Round-Up: Familiar Authors in Unfamiliar Places

In our latest round-up, we find many of our authors stretching their wings in new genres and finding new audiences:

• Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is to be a movie directed by Wayne Wang.

• Film critic Roger Ebert is a fan of W.G. Sebald and shares some video tributes on his blog. Check out the one from the architecture students for an Austerlitz flashback.

• John Conroy (Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People) has converted his investigation of allegations of the use of torture by Chicago police officers into a play.  He described it for the NYT, “I wanted to indict the whole city of Chicago.”

• Meanwhile, Lone Star Opera (Fort Worth) has made Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls into an opera.

• Louise Erdrich (Tracks) will participate in the PBS series Faces of America which explores the genealogical histories of a dozen prominent Americans.

• Helene Cooper (The House at Sugar Beach) takes time off from the White House beat to report on surfing in Liberia.
  

• Will Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) pen a graphic novel?

• Ann Cummins (Yellowcake) reviews books for the Arizona NPR affiliate and she's got some interesting regional picks!

• Walter Mosley (Little Scarlet) and Roberto Bolaño (Amulet) show up on LA Laker coach Phil Jackson's gift list to players.

• At the New Yorker, you can hear Junot Diaz read and discuss Edwidge Danticat's story "Water Child" and Danticat discuss Diaz' "The Dating Game."
  

• The photographer Pieter Hugo has published a collection of photographs, Nollywood, about the Nigerian film industry.  Chris Abani (Graceland) and Zina Saro-Wiwa, daughter of Ken Saro-Wiwa supply the text.  Preview this striking collection here.
  

• Orhan Pamuk (Snow) explains how his latest book, The Museum of Innocence, lead him to curate an actual museum and the NYT provides a slideshow of some of its holdings.  Want more Pamuk? How about a stroll with him through downtown LA?: "I like it when there is history, when there is decay. I'm very much impressed that this city has a decaying face. I identify it with my own." And then compare that to Istanbul.  Not juicy enough?  How about this literary match: ‘No secret, Kiran’s my girlfriend’. 

• Finally, remember our exploration of afropop legend Fela Kuti when we discussed Uzondinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation?  Kevin Mambo, star of the Broadway musical "Fela!" and Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's Executive Director discuss the musician's commitment to human rights (and Obama's Nobel speech) on WNYC. More from NPR here.

Pasadena Event: Chris Abani at Vroman's

Chris Abani, author of Rights Readers selection Graceland, will be speaking at Vroman's Bookstore on Monday, February 12 at 7:00 PM about his new novel Virgin of Flames,

Abani, the Hemingway/PEN Prize-winning author of Graceland, reveals a side of Los Angeles rarely seen. Black, an East L.A. mural artist, lives above a tattoo parlor/coffee shop that becomes the unexpected setting for several recent sightings of the Virgin Mary. As he grapples with the phenomenon and his own journey of self-discovery, larger social issues of poverty, ethnicity, and religion are raised.

Abani was also interviewed recently on KPCC (scroll down for audio link).

Bill Moyer's Faith & Reason/Pen World Voices

Pretty much at the same time the Los Angeles Time Festival of Books was all going down, PEN Center in New York was holding its World Voices New York Festival of International Literature. The authors and topics are even more in sync with Rights Readers than the LA Fest. And guess what? Most of it's online for your left coast listening pleasure! Print summaries and reactions to some of the talks are also available at Metaxu Cafe. Or for couch potatos, Bill Moyers has done his own interviews with some of the participants on the conference theme, Faith & Reason, and the series begins airing Friday on PBS.

Authors include Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) and Orhan Pamuk (Snow) and Moses Isegawa (Abyssinian Chronicles) and Chris Abani (Graceland) offer up reflections here. A few of the participating authors that may be up for future consideration for Rights Readers are Duong Thu Huong, Gioconda Belli, Helen Oyeyemi, Yiyun Li, Russell Banks and I'm sure several more...there's much to explore.

Observant Readers will note that there is a talk by our July author Svetlana Alexievich from last year's festival in the sidebar!

Rights Readers Guide to the Los Angeles Festival of Books

This weekend some of our loyal Readers may be attending the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Here's a little guide to Rights Readers authors past and future (?) you may want to check out:

On Saturday  Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains) appears in the "Writing Epic History" panel at 10:30 AM.  The "First Fiction" panel at 11:30 has two potential Rights Readers authors in Olga Grushin (Dream Life of Sukhanov) and Uzodinma Iweala (Beasts of No Nation).  At 12:30 Lost Boys Alephonsion and Benson Deng share their experience of Sudan, another possible future read.  And at 4:00 PM the "Fiction: Unknown Territory" panel includes Lisa See (who I'm sure we will get around to one of these days), author of Dragon Bones and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and Amy Wilentz (Martyr's Crossing).  The 4:00 PM panel "Under Siege: Life in a Culture of Conflict" includes Loung Ung, a Cambodian genocide survivor, whose previous appearance was praised by one of our Esteemed Readers, and I have to admit one of her books is sitting in my "to read" pile.  Wow!  Looks like this is a Rights Readers day!

On Sunday Amy Wilentz is back moderating a fiction panel featuring Chris Abani (Graceland) at 10:30 AM and he appears again at 3:00 PM. 

Reports on these authors or others I may be neglection are appreciated!

Nigeria: Report on Forced Evictions

Last summer we were moved by the description of the Lagos slum demolition which is the climax of Chris Abani's novel, Graceland. Now Amnesty has released a report, Nigeria: Making the destitute homeless - forced evictions in Makoko, Lagos state on just such an incident.