Festival of Books: The drug trade

Last year, 22,000 people died in Mexican drug wars. "Very little attention has been given to this daily killing in Mexico. Beheadings, mass burials, and bodies boiled in vats of acid are no longer headlines," said Los Angeles Times editor Davan Maharaj, moderator of the L.A. Times Festival of Books panel "South of the Border: The Drug Trade." But in their books, the three authors on the panel are telling those stories -- and explaining the complex economic and political factors behind them.

Ioan Grillo, author of "El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency," explained that since 2008, violence has escalated dramatically. "You have certain flash points around the country," he said. "Alongside it a power coming from these armed groups; criminal cartels ... are the only people offering job opportunities." What's more, "a lot of journalists are not going into those places, so they're becoming black holes of information."

Charles Bowden, author of "Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields," talked about how the city of Juarez, which has been a locus of violence, has seen its business and citizens empty out. "It doesn't take a lot to terrorize most people," he said, adding: "Narcos are moving to El Paso -- they move there and they commute [to Juarez] to murder."

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

Bowden and Grillo are journalists who have spent much time in Mexico covering these stories. A slightly different point of view came from Hipolito Acosta, a retired Immigration and Naturalization Service officer -- the most decorated officer in the history of INS, in fact. "Criminals know no boundaries," he said; rather, boundaries were his business. His book is "The Shadow Catcher."

Author Greg Mortenson settles, will pay charity $1 million

An investigation of "Three Cups of Tea" author Greg Mortenson and his charity the Central Asia Institute over its administration was settled Thursday. According to the terms of the agreement, Mortenson will stay with the charity and has three years to pay it $1 million of his own money as compensation for using charitable funds to promote and buy his books.

The investigation was spearheaded by authorities in Montana, where the Central Asia Institute is registered. The settlement will allow Mortenson's charity to continue its work building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, albeit with major structural changes -- and Mortenson's repayment plan.

Mortenson has already paid back about half the funds, says Anne Beyersdorfer, the interim executive director. Mortenson stepped down as executive director and has left the board, but will remain an employee of the organization.

Mortenson made bestseller lists with "Three Cups of Tea" and "Stones into Schools," his tales of mountaineering and school building in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was a popular speaker who spent much of his time -- and, it turned out, charitable funds -- touring the country talking about his books and work.

According to the Montana Attorney General's office, since 2006 the charity spent $4.9 million advertising Mortenson's two books and $4 million buying copies of them to give away to schools and libraries.

The reports about possible improprieties was brought to light by writer Jon Krakauer in April 2011. Krakauer's contentions about goings-on at the Central Asia Institute were broadcast on "60 Minutes" and caused a sensation. They were immediately followed by "Three Cups of Deceit," a 75-page story by Krakauer that launched the Byliner original e-book shorts for the Kindle; it quickly became a bestseller in its own right. Krakauer, the author of "Into Thin Air" and other bestsellers, also questioned the veracity of some of Mortenson's mountaineering stories. He visited remote locations where schools built by the charity stood empty, with no furniture or books.

The Central Asia Institute's board was made up of just three people -- Mortenson and two others. Boards of charities are meant to provide arms-length supervision of day-to-day activities, which the institute's apparently did not. The two other board members are reportedly to depart within a year and be replaced by a seven-member board.

The arrangement that allows the Central Asia Institute to continue its mission of building schools in remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan is probably a wise one. Despite the controversy, readers who responded to Mortenson's story voiced support for the author and his work. With more formal administration, that work may be done more effectively, so donors' funds are put to best use.

Update April 23, 2:15pm: A previous version of this post said that Mortenson's settlement was the result of a lawsuit. There was no lawsuit; the settlement agreement was reached after an investigation.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Greg Mortenson with Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the opening of Pushghar Village Girls School, 60 miles north of Kabul in Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan, in 2009. Credit: Department of Defense / Associated Press

Happy birthday, Gabriel Garcia Marquez!

