(Link Gems is a weekly round-up of interesting articles and essays from around the web)
- In Granta, the translator Margaret Jull Costa celebrates Jose Saramago ( of course this article will lead the pack:):
Saramago’s dense pages of prose may look daunting, but once you step in, you are immediately swept along on that seamless flow of thought and utterance, all the while chivvied and cheered on by a genial and garrulous narrator, eager to involve you in the narrative process, and occasionally confessing to certain narratorial misdemeanours – like jumping ahead of the plot – or apologising for not being able to spend more time with certain secondary characters, about whom he could tell us more, if only he had the time . . .
- Wole Soyinka sees a bright future for African fiction and notes the contribution of young African women writers (from BBC News)
- Miracle Speech: The Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer by Teju Cole (in The New Yorker)
His poems contain a luminous simplicity that expands until it pushes your ego out of the nest, and there you are, alone with Truth. In a Tranströmer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.
- Seven Reasons Why Alexandre Dumas Will Never Die (in The Millions)
- Twitter is Not The Enemy of the English Language (from The Atlantic Wire). And I agree. Some of the users of Twitter, though, are the enemy of English.
- The Lack of Women Reviewers from Amanda’s Blog
- How Audre Lorde Made Queer History (in the Ms. Blog)
- 25 Reasons You Won’t Finish That Story (from terribleminds)
- From DailyWritingTips, 50 Redundant Phrases to Avoid
- Alexandra Fuller’s Top 10 African Memoirs (The Guardian). It’s nice to see Toyin Falola on the list. But where is Jack Mpanje’s prison memoir, And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night, or Soyinka’s You Must Set Fort at Dawn, 1 of 5 memoirs.
- The Mapping Stereotypes Project: Africans According to Americans (from Africa is a Country)
- The Hajj of the Revolution? (from Africa is a Country)
Kinna Reads 
Great bunch of links: I forwarded a couple of them to fellow readers and family
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Thanks, Nina.
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I was looking for something to read a few weeks ago and I remembered your many posts about Saramago, and so I bought a copy of Blindness. It was a little rough going at first but it was all so very worth it, he was a brilliant writer. Thanks for pointing me in his direction
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It does take a *little work* getting used to Saramago’s style of writing. But once you do, a whole new world opens up! I strongly urge you to read All the Names, when you can. But soon :).
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