In conversation with Eliot Weinberger  Tuesday 30 August 2011
10:05AM (view full episode)  From the Melbourne Writers'
Festival, American writer Eliot Weinberger talks about his new
collection of essays Oranges and Peanuts for Sale.  In 1999 his
edited book of Borges's Selected Non-Fictions won the American
National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism. He's also the
primary translator of Mexican poet Octavio Paz's work in
English.  He was also the first American to be awarded the Order
of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.  But perhaps his
best known work was an essay called 'What I heard about Iraq'.
It's a collage of the statements made by American administration
officials and their allies leading up to the war and after the
war.  It's a kind of history of the Iraq war in soundbites from
1992 to January 2005 and, after its publication in the London
Review of Books, it was the most visited article ever on the
magazine's website. It was reproduced or linked on some 100,000
other websites.  It's