Yusuf Toropov's Blog: Literary Striver, page 10

Balancing the horror of a fascist getting closer to a major-party presidential nomination with the entertainment value of the GOP disintegrating

A brokered convention -- one in which no one candidate secures the necessary majority of delegates, and deals must be made during the convention itself to determine the nominee -- is now a realistic possibility for the Republicans. This hasn't happened to the GOP since 1948.

It's a strange, strange year.

The spectacle of the Republican Party elite rupturing publicly with the supporters of the leading candidate for the presidency is not something I thought I would see in my lifetime. Their plan...

Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, and JIHADI: A LOVE STORY

Readers eager to remain unaware of how storytelling works are unlikely to challenge storytelling when it is used (as it often is) to further interests that are foreign or detrimental to their own. So it's good to write a book that calls attention to its own mechanisms, questions those mechanisms, and thus makes readers engaged, or even angry, participants in the story, rather than passive consumers. Nabokov awoke this kind of fury, and he also got people to think -- surely a positive developm...

Postmodernism, Islam, and Postcolonialism

Readers eager to remain unaware of how storytelling works are unlikely to challenge storytelling when it is used (as it often is) to further interests that are foreign or detrimental to their own. So it's good to write a book that calls attention to its own mechanisms, questions those mechanisms, and thus makes readers engaged, or even angry, participants in the story, rather than passive consumers. Nabokov awoke this kind of fury, and he also got people to think -- surely a positive developm...

Postmodernism

Readers eager to remain unaware of how storytelling works are unlikely to challenge storytelling when it is used (as it often is) to further interests that are foreign or detrimental to their own. So it's good to write a book that calls attention to its own mechanisms, questions those mechanisms, and thus makes readers engaged, or even angry, participants in the story. Rather than passive consumers.

Starting 1 Mar, and for the rest of the JIHADI: A LOVE STORY blogtour, I tweet my commentary on the Beatles' WHITE ALBUM

Some of this connects to my novel JIHADI: A LOVE STORY, which you can find here. Follow along at https://twitter.com/LiteraryStriver. I am archiving the tweets below.




1. bit.ly/jih-wa1

Track one of the #Beatles WHITE ALBUM

Some people think that because I'm a Muslim I shouldn't ref pop culture

Doing so is a form of protest against ethnic/cultural  "cleansing" taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Track 1 of #Beatles #WhiteAlbum, credited to Lennon/McCartney, is in fact a McCartney co...

My piece in the Irish Times on Isis and Grendel

It can be found here.

An appropriate way to launch the official pub date of the novel, though of course it is sad that the article needed writing in the first place.

Cats in my writing

They always seem to be there. In my play AN UNDIVIDED HEART, there's a Zen puzzle about a cat. In my play SEVEN AFFIDAVITS ON AUTHORITY, there's a character named Cat. And in JIHADI: A LOVE STORY, well, they're all over the place.

I think it's probably because they're the ones most likely to answer in the affirmative when I ask them whether I should keep writing.

Click on the image below to see my Pinterest board devoted to people almost as cool as their cats.




Click here for Snarky Cat's announc...

Mr. Trump's rhetoric crosses the line: He speaks approvingly of Muslims shot with bullets soaked in pig blood

Leaving aside the entertaining question of what sound bites he might produce as Commander in Chief, I invite the Department of Justice to consider whether his latest outrage constitutes a criminal incitement to violence.
One vaguely recalls some legal principle involving shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

Below is from the New York Times.

I Feel Like Going Home (Muddy Waters)

Muddy Waters holds forth on the aspiration of my protagonist in JIHADI: A LOVE STORY.

The Work In Progress

It's finally clicking. Still messing with the opening,  but I know where it's going now. Happy about that.