Adios, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Calling Gabriel Garcia Marquez one of the all-time best Spanish language writers is as silly as calling Babe Ruth one of the all-time best English language baseball players. Love in the Time of Cholera is the greatest love story ever told by one of the greatest story tellers ever.

Garcia Marquez’s work will enrich our world as long as there are readers. Muchas gracias, senor.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Giving thanks for Doris Lessing

When giving thanks this holiday weekend, have a good thought for the long life of Doris Lessing, the marvelous writer who died on November 17 at age 94. Assessments of Lessing often label her a feminist. Lessing herself rejected that label even before renouncing all “isms.” No doubt Lessing’s life and her signature work, The Golden Notebook extended the boundaries for women, but her writing bagged far bigger game.

Lessing was the great chronicler of how the human mind processes emotion. She explained psychology far better than any textbook through case studies of her hundreds of characters. As I glided through her Children of Violence series on colonial life in Africa and repatriation – Martha Quest (the heroine’s fabulously apt name), A Proper Marriage, A Ripple From the Storm, Landlocked and The Four-Gated City – I’d sigh after reading a passage that delved into a character’s feelings, thinking, “I wish I could write like that.”

Whether the subject was human connections, as in Love, Again, or politics and violence, as in The Good Terrorist, her characters’ situations became the reader’s own here and now as they struggled to plot a course that was true to their own moral compass, however buffeted by their own times it may be.

The selection committee righted a great wrong when it awarded Lessing the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. It’s too late to do justice to John Updike, whose Rabbit Angstrom books tell the tale of postwar America better than any history book, and who could simply write the heck out of any subject. But it’s not too late for Philip Roth. The Ghost Writer is, along with The Great Gatsby, the best American novel you can read in a day. The Human Stain is the best thing I’ve read this century.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Crackpot threatens book burning

Hello. I’m Muhammad Cohen, and I have a stark warning for the American people.

My novel of Hong Kong On Air, a story of TV news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie, is now on sale at bookstores throughout the US and online. If you don’t buy my book, then I’ll have to burn it, and for the security and tranquility of America, you don’t want me to do that.

I’m a Muslim – Muhammad Cohen – and burning my book will offend the 2.1 billion Muslims across the world. It will offend Muslims in Afghanistan, where America’s finest are in harm’s way. So if you don’t buy my book and make me burn it, you’ll be putting our troops at risk.

I’m also Jewish – Muhammad Cohen – and burning my book will offend the world’s Jews. If you don’t buy my book and make me burn it, you’ll be inviting trouble from the powerful American Jewish lobby, not to mention thousands of doctors, lawyers and accountants.

My book is Hong Kong On Air – Hong Kong, like in China – and burning it will offend 1.3 billion Chinese. China already makes just about everything we buy, we’re in hock to China up to eyebrows, and they’ve got nuclear weapons. Burning my book is bound to get on China’s bad side, and that’s no where to be.

Hong Kong On Air is about the global media, especially big, family controlled global media that reaches across television and newspapers. Burning my book will get the powerful global media angry, and give them another reason to tap your cell phone.

I’m originally from Queens, the New York City borough that’s closest to America’s heartland. If you make me burn my book, Jerry Seinfeld will haunt you, and Sarah Palin will never stop tweeting you.

If you don’t buy my book, you’ll offend America’s sense of humor because Hong Kong On Air is the funniest book you’ll read this year. You don’t want to get on the bad side of the comedians who make America laugh every night, guys like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Glenn Beck and John Boehner.

I used to be a baseball writer, and I’ve still got plenty of friends in the game. Burning my book will anger people who make their living swinging wooden clubs and throwing rock-solid objects at great velocity with pinpoint accuracy – they could come looking for you. And, rest assured your ballpark nachos will never have jalapenos again. Besides, baseball remains America’s national pastime and if I burn my book… well, you can do what you want to me, but I’m not going to stand for you insulting the United States of America.

So, buy Hong Kong On Air, tell your friends to buy it, and give it as gifts. After you read it, post a review on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and wherever else you can think of. Or the smoking book could turn out to be a mushroom cloud.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.