The only offensive thing about my novel is that it’s been banned: I originally hoped to launch my novel, The Gulf Between Us, at the first Dubai literary festival, which kicks off next week. But I won’t be there because the book has been banned. [Guardian]
Dickens’s Refuge for Fallen Women: The story of Charles Dickens’s ‘chaste little harem’ for misfits, and the lost book he wrote about them. [TLS]
Atwood pulls out of Dubai festival in censorship protest: Margaret Atwood has pulled out of the inauguraul Emirates Airline international festival of literature in the wake of a novelist being blacklisted for potential offence to “cultural sensitivities”. Other authors due to appear at the festival, including bestselling children’s authors Anthony Horowitz and Lauren Child, are now also reconsidering whether to attend. [Guardian]
As their country descends into chaos, Pakistani writers are winning acclaim: Tales of religious extremism, class divides, dictators, war and love have come from writers who grew up largely in Pakistan and now move easily between London, Karachi, New York and Lahore. [Guardian]
Norman Mailer: ‘Deer Park’ Letters: These letters, written while Mailer was working on his novel The Deer Park or just after he finished it, are addressed to three novelists he was close to at the time, William Styron, Vance Bourjaily, and James Jones. [NYRB]
Widow self-publishes ‘recreation’ of Philip K Dick’s final novel: Tessa Dick, who described her self-publication of The Owl in Daylight as a tribute to her former husband, was Dick’s fifth and final wife, marrying him in 1973. [Guardian]
Stegner’s Complaint: The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite – those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber. [NYT]
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