Each week, members of MAC’s staff host “The Mississippi Arts Hour,” a radio program broadcast on Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s digital radio network, as well as on WLEZ(103.7 FM) in Jackson, Mississippi. The show features interviews with Mississippi artists, musicians, craftspeople, and others involved in arts and culture from around the state.

Broadcast Schedule:

Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Think Radio (statewide FM signal): Sundays, 3:00-4:00pm

Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Music Radio (statewide digital signal): Saturdays, 11:00am-12:00pm
You can also listen online at the MPB Radio page

WLEZ (100.1 FM) in Jackson:
Thursdays, 5:00-6:00pm and Sundays, 8:00-9:00pm

For artists or organizations who are interested in being considered for the show, please visit this page.

Freeing Yourself From the Narcissist in Your Life
by Linda Martinez-Lewi, Phd
Narcissism, an excessive desire for controlling ones self interest, is very interesting and I enjoy thinking about this concept.

Everyday interaction with people, especially for me, working in a retail bookstore for 34 years: where any conversation can happen (on the spur of any moment, about any topic or opinion) has opened my eyes with this continuous observation. I love watching how people think and talk, especially about what they are reading and why they are moved by books. I was excited to read this book.

Freeing yourself, kinda sneaks up on the reader, luring you into the lifestyles of some great successful (in some ways) narcissists: Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ayn Rand etc. All these fascinating grand achieving personalities are so interesting yet they each seem to have flawed a valuable part of their life by an excessive ego-control and a super-abundant self love.

I appreciated the way our author used these fishhook personalites to catch this readers interest and make me address my own issues. Addressing individually the handling of life’s enjoyment, creativity and the sharing of genuine compassion within the authentic representation of self.

This is not a heavy book, but an entertaining look using superstars. Yet always coming back to the readers own mirror of self. Freeing gives helpful hints of how to look at our own self and create an understanding of blocks handicapping us from more fulfilled lives.

Wednesday night around 9:30 pm the National Book Award winner will be announced in New York City. This years nominees are:

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (signed copies here)

Home by Marilyn Robinson

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (signed copy here)

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

The End by Salvatore Scibona

Five young writers have been recognized by former winners of the National Book Award at the “5 under 35” celebration this year:

One More Year: Stories by Sana Krasikov

The Boat by Nam Le

All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gesson

The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck

Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel

Have you read any of the nominated titles???

I had the pleasure of reading The Boat by Nam Le. As many other readers have noted, Le’s exploration of emotional and intellectual landscapes over an expansive geography is remarkable in this short story collection.

Luna Park Review asked Nam Le if he saw his own writing as somehow different from the majority of short stories being published today. He responded:

“Well, on balance, my stories are longer, I guess. But not so much as to be distinctive. I had to answer this question recently, of what it was I thought I was trying to do, and I came up with this formulation: that, for me, the project of fiction is to articulate consciousness with integrity. That’s what I try to do. What we talk about as ‘style’ is intrinsic to execution, of course, but should be, in my opinion, secondary in the reckoning of how ‘good’ something is. Barthelme and Bellow, Lydia Davis and Alice Munro, all different stylists, are all ‘good’; they just sit differently on each of the three branches (of ‘articulation,’ ‘consciousness’ and ‘integrity’). It’s a big tree. To mix metaphors, I think anyone who manages to pull off that trifecta is necessarily doing something new, something transformative. Maybe I’m old-school in that I still believe the finest thing a story can do is move its reader—to set off a little sob in the spine, as I think Nabokov called it. I don’t believe in technical self-limitation. I do believe 21st century consciousness is a complicated thing—and that its complications are without precedence. At bottom, I believe it’s a tough but good time to be writing.”

http://www.lunaparkreview.com/NamLeInterview.htm

Working at Lemuria, I have noticed that many readers shy away from the short story. Who could not love the short story? I rarely have the time to finish a novel at this point in my life. Though I have always loved reading and have degrees in English, I have many other passions. The short story allows me to experience another world, another view point in one sitting and there is never any guilt for having not finished. There is always the intellectual curiosity and wonder at how the writer is going to resolve the story, or perhaps not, in such a minimal number of pages.

