WisCon Schedule!

WisCon 37 is next weekend!

Here are all the places I plan to be:

Friday, May 24

Women's Speculative Poetry Now
9:00 - 10:15 pm
Conference 4

Saturday, May 25

Interstitial Salon/Meetup
11:30 am - 12:45 pm
634

Open Secrets: a Speculative Poetry Reading
2:30 - 3:45 pm
Senate B

Exhausting SF #1: Passionate Intensity (fiction reading!)
4:00 - 5:15 pm
Michelangelo's Coffee Shop

Coloring Outside the Lines: An Interfictions Extravaganza
9:00 pm - ?
607
THIS IS A PARTY! Food, drinks, prizes! Launch of A Stranger in Olondria, Before and Afterlives by Christopher Barzak, and Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, WHICH WILL BE LIVE AND AMAZING ON THAT VERY DAY.

Sunday, May 26

Contemporary Fantasy and Science Fiction from the Muslim World
2:30 - 3:45 pm
Capitol A

Monday, May 27

The SignOut
11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Capitol/Wisconsin
This is where I sign your copy of Olondria, if you have one, and look at you in a post-con daze.

See you there!

Would you buy your own book?

I got this email from Amazon.com today. Thanks, Amazon! You know me so well!

Seriously--would you buy your own book? This makes me think about how we buy books, and about book reviews, and the fact that I'm not writing reviews these days. There's a wonderful review of Olondria on Tor.com right now, by Amal El-Mohtar, who has a gift for engaging joyfully without babbling: I remember her excellent review of Sonya Taaffe's A Mayse-Bikhl, which I admired in this post last year. Based on Amal's review of Olondria, I would buy my own book. What strikes me most about the review is how very personal it is. The best part is not about my book at all. It's about Amal photographing shadows in Damascus.

I would buy a book because it reminded somebody of photographing shadows.

Like I said, I'm not writing reviews these days. I'm having a bit of trouble with the form. I stopped writing reviews because I had to devote every drop of spare time to my dissertation. Now that I've been away from reviewing for a few months, I'm having trouble going back to it. I feel cramped by the thought that there are certain things you Should Do in a book review--situate the work among other works of its genre, find something good to say if possible, find something bad to say if possible. Those boxes on the Reviewer To-Do List. I know reviews don't have to be like this, and the best ones aren't, but the majority are, and that's where the pressure comes from. Gail Scott: "To charm requiring anecdotes." That's really true. It's the personal that charms, that seduces, that draws you in. It's the personal that charms YOU as you're writing about what you've read. Maybe that's why I'm just blogging about books now, rather than trying to publish reviews. I find I'm not interested enough in the To-Do List. I want a kind of communication that the review doesn't seem built for. I leave you with a quote by Mary Ruefle:

I get so very tired of having to talk about literature. I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and discuss the subjectivity in Wordsworth and Ashbery; I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever.

5 Arabic novels to read before you die

This post is inspired by one that ran a couple of weeks ago on one of my favorite blogs, Arabic Literature (in English). The "Five Before You Die" feature originally ran in 2010. I'm pleased, and not surprised, to see that so many of the participants mentioned Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North as a must-read (I just finished a dissertation on Salih, and, y'know, you want folks to think your diss. subject is important). Here's my version of "5 Before You Die," arranged alphabetically by the author's first name:

Little Mountain
Elias Khoury

I love this book so much! I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH. When you hear people talk about Khoury you often hear about Gate of the Sun, but for me Little Mountain is really the Khoury book, I like it MUCH MUCH BETTER than Gate, in fact I haven't gotten around to reading more recent Khoury because Gate disappointed me because I loved Little Mountain so much. It's about Lebanon's civil war and especially about the collapse of perception, of personality, of everything in the midst of that conflict. In a way it goes from paradise to hell. My favorite character in it is a girl with close-cropped hair who runs on a beach and laughs and puts sand on her head--she's like something you can't really see because it's gotten into your eye, completely illegible and close.

