Saturday, March 29, 2014

Paper & Salt: the Love of Literature

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. (‘Measure for Measure’ Act1 Sc4 )

  In The Independent Alexander Nazaryan profilesHelen Oyeyemi, a postmodern literary wizard.
       It's worth it just for the mention that:

In 2007, she enrolled in a creative writing graduate programme at Columbia University, which would have likely led to a pat novel about the Anglo-Nigerian experience, perhaps a premature memoir of the sort pumped out by so many writers with nothing but their own slightly-deviated-from-the-average stories. But she found New York a "confrontational city" that distracted her from writing. And the workshop model of teaching proved "stressful".
       That's a a hell of a stretch for a hunch -- "would have likely led to" ? really ? -- but I'll take my MFA-bashing anywhere and any way I can get it (and, as a longtime New Yorker, Nazaryan has a bit more local street cred than if it were a UK journalist making the claims). Oyeyemi's most recent novel is Boy, Snow, Bird; get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

 At DeutscheWelle Jochen Kürten profiles Sigrid Löffler, whose new book apparently looks at The global expansion of immigrant literature.
       Yeah, there's a term I'm hoping catches on ..... (Dear god -- it apparently has ... see, for example, The Problem with Immigrant Literature by Nora Caplan-Bricker in The New Republic.)