Gordimer ropes in the heavyweights for AIDS crusade

Not one writer said no when Nadine Gordimer came asking for help in her ambitious campaign to raise money to fight AIDS. Gabriel Garcia Marq...

Not one writer said no when Nadine Gordimer came asking for help in her ambitious campaign to raise money to fight AIDS. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Susan Sontag signed on. So did Paul Theroux, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Guenter Grass, Margaret Atwood, Woody Allen and Arthur Miller.

Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist, enlisted each member of her literary A-list to donate a short story to a new anthology, Telling Tales (Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), whose profits will go the Treatment Action Campaign, a southern African organization that helps people with AIDS and HIV.

‘‘If the musicians can get up and sing, we can get up and write,’’ said Gordimer, 81, in a telephone interview from her home in Johannesburg. ‘‘It was more than one-and-a-half-years ago and there were so many gigs and performances by musicians and singers, people like Bono. They were giving their talents to help people and raise awareness about this pandemic plague.I thought: ‘This is awful. We writers collectively have done nothing.’’’

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Telling Tales, which contains 21 stories, is to be published simultaneously in the US and in 10 other countries (in nine languages) on December 1, World AIDS Day.

The book’s publication is to be celebrated with a book-signing and reception at the UN featuring Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Gordimer and readings from two contributors, Miller and Rushdie.

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