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	Home    Reviews   print this page Review of the week From the BBC Why is India's financial and entertainment capital, Mumbai (Bombay) the favourite muse of Indian authors writing in English? The BBC's Soutik Biswas finds out. "Indian writer Manu Joseph's debut novel Serious Men opens on Mumbai's crowded seafront promenade. It is filled to the gills with walkers - pale young boys, solitary women, calm old men, arthritic women - and furtive lovers sitting on the parapet. His protagonist, a Dalit - untouchable - clerk, loves the city's "humid crowds, the great perpetual squeeze, the silent vengeance of the poor". For him, the stifling constriction of Mumbai is a great leveller. "On the streets, in the trains, in the paltry gardens and beaches, everybody is poor. And that was fair." Joseph's mordant satire - the Daily Telegraph calls him one of the top new novelists of 2010 - could have been placed anywhere in India, but the writer chose Mumbai - or Bombay, as he and most of his peers prefer to call the city." Read more... July 20th 2010 From the Mail on Sunday Don't mention the mockingbird! The reclusive novelist who wrote the classic novel that mesmerised 40 million readers By Sharon Churcher "In the 50 years since Harper Lee published her classic novel that mesmerised 40million readers, she has barely written another word � and turned into an almost total recluse. So when her friends agreed to give our reporter an introduction, it was on one strict condition...Don�t mention the Mockingbird Despite the thick, black sunglasses, there is something familiar about the frail 84-year-old woman as she is helped falteringly towards the lake shore. A delighted smile flickers across her face as ducks and Canada geese flock round to feed on the scraps of bread brought from the care home where she lives in a modest apartment. Dressed in a clean but faded T-shirt and loosely fitting gingham slacks, she attracts barely a glance from passers-by. Yet hers is the face which has stared from the cover of a book that has hypnotised more than 40 million readers around the world, one that has frequently been rated as one of the ten most important books published in the past century. She is Harper Lee, whose only book, To Kill A Mockingbird, won the Pulitzer Prize, is translated into nearly 50 languages and was turned into the Oscar-winning 1962 film starring Gregory Peck. It also made Harper into a multi-millionairess." Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1289793/Dont-mention-mockingbird-Meet-Harper-Lee-reclusive-novelist-wrote-classic-novel-mesmerised-40-million-readers.html#ixzz0s9v5JH00 July 2010 From Outlook Review of Manu Joseph's Serious Men by Anita Roy "There is a war raging in the Institute of Theory and Research, Mumbai. Careers, reputations, the answer to life on earth, funds are at stake. There are those, like Jana Nambodri, who want to listen to alien signals using radio-telescopes. And there is Arvind Acharya, the head of the institute, whose life�s aim is to prove that alien lifeforms are falling to Earth by sending up balloons to collect air samples 41 km into the stratosphere. The 'serious men' of Manu Joseph's debut novel are scholars, Brahmins. Big men whose world is upturned by Ayyan Mani, a lower caste clerk, and Acharya's personal assistant, Dr Oparna Goshmaulik, a beautiful woman who is head of astrobiology and, coincidentally, total babe. "She was an event", "a commotion", a head-turner. It is clear from the outset that we're in the hands of a masterful storyteller. Manu Joseph does not so much describe someone as nail them. Jana Nambodri is described as having "a long benevolent face that clever women usually mistrusted". And instead of giving a sociological break-up of the inhabitants of the chawl where Ayyan lives, he simply writes, "People who knew what bdd stood for were not the kind who lived there." " Read More at Outlook India June 2010 From the New Yorker Islamismism How should Western intellectuals respond to Muslim scholars? by Pankaj Mishra "Was the prophet Muhammad a pervert and a tyrant? Does Islam promote terrorism and enslave women? Does Islam oblige its followers to wage jihad on Westerners whose roots lie in the secular Enlightenment? Should Muslims consider converting to Christianity? For the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the answer to all these questions is a resounding �Yes!� Hirsi Ali, who renounced Islam in her thirties, speaks from experience of bigotry and intolerance among her former co-religionists: she was genitally mutilated as a child in Somalia, briefly radicalized by a preacher of jihad in Kenya, nearly forced into a marriage, threatened with death in the Netherlands by the Muslim assassin of her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and is still hounded by murderous fanatics in her new home, America. In her latest book, �Nomad: From Islam to America� (Free Press; $27), she reminds her readers of the West�s tradition of intellectual revolt against clerical tyranny and warns of the insidious, intransigent enemies in their midst. �The Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of jihad,� she writes." Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/06/07/100607crat_atlarge_mishra#ixzz0qH0V7NTv May 2010 From the Financial Times Songs of Blood and Sword: Review by William Dalrymple "Towards the end of Benazir Bhutto�s political career she was reviled at home in Pakistan as corrupt and ineffectual, while being simultaneously perceived in the west, and especially in the US, as the great champion of democracy and women�s rights in a part of the world dominated by bearded men waving Korans and burning American flags. In a strange twist of fate, her niece Fatima � for long Benazir�s most trenchant critic � now finds herself in a not dissimilar position. Having just written a passionate memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, in which she accuses her aunt of complicity in the murder of Murtaza Bhutto (Benazir�s younger brother and Fatima�s beloved father) the author has now found herself being feted in the west � and featured like Benazir before her in glossies such as Vogue and Vanity Fair � while being severely criticised in her native country for telling a one-sided version of events." Read more at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b00579f6-5ecc-11df-af86-00144feab49a.html Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter�s Memoir, by Fatima Bhutto, Jonathan Cape �20, 408 pages, FT Bookshop price: �16 April 10th 2010 Mills & Boon goes behind National Trust's bedroom doors for racy novels Romantic publisher to launch a series of raunchy historical books set in stately homes "National Trust properties can be many things: historic, beautiful, timeless. What they're unlikely to be described as is sexy, but the institution is hoping to change that thanks to a new partnership with Mills & Boon that will see the publication of racy novels about the houses' former inhabitants. The initiative kicks off this week with the launch of Scandalous Innocent by Juliet Landon. Set in National Trust property Ham House, on the banks of the Thames in Richmond, Surrey, the novel weaves the story of real-life 17th-century Ham House inhabitants, the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale, with that of the fictional Phoebe, a beautiful scandal magnet with "abundant black ringlets", who falls for the duke's personal secretary, Sir Leo. Trysts and quarrels occur inside the walls of the property, with its sculpted gardens playing host to stolen kisses." Read more at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/03/mills-boon-national-trust-novels March 21st 2010 From Business Standard, India Coming of age by Payal Dhar "Worldwide, readers of young adult (YA) fiction have never had it so good. That trend is now gathering steam in India. Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, House of Night, Twilight, Princess Diaries � young adult (YA) readers have never had it so good. But while shelves overflow with YA books of every genre, if you go looking for home-grown fare, the view is rather more dismal. Indian publishing boasts of a thriving children�s market, but it has remained limited in scope. Classics, folk tales and mythology have been rehashed and regurgitated innumerable times, suiting both publishers who are largely content to stick with the tried and tested, and parents who decide what children ought to read. And while there is a fair amount of original writing for younger children, it is slim pickings in the YA segment." Read More here -- http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/comingage/389120/ March 10th 2010 From Ms Magazine Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman By Eva McKend "In Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant�s emotionally stirring new book, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance (Temple University Press), she unpacks the superwoman persona that so many Black women are expected to assume. In an interview with Ms., she explains that as we live the world that slavery and patriarchy continues to create, the idea of �strength� maintains race-based differences and creates a social distance between women. And that distance becomes part of the oppression. Beauboeuf-Lafontant, a sociology professor at DePauw University, does not leave us in despair, though, but celebrates the power of transcending strength and acknowledging vulnerability." Ms.: Why is the message of this book so important to you? Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafantant: When I was in graduate school, many of my black female friends would use this term SBW�strong black woman. They reasoned that if black women could make it through slavery, they could make it through anything. I began to wonder how strength misrepresents not just what black women are capable of but what people assume they can sustain. Too often we use the term �strong black woman� to dismiss legitimate claims and needs. I don�t think that black women are cut from a different cloth, but I think they have been expected, given historical circumstances, to operate as something other than human. Ms.: Why has appearing strong become so critically important to black women? TB-L: I believe this idea of the strong black woman is tied to the understanding of black women as mammies and mules of the world. It starts with slavery and the assumptions of black womanhood as this thing completely opposite to white womanhood. As a black community we�ve taken in a lot of those assumptions and have tried to find a redeeming aspect to them. A strong black woman is a woman who expresses a lot of fortitude, a deep wealth of caring and a lot of persistence�those can be seen as noble qualities. [But] they were used against us during slavery and I think they continued to be used against us by the white community and by black patriarchy. You can extort a lot of work from people who subscribe to the notion that they are strong and invulnerable." Read More...http://msmagazine.com/Fall2009/behindthemask.asp Feb 28th 2010 From Salon.com A word to the novelist on how to write better books By Laura Miller "Writers have been advising other writers since at least as far back as Aristotle, but the Guardian recently published an exceptional specimen of the form: 28 celebrated authors each offering his or her 10 rules for writing fiction. The inspiration for this roundup was Elmore Leonard's justly renowned list of pointers, also included in the Guardian piece. A lot of the advice focuses on practice (work every day, keep a diary, stop while you're still interested, etc.), and almost as much strives -- gently or not -- to inform aspirants that they shouldn't expect much (or, really, any) money or fame from a literary career. It soon struck me, though, that the perspectives offered are limited. What makes Leonard's advice so refreshing, after all, is that none of it fusses over the writer's own process and delicate ego. His tips ruthlessly focus on the creation of better fiction. Readers are what every novelist really wants, so isn't it about time that a reader offered them some advice? I've never written a novel, and don't expect to ever do so, but I've read thousands. More to the point, I've started 10 times the number of books that I've finished. Much of the time, I'm sampling brand-new novels that aren't great -- that frequently aren't even very good -- each one written by someone sincerely hoping to make his or her mark. I can tell you why I keep reading, and why I don't, why I recommend one book to my fellow readers, but not another. I've also listened to a lot of other readers explain why they gave up on a book, as well as why they liked it. Here are my five recommendations for the flailing novice...." Read More...http://www.salon.com/books/writing/index.html?story=/books/laura_miller/2010/02/23/readers_advice_to_writers Feb 15th 2010 From the Nation A Fine Romance: On Cristina Nehring By Miriam Markowitz "What we know about love in the times that preceded ours we have learned from proverb, myth and literature, and that knowledge remains, to this day, somewhat spotty. Love may be blind, a baptism and many splendored. A red, red rose or a wild plant born of a wet night; unlucky at cards; the course that never did run smooth; done with the compass, done with the chart! A labor we lose. The lineage of love is provisional and perhaps discontinuous: if the reign of love commenced with Adam and Eve soon after the dawn of the world, then the textual traces of their union were many years out of date by the time the Book of Genesis arrived a few centuries before the common era. Did Adam profess undying love to Eve before the serpent stole her heart? Perhaps not, but how are we to know?" Read more... Feb 1st 2010 From the Guardian Do love and marriage really go together like a horse and carriage, Susanna Rustin wonders: A review of Couples: The Truth by Kate Figes and No More Silly Love Songs: A Realist's Guide to Romance by Anouchka Grose "We feel we are truly ourselves in our marriages, when they are working. Our husband, wife or partner is likely to be the person to whom we reveal most of our thoughts and feelings. They will know what we eat, how we sleep, what we do when no one else is watching. They may also be our confidant in �matters of work and friendship. So it is strange to be reminded that this most intimate relationship is moulded by outside forces over which we have no control, that there is nothing particularly natural about being in a couple for most of a lifetime." Read more...http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/23/couples-love-romance-book-reviews Jan 18th 2010 From Tehelka Bhabhi Goes Hard Copy Banned at home? No problem, India�s hottest housewife continues to titillate aficionados � from France, finds ADELINE BERTIN -- ABONA FIDE DESI hottie, Savita Bhabhi is the eponymous star of savitabhabhi.com, an adult cartoon strip featuring the romps of a bored Indian housewife that found a flood of fans since its launch in March 2008. Banned by the Indian government in 2009, however, the sex star has found refuge and indeed libert� � in liberated France. The pneumatic neighbourhood sariclad sex symbol burst onto the Internet in 2008 and was an instant sensation but then suffered a ban, following complaints that its lurid tales and depiction were offending the sensibilities of conservative Indians. Considering that Savita Bhabhi whiles her time and her husband�s regular absences with a series of sexual encounters with strangers, that wasn�t surprising. But it�s hard to put a good siren off her stride: Savita Bhabhi has bounced back � this time in print as a comic book, brought out by Editions Blanche. Franck Spengler, the head of Editions Blanche � a publishing house which specialises in erotic literature � explains that the characters charmed him at first sight: �They are nice, funny and earthy. Savita is a cheerful woman who really likes pleasure: both giving and receiving it.� Immediately, Spengler contacted the London-based Indian creator of Savita, known to the world only as �Deshmukh�. They had discussions �exclusively by mail�, says Spengler. �I only met him once. He is very suspicious. It is impossible even for me to tell you his name.� Editions Blanche says they have paid Deshmukh Euros 1,500 (around Rs 1 lakh) for the rights in advance and 6 percent of the sales in royalties. Presently, the print run is modest: 4,000 copies of which 2,000 have already been sold. �Obviously, it isn�t as dazzling as it was on the Internet,� admits Spengler. In her new avatar, Savita Bhabhi stars in two sultry covers: Bollywood in Love and Love in Bollywood, at approximately Euros 13 (Rs 880). Each issue contains two different stories. �We plan to publish a third issue, in May-June,� reveals Spengler, adding: �If the sales get better, we even plan to publish totally new adventures, as the current ones are adventures that have been already published on the Internet.