Quickly Noted
Keith Gessen of New York gets to hang out with Salman Rushdie at Yankee Stadium, where they spend as much time talking about the Yankees’ pitching depth as they do Indian literature. Sometimes in tandem: “I don’t think you’d find Sir Vidia at a baseball game, do you? I don’t think sports are one of his interests.”
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Trachtenberg files a story for the Wall Street Journal on the bumper crop of Iraq War memoirs. John Crawford and Kayla Williams have already gotten plenty of attention, of course, but the mini-genre heats up in October with releases by Colby Buzzell, Jason Christopher Hartley, and Nathaniel Fick. (Remember that I called Fick’s One Bullet Away “the best memoir I’ve read in at least a year.”)
photo: Paolo Pelegrin/Magnum
18 September 2005 | uncategorized |
Meet Next Week’s Guest Bloggers
I’ll be on vacation all next week, and won’t even be checking my email for days on end. To keep Beatrice going while I’m away, I called on a couple friends and convinced them to do some daily posting.
Pearl Abraham is the author of The Seventh Beggar, about which Harold Bloom wrote, “By a kind of miracle of sympathetic imagination, Pearl Abraham has been able to revivify what may be the most spiritually disturbing of all Chasidic tales.” An excerpt of The Seventh Beggar appears in Bloom’s new book, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. Abraham’s earlier novels are Giving Up America and the international bestseller The Romance Reader. Recent stories were published in Epoch and the Forward; “Hasidic Noir,” published in Brooklyn Noir, just won the Shamus Award for best short story. Abraham is also the editor of the Dutch anthology Een sterke vrouw: Jewish Heroines in Literature (Meulenhoff, 2000).
Emily Gordon is an editor, critic, and poet who’s been writing emdashes.com, a blog about the New Yorker, since December 2004. For Beatrice, she’ll be covering as much of the New Yorker Festival as she can handle—i.e., lots and lots—during the weekend of Sept. 23-25.
16 September 2005 | housecleaning |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
