Harper, $26.99.
Lionel Shriver wrote her latest novel, The New Republic, before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and, according to the book’s foreword, held it back until both her sales record and the public appetite for a terrorism-themed satire increased. Her first stroke of good fortune came swiftly when her 2003 novel We Need Read More
Longreads.com is the internet-famous website that aggregates all the pieces of longform writing people* are passing around on the web, and puts the best ones (or the most popular, which lets face it, are often mutually exclusive) in one place. Well, not only do they now have a reading night at a book store—a sure sign of success (with people who go to readings)—but they also have a book! Definitely as much if not more of a sign of success than a reading. It may be an eBook, which can’t exactly be sold at a bookstore you can have a reading at, but it’s still a book. Read More
In early 2003, people started killing each other in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. The Darfuris rose up against the country’s regime. Then the country’s regime cracked down on the Darfuris. The crackdown became a massacre. Things had gone from the barbaric to the Boschian. Thousands died, then hundreds of thousands. Shock at the scale of the killing was compounded by its genocidal overtones. Darfuris regard themselves as Africans, but the Sudanese government, which is focused in Khartoum, a city in central Sudan, regards itself as Arab; the state is a relic of the colonial era, and it contains a fractious hodgepodge of peoples. Although the Darfuri uprising was ostensibly about resources—Darfuris felt the regime had forsaken the region—the ferocity of its suppression suggested something more primal. Old codes had been reactivated. The hodgepodge seemed to have given way to pogroms.
The killing in Darfur also suggested, to many observers, something familiar. Read More
