February 2011
4 posts
Recently . . .
I wrote two other pieces about Egypt for the Huffington Post blog.
This was before I found out, from Nate Silver’s post in the New York Times, that no one actually reads the Huffington Post blog, and that the fair market value of my blog posts is the price of a Hershey bar with almonds, maybe a little less. You might think I’d be disappointed, but in fact I thought Nate’s...
Inside the White House
The Secretary of State: The peaceful citizens of Egypt are gathered in Tahrir Square, singing songs and chanting slogans for democracy.
The President: What do they want?
The Secretary of State: President Mubarak to resign. Economic opportunity. An end to state torture. They also want an interim unity government and amendments to the Egyptian Constitution to allow free and fair elections.
...
Swamplandia!
A little over a year ago, in one of those rare moments of prescience that allows us to see the future and take a step or two ahead of it, I noticed that Karen Russell would be teaching at the Tin House Writer’s Workshop in the summer of 2010.
I had read St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen’s collection of Gothic, absurd, and darkly funny tales involving mystical...
Jalal Alamgir and Joshua Ferris at the AWP
We drove over to the AWP Conference at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on a rainy Saturday morning in Washington, D.C.
Jalal Alamgir gave the first reading we saw. He appeared on a panel of Bangladeshi writers, in this case four Americans born in Bangladesh who write about the country of their birth, except that Alamgir was born in Pakistan, if I remember correctly. He read a story about a woman...