The Story of Zahra
Hanan al-Shaykh

Like Khoury: Lebanon. Civil war. But while some parts of Little Mountain are set in Beirut, the overall impression of The Story of Zahra is much more urban: you sense the oppression and fear of life in a city where there are snipers in the windows. Zahra is an intense, defiantly disintegrating character, a site for al-Shaykh to explore the female body and/in/at war. I suspect Zahra will surprise you. The tone of the novel is gray sometimes, flat: it seems like a blank wall, and then you realize someone’s looking at you through the cracks.

The Tent
Miral al-Tahawy

Ok, it’s time to admit that “main character completely falls to pieces” is a plot that attracts me. In Miral al-Tahawy’s mesmerizing The Tent, that central character is Fatima, a young girl whose area of activity becomes progressively smaller and more restricted as she grows up in a conservative Bedouin household. Fatima’s inner life, however, is quite large. Under the pressure of seclusion, inner and outer are forced into one another and begin to blur, until you can hardly tell if her friends are real to anyone but her. Gah, this makes me want to read the book again right now. Look: “Every time I closed my eyes I found them. Every time I surrendered my thick, long hair to Sardoub’s tender hand they moved before me in silence. It was as if I had leapt over the high wall, and flown away, moving in and out between the farm buildings until I reached the open land beyond the houses and the wide mud walls. There were the green pastures, and the mountains and the low hills. I watched Mouha tending her goats, and I rode the donkey, and I ran and ran across the desert until I saw the seven palm trees.”

That Smell
Sonallah Ibrahim

This is a new translation of Sonallah Ibrahim's brilliant short novel, which I haven't read yet! I read the older translation by Denys Johnson-Davies (The Smell of It--that title is hard to work with, yo), and I loved it. Very much looking forward to reading the new translation, which, according to The NY Review of Books, preserves Ibrahim's "rawness" and "run-on form" (to be honest, I remember the version I read as very raw and run-on, but it's been a few years). The story concerns a young man who's just been released from prison. Cairo, alienation, sperm which grossed out Yahya Haqqi (as you can read in NYRB). Impressionistic, atmospheric, gut-wrenching. People who describe Tayeb Salih as a "modernist" writer in Arabic should definitely check out Sonallah Ibrahim.

Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih

Speaking of Salih. This book is a classic. In 2004, the Arab Academy in Damascus named Season of Migration to the North the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century. It’s the story of two men, both Sudanese, both educated in England, both haunted by a violent colonial past. One of these men is a murderer, the other an innocent--or is he? This shimmering, uncanny narrative makes it impossible to be sure. To borrow a metaphor from an Isak Dinesen story: each of these two men is a locked chest, and each contains the key to the other.

John Updike's longing

"If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering, and it is capable of great passion and also great nuances of passion--the passion of the mind, the passion of the body--and if syntax reflects states of desire, is hope, is love, is sadness, is fury, and if the motions of sentences and paragraphs and chapters are this as well, if the motion of line is about desire and longing and want; then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike’s longing?"
~ Carole Maso

more Miranda Mellis

I wrote briefly about Miranda Mellis' The Spokes in my last reading update. This weekend, I read The Revisionist, and that's it, I am on her side.

First I wrote "I'm a Miranda Mellis fan," which is also true, but it only covers the reading part, and I am completely on Miranda Mellis' side as a writer too: I can get my head into what she does and I just want her to keep doing it. Like The Spokes, The Revisionist is a slim book with lots of good white space, almost like a collection of prose poems, but there are characters in it, too: the seeing-eye dog, the runner, the curator, the woman with the broken hearing-aid, and of course the revisionist. The revisionist's job is "to conduct surveillance of the weather and report that everything was fine"--even as nuclear bombs explode and acid rain falls. "Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated." The revisionist is a person in shock, someone to feel sorry for, and also corrupt, a professional liar.

