Category: Scott Simon

Roundup: Call Your Mother

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alice McDermott, Dept. of Self-Promotion, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Scott Simon

The best line in the New York Times‘ piece on the Philip Roth 75th birthday celebration comes at the very end: “He has delusions of grandeur,” said Roth’s weeping mother when the writer explained that Portnoy’s Complaint was going to attract a lot of attention.

Alice McDermott: “When I go to colleges, I always look at their reading lists,” she told the South Bend Tribune, “and I still see they are very short on women writers. At least now you get an apology. Before, there wasn’t even an awareness of it.” She speaks Tuesday and Wednesday at “A Festival of Our Own: Women Writers at Notre Dame,” at Notre Dame University.

Your moment of zen: The latest VOA Special English author feature is on Langston Hughes.

And a quick DoSP note: I have a review of Scott Simon‘s Windy City in Washington City Paper, and a review of Brian Hayes‘ Group Theory in the Bedroom in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

The Chicago Way

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Scott Simon

From Scott Simon‘s new novel, Windy City:

“You think that all we have to worry about here is picking up trash, plowing the snow, and keeping Al Capone in his grave? My God, man. There are a hundred languages spoken here. Assyrian, Lakota, Urdu, and Yiddish. The Yoo-nited Nations doesn’t have to worry bout how to say ‘beans’ in as many languages as any diner on Western Avenue. All of these folks with five-day beards and black head scarves who are going for each other’s throats over in Snowdonia? They send their kids to the same school here and tell them, ‘Now behave!’ This nation kicks a little ass some place, and soon we got thousands of them living in basements on Halsted Street. Next day, you’re in the back of their cab while they’re on their phones, plotting a coup. We’ve got nuclear physicists from the Poon-jab and goatherds from Namibia. We’ve got brain surgeons from Ogbomoso–that’s in Nigeria, if you were too embarrassed to ask–and rocket scientists from Petropavlovsk–that’s in Kazakhstan, as I’m sure you knew–working as doormen. One day, after they find life on Mars, we’ll have bug-eyed, green-ass Martian-Americans bussing tables on Clark Street. This great heaving mass of diversity is united by a single, momentous desire: They expect you to get the snow off their street.”