� SAVITA BHABHI acquired cult status in India because of its brazen eroticism and the delicious dichotomy of the bhabhinymphomaniac. Pornographic comics don�t have the same novelty in France, but French readers have welcomed Bhabhi�s adventures as a curiosity piece. �It is definitely kitsch, a parody �made in India� in which everything is exaggerated, such as the colours or Savita�s chest; this is something they appreciate,� says Spengler. Bhabhi�s adventures were definitely less risqu� than Editions Blanche�s normal fare. Spengler explains: �Bhabhi has �healthy� sexual relations. She enjoys herself with no perversity. I am not sure she has even been sodomised in a story,� he adds with seriousness. But for the NRIs who formed a core group of Savita Bhabhi�s loving voyeurs, the comic strip is just another form of teasing. For the diehard fans, the fact that the strip is again accessible online on a new website (kirtu.com) will matter just as much, perhaps more: at least, nothing will be lost in translation. Jan 4th 2010 From Tehelka The Write Way: This gritty Dalit woman author has quit the BSP to launch her own party in Tamil Nadu. PC Vinoj Kumar on her never-say-die mantra "Acclaimed Tamil writer and Tamil Nadu's first woman Dalit IAS officer, P Sivakami, who in November last year took voluntary retirement at age 51 to join the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) imageand was made its state general secretary, is launching her own outfit. Says Sivakami: �The party I plan to launch will take up issues concerning Dalits and the poor.� She found the BSP inactive in the state, but won't comment on the two other Dalit parties -- the Puthiya Thamizhagam and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal. Sivakami, who has been part of the Land Right Movement for Dalits since 2003, has developed a network of activists, besides mobilising women�s groups. �In February last year we organised a meeting in Trichy in which 2.5 lakh women participated. It was a huge success,� she says. Sivakami comes from a political family. Her father, M Palanimuthu, was an independent MLA, who later joined the Congress and became a close associate of the late Kakkan -- a popular leader known for his honesty and simple lifestyle. It was her father�s wish that she should join the IAS." Read more at http://tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ws121209dalit.asp December 20th 2009 From Outlook Magazine Booking A Story: Bollywood is now dipping into desi bestsellers for inspiration by Namrata Joshi "Shahrukh Khan used to pull Anuja Chauhan�s leg on the sets of the Pepsi commercial shoot�that he would buy the film rights of the advertising professional�s debut novel if and when she finished writing it. That casual joke turned into reality when his Red Chillies Entertainment picked up the rights for Anuja�s The Zoya Factor, a quirky tale of ad agent Zoya, who becomes the lucky charm for the Indian cricket team in World Cup 2010. The script is now in the final stages. Last month Ashutosh Gowariker embarked on his latest epic venture, Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se, based on journalist and Telegraph editor Manini Chatterjee�s book Do And Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34. The book, and in turn the film, focus on the freedom fighters who attempted to raid the Chittagong police armoury. Abhishek Bachchan plays Surya Sen, who led the attempt. The most awaited Bollywood film this year, Raj Kumar Hirani�s Three Idiots, is inspired by the Chetan Bhagat bestseller Five Point Someone�What not to do at IIT. Chetan�s The 3 Mistakes of My Life has been bought by Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani�s Excel Entertainment for a film to be directed by Abhishek Kapoor of Rock On fame. Meanwhile, filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee is keen to work on journalist V. Sudarshan�s The Anatomy of an Abduction, the story of the kidnapping of three Indians and four other nationals in Iraq in 2004." Read more here: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?263236 December 10th 2009 From Outlook Magazine, India 10 QUESTIONS: Snigdha Hasan Interviews Eve Ensler Why did you choose India for the world premiere of your play? I love India for its multiculturalism. Feminism is essentially present in India. Also, the actors here have done a fabulous job in my plays. What�s your new play about? It is about the emotional journeys of girls all around the world and how girls are always conditioned to please everyone except themselves. What inspired you to take up this theme? Women are looked down upon for being emotional when there�s nothing wrong in being so. The play explodes such taboos. Is it a message to men not to be shy about showing their emotions? Absolutely! Our social setup prevents men from expressing their emotions with a given that men can�t be emotional. When you met girls from around the world for this play, what were the revelations? Violence against girls is a global phenomenon: rape, sex-trafficking, abuse, domestic violence etc. Women are then re-raped by the law when they talk about the violence. How different is the play from Vagina Monologues? I am an Emotional Creature is an evolution. It is more global in its context. Read More here....http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?263161 November 30th 2009 From Time Out Delhi The Englishman�s Cameo: A Mughal Murder Mystery By Madhulika Liddle A whodunit set in seventeenth-century Shahjahanabad breaks new ground, finds Avtar Singh. There�s a wealth of physical detail in your book. The chogas, for example, the sailabchi, the ritual of sitting out in the dalaan. How important was it for you to nail the physical atmosphere? Very important. I have been, for many years now, a devotee of historical fiction � whether crime or not � and I�ve realised that it�s the finer details that can help make an era come alive. What were the primary sources you used for your research? First and foremost, the many historical walks I�ve been on around Delhi, especially Shahjahanabad. The India Habitat Centre�s regular walks on Sundays, led by prominent historians, gave me a wealth of knowledge (including snippets of delicious trivia!) that helped me add detail to the novel. In addition, I did refer to books such as The Empire of the Great Mughals by Annemarie Schimmel, Private Lives of the Mughals of India by R Nath, Emperors of the Peacock Throne by Abraham Eraly, The Great Moghuls by Bamber Gascoigne and Historic Delhi: An Anthology by HK Kaul. How important was it to also restrain yourself from too much detail: to still keep the story in mind, as it were? That actually took a lot of rereading and reworking of the manuscript. The first draft had, in a couple of places, perhaps more historical detail than was needed. Restraining myself from adding lots of detail wasn�t eventually too much of a problem, because the plot was complex enough to need a lot of attention. Historical mysteries are a huge genre abroad. Did you see an opportunity here? Muzaffar Jang (the detective protagonist) is someone we�d all like to see again... Yes, Muzaffar was created because I saw that historical detectives were a dime a dozen abroad: there are Irish and Russian nuns, Roman and Egyptian investigators, a medieval Chinese magistrate, a Tudor lawyer, a Turkish eunuch, even a Welsh monk out there � but no Indians (or none that I�d come across). I thought it was about time someone used the richness of the Mughal court as a backdrop for a crime novel. And yes, there are more Muzaffar Jang works in the pipeline: short stories as well as novels. There seems to be a rediscovery of Delhi in the recent past as regards genre-driven fiction. There was the one about the Punjabi detective agency (The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall; Random House India), and now there�s yours based in Shahjahan�s Delhi. Is there a new interest brewing in Delhi about the city itself: its origins as well as the people who live here now? I agree there�s a greater awareness about Delhi and its past than there was some years ago. I�m glad about that. Unfortunately, too much of this newfound awareness seems restricted to a fashionable elite; it needs to filter down to people who live and work in areas that are especially historic � like Shahjahanabad or Mehrauli � because if they appreciate the importance of keeping that heritage alive and well, then the chances of Delhi�s heritage surviving increase significantly. I liked the fact that Europeans play such a major role in your book. Was that a conscious choice on your part, to portray that side of Mughal Delhi (and India) to your readers? A lot of Indians tend to equate India�s pre-twentieth century interactions with the West with European colonialism. I wanted to show that India then, and Delhi in particular, was about as cosmopolitan as it is now, if not more. There were traders and merchants here, mercenaries, physicians, adventurers, even tourists. We owe some of the most vivid descriptions we currently have of the courts of Shahjahan and Aurangzeb to European travellers like Fran�ois Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Niccolao Manucci. In describing the demimonde of the time, you�re almost certainly taking the average reader into unfamiliar territory. There are no court scenes, but there is lots of courtesan intrigue, glimpses of catamite-seeking nobility and even the secret lives of Yamuna boatmen. Again, detail to add colour, or