I take care of the foreign fiction section and I had been eying The White Tiger (click here) on the shelf, facing it out for customers thinking that it might prove to be an excellent read. Well, my hunch proved to be a very popular one. Aravind Adiga was awarded the Man Booker on October 14. Now I am midway through the book and have been amazed, saddened and humored as the main character, Balram Halwai, explains through entertaining detail in the confines of a small, dark room to the imagined Chinese Premier his story of rising up from the “Darkness” of India’s caste system.

Also, Nan has decided that The White Tiger will be the January selection for Lemuria’s book club. And for those of you who prefer, The White Tiger is already out in paperback!

At the Man Booker Prize website, there is a great interview with Adiga:

Aravind Adiga talks about the inspiration behind The White Tiger

Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008. Has the news sunk in yet?

It’s a great thrill to be longlisted for the Booker. Especially alongside Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie. But I live in Mumbai, where not many people know of the Man Booker Prize; I’m still standing in long queues and standing in over-packed local trains in the morning and worrying about falling ill from unsafe drinking water. Life goes on as before.

This is your first novel but you’re known for your journalism. Has it been a smooth transition to writing literary fiction?

I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was a boy. I studied English literature – a lot of Elizabethan drama – at university, and wanted to write a novel about India that would be vivid, political, and funny, like The Duchess of Malfi set in Delhi. While I was figuring out how to do this, journalism paid the bills – and also gave me a chance to travel throughout India (and the rest of South Asia). When you work for a mainstream publication, even a very good one like TIME, there is a limit to what you can put into your stories; there is so much you see or observe that goes not into your official reporter’s diary but into another, secret diary-which became The White Tiger.

What inspired you to write The White Tiger?

The novel began as an experiment of a kind. Visitors to India from South Africa or Latin America often asked me why there seemed to be so little crime in India, given the vast (and growing) disparity in wealth between the classes – a condition that had led to much higher levels of crime in their countries. Why was it, I began to wonder, that even though rich people in India keep so many servants, and the servants have such regular and intimate access to their master’s households, that the servants in India, by and large, stay so honest? What keeps the class system in place – and what are the conditions under which it might start to crumble? I began to think of a servant in Delhi who would, cold-bloodedly, steal from his master – and do something even worse to him. And imagining what that servant would think, and feel, and do, I began making notes that turned into this novel.

The White Tiger has been described as a new vision of India with one reviewer calling it ‘a witty parable of India’s changing society’. How do you feel about that?

The White Tiger is not a political or social statement: it’s a novel – meant to provoke and entertain its readers. The narrator is a tainted one – a murderer – and his views are certainly not mine. But there is something I’d like my readers to think about. I’m increasingly convinced that the servant-master system, the bed rock of middle-class Indian life, is coming apart: and its unravelling will lead to greater crime and instability. The novel is a portrait of a society that is on the brink of unrest.

What made you choose to write an epistolary novel? What makes it work as a vehicle for this particular story?

This isn’t an epistolary novel: there are no real letters involved. The narrator is lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking out aloud about the story of his life. It’s a story he can never tell anyone-because it involves murder-in real life; now he tells it when no one is around. Like all Indians, who are obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider’s gaze, he is stimulated to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an important one. So he talks about himself and his country in the solitude of his room.

http://www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/articles/1125

This years shortlisted titles are The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, A Fraction of the Whole by Steven Toltz.

I enjoyed my time at the site . . . you can also find audio and text excerpts from shortlisted titles for the Man Booker along with interviews from other shortlisted authors.

John’s friend Tim wrote a great post about one of his (and John’s) favorite poetry books, Mountain Home. Check out Tim’s blog, We Reckon, you will not be disappointed…