ON an evening just a few days before his novel would win a top Arabic literary prize, Ahmed Saadawi was relaxing with his writer friends at a Baghdad cafe, a place so special to him that he had written it into his book.
About an hour after he left, a suicide bomber struck, wounding several of his friends and killing some others. It was a common enough experience for Mr. Saadawi — as it is for anyone who has lived for the last decade in Baghdad, where the simple matter of timing can determine who lives and who dies.
Political gridlock, economic torpor and the machinations of pro-Syrian Hizbollah - the non-state regional superpower - have once more pushed the crossroads of the Middle East to the edge of collapse
Fifty years after it was first published to little fanfare, Stoner, the story of an academic whose life is full of disappointments, has become an unexpected bestseller. Julian Barnes on how a novel he'd never heard of became his book of the year.
On 13 June 1963, the American novelist John Williams wrote from the University of Denver, where he was a professor of English, to his agent Marie Rodell. She had just read his third novel, Stoner, and while clearly admiring it, was also warning him not to get his hopes up. Williams replied: "I suspect that I agree with you about the commercial possibilities; but I also suspect that the novel may surprise us in this respect. Oh, I have no illusions that it will be a 'bestseller' or anything like that; but if it is handled right (there's always that out) – that is, if it is not treated as just another 'academic novel' by the publisher, as Butcher's Crossing [his second novel] was treated as a "western", it might have a respectable sale. The only thing I'm sure of is that it's a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one."
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