Chinua + Chimamanda

Salon has an article up that is written by one of my favorite writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's a reprint of her introduction to Chinua Achebe's The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God that is now available through Everyman's Library. In the piece she talks about "the strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature--and indeed of not seeing oneself at all." This is a topic she also addressed in her Ted Talk titled "The Danger of a Single Story."

What Readers are Reading and Watching

I'm reading and loving Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. The Nigerian born writer also has a story collection that came out this spring titled The Thing Around Your Neck. Watch a video of her talking about the collection here.

Books that I've spied being read on the light rail: Angels and Demons, The Life of Pi, The Virgin Suicides.


Interested in the most popular books being read right now on NY subways? Go here.

A recommendation from the world of film. I recently watched the movies "Twelve Angry Men" and "12" back-to-back. The first flick, adapted from a play, came out in 1957 and stars Henry Fonda. It's about a jury of twelve men deliberating on a murder case where the suspect is a poor boy accused of killing his father. The remake (2007) is set in contemporary Russia and the suspect is a young Chechan boy accused of killing his stepfather. Both movies explore ideas about class, ethnicity, innocence, and guilt.