Hundehoved. See, it sounds a little more haunted, a little more rhythmic, a little more intense in Danish. But the English “Doghead” sounds good, too: blunt and pragmatic, both mysterious and common as dirt. Come to think of it, mystery and the commonplace both pervade Doghead(Thomas Dunne Books, 2009, trans. Tiina Nunnally), a Scandinavian saga obsessed with the convoluted telling of what goes awry in the gnarled branches of the Erikkson family tree.
Sung J. Woo was born in Korea and immigrated to the United States with his mother and two sisters when he was ten years old. Several years earlier, his father had moved to this country in order to establish a small business–a small, Asian-themed store in a mall in New Jersey–which would one day serve as the basis for the setting of Sung Woo’s debut novel, Everything Asian. Captured with humor and generosity, the book chronicles one year in the lives of the Kim family as they adjust to a new life in the United States and interact with fellow shopkeepers at Peddlers Town.
Woo spoke with Jeremiah Chamberlin on May 15th during the Ann Arbor Book Festival.
I had to go four or five pages into my junk email folder to find one. It was from a Dr. Obadiah Maliafia of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The email says that my $10.7 million in overdue inheritance funds: “HAS BEEN GAZZETED TO BE RELEASED TO YOU VIA THE FOREIGN REMMITANCE DEPARTMENT OF OUR BANK.”
After reading Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s debut novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance (Hyperion, May 2009), the missive from Dr. Maliafia read like a finely tuned piece of art: the formal language, the capital letters, the amount of money – a perfect example of the 419 email scam.
Ptolemy was trying to describe a system that didn’t exist. His point of view, literally, was wrong. He wasn’t looking at the planets from a fixed center, but from a body that was itself circling the sun. Copernicus’ eventual understanding of this fact led swiftly to the discovery of several other beautiful truths, including those of Kepler, Brahe, and Newton – suggesting that where you stand has everything to do with what you can see. And that if you’re standing in the wrong place, or facing the wrong direction, you’re going to see a very strange, distorted view.
All of which is to say, point of view matters. It might be proposed that an author does well to be relatively Copernican, even if his characters start out almost entirely Ptolemaic. … The supreme example of a character remaining Ptolemaic within a Copernican story is Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog”. In this story, Chekhov knows nearly everything, and Anna knows, perhaps, only a little less – while the point of view character Gurov knows almost nothing of what goes on around him.
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. And this summer I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the NES fellows.It was, in a word, amazing. And though I’m by no means a photographer, I hope that a few of these snapshots might begin to capture the experience of being in such a unique place with so many generous and talented individuals.
On June 10, for one day only, Haaretz replaced its reporters with 31 of Israel’s literary writers, instructing them to cover the news. The result? Top stories about “integration at the giraffe enclosure, love in the cancer ward, mosaics in Tel Aviv, addicts at the Jerusalem rehab centre, and a visit to the grave of a holy man, among others” (via Metafilter). The Jewish Daily Forward‘s David Estrin describes the experiment: Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The […]
FWR is thrilled to host South African debut novelist Bridget McNulty for a stop on her book blog tour. In addition to sharing an excerpt from her book Strange Nervous Laughter, Bridget has also written a great post about the story and process behind it. (And if you haven’t yet seen “The Lonely Cupcake,” a one-minute whimsical fable/preview of the novel, watch it today; and check out behind-the-scenes photos from that project.) An excerpt from Strange Nervous Laughter: He arrived at her house in a hearse, which was perhaps not the best omen for a first date. What was unusual […]
South African writer Bridget McNulty will make a (virtual) stop at FWR during her blog tour later this month when Strange Nervous Laughter (St. Martin’s), her debut novel, publishes. In the meantime, Bridget offers this lovely, wacky little film to get you in the mood for it. As she says: How can you resist watching a video with a name as intriguing as ‘The Lonely Cupcake‘? Especially when it’s only 1 minute long! And it’s only vaguely related to Strange Nervous Laughter. And it has cupcakes in it. With funny faces.
A.B. Yehoshua never writes the shortcut phrase “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in Friendly Fire, his most recent novel, newly translated into English from Hebrew. It’s as though the veteran Israeli author is mining a seam so deep that its boundaries do not need to be explored or examined, or picking up a thread of conversation that Israelis have already been engaged in for 60 years. That isn’t to say, however, that Yehoshua has no comment on the matter.
Lee Thomas talks with Aravind Adiga about neo-realism, myth, being a misfit, and winning the Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Adiga’s next book, a collection of stories called Between the Assassinations, will publish in the United States this June.
