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As the general secretary of the Ministry of Culture and then the Minister of Culture, Jeryes Samawi oversaw the Jordanian Writers Association (JWA) until a constitutional reform passed in October banned ministers and members of parliament from holding dual citizenship. (At nineteen he immigrated with his mother to New York City and became a U.S. citizen). Samawi subsequently renounced his American citizenship, but in the ensuing political wrangling, he eventually resigned.
The author of The Cat Who Taught Me How to Fly, a recently published autobiographical novel about a former Communist's experience in a Jordanian prison during the 1980s, Hashem Gharhyba (left) attended the University of Baghdad, in Iraq, and studied to be a medical-lab technician. "A year ago, they would not have published [my book]," he told Morison and explained that the Arab Spring protests have altered the political landscape. "Now they published it without any problems."
"The political regime does not want people to question," said avant-garde short story writer Hisham Bustani. "The religion does not want people to question. Everything is given. Take orders. The school is like a military system. The university is like a prison. It's behind walls. There are gates. They check IDs." Bustani told Morison he's happy that people have taken to the streets in protest, but he's not optimistic that it will result in real change. "There's no ideology, no thinkers," he said. "The 'Arab Spring' as CNN calls it, will soon see autumn."
The author of five books of short stories in Arabic and the editor of three local magazines, including the women's magazine Tyche, Basma Al Nsour told Morison that if there is tension in the Jordanian literary community, it exists not between writers and censors, but rather between liberal writers and religious writers.
The ancient theater, built into a hillside in Amman, was built during the reign of Antonius Pius (138-161 CE).
The modern Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the country east of Israel, stretches from the southern hills of Syria to the Red Sea. The capital city of Amman, shown here, is the political, cultural, and commercial center, with a population of approximately three million people.
At a November 2011 performance on the Murphey School Radio Show, a cross between the Grand Ole Opry and A Prairie Home Companion in Orange County, North Carolina, poet Alan Shapiro read the poem "Sick Bed." Shapiro's latest book is Night of the Republic, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last month.
Amazon takes a jab at Apple's iPad in a new advertisement; the history, appeal, and common disdain of listening to audio books; the competitive nature of landing a job with one of the "big six" publishing houses; and other news.
Valentine's Day isn't until next Tuesday, but some particularly amorous books (and booksellers) at Skylight Books in Los Angeles are already in the mood. Enjoy!
The Pushcart Prizes, given annually since 1976 for poems, stories, and essays published by literary magazines and indie outfits, purport to highlight the "best of the small presses" in a yearly anthology.
Looking to apply some objective analysis to the results (and determine, by Pushcart standards, where his own fiction might be in the most distinguished company), one writer has taken to tracking winning venues over the years.
Since 2008 Clifford Garstang, author of the story collection In an Uncharted Country (Press 53, 2009) and editor of Prime Number Magazine, has looked back at the past ten years of Pushcart anthologies and calculated the most-honored magazines, using a system that awards points for Pushcart wins and honorable mentions. The results for 2012, broken out by genre, were reported last week his Perpetual Folly blog.
This year's tally saw Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Review taking top slots across all three genres, with Conjunctions ranking in the top five in both fiction and nonfiction. Poetry was the front-runner in its genre of specialization. Big movers in fiction, in relation to Garstang's 2011 rankings, were A Public Space and One Story. In nonfiction, Harvard Review and n+1 made jumps this year, tied for thirty-second place. (Small presses make a lesser showing, though BOA Editions holds the fifteenth spot in poetry.)
Garstang admits that ten-year retrospective he takes naturally favors older journals, as well as magazines that appear in print (only one online journal was highlighted in the 2012 award anthology). "Pushcart has for several years been criticized for discriminating against online magazines," Garstang writes on his blog. "Online magazines have made some inroads in the annual volume. I expect this will accelerate and the problem will correct itself. We shall see. In the meantime, for those of us who submit work to online journals—some of which are excellent—we have to look elsewhere for measures of quality."
For more information about the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology, visit the prize website.
