Word: ever
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cover of the British edition of Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf; 336 pages), her first since Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? in 1994. It's rare that a blurb escapes from its usual station on the back cover of a book, but if Hornby ever called me the best American writer of my generation, I'd tattoo it on my forehead...
...German government--aid agency GTZ to build a road in Kunduz, in Afghanistan, and that Jan handed some cash to a Taliban middleman [Sept. 7]. We would like to point out that the project mentioned is not a GTZ project, and no one of that name has ever worked as a subcontractor for us. Neither we nor our partners make any payments to antigovernment groups. All of our projects are monitored very strictly...
...Ever since Jesuit monks brought coffee to Guatemala three centuries ago, raising the beans has been a losing business for small farmers. Conditions are miserable - try lugging 100 lb. of fertilizer up a mountain - and even though coffee is the world's second most valuable traded commodity, after oil, the money it brings in is measly. "It's not enough to live on," says Luis Antonio, who has grown coffee near Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala's western highlands, for three decades but gets deeper in debt each year. "What we earn isn't enough to buy food for our children...
Novelists love twins--evil twins, vanishing twins, incestuous twins, conjoined twins, spooky dead-little-girl twins. We make handy symbols for any writer who feels inclined to muse on the nature of human identity, which is basically every writer ever. But twins aren't symbols; they're people. There are not, to my knowledge, any great identical-twin novelists (though I think John Barth has a twin sister), and I have never yet read a fictional account of twinness that I found convincing, with one exception: Darin Strauss's excellent Chang and Eng, about Barnum & Bailey's famous Siamese twins...
...gravestones and ghosts and pallid, hollow-eyed waifs, it's pure goth porn. At times, it's more. When the lonely phantom Elspeth, longing for solidity, snuggles her ectoplasmic self into a little desk drawer for comfort, it's so viscerally convincing, you wonder how a corporeal being could ever have imagined...