Today, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez celebrates his 84th birthday. Happy birthday, Gabo!

Marquez, who is known colloquially as Gabo, was born in 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town in the north of the country. As a young man, he worked as a journalist in Colombia and as a foreign correspondent in Rome; Paris; Barcelona, Spain; Caracas, Venezuela; New York; and Mexico City. It was in Mexico City that he wrote the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which earned him his lasting international reputation.

First published in Spanish in 1967 and in English in 1970, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" launched a new genre, magic realism, which became closely identified with Latin American literary tradition. His other major works include the novels "Love in the Time of Cholera," "The Autumn of the Patriarch," "The General and His Labyrinth," and the novella "Chronicle of a Death Foretold."

Marquez has been overtly political, visiting Cuba when it was under strict American embargo and fostering a friendship with Fidel Castro. The novel "The General in His Labyrinth" caused an uproar when it was published in Colombia, while Marquez still lived abroad. The book presented an ailing, delirious Simon Bolivar in a way that angered Colombian conservatives. "He uses history to darken the prestige of our institutions and heroes," Roberto Belandia, secretary of the Colombian Academy of History, told The Times in 1989. "It is an anti-patriotic book." Marquez stood his ground, telling The Times on the eve of its English publication, "I haven't tried to destroy anything but to show the man. All the veneration and all the respect that he gets as a myth are greater if he is seen as a human being."

When he won the Nobel Prize in 1982, Marquez traveled to Sweden and, exhausted, went to sleep. "I suddenly woke up in bed, and I remembered that they always give the same room in the same hotel to the Nobel winner," Garcia Marquez told the Times in 1990. "And I thought, 'Rudyard Kipling has slept in this bed, Thomas Mann, Neruda, Asturias, Faulkner.' It terrified me, and finally I went out to sleep on the sofa."

At age 72, Marquez was treated by Los Angeles doctors for cancer. He's made it another dozen years: Happy birthday.

After the jump, a fascinating 1991 conversation between Marquez and filmmaker Akira Kurosawa that ran in our magazine.

Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska dies at 88

Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Syzmborska died Wednesday at home in Krakow, Poland.

The 88-year-old poet had been afflicted with lung cancer, the Associated Press reported. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said on Twitter that her death was an "irreparable loss to Poland's culture."

When Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996, the committee cited her "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."

Szymborska published her first book of poetry in 1952; her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” she once said. 

Her last collection, "Here," was published in the U.S. in 2008. The poem "Greek Statue," our reviewer Dana Goodyear wrote, is "a piece that, in gently touching on the great lyric themes of time, death and art-making, shows Szymborska at her subtle best, finds the perfect metaphor for that pause. At once fleeting and frozen, the statue's torso, she writes, 'lingers/ and it's like a breath held with great effort,/ since now it must/ draw/ to itself/ all the grace and gravity/ of what was lost.' Her most skillful poems — think of them as broken friezes or bits that suggest rather than encompass the whole — do this same work."

In 1996, after the Nobel announcement, the Times' Warsaw bureau chief, Dean E. Murphy, spoke to Szymborska -- "a retiring woman with wispy gray hair who cherishes her solitude" -- about her work. "The award came as a surprise to Szymborska -- and most everyone else in Poland -- not because she is considered unworthy, but because her poetry speaks mostly to universal themes rather than the parochial political subjects that have distinguished Eastern European verse since World War II," he wrote. Selections from that Q&A follow.

Q: Is your poetry an expression of vanity?

A: If you mean, is it a form of exhibitionism, probably it is. I have never really thought about it seriously, but telling one's feelings to unknown people is a little bit like selling one's soul. On the other hand, it brings great happiness. All of us have sad things happen to us in our lifetimes. In spite of everything, when those terribly horrible things happen to a poet, he or she can at least describe them. There are other people who, in a way, are sentenced to live through such experiences in silence.

