The Presidential race. Who’s running, who’s not, who cares, etc. Here’s a passage from Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance:

For company, she’d bought the bonus double Arts and Leisure sections of the Friday edition of The New York Times. She liked reading reviews of plays she’d never see, recitals she’d never hear, exhibits she’d never visit. Lucy was no vicarious culture vulture; it was the language of the reviews themselves that she treasured. After the front-page headlines, body counts, senatorial brawls, and denunciatory op-eds, it was good to loiter in a world where “subtlety” and “restraint” were terms of praise. So, sipping wine, she read about “the innate good taste and nuanced phrasing that informs Mr. Thomas’s spectacular, crystal-clear performance” in a dance concert at NYU. A pity, Lucy thought, that Mr. Thomas was unlikely ever to run for president.

Austin Merrill and Anderson Tepper at Vanity Fair provide a list notable non-fiction books and novels from Africa in recent years. Here’s a brief sampling of the fiction:

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead). Ethiopian-born writer Mengestu’s debut novel is an eloquent and wise portrait of African-immigrant life in Washington, D.C.

Moses Isegawa, Abyssinian Chronicles (Knopf, 2000). If the film The Last King of Scotland—based on Giles Foden’s excellent 1999 novel—whetted your appetite for details of Idi Amin’s grisly reign, pick up this debut novel by Isegawa for an even more elaborate portrait of 1970s Uganda. Isegawa, now based in Holland, writes with a feverish intensity, furiously stuffing an entire decade’s worth of woe and clamor into this dense, ambitious book.

Ahmadou Kourouma, Allah Is Not Obliged (Anchor, 2007). Recent civil wars in Africa have spawned their own literary genre: child-soldier novels. Besides Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (both discussed in “The Continental Shelf”), there is the Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), and now, finally translated from the French, the last novel by the great Ivorian author Kourouma, who died in 2003.

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