part of a larger plan, to humanise an era we tend to see in overly grand terms? Yes, the book is certainly an attempt to make Mughal India less �elevated� than popular culture usually makes it out to be. The elephants, the glittering court and so on are glamorous all right, but I think a little clich�d by now. I wanted to show another side of Mughal Delhi, occupied by the nobility and even by the common people, for whom the grandeur of the court would have been something to gawk at and not participate in. Hachette India, Rs 295. November 6th 2009 From Outlook A Pack Of Lies By Urmilla Deshpande Tranquebar | 291 pages | Rs 295 A Bruising Pursuit Of Love Autobiography masquerades as novel in a tale of vicious dysfunction overcome by resoluteness of spirit Manjula Padmanabhan "The only lie in this pack of truths, so far as I can tell, is its title. The author�s voice is so raw with the need to tell her story that it simply doesn�t make sense except as autobiography. But as she is the daughter of the late poet and novelist, Gauri Deshpande, it isn�t possible to think of this as just another tale of derelict parenting, embellished by a young writer�s lively imagination. A grotesque portrait emerges of life in the shadow of a highly acclaimed mother who simply did not have the time or patience to care for her three small daughters, two by her first husband and a third by the second." Read More... October 20th 2009 From the NY Review of Books The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson By Joyce Carol Oates Review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem (Penguin, 146 pp., $15.00 (paper)) We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it. �Merricat, We Have Always Lived in the Castle Of the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction�a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Scout of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the murderous eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark of William March's The Bad Seed (1954), and the slightly older, disaffected Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963)�none is more memorable than eighteen-year-old "Merricat" of Shirley Jackson's masterpiece of Gothic suspense We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). At once feral child, sulky adolescent, and Cassandra-like seer, Merricat addresses the reader as an intimate: My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Con- stance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. Merricat speaks with a seductive and disturbing authority, never drawn to justifying her actions but only to recounting them. One might expect We Have Always Lived in the Castle to be a confession, of a kind�after all, one or another of the Blackwood sisters poisoned their entire family, six years before�but Merricat has nothing to confess, still less to regret. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a romance with an improbable�magical�happy ending. As readers we are led to smile at Merricat's childish self-definition, as one who dislikes "washing myself"; it will be many pages before we come to realize the significance of Amanita phalloides and the wish to have been born a werewolf. Read More...http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23131 September 30th 2009 From Open Magazine Oh, for a Book to Ban! by Hartosh Singh Bal �Satanic Verses� was banned 20 years ago. In all the navel-gazing contemporary Indian fiction, where�s the book that has the power to offend? Twenty years ago, give or take a month, The Satanic Verses was banned in India. Over the course of this month, there will be no dearth of writing on the ban of books, but on this anniversary, the real tragedy is not that book bans are still alive in the country but that there is a diminishment of the kind of literary ambition the book represents. Today you would be hard put to find Indian fiction in English that anybody would want banned. Take a look at this year�s shortlist for the Shakti Bhatt Prize: � Anuradha Roy: An Atlas of Impossible Longing � Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf � Mimlu Sen: Baulsphere � Mridula Koshy: If It Is Sweet � Palash Krishna Mehrotra: Eunuch Park � Parismita Singh: Hotel at the End of the World � Preeta Samarasan: Evening is the Whole Day Baulsphere is non-fiction. The others, well, the titles speak for themselves. If you want to convince yourself, go glance at the blurbs in a bookstore or on the Web; I did, and there is not a book of fiction on the list I want to read. Individually some may be well written, taken together the list only illustrates the point I made, unless of course there are dwarves or eunuchs out there who are offended. Read More here....http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/oh-for-a-book-to-ban#comment-574 September 10th 2009 From the National Worlds of experience by Philippa Kennedy "Alia Yunis is jet-lagged. She has just flown in from Washington via Frankfurt, and although she�s back at her desk in Abu Dhabi�s Zayed University, she feels as though half of her brain is still floating around somewhere in between. Since mid-July, she has visited eight American cities, giving talks and signing copies of her debut novel, The Night Counter, which is making a satisfying ripple in the publishing pond. Few first-time novelists get that kind of treatment, but Yunis�s publisher, Random House, clearly thought it was worth it to fly her to the US for a six-week publicity tour in order to bring her whimsical tale of Arab-American family life to a wider audience." Read More... August 16th 2009 From the Guardian A culture of fear "Liberal spaces within Europe have brought many more Muslim women out of their old confinements Europe is at risk of being 'colonised' by its Muslim populations, argue a number of bestselling new books, acclaimed across the political spectrum. How has such hysteria gone unchallenged? Pankaj Mishra on the 'Eurabia-mongers.' Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that "a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise - the term is not too strong - a senescent Europe". And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a "bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties", Muslims are already "conquering Europe's cities, street by street". So what if Muslims account for only 3% to 4% of the EU's total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? - which was featured on Start the Week, excerpted in Prospect, commended as "morally serious" by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards - Caldwell writes: "Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today." Read More... August 1st 2009 From The Digital Journal Published About, By And For Women by Alakananda Mookerjee "Roughly, two years prior to the start of World War I, The New York Times published a brief, yet riveting news under the �London Literary News� section of its book reviews. It was dated October 20, 1912, and read: A new publishing firm has come into existence which calls itself The Happy Publishing Company. Its members are all women. No male members are eligible, since the object of the firm is to deal with books that are written, printed and published by women. The Happy Publishing Company�s first venture is a volume of love stories! This was a rare instance of an early 20th century feminist press and its success was a flash in the pan. Much later�as much as 50 years�coinciding with the women�s movement of the mid-1960s, women�s publishing houses began to burst on the horizon of the Western book industry. Their beginnings were wobbly, their presences, faint and their futures, uncertain at best. " Read More at http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/277070 July 10th 2009 From Outlook Magazine Review of aDon't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight By Rujuta Diwekar Random House India, Pages: 279; Rs. 199 "If devouring diet books could make you lose weight, your reviewer would be a thin woman. She is not. What a good diet book does however�to paraphrase what some lipstick king once said about his cosmetics�is sell hope. It leaves you with the strong conviction that, as writers in this genre are apt to tell you, You Can Do It. It has you reaching for your diary, writing "This is the first day of the rest of my life" next to tomorrow�s date, scribbling menus on the backs of envelopes, starting a food diary and calling up your best friends�all, of course, dying to drop a few kilos just like you�and saying, Hey guys, this is the book, buy it." Read More... June 20th 2009 From the Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Should Read Love: Introduction "So, what makes a great love story? Initially, this seemed the easiest of the seven categories that make up our series. All great novels are essentially about love, aren't