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	Home    Reviews   print this page Review of the week From Mint Leaving Home The acclaimed novelist proves herself equal to the demands of the short story by Chandrahas Choudhury "When he asked if she would marry him, she thought how unnecessary it was, his asking, since she would have been happy simply to be told.” Doesn’t this one sentence open up an entire world of gender relations, one that is both static and shifting? The woman is willing to play the traditional role of docility and submission; she is fine with being instructed, and is surprised at being “asked”." 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 Guantánamo 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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