I noticed recently that I’d been getting a lot of hits from the Netherlands, but couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized that the Dutch translation of THE YEAR OF FOG came out this month, and the novel is currently featured in the book club section of the Dutch magazine Libelle. MyDutch publisher, Archipel, kept my original title, Ocean Beach. Here’s the cover.
My friend Wade Williams wrote this beautiful essay for The Texas Observer. If you want to see more of his writing, check out The Tao of Wade over at Fiction Attic. The exercise: Write about revisiting the roads of your youth.
I gave a reading yesterday at ArtFete, a fundraising event for ArtSFest, which celebrates and showcases a wide range of arts in the Bay Area. Also reading was Jeff Greenwald, author of several books about travel. Greenwald read a wonderful piece about dawn-diving off Australia from The Size of the World. You can read an excerpt from The Size of the World here. Greenwald did a fetching impression of a moray eel, described the ethereal, cocoon-encased slumber of the parrot fish, and quoted something Arthur C. Clarke said to him in a private conversation a long time ago, when...
Last night, Ellen Sussman hosted a reading and party in her home for Lalita Tademy, author, most recently, of the novel Red River, a multi-generational story inspired by the men in her family. The first half of the novel centers on the Colfax Massacre, an actual event which took place on Easter Sunday, 1873, in the town of Colfax, Louisiana, and resulted in the deaths of 280 black men. Tademy read a moving piece about how one of her ancestors refused his slave name and instead handed down to his sons the name he brought to America from Africa–noting...
Jenny Durant, who is currently in the Philippines on a Fullbright, writes alluringly about what she calls “the native rice dilemma”–the impossible obstacles that Ifugao rice farmers face when trying to make ends meet. It’s a story of how the Department of Agriculture infiltrated a centuries-old practice, introducing a breed of rice that effectively destroyed the soil. So, the D.A. provided a solution—a new rice variety. But after a few years, they encountered the same problems: the hardening soil, the low harvests, etc. So every few years the D.A. had a new variety to introduce to the farmers—it was...
