Lee Thomas calls Michael David Lukas’s debut novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, an antidote to mid-winter malaise with “sun-drenched marble, the heat and clamor of the bazaar, and a warm, salt breeze off the Sea of Marmara.” The book features a precocious prodigy, eight-year-old Eleonora Cohen, as a guide through Lukas’s tale of political intrigue in late 19th-century Stamboul.
Each year the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five native English speaking (NES) writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. In 2009 I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the NES fellows. Joining [...]
Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Brooks Rexroat, Kierstyn Lamour, and Kate Hill Cantrill. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of this [...]
Over at MelvilleHouse Publishing there’s an interesting blog post, In Support of Translation, along with responses, about the Best Translated Book Award being funded by Amazon. Editor Dennis Loy Johnson writes:
As the winner of the most recent Best Translated Book (BTB) prize for fiction — for our book, The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail [...]
“Writers can almost be defined as professional outsiders. It’s part of the job. You often have to step outside of a situation to observe it—to choose the right details—to reshape a mess of events into a narrative.”
Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. Four of the 2010 English speaking fellows–Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich–collaborate on a group portrait of their experience at this year’s seminar.
In a Strange Room chronicles Damon’s travels as he journeys from Greece, to various countries in Africa, to India. Traveling, in general, disorients. We are displaced from our normal locations, we are observing places that are not our own, and our minds constantly compare the new, foreign place with the familiar one. Like Rimbaud’s process of becoming a seer, the state of traveling might be a process by which we project toward the unknown by a derangement of the senses. To travel is to step into a sort of duality.
What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent?
In her latest novel, White is for Witching (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday), Helen Oyeyemi dismantles and rebuilds the Haunted House story brick by brick, creating a book filled to the rafters with innovation. The Cambridge, UK-based author talked with Neelanjana Banerjee about why she’s drawn to supernatural subjects (but not “magical realism”), why vampire stories are really about race, and how to write stories that will freak your readers out.
Like most of us, Orhan Pamuk’s narrator Kemal rushes through his happiest moments in a preoccupied haze, only appreciating them in hindsight. A true materialist, he seeks to recreate them through his collections of mementos large and small, iconic and insignificant. His “museum” in The Museum of Innocence (Knopf, 2009) is a diorama not only of Kemal’s own nostalgia, but of Turkey itself in the late 1970s.
