In books this week: Darwish, Solzhenitsyn and Tommy Chong
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Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died at age 67; the author-activist was undergoing open-heart surgery in Houston. In his poem ‘State of Siege,’ he wrote:
To a reader: Do not trust the poem –
The daughter of absence
It is neither intuition nor is it
Thought
But rather, the sense of the abyss…
Last Sunday, Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow. He was 89.
Stoner comedian Tommy Chong publishes another memoir, ‘Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography.’
Actor Ernest Borgnine, 91, talked to us about his autobiography, ‘Ernie.’ What keeps him young? Books: ‘I do an awful lot of reading. It keeps me busy. I try to keep my mind going always. That is the thing that counts. You can have your body not feeling so good, but if your mind is working you got it made. That is the way I figured it out.’
American Zoë Ferraris helps us figure out how she found herself in the position to write ‘Finding Nouf,’ a mystery set in Saudi Arabia.
Daniel Silva, whose new book ‘Moscow Rules’ debuts this week at #1 on the LA Times bestseller list, will read at Vroman’s Bookstore on Wednesday, Aug. 13 at 7 p.m.
— Carolyn Kellogg
