absence? Impossible.
We paused in our conversation just long enough for my brain to settle on yet another catastrophic possibility. “You know what would be worse?” I asked. “What if I died and John (my husband) married someone awful? I’d have no control at all!”
Another pause.
“Unless,” I continued. “I could get him to agree that if he remarried, my sisters and friends would check out the bride. Make sure she wasn’t some kind of wicked stepmother.”
And thus was hatched the idea of EVERYONE SHE LOVED, a novel that explores the faith one woman placed in her dearest friends, the care she took to protect her family, and the many ways in which romantic entanglements will confound and confuse even the most determined of planners.
Terry Griggs's Thought You Were Dead book trailer (take 2) from Biblioasis Press on Vimeo.
"Meet the Perfect Man...no, no, he's not the hero of "Thought You Were Dead". That would be Chellis Beith, literary researcher, slacker, reluctant detective, and a man bedevilled by every woman in his life. There's his lost love, Elaine Champion, a now happily married inventor who uses him for market research, his best friend's dotty ex-wife, Moe, his two vanished mothers, and his menacing boss, Athena Havlock, a celebrated writer who herself becomes embroiled in the dark side of fiction. The humour is wild, the language a thrill, the mystery within marvelously deft and daft. And as for the Perfect Man...well, nothing is as it seems. Is it? "Thought You Were Dead" is the most unconventional of all murder mysteries, turning the genre completely on its head, bludgeoning flat language and Puritanical sensibilities with evident glee, and is further evidence that Terry Griggs is sui generis: an original and completely inimitable literary voice."
Alyosha was a younger brother. He was nicknamed “the Pot”, because once, when his mother sent him with a pot of milk for the deacon's wife, he stumbled and broke it. His mother thrashed him soundly, and the children in the village began to tease him, calling him “the Pot”. Alyosha the Pot: and this is how he got his nickname.
Alyosha was a skinny little fellow, lop-eared – his ears stuck out like wings – and with a large nose. The children always teased him about this, too, saying, “Alyosha has a nose like a gourd on a pole.”
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“The most concise and widely-cited example of flash fiction is the story Ernest Hemingway penned, allegedly to settle a bar bet: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Despite the limitations of its length, this story, framed as an advertisement, satisfies all of the requirements of a short story: protagonist, conflict, and resolution..."
I don’t want to do this any more.
It’s cold, and we’re all hungry. I knew it would be like this, but that’s the difference between knowing and experiencing.
Nobody talks much any more, Scott least of all. When we were on the way there, he tried to keep people’s spirits up by talking up the grand adventure. When we got to the pole and found we had lost, that all this was for the privilege of being the second team to get there, he sort of withdrew. He doesn’t show how much this has broken him, doesn’t show that he suspects what I know for certain. We are all going to die here.
"...A persistent theme of the novel is the struggle to sincerely connect with the world. In the process of describing this struggle, Wallace ends up building a connection, a trust, with the reader. ...Infinite Jest is my desert-island book, a book that I could not wring all the pleasure from if I squeezed for a century."
The scream tore through the building like a pregnant nun on her way to confession. It bounced off the walls, rattled the windows, and woke up everyone in the neighborhood.
Ed Lowry plummeted a hundred feet before he made any noise. The fire escape on the 20th floor was two hundred feet off the ground, so accelerating at thirty-two miles per second squared, he was falling at nearly forty miles an hour and covered half the distance to the ground before he grasped the real gravity of his situation and started screaming.
It was probably the sight of the penguin that jolted him back to reality and knocked some air back into his lungs.
As I made my way to the coffee area, I was secretly delighted to have my own book recommended to me by no less than half a dozen people. No one ever recognizes me from the author photo, as I'm nine years older and have hair now. (That fabulous bald noggin on the front cover is gorgeous Margaret Baker.) I suppose I should be coy and proper and leave it off this list, but the truth is, I'm proud as hell of this book and gratefully astonished at how people have connected with it. If I do say so myself (and yeah, I do, or I wouldn't have put so much work into it), it's a great book for anyone going through chemo or seeking to understand that experience. It's not a book about cancer, it's a book that reminds people: cancer exists only in the context of a life. Book clubs who've embraced it over the years made me realize it's actually a book about finding joy in whatever refining fire life dishes out.
Newsweek editor Jobathan Alter says Wendy's latest, Only 10 Seconds to Care: Help and Hope for Busy Clinicians, is "extraordinarily useful — not to mention compelling — for patients like me. She has x-ray vision that gets to the core of the doctor-patient relationship. This is a wise and insightful and deftly written book."
"a blog dedicated to short fiction you can read on your lunch hour. Lunch Reads stories will come in all genres but will be brief yarns designed to entertain, enlighten and/or uplift. One a day will be posted, Monday through Friday."
"In many ways, our childhood defines the rest of our life. Books about childhoods shattered by pain and suffering – both fiction and non–fiction – are commonplace today but they have a long history dating back to the English tale of the Babes in the Wood in the 16th century. Some like Oliver Twist and Anne Frank's Diary illustrate a period of history, while others, such as Lord of the Flies and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, have become deeply symbolic."
Wallace's second novel is not for the faint-hearted or the weak-wristed. Wallace (The Girl with Curious Hair, LJ 7/89) throws everything he knows-and he knows plenty-into this river of stories. If you can stand the extreme length, ignore the footnotes, and have a bed-desk to rest this tome on, this book can be fun... Too much happens here even to begin to summarize, but the author has a wicked sense of humor and a wonderful eye for capturing the odd juxtapositions of modern life... Distinct, idiomatic, wild, and crazy, this book is destined to have a cult following.
I can't help it; I am about to utter the hacky cliche of all book recommendations: I couldn't put it down. The words "pleasure reading" hardly begin to describe it. This was somewhere between a spa treatment and mid-day lovemaking. It's a mystery and a love story, a twisting path through the heart and mind of a richly drawn character.
I've been fascinated by language for as long as I can remember, and I've been fascinated by dead and endangered languages for a few years now; I suppose Eli's spirit came out of my personal interest in his field of research. Our thoughts and experiences are framed by the language that we speak, so I do think that the death of any one of the thousands of languages still spoken on this planet (and they die at a rate of one every ten days or so) is a genuine tragedy. I think we lose something irreplaceable when a language disappears.