they? As it turned out, things weren't so easy. There is, as one of our panel remarked of Madame Bovary, often precious little loving going on in these famous love stories. With the exceptions of Jane Austen and sometimes Dickens there are very few guaranteed happy endings. "Reader, I married him" is quite defi nitely the exception to the rule � unless our poor heroine has married the wrong man, or he is in love with someone else. The contemporary novel, for one, has fallen out of love with love. When our most successful and popular authors choose to write love stories, they look to the past, as do TV producers with the endless return to old favourites for the Sunday night bonnet slot. And you can be sure that in any poll of the nation's favourite novels Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights will be somewhere at the top. So perhaps we haven't become disillusioned with romance itself, just distrustful of its ability to thrive in such a cynical age." Read More... June 10th 2009 From NEXT A fardel of stories By Tade Ipadeola Review of One World: A Global, Anthology of Short Stories By Various Authors; New Internationalist "The declared intent of the New Internationalist literary projects of which the One World Anthology of Short Stories is one, is to heal the world. The artistic impulse is at its purest when pecuniary advantage takes secondary place. In One World: A Global Anthology, with at least a representative story from every continent except Antarctica, we have twenty three stories worth the reading." Read More... May 25th 2009 From Outlook Best Heard On 78 RPM India's greatest living singer, Lata will be celebrated. But a hagiographic Q&A cannot stand for a biography. By Bhaichand Patel "First the statistics: Until the 1991 edition, when her entry disappeared, the Guinness Book of Records listed Lata Mangeshkar as having sung no less than 30,000 solo, duets and chorus-backed songs. That made her easily the most recorded artiste in the world. I will get back to that later. Lata started as a child actress to support her impoverished family and had small roles in eight Marathi and Hindi films. She hated acting and turned to singing. Her early songs were forgettable until composers Khemchand Prakash, Naushad Ali and Shankar Jaikishan discovered her more or less at the same time. Her first big hit was Aayega aanewala but HMV attributed the recording not to Lata but to �Kamini�, the character Madhubala played in Mahal. The huge success of her songs in two films that rapidly followed, Mehboob Khan�s Andaz and Raj Kapoor�s Barsaat, ensured her uncontested reign as the queen of playback for the next 50 years or so." Read More... May 14th 2009 From the Guardian You can't be serious "Celebrity memoirs, declining libraries, the web and now the recession have all spelled bad news for publishing. Once thriving genres such as political and literary biography are ailing. Is it the end for quality non-fiction? Andy Beckett investigates. Colin Robinson has been in publishing since 1976. He has worked for fusty companies and radical ones, for earnest independents and empire-building corporations, for Britons and Americans: as an editor, always involved in the slightly precarious business of putting out serious books. But recently he started noticing something about the way books are treated that disturbed him. "Here in New York" - Robinson lives in a fairly intellectual part of Manhattan - "books are quite often left out in the street. If people are moving, they don't take their books with them." Read More... May 1st 2009 From the Telegraph Zoya Phan: the face of Burmese protest Zoya Phan recalls how she fled the jungle to become the most powerful political activist for Burma living in Britain. "Destiny is a big, portentous, overworked word. Zoya Phan never once uses it. But for her followers it is the only way to make sense of how she escaped persecution in the Burmese jungle and became, aged only 28, a human rights campaigner in the mould of her assassinated father, and the most powerful political activist for Burma living in Britain." Read More... April 15th 2009 From the Guardian The missing piece "Tennyson, Edith Wharton and Henry James all exorcised their demons through work. Margaret Drabble on how walking, talking, jigsaws - and above all writing - have helped her overcome periods of depression. Virginia Woolf's father went in for mountaineering and public groaning, mine for gardening and a kind of tuneless humming; he also liked to walk with his dog Anna by the river Deben in Suffolk. My mother sought relief in pre-Prozac pills called Tofranil, and in novels. I take long walks and do jigsaws. (Reading doesn't do the trick so well any more, although I still read obsessively.) These are all attempts to alleviate depression. We claim we talk much more openly now about depression than we used to, and it is true that many confessional memoirs dealing with it have been published in recent years, some good (William Styron's Darkness Visible, Gwyneth Lewis's Sunbathing in the Rain), some bad, and some exploitative, but it's hardly a new topic. Melancholia has been with us for centuries, and Hamlet was not the first to have suffered from it. Tennyson feared what he called "the black blood of the Tennysons", an inheritance of mental and physical disability and drug addiction, and exorcised his demons in the intense, hypnotic and enervating melancholia of his verse. Some can harness it to their own purposes, and ride the waves. Sylvia Plath rode bravely and fearlessly for a while, yet in the end went under." Read More... 23rd March 2009 From Open Magazine New magazine, Open, launched this week. Cutting edge news, features and profiles in a glossy package - http://www.openthemagazine.com/ - Check out page 54 - After Ever After, a profile on the winners of the Mills and Boon competition to discover new romance writers in India. 10th March 2009 From the Guardian Maya Jaggi reviews Kamala Shamsie's new novel, Burnt Shadows "The huge ambition of Kamila Shamsie's fifth novel is announced in the prologue. As an unnamed captive is unshackled and stripped naked in readiness for the anonymity of an orange jumpsuit, he wonders: "How did it come to this?" The vastness of the question as applied to a prisoner in Guant�namo is a challenge to which this epic yet skilfully controlled novel rises in oblique and unexpected ways." Read More... 28th February 2009 From the NY Times Exile�s Return: A review of Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moaveni By GAIUTRA BAHADUR The subtitle of �Honeymoon in Tehran,� an engaging new book from the author of �Lipstick Jihad,� promises �two years of love and danger in Iran.� But while Azadeh Moaveni does indeed deliver details of her romance with the son of an Iranian textile tycoon, there�s another, more intriguing relationship at the core of this memoir." Read More... 21st February 2009 From Salon.com Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel? Female authors hold their own on the bestseller lists, but Elaine Showalter's provocative new history wonders why they get so little respect. "Every few years, someone counts up the titles covered in the New York Times Book Review and the short fiction published in the New Yorker, as well as the bylines and literary works reviewed in such highbrow journals as Harper's and the New York Review of Books, and observes that the male names outnumber the female by about 2 to 1. This situation is lamentable, as everyone but a handful of embittered cranks seems to agree, but it's not clear that anyone ever does anything about it. The bestseller lists, though less intellectually exalted, tend to break down more evenly along gender lines; between J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer alone, the distaff side is more than holding its own in terms of revenue. But when it comes to respect, are women writers getting short shrift?" Read More... 14th February 2009 From the FT A Fine Balance by James Lamont "Mahatma Gandhi famously observed that �India is to be found not in its few cities but in its 700,000 villages.