Besides the news that naughty Alberto has liberated the nude statues at the Justice Dept. from their curtains, I just spotted this in the NYTimes weekly book reviews:

   “An erotic novel written under a pseudonym might normally struggle to find a mainstream publisher and a wide readership. Not so, it seems, when it is penned by a Muslim woman living in a traditional Arab society. ‘The Almond,’ a semi-autobiographical exploration of sexual freedom, has sold 50,000 copies in France since Éditions Plon brought it out here last year. And it has now appeared in eight other languages, including English.”

[S]he wanted both to celebrate the body as an expression of life and to strike a blow against the centuries-old repression of Muslim women.


In fact, she said, what first set her writing was her anger at the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and Washington’s reaction to them. “Two fundamentalisms collided,” she said. “The fundamentalists committed an irreversible, shocking, outrageous act. But the reply was also monstrous, shocking, outrageous. I saw the two sides speaking only of murder and blood. No one cared about the human body.”


… [B]uilt around her reminiscences of a steamy love affair, she decided to address what, in the Muslim world, is often considered a forbidden topic: sex.


“I had to talk about the body,” she said. “It is the last taboo, one where all the political and religious prohibitions are concentrated. It is the last battle for democracy. I didn’t want to write politically, but I did look for something radical. It is a cry of protest.”