Happy first of May, Asymptote readers! On this first of May, readers and observers are reeling at a bit of a scuffle around awards (this happens more rarely than you’d think): a few authors, among them Michael Ondaatje, Rachel Kushner, Salman Rushdie, and Joyce Carol Oates have formally withdrawn from a gala event honoring the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo with its Freedom of Expression award, citing discomfort with the periodical’s inflammatory depictions. If you’re interested in an insider look at the controversy, here’s the letter between the PEN exec and a dissident. Meanwhile, French cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo says he’s withdrawing from depictions of Mohammed altogether, for reasons you may not anticipate. And altogether less contentious is the PEN Manheim award for translation, given to Chinese and Japanese scholar/translator Burton Watson.
I love a good story as much as the next guy, unless the next guy is a highfalutin modernist. The New Statesman wonders why good storytelling is so apparently secondary to whatever qualifies as “clever” fiction. And if fiction is difficult, memoir’s a minefield: here’s an essay about the difficulty of writing about family, a problem Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose fourth book of the series My Struggle appears in English translation this week, is most certainly acutely aware of.
At the Boston Review, a lovely look at a writer often thought of as singly political: Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, whose great accomplishment was art—and whose “life sings with many voices.” And perennial friend of the blog, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, debates the very continental categories I unceasingly employ in the roundup in interview with LitHub, also contesting: “a writer is a social climber.” And if you’re interested in fascinating interviews, perhaps you’d like this shake of solipsism, via Viet Thanh Nguyen and Viet Thanh Nguyen (yes, you read that right).
In light of the earthquake tragedy in Nepal, words of advice from a journalist who covered another horrific natural disaster, namely the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Here’s how not to treat the tragedy.