� Six decades after India declared independence, however, Gandhi�s view is being overturned. In the 21st century, Indians are increasingly likely to leave their villages in search of something better beyond, whether it�s just around the corner, in the next town or overseas." Read More... January 30th 2009 From Outlook Magazine In Vino Veritas The moralist local press almost plays spoiltsport at the third litfest Sheela Reddy "You wouldn't think it's a place you'd bump into the Hindu Taliban. The Jaipur Literature Festival, the yearly gala where both Indian and international writers and publishers gather at a picturesque haveli for a few days of hard partying and networking every January-end, is now famous for many things: crowds more interested in the idea of literature than actual books, stars (both the filmi and literary kind), scores of lifestyle journalists lined up with their cameras and mikes for their daily round of celebrity-chasing, and, of course, many more hoping to catch the eye of a literary agent or publisher with the book they hope to write someday soon." Read More... January 14th 2009 From the Guardian 'It should make you blush' "People have fainted at public readings of Charlotte Roche's debut novel Wetlands, which makes The Vagina Monologues sound tame. But is it a daring feminist work or just puerile porn? Decca Aitkenhead meets her. Feuchtgebiete, which translates as Wetlands, or Moist Patches, is the debut novel from Charlotte Roche. As it opens, we find 18-year-old narrator Helen Memel in hospital, after an accident shaving her intimate parts. The remainder of the book plays out entirely on the proctology ward where, in between ruminating on her haemorrhoids and sexual proclivities, Helen asks her male nurse to photograph her wound, tries to seduce him, and hides under her bed to masturbate. She has an insatiable, childlike curiosity about the sight and smell and taste of bodies, especially her own. She is also exuberantly promiscuous. Hygiene, she reflects, "is not a major concern of mine". When she uses public toilets, she likes to rub her vagina around the lavatory seat, and she has experimented with "long periods of not washing my pussy", to investigate its erotic impact - dabbing her own personal pubic perfume behind her earlobes. "It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek."" Read More... January 6th 2009 From Outlook India Going Native in Bits "I was an army brat, which meant that everyplace�and no place�was my permanent home address. In fact, all it took for me to think of someplace as "home" was some rickety mes furniture, and a school that I could go to. Geography was never a part of what constituted "home". But that didn't mean we were allowed to grow up with an "I am just an Indian from anywhere" sort of identity. The sacredness of the "native place" was always invoked by my parents and our battle-axe family retainer, to explain to us kids why we had to bother to get fluent in Telugu�a language that our friends made fun of, even though my dad assured us that it was known as the Italian of the east." Read More... December 27th 2008 from the Guardian 2008: a year in books "This year had all the ingredients for a good novel: fake memoirs, a firebombing, a Booker winner who wasn't and JK Rowling up in court. Michelle Pauli charts the year in books" December 15th 2008 From Salon.com Since you asked ...By Cary Tennis "Dear Cary, I'm blocked. Creatively, spiritually, emotionally -- you name it. I'm a 28-year-old writer who can't seem to get anything onto the page without second-guessing and editing the entire time. I write the first sentence over and over, eventually giving up on the idea entirely -- only to see it appear in another publication later. This happens constantly. (It took me an hour to write that first paragraph. If this were a piece, and not a messy letter, it would've taken me four.)" Read More... December 6th 2008 From the Guardian Fresh air and Chanel No 5 William Radice finds plenty to relish in an anthology of Indian poets in English "Two years ago, at an event in London on "Tagore's Gifts to English", I asked one of my research students to read out a couple of poems from Tagore's Gitanjali. Hearing them in her educated Calcutta voice was a revelation, and made me aware that when an Indian writes poetry in English, we should read it with Indian accents in mind, just as we think of American voices when we read American poetry. So in this diverse new anthology of 73 Indian poets in English, is this the common factor? The useful short introductions for each poet quickly dispel that notion, for more than a third of them live (or lived at their deaths) outside India, and nearly a quarter in the US, including some, such as Ravi Shankar and Prageeta Sharma, who were born and brought up there. The voices running through my head as I read were as often those of New York, Berkeley or Montana as they were of Mumbai or Bangalore." Read More... November 25th 2008 From Dawn Sehba Sarwar And Asif Farrukhi from Dawn meet Bapsi Sidhwa "It�s a warm Monday morning, a month after Hurricane Ike tore through Houston, as I drive over to Bapsi Sidhwa�s house in southwest Houston. Even though I�ve visited Bapsi�s home many times over the last decade, today the street looks different. I almost drive by without recognising her place. �We lost three pine trees in our front yard and all our shade,� she says, leading me to her kitchen table. �We had to move out. We had no electricity for two weeks.�" Read More... November 16th 2004 From Tehelka An influx of women technicians, from sound designers to cinematographers, is changing the Hindi film industry, says MANJULA NARAYAN "The last time you stumbled onto a Hindi film set more than a decade ago, the place was teeming with oily men in white polyester trousers and matching patent leather shoes. The leading lady was ensconced in a vanity van, besieged by more of the shiny patent leather brigade whose sole function, it seemed, was to assure her that she was and would always be Number One. Outside, the light boys were shimmying up scaffoldings, cinematographers were peering through their lenses and the director was looking like a tortured genius. The only female faces on set belonged to the hairdressers." Read More... November 6th 2008 From the Guardian Sussana Rustin interviews Toni Morrison "Toni Morrison breaks off from explaining a crucial passage in her new novel - Florens, the main character, has just been searched by a posse of witch-hunters - to check her mobile. "It's my son," she apologises, "is he kidding me?" She calls him back for a quick discussion about the latest presidential election headlines." Read More... October 24th 2008 From The Guardian Where are the books by women with big ideas? Books like Freakonomics, defining significant cultural or economic trends with a punchy title, never seem to be produced by women. But why? By Alison Flood "If you'd predicted that economics was going to be the big new thing in books five years ago you'd probably have been laughed out of the room. But thanks to the success of books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist, a new genre has been spawned. And despite the collapse of western capitalism it's still going strong, with football due the Freakonomics treatment in the new year." Read More... October 19th 2008 From MSNBC.com Author Anita Jain talks about the search for love and sex in the New India by Minal Hajratwala "Anita Jain is the kind of woman who can keep you up all night chatting about everything from sex and family to culture and literature, with insight and wit. (I know; it was 3 a.m. my time when we finished our interview, which turned out to be the most convenient way to bridge her time zone in New Delhi with mine in California.) But is she the kind of woman you�d want to marry? Or, more to the point, can she find the man she�s looking to marry? That�s the question at the heart of Jain�s memoir, Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India (Bloomsbury, 2008), in which she decides, after years of dismal dating experiences in the West, to move to her parents� homeland of India to see if she can find The One." Read More.... October 12th 2008 From Ecstatic days, a blog by Jeff Vandermeer "Kali for Women was founded by Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia and was India�s first feminist press. Later on, in an age where other feminist or women-friendly presses came to be, Urvashi founded Zubaan. The word means �tongue� in the sense of voice, or language. Today Zubaan publishes fiction for children and adults, and non-fiction, including academic tones, bringing to the forefront some interesting and unusual voices that might otherwise be lost. They include collections of fiction by Indian women, including translations from many Indian languages. Zubaan also published my children�s books in the Younguncle series � I count myself unbelievably lucky to have been �discovered� by Zubaan editor Anita Roy. Zubaan is also the publisher of my first short story collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. So I asked Urvashi and Anita to tell us a little about the world of feminist publishing in India and how they see the world from their office up in a flat in Hauz Khas, a suburb of New Delhi. They took time between traveling and editing to answer a few questions. I�m really honoured to be asking questions of you, Urvashi and Anita. When Anita first discovered my writing through my Younguncle book, I learned that Urvashi was the one who had started Zubaan. As I had admired you from afar for a long time as one of India�s