News

• February 23, 2010

  Bookseller praise for Where We Going, Daddy?

  Lisa Stefanacci from The Book Works in Del Mar, CA called Where We Going, Daddy? “a book to keep, to share, to think about, to talk about, and I fear, to defend.”  Read more on The Book Works Blog here.

• January 27, 2010

  The Glass Room on Diane Rehm

  Simon Mawer’s Booker shortlisted novel The Glass Room was the subject of Diane Rehm’s “Readers’ Review” discussion today on NPR.  Listen to the show here.

• November 18, 2009

  Michael Greenberg on Electric Literature

  Michael Greenberg, author of Beg, Borrow, Steal, writes about writing and money in an essay for Electric Literature’s The Outlet.  “[Writers] sound like a group of salesmen, insisting on a materialism that we don’t really possess, as if to trick themselves into believing that the profession is like any other.”

• The Glass Room in WaPo

  In The Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote of Simon Mawer’s Booker Shortlisted novel, “The Glass Room works so effectively because Mawer embeds provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that’s eerily erotic and tremendously exciting…. [A] gorgeous novel.”  Read the full review here.

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Featured Book

The Glass Room “Readers’ Review”

Diane Rehm called Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room “breath-takingly beautiful” on her monthly Reader’s Review panel featuring the book. An hour-long discussion of the work featured panelists Ron Charles, fiction editor at the Washington Post, Bernard Lambeck, attorney and descendent of the family on which the story is based, and Susan Piedmont-Palladino, architect, curator at the National Building Museum, and professor of architecture at Virginia Tech. Several callers recommended The Glass Room as perfect for reading groups.  

Listen to the discussion, read Ron Charles’s review of the book, check out the reading group guide, and see photographs of the architectural masterpiece that inspired the story.

Featured Book

The Patience Stone

Written by Atiq Rahimi

 In Persian folklore, Syngue Sabour is the name of a magical black stone, a patience stone, which absorbs the plight of those who confide in it. It is believed that the day it explodes, after having received too much hardship and pain, will be the day of the Apocalypse. But here, the Syngue Sabour is not a stone but rather a man lying brain-dead with a bullet lodged in his neck. His wife is with him, sitting by his side. But she resents him for having sacrificed her to the war, for never being able to resist the call to arms, for wanting to be a hero, and in the end, after all was said and done, for being incapacitated in a small skirmish. Yet she cares, and she speaks to him. She even talks to him more and more, opening up her deepest desires, pains, and secrets. While in the streets rival factions clash and soldiers are looting and killing around her, she speaks of her life, never knowing if her husband really hears. And it is an extraordinary confession, without restraint, about sex and love and her anger against a man who never understood her, who mistreated her, who never showed her any respect or kindness. Her admission releases the weight of oppression of marital, social, and religious norms, and she leads her story up to the great secret that is unthinkable in a country such as Afghanistan. Winner of the Prix Goncourt, The Patience Stone captures with great courage and spare, poetic, prose the reality of everyday life for an intelligent woman under the oppressive weight of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.