Book news: Salman Rushdie, tattoos, and Thomas Mann on Hollywood

Salman Rushdie stayed away from the Jaipur Literature Festival because of death threats. A few authors read from his book "The Satanic Verses" in protest, and were swiftly encouraged to leave the country. Then it turned out that the threats were fake. If from afar, this begins to seem like much ado about nothing, up close the story is very different. "Debate over Rushdie's attendance at the festival even eclipsed an appearance by Oprah Winfrey, with its own minor controversy and major star power," Mark Magnier reports from Jaipur, India. "Some saw India's electoral politics as the real reason for the controversy over Rushdie's potential appearance at the festival. India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh is weeks away from holding closely watched state elections. Muslims there are swing voters, and the head of an influential Islamic seminary in that state had termed Rushdie's plans to appear at the festival as offensive to Muslims."

Under new ownership, Washington's landmark independent bookstore Politics and Prose is flourishing. Lissa Muscatine and Bradley Graham took it over after the 2010 death of co-founder Carla Cohen. "Most heartening," they tell The Atlantic, "is that the store continues to flourish even amid the uncertainties of the book industry."

Do you have a literary tattoo? Have you ever seen anyone else with it? It's kind of like wearing the same dress to a party. (It's happened to me; I know.) Publishers Weekly's blog PWxyz has a list of the five most popular books to inspire literary tattoos, complete with collages of the tattoos themselves. Check to see if yours is among them.

Los Angeles poet and Whiting Award winner Douglas Kearney will be reading Saturday at Machine Project, one of L.A.'s most daft and brilliant gallery-type places. The event/performance is called Shuffle Stagger Fail, and it celebrates the launch of his new chapbook, "SkinMag."

Her bestsellers included "Hollywood Wives," "Lucky," "Drop Dead Beautiful," "Sinners" and "Hollywood Divorces." Is that a cougar on author Jackie Collins' letterhead?

Thomas Mann, author of "Death in Venice" and "The Magic Mountain," left Fascist Germany and by 1940 had made his way to Los Angeles. "The climate has great advantages," he wrote, "as does the countryside, living expenses are relatively cheap, and, in particular, the opportunities for our young musician-children are promising." That's from KCET's website, which has a special section on L.A. history. Mann later wrote his son, "We were just at Princeton and it is very pretty. But I am a bit afraid of the scholarly atmosphere, and I basically prefer the movie rabble in Hollywood."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Indian writer Anni Zaidi, left, asks a visitor to the Jaipur Literature Festival on Monday to sign a petition calling for reconsideration of the nationwide ban on Salman Rushdie's book "The Satanic Verses." Credit: Manish Swarup / Associated Press

Man Asian Literary Prize expands shortlist to 7

The Man Asian Literary Prize, which has historically limited its shortlist to five books, announced Tuesday that it has expanded this year's shortlist to seven. The reason? The books are just too good, says the chair of the judging panel, Razia Iqbal.

The seven shortlisted books are:

"The Wandering Falcon" by Jamil Ahmad (of Pakistan)

"Rebirth" by Jahnavi Barua (of India)

"The Sly Company of People Who Care" by Rahul Bhattacharya (of India)

"River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh (of India)

"Please Look After Mom" by Kyung-Sook Shin (of South Korea)

"Dream of Ding Village" by Yan Lianke (of China)

"The Lake" by Banana Yoshimoto (of Japan)

The Man Asian Literary Prize is given annually to the best novel by a writer from one of 26 countries in South Asia and East Asia. To be eligible, a book must either have been written in English or translated into English. The winning author is awarded $30,000 and the translator (if any) $5,000.

Novelists Chang-rae Lee ("The Surrendered") and Vikas Swaru ("Q&A," the novel upon which "Slumdog Millionaire" was based) also served as judges this year.