foremost feminists, I felt very special to be published by Zubaan, to the point of being very nearly tongue-tied when we first met. So, can you tell me, Urvashi, how Zubaan came to be? Urvashi: And we have loved publishing you, Vandana, and hope to continue doing so. Zubaan is, in many ways, a child of Kali. As you know, Kali was founded in 1984 by two of us, Ritu Menon and myself. We worked together for 19 years, publishing books we loved and then, we decided to split up. We split for all the reasons people do, they�re never good, but sometimes the only �solution� seems to be to separate. So we shut down Kali and went our separate ways. I set up Zubaan at the time, in 2003. The choice before me was to give up publishing altogether, which I wasn�t willing to do, I love the work, or to join another publishing house. But I felt very strongly that I had an obligation and a responsibility; to the authors who had invested trust in us and given us their books, and to my colleagues who would have been out of a job had we just shut down. So Zubaan came up. Basically its mandate was to do what Kali was doing but also to expand and take account of the changes in the women�s movement and try to build those in. So while the spine of our work remains the straightforward academic research based books, we are also doing a lot more fiction, and general books and we went into doing books for children and young adults. This is the list that Anita developed and continues to develop for us. At the time we took this on, no one was paying much attention to young adults. I�m glad to say this is changing. Zubaan�s birth as a child of Kali happened also because of other reasons. The issue about feminist publishing is that it is believed that it is a temporary phenomenon, that in some ways its success is its very failure. Let me explain; in Kali we set out to fill a gap, to answer a need, to be part of a political process of mainstreaming the voices and concerns of women. In many ways this has begun to happen in the world of writing and publishing. Women are no longer discriminated against in the same way, their voices have in many ways become mainstream. From the early days when we did not have any difficulty finding authors to today when we have difficulty holding on to them is a very different story. Does that mean there is no place for us any more? That we should give up the focus on women and move into mainstream publishing? When Kali was going through its break up this was the question put to us by many � why continue to publish on women, there is really no need for that any more. But I strongly believe otherwise. I believe we continue to have a role, that the world of women�s writing is not finite, that as long as there is a movement and a politics, writing will be born out of that, and it is our responsibility and our commitment to reflect this, to publish it, even if � as increasingly happens � we end up publishing writers who then move on to more mainstream publishers. But that is our role and function. So all the reasons that were releveant when Kali was born, still remain: to centre-stage women�s writing, to reflect what is going on in the movement, to reverse the flow of information which had traditionally been from North to South, West to East." Read More... October 3rd 2008 From Outlook Review of Anita Jain's Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in New India "My initial impression on reading the first few pages of Marrying Anita was one of dismay. I braced myself for frothy Sex and the City-style outpourings and facetious observations about men and the modern woman�s seemingly doomed quest for love." Read More... September 22nd2008 From Outlook 'One Rip Van Winkle Sleep And...' By Anita Desai "All the books I wrote, and had published�in the '60s, '70s and even in the '80s�came out in India after their publication in England and the US without benefit of publicity, book tours, readings or any of those events that in the '90s seem to have become de rigueur in the publishing world." Read More... September 14th 2008 From The Telegraph Mills and Boon: The Art of Love by Louisa McKay "Mills & Boon, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, is the biggest publisher of romance novels in the world. Derided, ridiculed, the easiest form of fiction to knock, they're still obstinately popular. One is sold every three seconds in Britain, 200 million a year worldwide. Up to 70 new titles are released each month. For all the brutal criticism the books receive, Mills & Boon has tapped into a perfect formula of easy-read, no-nasty-bits romance, which is loved by millions of women." Read More... August 30th 2008 From Dawn Workplace: Working with the unfair sex "Gender equality, women leadership and treatment of women at the workplace are issues that generate a lot of discussion, not just in our country but also abroad. But is gender equality and fair treatment of working women in corporate organisations an everyday practical reality? Do male colleagues treat their female counterparts with fairness and due respect? "To get a clearer picture of what women face in the corporate world today, we talked to a number of professional women, all with years of working experience at different positions. They candidly discussed the issue of gender (un)equality in their organisation and the attitude of male colleagues towards them as well as their comfort-level when working with both genders." Read More... August 21st 2008 From the FT New Wives Tales Four biographies reflect the outcome of history�s feminisation, writes Jackie Wullschlager "Twenty-one years ago, I reviewed on these pages the first biography of Simone de Beauvoir, by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, published just after her death in 1986. Focusing, inevitably, on her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, it was a work of romantic hagiography: �The two writers hid themselves more deeply in the chestnut groves. The most singular love story of the 20th century had begun.�" Read More... August 12th 2008 From Dawn Profile of Padma Viswanathan "�I write about the things I want to read and I hope my readers like it too,� with this quote, Padma Viswanathan, 40, sets the tone for an interview to discuss the long road she travelled while writing her debut novel The Toss of a Lemon. Published in Canada by Random House, the novel is a new voice in the world of fiction." Read More... August 1st 2008 From the NY Times Review of EVENING IS THE WHOLE DAY By Preeta Samarasan. "What can fiction offer in this age of instant messaging and quick downloads? Search and click: far away locales zoom into focus on the computer screen, along with helpful links to rental cars. News, history, travel blogs await. And yet all the information in the world cannot substitute for the long slow banquet of a fine novel." Read more... July 20th 2008 b>Outlook Interviews Arundhati Roy "'What does it matter if I fail?' asks the Booker winner on her second novel and of course, the first work of fiction since The God of Small Things. The Briefing, the first work of fiction by Arundhati Roy since The God of Small Things in 1997, was written for Manifesta7, one of the most important European Biennials of Contemporary Art, which opens on July 19 in northern Italy..." http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080728&fname=Arundhati+Roy+%28F%29&sid= >Read More... July 11th 2008 From the Guardian Letters cast a new light on famous lesbian affair "Funny, revealing and downright bitchy pen-portraits of the leading figures of the Bloomsbury Group, the key British literary stars of the 1920s and 1930s, have come to light in unpublished correspondence between the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and an aspiring young writer." Read More... July 2nd 2008 Outlook Magazine Review of Qurratulain Hyder's Fireflies in the Mist "Non-Urdu readers have just begun to realise that Qurratulain Hyder is without doubt one of the finest writers anywhere of fiction, especially reportage fiction. Trying to review Qurratulain Hyder�s translation of her novel Akhir-e-Shab Ke Humsafar is like trying to review two books together. She has made several significant changes in the translation. The first two chapters�Caledonia and The Golden Album�have been written only for the English version. Many chapters have been shuffled around and new details added." Read More... June 24th 2008 Five Dials Hamish Hamilton introduces FIVE DIALS, a brand new and totally free monthly magazine for lovers of literature. Issue 1 contains new writing, artwork and despatches from the world of words including: * unpublished work from Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein * a short story from Hari Kunzru * the first of Alain de Botton's regular Agony Uncle columns * line drawings from some of the finest illustrators