I used to collect book jacket outrageousness. Partly dedications, whose total mendacity was revealed to me when an author, having just divorced his wife - and being in the midst of several other relationships - still dedicated his book to his wife, with undying love. But I prefer to collect examples of the formula “X divides his time between…” All decent authors divide their time between. The best one I can remember was someone who divided his time between southern Gloucestershire and the Philippines. For some reason, I have just been looking at the Granta website and found something that surpasses even that:
Nicole Krauss is the author of the novels Man Walks into a Room (Hamish Hamilton/Anchor) and The History of Love (Hamish Hamilton/W. W. Norton), which won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was shortlisted for the Orange, Médicis and Femina prizes. She was born in New York City, where she still lives, though from time to time she imagines and even makes overtures towards living elsewhere. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
She wants slapping. And I say that despite a firm opposition to violence large and small against women. And some men.
Elsewhere on the Granta site though is this old but brilliant essay by Binyavanga Wainana, which I read hoping to god I hadn't done any of what he was castigating. It's a bit difficult not to write about war-torn atrocity when you're writing a book about Liberia, so I certainly did. There were no lions though. Somewhat relatedly, I subscribed to Vanity Fair when they offered me a free Moleskine diary. The diary is fine; VF is awful. The recent special issue on Africa, guest-edited by Bono, was predictably awful and more. The best thing in it was another essay by Binyavanga Wainana, which is here if you're bothered. I suspect not, given the loud silence that worm burdens met with. A fascination with helminth semantics is just me then.