At one of the kickoff events for New York City’s PEN World Voices festival,actress Mia Farrow, critic Bernard-Henri Levy and novelist Dinaw Mengestu met tonight at the Alliance Francais to discuss the ongoing genocidal situation in Darfur, which has gotten no better after five years of worldwide apathy. Hundreds of thousands of people are living in squalid, barren refugee camps after their villages were bombed and destroyed by the Sudanese government (the conflict — no big surprise — originated in ethnic battles …

In 1973, as a follow up to his highly successful “Transformer” album, Lou Reed released the album “Berlin”. The ten-song concept album tells of the disintegration of a couple living in Germany. The couple, Caroline and Jim, follows a dark path that starts with drug addiction and descends into infidelity, spousal abuse, loss of children due to unfit parenting, and, ultimately, suicide. The album was a commercial flop upon release. Rock critic Lester Bangs, up until this point a huge Lou Reed …

Two weeks ago a New York Times Book Review cover article by Niall Ferguson all but endorsed John McCain for President, also referring to a book that called for eternal USA military domination of Muslim nations “the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 — indeed, since the end of the cold war”.

This weekend’s New York Times Book Review continues to buttress up the pro-Iraq-War position that is at …

1. I’m ready for my fifteen minutes of fame now.

2. The culture wars: comic style.

3. Laura and Jenna Bush held a discussion of the children’s book they collaborated on, Read All About It!

4. I remember being thoroughly engrossed with and creeped out by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca when I read it in high school, then having the same reaction to Hitchcock’s film version when I saw it a few years later, so the story behind how du Maurier wrote the …

The literature biz, not an easy biz even in the best of times, is reeling from the challenges of new media, new pricing models, new access models and new corporate ownership models. Future trends remain unclear, but there are encouraging portents lately:

1. A self-published autobiography, Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? by psychotherapist Jane Haynes, has been nominated for a prestigious PEN prize.

2. I don’t think you’ll catch me reading I Was Told There’d Be …

I hadn’t realized the extent to which Mark Sarvas had written a psychological comic novel in the classic tradition of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman (John Updike …

1. I don’t usually pay attention to “Earth Day” any more than to “National Poetry Month“, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call attention to an impressive book that’s hitting the stores on this day, Tuesday, April 22.

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau by Bill McKibben is a substantial, eclectic anthology of original texts by many American writers concerned with ecology or nature: John Muir, Frederick Law Olmsted, Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, Theodore Dreiser, Robinson Jeffers, …

Michael Orthofer has been bemoaning the English-only literary focus of the New York Times Book Review for a long time, and he reaches a brilliant sarcastic pitch with a recent blog post titled 29 Words. It’s more important that you read this than that you read anything I will say here this weekend.

Of course, the Book Review editors might feel singled-out by this type of analysis, since they are effectively a pillar of the USA commercial publishing/bookselling industry, and it’s …

My family is full to overflowing with storytellers. Southerners on one side and Arabs on the other, for as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by people who like to spin tales, true or false or handsomely embellished amalgamations of the two. So it’s really no wonder that I’ve been making up stories since I was able to figure out how. When I was a kid, I usually did this in face-to-face conversations, inventing first-person narratives on the spot, telling people about …

1. The Beat Poetry Happy Hour will take place at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City this Thursday, April 17 from 6:30 to 7:30 pm, featuring Tao Lin, Zachary German, Clarissa Beyah Taylor, Larissa Shmailo, Joy Leftow and, of all people, me playing bongo drums. How, you may wonder, did I end up playing bongo drums? Well, it has something to do with a recent Bowery Poetry Club Beat Poetry Happy Hour I attended. A drummer was struggling a …