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.

Rights Readers Round-up

Our periodic round-up of what's been happening with our favorite authors:

Martha Minow (Between Vengeance and Forgiveness) has been appointed Dean of Harvard Law School.

A retrial has been ordered for some of the alleged conspirators in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya (Putin's Russia).

Amira Hass (Drinking the Sea at Gaza) speaks with Amy Goodman about editing her mother's Holocaust memoir (Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944-1945--Hanna Levy-Hass).

In the wake of the sentencing of two American journalists to hard labor in North Korea, the NYT discusses sources of information regarding life in North Korea which of course includes Kang Chol-hwan's (The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag). Also noted is this video of the camp where Kang lived. Take action for Laura Ling and Euna Lee here.

Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea) received the Jefferson Award for public service and more recognition from the National Education Association. National Geographic notes a Pakistani honor and investigates his project's Taliban problem.

Toni Morrison has been promoting a volume she edited on censorship (Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word) which includes essays by Rights Readers favorites Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk and Nadine Gordimer, The NYT reports,

Morrison, looking regal and speaking in a warm, languid voice, talked about how she had proudly framed and hung in a bathroom a letter that said that “Song of Solomon” could not be distributed among Texas inmates because “it might stir inmates to riot.” She let that sink in for a few seconds. “I thought, ‘what a powerful book.’ ”

Speaking of censorship... Jose Saramago (Blindness) has found himself at the center of the struggle for press freedom in Italy. The BBC has a good profile on the Nobel Laureate in anticipation of his forthcoming book, Death with Interruptions.

Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) has sanctioned a reworking of some of her material to promote Iranian democracy. The Guardian quotes the creators of the mash-up,

"Her cartoon are about her life but to my generation of Iranians (at least in the West) they have become more than that, they have become iconic. The fact that images from 30 years ago can tell a story about what is happening now makes them all the more powerful.

"Unlike her original work, Persepolis 2.0 is filled with flaws and inaccuracies, but the bottom line is that it has helped spark hundreds of conversations and that's more than we could have expected."

Californians! Read Sister Helen Prejean's (Dead Man Walking) no-holds-barred letter to the Department of Corrections regarding revisions to California's lethal injection protoccol.

Were you aware of Amnesty International's contributions to the history of comedy? Fun interview with Monty Python vets from WNYC here.

Pamuk in Exile?

The Guardian Reports,

The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has reportedly left his home country to live in America amid fears for his life. The Nobel laureate is believed to be at risk of assassination in Turkey following the murder of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink last month. Threats appeared to have been made against Pamuk by the man who confessed to orchestrating the murder.

Pamuk wins Nobel

We would have been more excited about this a year ago when we were right in the middle of reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow, but we're happy he won the prize this year.

Turkish Writers on Trial

Maureen Freely, Orhan Pamuk's (Snow) translator writes in the  New York Times about another Turkish author facing trial,

In [Elif Shafak's] sixth and most recent novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul,” which is already a best seller in Turkey and will be published in the United States by Viking next year, one character declares: “My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is Varvant Istanboluian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives in the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustapha!” These are strong words in a country whose official historians maintain that the Armenian genocide at the hands of Turks is itself a fiction... In September, she spoke at a conference at Bilgi University in Istanbul — the first Turkish conference ever to challenge the official line on the Ottoman Armenians — and though she went on to state her own position clearly and unequivocally in several newspapers, the censors left her alone. But early last month, Shafak learned that she was to be prosecuted for, among other things, allowing a character of partly Armenian heritage in “The Bastard of Istanbul” to utter the forbidden G-word. Her trial is scheduled for Sept. 21.

Hey that's just in time for Banned Book Week!  PEN urges you to take action.

Tags: Turkey, Armenia, genocide, censorship, banned books

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!

Pamuk Post-trial

The Guardian checks in on Orhan Pamuk (Snow) post trial:

So does he think he was the victim, in a way, of Turkish self-hatred? This too, apparently, would be too simplistic. "Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others." It is a kind of plea.

Pamuk: Case Dropped

Turkey has dropped the charges against Orhan Pamuk avoiding much embarrassment, but the offending law still stands. On the Media interviews Kevin Goldberg of the World Press Freedom Committee about that organization's Campaign Against Insult Laws. It's not just the Turks!

Pamuk on the Novel in East/West Dialogue

For those just joining us, we read Orhan Pamuk's Snow last month, just prior to the inauguration of this blog, and both the book and the author are showing some staying power in terms of our interest in supplementary material that helps us digest what he's all about. Here's a little more material for the file.

This Guardian article, is essentially a speech he gave recently in accepting a German peace prize. He says of Snow:

I am using this story as a way into the subject that I am coming to understand more clearly with each new day, and which is, in my view, central to the art of the novel: the question of the "other", the "stranger", the "enemy" that resides inside each of our heads, or rather, the question of how to transform it.
...

A novelist's politics rise from his imagination, from his ability to imagine himself as someone else. This power makes him not just a person who explores the human realities that have never been voiced before - it makes him the spokesman for those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger is never heard, and whose words are suppressed.

...

As we all know: wherever there is too much pride, and whenever people act too proudly, there is the shadow of the other's shame and humiliation. Wherever there is someone who feels deeply humiliated, we can expect to see a proud nationalism rising to the surface. My novels are made from these dark materials, from this shame, this pride, this anger and this sense of defeat. Because I come from a nation that is knocking on Europe's door, I am only too aware of how easily these fragile emotions can, from time to time, take flame and rage unchecked. What I am trying to do here is to speak of this shame as a whispered secret, as I first heard it in Dostoevsky's novels. For it is by sharing our secret shames that we bring about our liberation.

...

These are the times when we feel humility, compassion, tolerance, pity and love stirring in our hearts: for great literature speaks not to our powers of judgment, but to our ability to put ourselves in someone else's place. Modern societies, tribes and nations do their deepest thinking about themselves through reading novels; through reading novels, they are able to argue about who they are; so even if we have picked up a novel hoping only to divert ourselves, and relax, and escape the boredom of everyday life, we begin, without realising, to conjure up the collectivity, the nation, the society to which we belong.

...

This is also why novels give voice not just to a nation's pride and joy, but also to its anger, its vulnerabilities, and its shame. It is because they remind readers of their shame, their pride, and their tenuous place in the world that novelists still arouse such anger, and what a shame it is that we still see outbursts of intolerance - that we still see books burned, and novelists prosecuted.

This second (older) reflection from the New York Review of Books also emphasizes the shame and humiliation theme in his response to the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

This is the grim, troubled private sphere that neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom. And it is while living within this private sphere that most people in the world today are afflicted by spiritual misery. The problem facing the West is not only to discover which terrorist is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave, or which street of which city, but also to understand the poor and scorned and "wrongful" majority that does not belong to the Western world.

I recommend reading the Guardian article in particular in its entirety.