I’m thrilled to have the opening pages of my novel-in-progress, After the Levantines, selected for a 2022 First Pages Prize by Justin Torres. The recognition comes at a time when I’m deep in a revision of the draft, which began as a story collection in 2018. I’m very grateful to the committee and to Justin Torres, for the recognition and support of this project. Learn more about the First Page Prize, and all the prizewinners here.
My essay for the CBC's August selection, on The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine
Alameddine’s sixth book, which earlier this year won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, is an extraordinary chronicle of the refugees who were forced to flee after the Syrian civil war began in 2011, the humanitarian crisis that grew more tragic by the year, and the struggles of the volunteers who work to stabilize their lives. By 2015, over a million migrants and asylum seekers, fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, sought asylum in Europe, arriving by raft on the Greek island of Lesbos. The book is also a critique of the global divide between passive observers and displaced people, and how, in a world that is ever smaller, those in stable democracies have become numb to the oppression of hostile governments and violent militias. I was honored to write about the novel for Alta Journal’s California Book Club, and being a fan of Alameddine’s books, was excited to delve into the novel’s striking visual style, and precise, atmospheric detail (Alameddine is also an accomplished painter). You can see Rabih Alameddine in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Aleksandar Hemon, on August 18 at 5 p.m. Full details follow the essay, which you can read here.
My essay on David Hockney appears in World Literature Today
My essay, “Deconstructing Celia” appears in the just-released May issue of World Literature Today. I wrote about David Hockney (and his 1980 book, Pictures), the search for form and subject during my years as a young art student, and finding my way through a painter's vocabulary. The issue, subtitled Muse: Writers, Artists, and Their Inspiration, features essays, poetry, and interviews, and includes work by an international roster of writers. World Literature Today is the University of Oklahoma's award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, and a digital subscription is affordable! Learn more here.
My July newsletter is live
The return of our AWP panel—High Style and Misdemeanors comes to 2021’s virtual conference
It’s been a long road for our panel, but High Style and Misdemeanors: The Virtues and Vices of Elevated Prose, which we’d first planned to present last year in San Antonio, will broadcast March 5 as part of AWP’s 2021 virtual conference. If you’re going, please join me, Anita Felicelli, Olga Zilberbourg, Lillian Howan, and Aatif Rashid for our conversation on elevated prose—when we ask the question, “Can writers whose work concerns immigration and displacement embrace a stylistic approach that has historically been disengaged and apolitical?” We’ll look at how high style has progressed to include contemporary writers of fiction, and as a result, taken on broader and more varied meanings, and the wonderful panel will discuss high style in their own work and read excerpts.
We’re providing an outline that includes nearly the full text of our panel, available for download in our AWP chat space which opens on March 3.
I’ve turned comments on, so if you have questions, just drop them here.
New year, new newsletter
Issue one of my long-in-the-making newsletter is officially out. In 2021, I’ll be sending quarterly dispatches on reading, writing, and the road to book publication. I’ll also include thoughts on writing craft, and flash interviews with writers—talking about literary fiction, writing life, and their new books. I’ll be using Mailchimp, so in the world of proliferating newsletters, it’s easy to unsubscribe anytime. To sign up, just head to the Subscribe block at the bottom of any page here. And to read issue one, you can go here.
This is one of my favorite photos of myself—walking in the garden at Henry James’ Lamb House, in Rye, Sussex.
“A Brief History of the Colloquial Title” at The Millions
This essay, published in 2014, is one of my favorites, so I was delighted to see The Millions recently re-upped it on Twitter. The writing arose from a fascination of what seemed a vernacular drift in titles of novels and story collections, so it was a pleasure to dive in and investigate how this direction came about and the extent of its variations.
What I’ve come to think of as the colloquial title rejects literary tone for the purely voice-driven. Colloquial titles can be wordy, even prolix, and often make use of a purposefully curious yet catchy syntax. The colloquial title is based in common parlance, but also draws on aphorism, the stock phrase, and familiar expressions. For a more elevated voice-driven title, look to the literary/biblical allusion, the colloquial title’s highborn cousin. With exemplars like As I Lay Dying and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the allusion-based title has undisputed gravitas, and frankly, when it comes to authoritative tone, is hard to beat. Think of The Violent Bear It Away and A River Runs Through It.
Read the entire essay here.
The 2018 O. Henry Prize Stories in a new Persian transation
Via The Tehran Times, the 2018 edition of The O. Henry Prize Stories is now available in a new translation by Ali Famian, and has just been released in Iran. The edition is titled for one of the stories, “Lucky Dragon,” by Viet Dinh, and my story, “An Amount of Discretion,” which first appeared in The Southern Review, is included. The 2018 anthology, edited by Laura Furman, features stories by Jo Ann Beard, Jo Lloyd, Jamil Jan Kochai, Brad Felver, Thomas Bolt, and more. Read the story here.
And thanks to Jo Lloyd for this great link on bookstores in Tehran!
My latest column at Invisible History.
“Searching for Family History in My Grandmother’s Embroidery,” runs today in my column at Catapult Magazine. My grandmother, Fausya Zemberekci Alwan, lived a life bound by family and cultural expectations, and to many her life might have appeared small from the outside—but her life was extraordinary. Growing up, I was always fascinated by her embroidery, so I’m grateful to be able to share this story of the new pieces we recently discovered. It’s those latest pieces that seem to tell a deeper, more personal story.
And if you are one of the many sheltered in place today in the SF Bay Area (as I and my family are), or those around the world working from home or taking classes from home, be safe, take care, and take care of each other.
We'll miss #AWP20 in San Antonio
In a turn that no one expected, our panel for High Style and MIsdemeanors, scheduled for this Thursday, March 5, at #AWP20, is cancelled. The decision was a difficult one, but the right one for us. For those headed to the conference, I hope you have a fun, enriching, and healthy visit to a great city. It would have been lovely to go to San Antonio, but for now, my panel colleagues and I are looking forward to #AWP21, where we hope to bring the discussion to the conference in Kansas City next year.
