That sound you hear is the earth shaking a little: A work of literary fiction that wasn't endorsed by Oprah has become a hit in the United States. Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, comes in at Number 10 on USA Today's list, at it will debut at Number 1 on the New York Times list.

I'm not extrapolating too much from this news: I don't think it signals an improvement in America's reading taste, or anything like that. But it's nice to see an idea-driven writer rule the roost for a little while. Even if Lahiri tends to circle around the same one: The centerpiece of all of her fiction is the awkward transition of Indian-Americans from the first generation to the second. Her characters are generally college-educated, often financially successful; she outright rejects the notion, popular in America, that any novelist who writes about immigration and assimilation is obligated to provide sweeping cross-sections of the ethnic experience. For Lahiri, the well-off, Ivy League Indian-American is simply a blank canvas upon which to work her plots. Sometimes the tactic doesn't quite work--her novel, The Namesake, seemed to be hunting for a crucial plot turn that never arrived--but Unaccustomed Earth is full of detail-rich storytelling, and if she occasionally forces some drama in the final pages of a couple of stories, her characters are always full and lived-in. They're all of a piece, but they're all very much themselves.

All of this is worth...

Book people, by and large, aren't an especially contentious lot. (This is a little more true in the U.S. than in the U.K., where discussions of authors seems to be more of a blood sport.) But if you'd like to start an argument, accuse good authors of engaging in writing genre fiction. About a week or so back I got a little cranky at James Wood's review of Richard Price's new novel, Lush Life, in the the New Yorker. Wood writes: "Price has greater novelistic ambitions than his genre can accommodate, and one longs to see him free himself from the tram track of the police procedural." This is a classic backhanded compliment, an artful way of saying that he's pretty good for a crime novelist. (Somebody asked Price about this when he spoke in Washington D.C. last night, and he responded cooly, saying he never considered himself a crime novelist. He was crankier about the Gorey-esque illustration of him accompanying the review. "Even I wouldn't have sex with that guy," he said.)

Wood's comment passed unnoticed, but it seemed like everybody in the litblog world has needed to voice their anger at Jane Smiley's review in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer of Jennifer Weiner's new novel, Certain Girls. Weiner's novels are generally regarded as chick lit, and Smiley in essence argues that Weiner should aim higher, speculating that she's perhaps writing to meet the demands of the genre instead of thinking of how...

About a week ago BoingBoing had a post on Danish photographer Jacob Holdt, who currently has an exhibit at Luxembourg's Centre National de l'Audiovisuel. It's called American Pictures, based on Holdt's book of the same title, and it's been short-circuiting my brain for a while now.

Holdt's chosen theme is racism in America. For much of the 70s, he writes, he was a vagabond, traveling around the United States, scaring up enough money for food and film, relying on the kindness of strangers to put him up for the evening. He spent a lot of time in the deep South--amid the tobacco plantations and cotton fields worked by poor blacks through the 1990s. "I hitchhiked 118,000 miles and stayed in over 400 homes in 48 states," he writes. "I had arrived with only $40. Twice a week I sold my blood plasma to earn the money I needed for film."

Holdt's photos are deeply compelling, snapshots of grinding rural poverty and racism (he has a separate site dedicated to his experiences with the Ku Klux Klan), rivaling the photos of Jacob Riis--a photography pioneer who Holdt isn't shy about comparing himself to. Unquestionably, the places that Holdt captured exist. But is it too much to ask that such important imagery come with writing that's a little less sanctimonious? In his chapter on the squalid living conditions he encountered, Holdt writes: "While my images of broken people tend to make Europeans feel solidarity with blacks, they...

The New York Times reports today that author Sebastian Horsley--who was sent back to his native England from the U.S. under charges of "moral turpitude" (I wrote on the matter last week)--has become something of a cause celebre in literary circles thanks to the incident. (I gather that Horsley was always something of a publicity hound, but in this regard he wasn't explicitly chasing it.) The PEN American Center has invited Horsley back to the U.S. to speak at a festival at the end of April. "PEN supports freedom of speech and freedom of expression on the most basic level," PEN American Center president Francine Prose told the Times. "Writers should be able to enter our country regardless of what they've written."

Ron Hogan, who writes for two of the best book blogs around, Beatrice and Galleycat, has videos on his YouTube page from the reading that Horsley was supposed to attend in New York. In the one above, actor Robert Pereno reads a statement from Horsley that comically gets at the the Kafka-esque, Wilde-ian predicament:

If you need a reminder that the United States was a country founded by puritans, just consider the case of Sebastian Horsley. Last week Horsely had arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport, having flown from London to promote his book Dandy in the Underworld, his memoir of what, to be sure, has been a debauched life--as he tells it, there was lots of heroin and lots of prosititues. According a story in the British Times, he was detained for eight hours, grilled on all manner of details--including the contents of his top hat ("my head," he explained), his relationship with Kate Moss (none), his previous convictions (none, he says, though one report says he was fined for possession of amphetamines 25 years ago). After the interrogation, Horsley was planted on a flight back to London. The stated reason for his deportation: "moral turpitude."

Both the British and the American press roundly mocked the behavior of the customs agents. "Their decision to expel Mr. Horsley on grounds of moral turpitude only proves that they used torpid judgment," wrote the Washington Post in an editorial today. Such decisions are nothing new. The crackdown on visas following 9/11 meant that a great many Middle Eastern musicians and artists who'd planned to come to the U.S. found their travel plans scotched, even if they were innocent of any larger global conflagrations. Yet great moral overreactions are, in some ways, defining characteristics of the American mind--certainly since the end of World War...