around * Gustave Flaubert's letters to Louise Colet about Madame Bovary * plus poetry from Joe Dunthorne and contributions from Mohsin Hamid, Nick Tosches and others. A sneak preview is available for download here: http://fivedials.com If you like it, and we hope you do, you can sign up for a free monthly subscription by clicking the Five Dials button at www.hamishhamilton.co.uk June 16th 2008 From the Independent Louise Erdrich: Secrets in the Indian file "Of all the fictional hamlets American writers have planted, from William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, the most complex, luminous place yet might be a little town called Argus, North Dakota. Since she first introduced the town in Love Medicine (1984), Louise Erdrich has gone back to it continually, conjuring the reservation it abuts, the love affairs which bolt down through the generations, the tensions that simmer between French-Canadians, Catholics and the native Ojibwe Indians and their competing notions of God. It is amazing someone hasn't accidentally drawn up a rough guide." Read More... June 9th 2008 From Outlook Pickle Point: A review of Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age "The human story behind the bitter and bloody war of independence that resulted in the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistani rule in 1971 has rarely been told, at least in English language fiction, and rarely been told so poignantly and well as in Tahmima Anam�s debut novel." Read More... May 24th 2008 From the Hindu Award for woman playwright "Saroop Dhruv, the Gujarati playwright, poet and social activist, has received the 2008 Hellman/Hammett Award for courageous writing by Human Rights Watch. She is a member of Women�s WORLD (India), a national network of over 200 women writers dealing with censorship. This is a part of an international free speech network, Women�s WORLD (International) which had nominated her for this award." Read more... May 18th From the Guardian "London-born Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories went straight to number 1 in the American bestseller lists. Now her tales of immigrant life are being hailed as a new direction in US literature. Edward Helmore reports on a changing of the guard in American fiction." Read More... May 12th From Dawn Monica Pradhan's The Hindi Bindi Club reviewed by Shagufta Naaz "Take three mothers, add three daughters. Stir in some ethnic flavour and spice with cross-generational conflict. Add a dash of age-old Indian wisdom, sprinkle with romance and there you have it: Monica Pradhan�s debut novel, The Hind-Bindi Club. Or at least, that�s what you expect. Like a dish that looks appetising but lacks some unidentifiable ingredient, the novel promises a delicious read but somehow fails to deliver." Read More... May 5th 2008 From Outlook Magazine 'Pretty Confused', 'Pretty Sinister', 'Pretty Average': Don't judge the book by its cover. Shobhaa De looks pretty on it but can't say the same about her book. By Bhaichand Patel "Why does a book that is ostensibly about India have a portrait of the author on its cover? Let me explain. When David Davidar was the publisher at Penguin India, he once caught his staff sniggering over a manuscript that Shobhaa De had submitted. "Don�t laugh," he told them sternly, "her books pay your salaries."" Read More... April 28th 2008 From Dawn The 'Woman Warrior' celebrates victory by Mohsin Maqbool Elahi "Maya Angelou, author of the best-selling books I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, and the Heart of a Woman, has also written several collections of poetry including Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water �fore I Die. She read her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton on January 20, 1993. She also wrote 10 one-hour programmes for the television series called �Blacks, Blues, Blacks�, which highlight Africanisms still current in American life. However, the book under discussion here is Angelou�s 1993 book Wouldn�t Take Nothing for My Journey Now which is considered by many to be an inspirational book." Read More... April 21st 2008 From VOW Nepal Kagajma Dastakhat: A review by Neelam Karki "...Kagajma Dastakhat (is) a collection of eight short stories written by Neelam Karki �Niharika�. In the story, Abha, an unmarried woman tries to fight against societal gender discrimination only to face obstacles from her own family. The paragraph is the description of Abha�s feelings incited by an old woman who refuses to eat food outside because she is a Brahmin..." Read More... April 16th 2008 From the Guardian Don't forget the F-word: Erica Jong on how the hope she had for women in 1968 has been extinguished "It's an artifice of journalism to choose a given year and pretend that year "changed everything". We constantly hear in the United States that 9/11 "changed everything", yet - for most of humanity - life is still as nasty, brutish and short in 2008 as it was in 1008 or 2008 BC. If it is so for man, it is doubly so for woman - since women and children are the main victims of war - if we go by numbers. But can numbers measure pain? Probably not." Read More... April 8th 2008 From The January Magazine Bee Season; Review of Amulya Malladi's The Sound Of Language by Linda L. Richards "While Amulya Malladi�s five novels have not had huge pushes behind them, they have been wonderful is their consistancy and the largesse of the vision that drove them. The author gives every impression of building a solid and passionate following..." Read More April 2nd 2008 From The Los Angeles Times An Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri Review by Lisa Fugard "With her Pulitzer Prize- winning story collection "Interpreter of Maladies" and her novel "The Namesake," Jhumpa Lahiri established herself as a clear-eyed and compassionate chronicler of the lives of expatriate Bengalis and their first-generation American-born children. In her latest work, "Unaccustomed Earth," a powerful collection of short stories, those children have left home and are starting families of their own, as they struggle both with tangled filial relationships and the demands of parenthood. The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations." Read More... March 26th 2008 From The New York Times An Investement Banker finds Fame Off the Books A profile on Chetan Bhagat, author of Five Point Someone and One Night at the Call Centre By Donald Greenlees "HONG KONG � Until about four years ago, Chetan Bhagat was an investment banker distinguished from the suited phalanx in this city�s crowded financial district only by his secret hobby." Read More. March 19th 2008 From Dawn Remember Me? By Sophie Kinsella Bantam Press, London "Right off the bat, I should admit that I generally detest chick-lit. The 20-something heroines, the wealthy love interests, the contrived searches for the perfect relationship and the trite endings � I hate all of it. I used to think that the instant I picked up one of �those� novels my brain would turn to mush. At its worst, chick-lit is boring, repetitive and frothy. At its best though, the writing is witty, bold and slightly irreverent: see Helen Fielding�s Bridget Jones Diary. Finding these gems amidst a market flooded with formulaic titles and pink covers is no easy task. Alongside the standouts (The Devil Wears Prada, The Nanny Diaries) is Sophie Kinsella." Read More... March 13th 2008 From The TLS Giles Whittell SPITFIRE WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II HarperPress Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird CONTESTING HOME DEFENCE Men, women and the Home Guard in the Second World War Manchester University Press. "They shared a burning desire to �do their bit�, but they could not have been more different: the flying few, who realized their dreams, and the down-to-earth many who didn�t. These two books about British women in the Second World War could not be more different, either. Exuberant Giles Whittell is a Times journalist and a travel-writer, sober Professor Penny Summerfield and her associate, Dr Corinna Peniston-Bird are professional historians; but both stories are of patriotic women pressing to share what men regarded as their territory and thus, for those who thought about it, advancing the cause of women�s equality." Read More March 7th 2008 From the Guardian My Life As a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman 250pp, Bloomsbury, �12.99 "Evin prison stands in the Elburz foothills overlooking Tehran, and casts a shadow over all Iran. Built for the Shah in the 1970s, it symbolises a sort of continuity of despotism between the monarchy and the Islamic republic." Read More... And don't forget to check out our extensive list of review resources below. From the Guardian to Moscow Times to Dawn, we have it all. 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