Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing on Books and War | Newsweek Books

THE ARTS
A Literary Life
Amber Haq 9/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
The conflicts between mothers and daughters have long interested Doris Lessing. Growing up on a farm in colonial Rhodesia in the 1920s, the Nobel laureate in literature certainly experienced her fair share of such conflicts. She found herself in combat with a mother whose personal hopes and ambitions had been bitterly crushed by unkind fate and historical circumstance. "I had to get free," she writes. "My battles with my mother were titanic. What were they about? Everything, nothing, but she was going frantic as I escaped her."
OLYMPICS
China’s Agony of Defeat
Orville Schell 7/26/2008 12:00:00 AM
The Olympics are an irresistible stage for athletes—but also for those who wish to act out their grievances before the world. The Beijing Games, which kick off on Aug. 8, are hardly an exception. While Chinese leaders furiously insist they're not, and should not be, "political," these Olympics promise to become one of the most charged in history. Rarely has a more varied array of contentious issues crystallized around a single sporting event.
GLOBAL LEADERSHIP FORUM
The Realist
Christopher Flavelle 4/30/2008 12:00:00 AM
When John McCain outlined his foreign policy platform in a speech in Los Angeles on March 26, part of the credit went to Robert Kagan, an adviser to McCain's campaign and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In his new book, "The Return of History and the End of Dreams," Kagan argues that the apparent triumph of liberal democracy in the 1990s was fleeting and that an era of renewed great power competition is upon us.
Lessing Is Nobel’s Oldest Laureate
Cathleen McGuigan 10/12/2007 12:00:00 AM
Doris Lessing was on the short list for the Nobel Prize for Literature for so long, she assumed she'd never win. Now at 87—she turns 88 next week—she's become the oldest writer to receive the honor. The medal, which comes with a check for $1.6 million, will be awarded in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Snap Judgment: Books

The Whale Caller by Zakes Mda
War Wounds

Alexandra Fuller remembers precisely the moment when "Scribbling the Cat" got tricky. "I was sitting in the Denver airport three years ago," she said in a phone interview from outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., where she lives with her husband and two children. She was reading over a draft of a story that would run in The New Yorker about a white African--an ex-soldier in the Rhodesian Army and a born-again Christian. "The magazine had asked for 6,000 words and already I was up to 30,000. And sitting in the airport I felt sick when it hit me that to tell the story, I was going to have to write about myself the way I'd planned to write about this man." Doing it right, she realized, meant telling the reader, "There's a piece of him that you see as vulnerable and only I saw that piece, because he had decided he was in love with me. And in a bizarre way, it was this love story. Part of me felt true love for him. And part of me was utterly, utterly horrified."