I’m now blogging for the San Francisco Chronicle, as part of their City Brights feature. Visit my SF Chronicle blog here.
L’année brouillard, the French translation of The Year of Fog (translated by the wonderful Sophie Aslanidès) is out today. There’s a nice review of the book on the French literary blog Chez Clarabel. And the Buchet Chastel website has a wonderful virtual copy of L’Annee Brouillard, wherein you can flip through the first couple of chapters. A little love for your Francophile friends: purchase the French translation of THE YEAR OF FOG here.
Luis Meza Valdiva took his 22-month-old daughter, Yosseline, by gunpoint from her mother on East 14th Street in San Leandro this morning. I could not find this listed on the Amber Alert website. My information comes from the Chronicle: Valdiva is described as a Latino man with brown hair and brown eyes, about 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing about 160 pounds. He was last seen driving a white 1992 four-door Toyota Camry with California license plate 5GBD911. The suspect was last seen driving on state Highway 99 in central California and may be headed toward Mexico.
My friend Wade in Texas wrote this beautiful song for his father-in-law, Sir Donald Neil MacCormick, who died on April 5, 2009. Sir MacCormick’s incredibly illustrious career included drafting the constitution of the European Union and being a leading voice in the Scottish Nationalist Party that his father founded, but Wade’s song is about a different part of the man. Read Wade’s entire tribute to his father-in-law here. But you would not know that he had met with princes and prime ministers or that conferences were organized in foreign countries to discuss his life’s work. You would not know...
I met Georges and Anne Borchardt at Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. The couple co-founded their literary agency in 1967, and are known for introducing American audiences to the work of Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Pierre Bourdieu, Marguerite Duras, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Eugene Ionesco, Jacques Lacan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Elie Wiesel. When we met, I’d just had my first novel published with San Francisco independent MacAdam/Cage (sans agent) and was looking for representation. Jill McCorkle, a faculty member at the conference, read a chapter of the novel I was working on and set up a meeting....
