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Christopher
G. Moore Blog
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Blog
Archive April 2009
| SPANISH EDITION OF THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX |
The week of 4th May, my
Spanish publisher, Paidós will release the Spanish edition of The Risk of
Infidelity Index. The Spanish title is Alta Infidelidad 432 páginas. ALEA
ISBN: 9788449322624.
Here’s a glimpse of the cover for
Alta Infidelidad
You can find copies for sale
on the Internet here
and here.
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Posted: 4/29/2009 4:53:39 AM |
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| GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF THE STORY |
  Matt Beynon Rees who writes the international award winning
Omar Yussef series interviewed me recently. If you haven’t read The Collaborator of Bethlehem, you are missing an insiders view of the
dynamics behind the internal violence inside of Palestine. He’s walked the
streets and knows the people, their history, culture and language. And his books
give you a dimension of the human face behind the news
headlines.
Readers love to discover an
author whose work suggests they’re a kindred spirit. Novelists, engaged in the
often lonely work of writing, enjoy it even more. That’s how I feel about
Christopher G.
Moore,
whose path is in many ways similar to mine (as you’ll see in this interview).
Based in Bangkok, he’s the creator of one of the most striking sleuths in crime
fiction: Vincent Calvino seems a distillation of all the most intriguing expats
you’ll ever meet traveling the world and at the same time utterly unique.
Moore's “Spirit House” is one of the most riveting crime novels I’ve read, and
I’m delighted that he’s the first fiction writer to participate in “The Writing
Life” interview series.
Link: http://mattbeynonrees.blogspot.com/2009/04/writing-life-christopher-g-moore.html
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Posted: 4/20/2009 11:28:03 PM |
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| The Echo of Laughter in the Secular World |
Adaptation to the world has always
been, Darwin teaches us, a struggle. And uphill battle where casualties are the
norm. Many fall aside. And when that happens, it is often labeled failure to
adapt. Terry Eagleton has written a piece that links the role of capitalism to
the shedding of beliefs in the sacred. The contradiction is in the continuing
emotional resonance of metaphysical values in daily life--whether they become a
source of inspiration or one of parody. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show popularity
suggests the preference is leaning toward the latter.
The Western audience in search of
spiritual transcendence, at least in the traditional ways, has increasingly
shrunk in influence in the modern secular world. Their voice is one voice among
many. Again in the West, the central role and legitimacy of the institutions
traditionally vested with a monopoly over spiritual values have eroded over
time. The question is what scope is left for such institutions to play in the
modern political world. That is the essential unanswered (and perhaps at his
juncture unanswerable) question of our time. How it is officially answered is
the line drawn in the sand between cultures.
“Modern market societies tend to be
secular, relativist, pragmatic, and materialistic, qualities that undermine the
metaphysical values on which political authority in part depends. And yet
capitalism cannot easily dispense with those metaphysical values, even though it
has difficulty taking them seriously.”
And
“Civilization is precious but
fragile; culture is raw but potent. Civilizations kill to protect their material
interests, whereas cultures kill to defend their identity. These are seeming
opposites; yet the pressing reality of our age is that civilization can neither
dispense with culture nor easily coexist with it. The more pragmatic and
materialistic civilization becomes, the more culture is summoned to fulfill the
emotional and psychological needs that it cannot handle-and the more, therefore,
the two fall into mutual antagonism. What is meant to mediate universal values
to particular times and places ends up turning aggressively against them.
Culture is the repressed that returns with a vengeance.”
Link: http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2488
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Posted: 4/20/2009 10:26:59 PM |
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| Bangkok Report: Black Songkran, Sunny Thursday |
Some in the media have called it
Black Songkran. Demonstrations over the traditional Songkran festival turned
ugly and violent. Soldiers, APCs, and tanks were in the streets. Buses burnt.
Confrontation found the Reds and the military and police on opposite sides (most
of the time). Then suddenly it was over as quickly as it started. The
demonstration was called off and the protesters in the thousands who had camped
out at Government House left, loaded into buses provided by the
authorities.
This is a blog devoted to books.
There are a number of such political blogs that have given a blow-by-blow
account of the events over the last week. Foremost would be Bangkok Pundit which
contains a good source of foreign reporting, local Thai newspaper and TV reports
as well as the English language newspapers in Bangkok. If you scroll down, you
will find a number of related blogs that present points of view on the current
political situation.
The pundits will be going through
the wreckage and assessing the short, medium and long term damage. For a lot of
people it has been difficult to separate what are legitimate political issues
that remain largely unresolved and the highly flawed messenger that the Reds
used to advance their cause. It is difficult to win over support for legitimate
grievance if the main leader has a history inconsistent with supporting
democratic reform. The government side would have much more problem if a leader
untainted by corruption and a democratic instinct were to emerge in what likely
will be the next round in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of the
public.
I’ve had a lot of email from
readers concerned about the situation in Bangkok. If you are planning a trip to
Thailand, the risk to a tourist is minimal. Even at the height of the violence
earlier in the week, the streets where the action took place was largely
localized to a few areas and no one from abroad was injured.
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Posted: 4/16/2009 5:57:39 AM |
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