Word: authoring
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...Japanese crime fiction, where women mostly inhabit peripheral positions as prostitutes or femmes fatales. Like Natsuo Kirino, whose best-selling 1997 novel Out chronicles a band of disaffected middle-aged bento-box factory workers who moonlight as murderesses, Nonami places women at the center of her work. As the author of some 50 books, she is more prolific than Kirino, although only one previous work has been translated into English. That's The Hunter, a fetching police procedural that follows Detective Takako Otomichi as she struggles to prove her mettle and earn the respect of her loutish male counterparts...
...issue in Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem (HarperOne; 304 pages) haunts him. Once a Baptist pastor, Ehrman recounts how trying to unravel the ferocious conundrum--of a kind, all-powerful deity who also allows suffering--undid his faith. Since then, as a religion professor and best-selling author (2005's Misquoting Jesus), he has knowledgeably subverted his old beliefs. Here his biblical expertise is a help and a hindrance, since his conceit is to examine only explanations of suffering that appear in Scripture. As Ehrman takes issue with pain--portrayed as punishment for sin (in Genesis...
...nation's Nobel literature laureate, Naguib Mahfouz. Such high praise may be a little premature: Mahfouz founded modern Arabic literature and wrote almost 50 novels over half a century. But Al Aswany - who continues to work on the side as a dentist in Cairo - does share the legendary author's talent for constructing simple stories about Egyptian life that convey universal truths in defense of human dignity. His writing tackles the most pressing issues facing Egyptian society today, from dictatorship and corruption to economic inequality and Islamic extremism. "The greatest role of literature is its human message," said the gregarious...
Some of Al Aswany's popularity undoubtedly stems from his delight in smashing social taboos. Apart from the barbs against Egypt's regime that flow from his characters' mouths, the author has expressed understanding, if not actual sympathy, for Islamic extremists, and has written explicitly about issues like homosexuality and abortion that had long been taboo in Arabic literature. One of the main characters in Yacoubian, for example, is the gay editor of a Cairo newspaper, who uses money to seduce a married Egyptian soldier desperate to feed his family. In Chicago, a female character visits a sex shop...
...author resists any analysis of his writing, but he does not dispute that both of his novels end with a spark of hope. Yacoubian concludes with the hopefulness of Busayna's marriage - albeit to the dubious Zaki Bey. And Chicago ends with a similarly unexpected union. Perhaps this is Al Aswany's way of suggesting that Egypt, too, broken down as it may be, will continue its quest for renewal...