Previous winners of the Man Asian Literary Prize include Chinese writers Bi Feiyu ("Three Sisters") and Su Tong ("The Boat to Redemption") and Miguel Syjuco ("Illustrado"), of the Philippines. The 2011 winner will be announced at a black-tie dinner in Hong Kong on March 15.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Author Banana Yoshimoto in 2004. Credit: Tiziana Fabi /AFP/Getty Images

Ezra Pound's daughter takes on Italian fascist group CasaPound

Ezra Pound's daughter has filed suit to stop the Italian fascist group CasaPound from using her father's name.

Mary de Rachewiltz, who is 86, was motivated to act when a sympathizer of CasaPound went on a shooting spree in Florence on Dec. 13, killing two men from Senegal, wounding three others and then killing himself. 

"This affected me terribly. It was the last straw," she told the Guardian. "I studied in Florence which makes it that much more painful."

Why would a far-right group in Italy take its name from an American poet? That would be the unfortunate part of Pound's legacy. In London, the expatriate author and editor fostered the careers of some of the most significant writers of the 20th century, including James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. But he became displeased with the politics of the first World War and moved to Italy, where he became enchanted by Benito Mussolini. His support for the Italian fascist included radio broadcasts during World War II that were eventually found treasonous by U.S. authorities. After the war, he was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a dozen years. He returned to Italy and did not disavow his fascist ideas.

CasaPound has distanced itself from the shooter, who had spoken at group meetings. "We are very sorry about this. She doesn't really know about us. We are not racist or violent," Simone di Stefano, an official with the group, told the Guardian. "We would like to resolve this out of the courts -- Pound is not a trademark and anyone can refer to his ideas."

De Rachewiltz, for her part, does not think the organization should use her father's name. "A politically compromised organisation like this has no business using the name Pound," she told the Guardian. She points to his work as explanation. "Pound was not leftwing or rightwing and you have to understand The Cantos to understand that. It is also a question of style. I have seen pictures of their shaven-headed leader and it does not impress me."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Ezra Pound in 1966. Credit: Jonathan Williams, from the book "A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude by Jonathan Williams," published by David R. Godine Publishers

Shakespeare & Co. founder George Whitman, 98, dies

George Whitman, the legendary founder of the Paris bookshop and literary institution Shakespeare & Co., died Wednesday at age 98. Whitman opened his bookstore in 1951, following in the footsteps of Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company, which had been shut down during World War II.

Shakespeare & Company was a haven for American and British expatriates who became some of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. Beach published James Joyce's "Ulysses" when no one else would. Beach was forced to close the store after Germans marched on Paris.

Whitman nurtured a new generation of struggling writers at his shop, including Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Devorah Lauter writes:

He used to call Shakespeare & Co. "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookshop," and in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said: "I never had any money, and never needed it. I've been a bum all my life."

But Whitman was something of a wild-haired, and wild-mannered, king to those who knew him....

Inspired by Sylvia Beach's famous Paris bookstore and publishing house, which closed during World War II, Whitman fashioned the 17th century, two-story apartment into a labyrinth of soft-lit, teetering bookshelves, winding stairs, a library, stacks of well-read Life magazines, and cushy benches that turned to beds at night for Tumbleweeds. Free tea and pancake brunches were served every weekend to anyone brave, or hungry enough. After brunch, the leftover, mysteriously thick pancake batter was used as glue to repair peeling floor rugs.

Whitman didn't care much for supervising the young lodgers that passed through, but his temper could famously flare if a book was misplaced or an edition not shelved just so....

He once threw a book out the second floor window at a customer below because he thought they might enjoy reading it. And he used to light people's hair on fire to save them the trouble of paying for a haircut. After all, he had been using the same technique on himself for years.

