books

If You Give Enough Helper Monkeys Enough Typewriters: An Interview with Madras Press Publisher Sumanth Prabhaker

03.29.10

Sumanth Prabhaker’s Madras Press recently published a quartet of novellas by Aimee Bender, Trinie Dalton, Rebecca Lee and Prabhaker himself. The books are small, square, beautifully designed and include neither bar codes nor blurbs. The profits from each book are donated to a charity of the author’s choice. Part of what makes this interesting is the type of non-profits they select — the proceeds from Prabhaker’s book will be donated to a Helping Hands, a group that trains helper monkeys for the disabled. Pasha Malla, author of The Withdrawal Method, speaks with him about the ideal way to read a short story and fiction of odd lengths.

Update on HTMLGIANTness – Blake Butler on Joyland

Casey McKinney

03.23.10

Updated HTMLGIANTness – Blake Butler on Joyland

Poetry: Amy McDaniel: Selected Adult Lessons

Casey McKinney

03.22.10

Saw Amy McDaniel read the other evening in East Atlanta – bit of fiction and some poetry from her new collection Selected Adult Lessons on Agnes Fox…

The Time of the Men with Guns: My Life with the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef

Michael Busk

03.17.10

In December the Obama administration brought 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, attempting a surge strategy similar to Bush’s in Iraq, and, with the escalation of the war, the Taliban has found its way back into public debate. Abdul Salam Zaeef was the Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan, where he was captured in 2002 and held in the Guantanamo Bay prison facility until 2005. Michael Busk reviews Zaeef’s recent autobiography, which brings up troubling questions about the conduct of the U.S. government but also what the appropriate response to theocratic despotism might be.

For further Afghanistan reading, check out William Vollmann’s out-of-print Afghanistan Picture Show, which recounts his time as a naive young buck fighting alongside the Mujahdeen against the Soviets. Also, recommended is Love and War in Afghanistan, a collection of oral histories that shows that region’s conflicts from many wildly different perspectives.