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Last night at the Sydney Writers’ Festival opening night ceremony, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about the importance of putting forth multiple stories into the world. She told us about growing up in Nigeria and reading children’s books from Britain and the United States. In these books, she said, all the children were blonde and blue-eyed, the pigs were pink, there was snow on the ground, and the parents liked to drink ginger beer. Adichie said she began writing when she was seven, and her earliest stories were about blonde, blue-eyed children who lived in a place where it snowed, the pigs were pink, and the parents drank ginger beer. Adichie’s point was that she had been given a single story of childhood that had warped her earliest perceptions of what subjects were suitable for literature. This also shows, she said, the dangers of limiting the number of stories to one. Continue reading
For tennis fans – and I consider myself a world-class super-fan – there are four Meccas in the world: Wimbledon, Paris, New York, and Melbourne. In each city there’s a stadium that serves as our cathedral: Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Court Chatrier at Roland Garros, Arthur Ashe Stadium out on the 7 subway line in Queens, and, in Melbourne Park, Rod Laver Arena. Visiting these tennis courts is like making a Hadj: we vow to see them all before we die. I’ve been to Wimbledon, Roland Garros, and every summer I’m sweating in the cheap seats at Arthur Ashe. To complete my own personal Hadj, I needed step foot onto the blue Plexicushion of Rod Laver. Thus, after touching down in Melbourne on Sunday morning at a quarter past six, I hustled over to Rod Laver Arena for a tour.
First the books. I don’t mind a long flight if I have the right books. Before a trip I spend more time thinking about the books to pack than about my shirts and jeans. I boarded my 15.5 hour flight to Hong Kong on Friday with these: City of Thieves by David Benioff, American Rust by Philipp Meyer, Dumbfounded by Matt Rothschild, and Neverland by Joseph O’Neill. At the last minute I decided to leave behind American Lion by Jon Meacham only because it wouldn’t fit. Had I made the right decision? Mid-flight, somewhere over the whites of the North Pole, would I be struck by an irrepressible urge to read about Andrew Jackson?
David Ebershoff is the author of The Danish Girl, a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award. His collection of stories, The Rose City, was named one of the best books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times.
His books have been published in more than a dozen countries to critical acclaim
Since 1998, he has been thepublishing director of the Modern Library. He has taught at New York University and Princeton, where he is now a visiting lecturer. Originally from Pasadena, he is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago, and he currently lives in New York City. He can be reached at www.ebershoff.com.
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