Festival week
On Wednesday Jamie Rogers (if you didn't meet her at Winter Institute, you'll definitely see her at BEA) and I had occasion to venture out of suburbia, thanks to some last-minute tickets to one of the PEN World Voices Festival readings. I'd planned to come back and write all about it, but Garth at The Millions beat me to it.
I'm with him on the amazingness of Péter Esterházy - he struck me as the Hungarian Eduardo Galeano.
Ian McEwan (Jamie's reason for attending) was surprisingly funny. I have to admit I haven't read any of his books, but if the piece he read - noting that it's absurd to expect humans to take care of an entire planet when they can't even keep a communal mudroom under control - makes it into the next one, I'll have to make time for it.
My "discovery" of the night was South African Rian Malan. All I can say is he's complex, and when discussing contemporary South Africa you can't be anything else.
In other news, the Shrinking Violets have kicked off their second National Independent Booksellers Month. Nominate your favorite bookstore as National Independent Bookseller of the Year, and say hello to SV Robin LaFevers, who will be signing Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos in the ABA Lounge.
Alison Morris touched a nerve when she asked readers to list the books they just didn't get, while everyone else seemed to love them. 91 comments so far! (For my part, I can't think of any books off the top of my head, but I vividly recall how shocked a friend was when I was underwhelmed by the ending of The Usual Suspects - and I was still scarred by that movie.)
I'd love to spend a few hours days weeks wandering through "the first real estate home for literary arts in the nation," especially if I could combine it with that. It would be like summer camp for nerds, but even better.
YA lit has been the subject of a lot of talk this week. First, it was the subject of a Publishers Weekly panel, where Sherman Alexie made some remarks that struck some YA writers as either condescending or hilarious.
And then Cory Doctorow, novelist and blogger extraordinaire, realized he was forcing a lot of people into a "parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness" in search of his just-released Little Brother. Some of them weren't too comfortable making the switch. Meanwhile, much sighing was overheard from the people who read YA books on a regular basis.
Posted at 06:20PM May 02, 2008 by Sarah Rettger in General |