Lauter wrote that Whitman, who was born in New Jersey, had a "spitfire wit, unpredictable temper and unending generosity." He will be buried in Paris; his daughter Sylvia, who has been in charge of Shakespeare & Co. in recent years, plans to continue.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Shakespeare & Co. window display featuring photographs of George Whitman. Credit: Miguel Medina /AFP/Getty Images

Poets drop out of T.S. Eliot Prize competition over politics

Two poets who were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize dropped out of contention last week, voicing concerns over its sponsor. Aurum Funds, an international financial firm, recently signed on for a three-year sponsorship of the prize; the company's involvement was announced alongside the announcement of the shortlist, which winnowed 100 poets in consideration down to just 10.

Alice Oswald, who won the T. S. Eliot prize with her debut collection in 2002, raised the issue. "I'm uncomfortable about the fact that Aurum Funds, an investment company which exclusively manages funds of hedge funds, is sponsoring the administration of the Eliot Prize; I think poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions and for that reason I'm withdrawing from the Eliot shortlist," she said in a statement.

John Kinsella followed her lead, leaving only eight poets in contention for the prestigious British poetry prize. Its winner will be awarded more than $23,000.

The Poetry Book Society has long awarded the prize, but ran into trouble in April of this year when the British Arts Council announced it would cease funding it. More than 100 poets protested the move; Aurum Funds later emerged as a short-term funder of the prize.

Although the Poetry Book Society did not officially comment on the poets' withdrawals, board member Desmond Clarke told the Guardian that "there is a tradition of financial institutions sponsoring literary prizes such as the Man Booker prize", adding that "Aurum are respected investment managers whose clients include public sector pension funds and Oxford University."

And T.S. Eliot did not have such concerns about the financial industry; he worked for Lloyd's Bank before moving into publishing.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: T.S. Eliot in his youth. Credit: File

German author Christa Wolf has died

Author Christa Wolf, one of Germany's most significant writers, has died in Berlin, her publisher announced Thursday. The novelist, essayist and literary critic was 82.

Wolf is best known for her novel "Cassandra," published in translation in the U.S. in 1984. The book is a retelling of the Trojan War, and is known for its feminist themes. Her last book was 2010's “City of Angels or the Overcoat of Dr. Freud,” a semi-autobiographical account of a visit Wolf made to Los Angeles in the 1990s; it has not yet been published in English.

Born in 1929 in a part of Germany that is now Poland, the Wolf moved to East Germany in 1945. Wolfe was an outspoken cultural observer, a member of the Socialist party who was both supporter and critic. Her role was multilayered and complex: she wrote critically of the Stasi's police surveillance while later admitting that she herself had been an informal informant. Bloomberg reports:

She took part in an open protest against the exile the East German regime forced on the singer Wolf Biermann in 1976 and campaigned for reform in East Germany. Her privileged status there allowed her to travel extensively in the west after 1978.

Wolf was, though, an opponent of German reunification, and remained a member of Erich Honecker’s Socialist Unity Party until 1989. She delivered a speech to demonstrators at Alexanderplatz in November that year, days before the Berlin Wall fell. She welcomed the calls for democracy, yet made clear she did not support German unification or capitalism.

Her 1990 short story, “Was Bleibt” ("What Remains"), provoked a two-year battle over the merit of East German literature, fought out in the arts pages and chat shows of Germany’s newspapers and television channels.

In her story, Wolf described a female East German author under close surveillance from the Stasi. She was criticized for waiting until the end of the East German regime to publish it and accused of hypocrisy in her tolerance of that regime.

In 1993, Wolf announced that she had worked as an informal collaborator for the Stasi between 1959 and 1962 and published her own files for that period.

Calling Wolf "an enormously significant figure," Georgina Paul, an expert in East German literature at Oxford University, told Reuters that the author was "regarded up until 1990 as someone who carefully and delicately expanded the boundaries of what could be said in East Germany."

Wolf was awarded the Thomas Mann prize in 2010 for writing about "the struggles, hopes and mistakes of her age," with "deep moral earnestness and narrative power." 

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Christa Wolf in 2010. Credit: Rainer Jensen / European Pressphoto Agency