Re: NYTimes.com Article: America Yawns at Foreign Fiction

Thanks for the excellent article Steve.  What a
powerful quote:

"It's a great paradox of American life," Ms. Allen
said, "that on the one hand we feel very cosmopolitan,
with Mexican restaurants and cab drivers who speak
Swahili, and we feel that we inhabit a mind-boggling
multicultural universe, but at the end of the day, it
breaks down to different ways of being American."

And this is literature from Europe that American
publishers are having difficulty putting on the
market.  Imagine the scenario for literature from the
Periphery?  I remember when Mahfouz won the prize the
same reaction occured.  But I wonder if in some cases
there is more to it than just an unresponsive market. 
How many have heard of the great Palestinian writers
like Ghassan Kanafani or Mahmud Darwish?  As an
Arab-American living in the US it took me 25 years to
hear about Darwish and 36 for Kanafani.  In Sociology
we have some names: Samir Amin for one.  But to make
it one has to literally be stationed in the US, as for
example the great work of Edward Said. 

Khaldoun



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