November 2, 2009 – Peace Corps Worldwide

RPCV Peter Hessler on New York Marathon Winner Eritrean Meb Keflezighi

Nov 02 2009

Check out The New Yorker on line today and the piece by Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) who is also a serious runner, writing about the surprise winner of the New Yrok Marathon on Sunday, an American named Meb Keflezighi who happens to be from Eritrea. November 2, 2009 Last year, Meb Keflezighi’s Olympic dreams ended on the Fourth of July. Nobody would have predicted that a year later he would win the New York City Marathon. At the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon, where I interviewed him for my article on American long-distance runners, he finished thirteenth in the ten thousand metres, nearly a full minute behind the winner. Eight months earlier, at the marathon trials in New York City, he had also failed to make the team. He was thirty-three years old, and he suffered from nagging injuries; most people in the sport believed that his best races were . . .

Togo RPCV George Packer has a new book

Nov 02 2009

Interesting Times: Writing from a Turbulent Decade by George Packer (Togo 1982–83) is published this month from Farrar Straus Giroux. It comes out on November 17, but the book is in stores now. Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and two works of nonfiction, The Village of Waiting, which is his Peace Corps memoir, and Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the 2001 Peace Corps Writers Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award. His play Betrayed, based on a New Yorker article, won the 2008 Lucille Lortel Award for Best Off-Broadway Play. His reporting has also won four Overseas Press Club . . .

Publishing On The Net

Nov 02 2009

John Givens (Korea 1967-69), a graduate of the Iowa Writers Program who spent many years working in Japan and now lives in Ireland, is the author of a half dozen novels and books of non-fiction. He is also writing a 17-century Japanese novel, several sections of which have already been published online. The latest section is entitled Night Train and can be found at the URL: http://www.nighttrainmagazine.com/contents/givens_9_2.php John writes us, “Although great old print journals such as The Paris Review or Granta or Conjunctions are still attractive, the future does seem to be digital. TriQuarterly has recently announced that it is converting to an online format next year. One of the nice things about digital journals is that they accept email submissions or submissions through a dedicated online submissions manager. Most also will read simultaneous submissions. This makes them easy to approach, and they are obviously inundated with manuscripts, resulting in . . .

Archive - November 2, 2009