A lot of the book is about the contradictions that make life impossible, and how life happens anyway. "A gigantic tree fell out of the sky, crushing a truck at a nearby university and killing three students. Their skeletons crouched in there, bent under the tree. After an appropriate interval, they became a comedy act."

Lots of things fall out of the sky. A girl's father's head falls out of the sky and lands on top of the girl's own head. The father's head can still talk.

Also, there are strange, often haunting images by Derek White.



I read an interview with Lucie Brock-Broido where she said: "I believe wholly in the slim volume of verse, I believe in the slim everything, I like the trees to be slim in October." The Revisionist is slim the way Wisconsin trees are slim in October. They look dead, but they're alive, and you can see through them with a weird kind of clarity. Every October makes you recognize them again. Looking through the branches, you see that the sky is dark and winter is coming. The Revisionist makes things visible in this way, even as the revisionist character in the book sees less and less.

Coda! Something must have happened recently about women writers of fantasy and science fiction, specifically about there not being any, but I sort of missed it because I was busy with a book launch, lol. Anyway, in response to this, people have been saying that yes actually there are such writers, and Nina Allan put together a list of 101 of them here. I'm on the list, which is really kind of her, and obviously this is one thing I like about the list. The other thing is the way she includes writers who aren't usually thought to be writing f/sf, but who, in fact, are our people, like Clarice Lispector and Anna Kavan and Jan Morris. If I were going to add one person to the list, it would be Miranda Mellis. F/sf fans, I really encourage you to read her. Her work is weird and beautiful and important. It will fall out of the sky and land on your head and start talking.

cover art, Locus review

Some recent Olondria stuff: Kathleen Jennings, who created my marvelous cover art, has blogged about the process here. It's a fascinating glimpse into the way the cover developed. The image shown here is an early color study. Check out Kathleen's post to see a recreation of the Bainish skyline on her dining-room table, as well as the final wraparound cover!

Also, Gary K. Wolfe reviewed A Stranger in Olondria for Locus Magazine, and I died. Sample sentence:

"[J]ust about every piece is in place here – it’s the rare first novel with no unnecessary parts – and, in terms of its elegant language, its sharp insights into believable characters, and its almost revelatory focus on the value and meaning of language and story, it’s the most impressive and intelligent first novel I expect to see this year, or perhaps for a while longer."

Read the full review here.

real/unreal

People keep asking: "What's it like?"

Yesterday I submitted my dissertation. This is what you do when you're completely done, when you're not going to revise another word. That was at about 2 p.m., I think. Then at 6 I was in A Room of One's Own Bookstore in Madison to launch my novel, which is also what you do when you're completely done and you're not going to revise another word. This is a photo of the amazing "A Stranger in Olondria" cake my friend Kat baked for the occasion!

"What's it like?" What's WHAT like? How can you disentangle your experiences? And on the other hand, how can you talk about all of them at the same time?

At the book party, people asked great questions. Here's one: "When I heard you'd written a novel, I thought it would be about your experiences in Egypt and Sudan. And then when I saw the title, I realized it wasn't. But did anything from those experiences go into the book?"

Yes, of course, of course! Nothing is made up. Everything is an extension or exploration or transformation of the world we know: real and unreal at the same time.

Question: "You talked about how, in your book, there are names for winds. Is that your idea, or is it based on something in real life?"

Nothing is made up. Nothing is made up. In Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, the patient remembers the names of Saharan winds. At the back of the book, Ondaatje mentions a book by Lyall Watson called Heaven's Breath, which taught him about winds. I loved Ondaatje's book so much, I also read Watson's! (And forgot the title and author! So I'm lucky Keith was at the book launch to give people the information!) And this is why, in my imaginary islands, the winds have names.

"So, what's it like?"

My friend made a beautiful cake in the shape of a book. This cake is an unreal book and a real dessert. It has words on it and you can eat them. It's got chocolate and white cake and freaking raspberries or something, I mean I don't know exactly what's in it but when you taste it you're there. You're right there. It's just unreal.