For a free copy, e-mail sarahcypher at gmail dot com with your name, mailing address, and business website. (Don’t worry, you aren’t signing up for spam. I just want to verify that you’re an editor.)

To order copies in bulk, e-mail the publisher, william at glydevanspress dot com.

Yet the school is more than it seems. The headmistress singles Rabia out and offers another option: to go through the motions of the Islamic education program, but to also be trained in the government’s corps of female operatives, who will be married with the rest of their classmates to vacationing bureaucrats and carry out orders from the government. Rabia soon discovers that the secret program is not what she expected: it is a small class of misfits whose desperation is being exploited into zealotry. The women are being trained as shahidat, suicide bombers. Once in, she cannot back out lest she be stoned as a “collaborator,” and die before ever holding her son again.

The only way out is a fellow student who offers to help Rabia escape in exchange for favors to an underground organization. As the favors grow larger, Rabia advances on a road that leads to violence anyway—but it also leads to Sami, an unwilling revolutionary who falls in love with her. She must decide whether to accept his offer of marriage as a way out of a land where the veil of femininity can hide almost anything, and where every act is dangerously political, even love.

***This is about as rough as a rough draft can be. I posted it, however, so you can see how a concept evolves over the course of a year. See below.

I generally consider myself to be among those readers, if you can generally define “pro-Palestinian readers” as people who think there are better ways to handle a territorial dispute than to put the party with inferior weapons on the rough equivalent of an urban Indian reservation. Most people here will agree; but only in principle, and only until someone  accuses them of being an anti-Semite for saying so–at which point they will have to equivocate and justify like a Democrat being charged with a lack of patriotism. Among Americans, it’s difficult to explain that criticism of Israel’s policies is not the same thing as hating all things Jewish; and as a matter of fact, we don’t like being equated with our administration, either (see, Bush years).

And from so far away, it is also difficult to see how many Jews in Israel and Arabs in Palestine do want peace, and are frightened, but who do let their children play together, and who do not buy into an us vs. them mentality. Writer and professor Sari Nusseibeh said it best when he said that Israelis and Palestinians are natural allies for the simple reason that their futures are inextricable. And in a much less formal context, Margaret Atwood showed the same thing when she polled many Israelis and Palestinians for their feelings about the situation, and posted their responses in a blog string, “What Was Said,” here and here.

Best, however, was Amitav Ghosh’s thoughtful and lengthy response to the charge that he and Atwood “denounced the Palestinian call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions of Israel” so that they could snub peace and share the $1 million prize. The letter is available in full here. Here are some highlights:

The gesture you were asking me to make was one that would have had the import of denying the legitimacy of all Israeli civil institutions and thus of Israel itself. As such it would have been completely contrary to my beliefs. …

Could I allow my books to be sold to readers whom I would never agree to meet? If I did agree to meet my Israeli readers would it have to be outside an institutional context? … I came to the realization that it is impossible to imagine a peaceful, non-catastrophic future for the Middle East without sincerely accepting the legitimacy of Israel; and if one accepts this then how can one deny the legitimacy of Israeli civil institutions, including universities? If one does deny this then what exactly has one accepted?

Incidentally, Elvis Costello might have more time to think about this question now that he has canceled the Israel leg of his tour. He said his decision was “a matter of instinct and conscience” and that his concerts should not be interpreted as “a political act.” Unfortunately, though, everything is.

And then she goes on to make a fine Möbius Strip of her own, saying that in the publishing industry, editors’ salaries are so low because most editors are women. Besides content, the only thing the article is missing is that blameless and vapid phrase, “Well, I’m just sayin’…”

Read the rest of the article here.

A few months ago, the subject came up between E and I on a long drive to the Naval Hospital in Bremerton, where she was going for eye surgery. I asked what novels are for, because I wondered how difficult it would be if my eyes were out of commission–how soon I would miss reading, and what I would miss about it most. E is a good person to bring your big questions to, because she never convolutes the answers.

Books are a form of entertainment. To writers, books are more than that–or at least I wish they were, but when I try to make them too much they get, well… convoluted. The conversation left me wishing for a deeper definition of entertainment, but really, we have the penny romances that fed gossip-hungry 18th-century socialites to thank for the market that later gave us Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Dalloway, Lolita, 1984, and all the rest. Your thoughts?

1711 title page.