61 Essential Post-modern reads

I stumbled upon this list this morning at LAT home blog and had a curious look at it. Hey, many of my favourite books are here,like Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis", Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five",Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". A great list. But one thing I can't help wondering: are all real writers post-modernists?

Do we miss anyone? Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie? Are not they post-modernists?

Kathy Acker's "In Memorium to Identity"
Donald Antrim's "The Hundred Brothers"
Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy
Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine"
J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition"
John Barth's "Giles Goat-Boy"
Donald Barthelme's "60 Stories"
John Berger's "G"
Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser"
Roberto Bolaño's "2666"
Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths"
William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch"
Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch"
Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor"
Stanley Crawford's "Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine"
Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves"
Don Delillo's "Great Jones Street"
Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
E.L. Doctorow's "City of God"
Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D. H. Lawrence"
Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Steve Erickson's "Tours of the Black Clock"
Percival Everett's "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"
William Faulkner's "Absalom! Absalom!"
Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated"
William Gaddis' "JR"
William Gass' "The Tunnel" John Hawkes' "The Lime Twig"
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project"
Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
Shelley Jackson's "Skin"
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn"
Ben Marcus' "Notable American Women"
David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress"
Tom McCarthy's "Remainder"
Joseph McElroy's "Women and Men"
Steven Millhauser's "Edwin Mullhouse"
Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"
Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds"
Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor"
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"
Philip Roth's "The Counterlife"
W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Gilbert Sorrentino's "Mulligan Stew"
Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance"
Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II
Laurence Stern's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"
Scarlett Thomas' "PopCo"
Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"
David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"

Full-length literary novel on Twitter!

Ubercool!
So, you've heard about(or, read) novel on your cell phone. Now you can read a full-length novel on Twitter.
"I didn't write The French Revolution in short, burstable, Twitterific sentences. I wrote this novel for lovers of literary fiction, with long and loving sentences, exploding with imaginative descriptions and inventive plot twists and characters I hope will stick with you for a while. Twitter is the delivery mechanism, not the defining structure. While I think my whiplash sentences will be compelling in 140-character bursts, it also may backfire.

I'm willing to take that chance. Publishing needs to change, and while I'm not going to revolutionize the industry on my own, I think I can help nudge it toward a more dynamic and customer-friendly future. "

Congratulation, Matt. Like you experiment with the delivery of your novel, I'll also experiment with reading a novel this way.

Is Wole Soyinka the best Nigerian writer ?

Dr.Olatunji Dare, the well-known journalist, describes Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, as the best Nigerian writer that ever lived.

I wonder what he thinks of Chinua Achebe.

Writing has become a weapon: Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy talks to Tim Adams in the Observer and says that she is writing bits of fiction, but gets derailed by something happening.
"The prize(Booker) was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition."

Now, A Suitable Girl by Vikram Seth

Sequel to A Suitable Boy? Yes, it is. No joke. Vikram Seth has really started working on it. But he assures us it might not be as long as its 1400-page predecessor.

Q:Are you comfortable with the fanfare with which the impending arrival of A Suitable Girl has been announced? Doesn’t it remind you of the hype surrounding films these days?

A:I would be lying if I said I’m completely at home in it. But if you’re in the book business, the publishers are taking care of every little thing for you, and as a writer, the least you can do is handle these things with good grace. Do I like doing interviews? No, mostly, and there have been many where I’ve switched my mind off completely. But I don’t mind this one. It’s around noon here, and I’m lying on my bed, looking out at a pleasant view from my window, and I don’t mind answering your questions.

Language Thieves!

Just read an article (more appropriately, essay) by Arundhati Roy. She is as always brilliant with her unique observation of happenings around us, and offers her explanation in a cool and intrepid way.

Today, words like 'progress' and 'development' have become interchangeable with economic 'reforms', 'deregulation' and 'privatisation'. 'Freedom' has come to mean 'choice'. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. 'Market' no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The 'market' is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling 'futures'. 'Justice' has come to mean 'human rights' (and of those, as they say, 'a few will do'). This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being 'anti-progress', 'anti-development', 'anti-reform' and of course 'anti-national'—negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, 'Don't you believe in Progress?' To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, 'Do you have an alternative development model?' To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, healthcare and social security, they say, 'You're against the Market.' And who except a cretin could be against a Market?

Oh, I've also thought along these lines many a times, but never could express it.

Waiting for 1Q84's English translation

No release date for English translation of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 has been set yet. But I wish I could get it right now. Yes, I'm hugely obsessed with Murakami's work. I like his passive, almost ignored protagonists, and his deft handling of contemporary themes with his sharp statement and humour. Murakami is no doubt a great thinking writer, and I take pleasure in noting that he has an ever-growing following of readers across the world.

Since I have to wait for a while for the book, I satisfy my appetite by reading all kinds of news and views about the novel.

According to informed critics, 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's magnum opus.

Haruki Murakami on New Realism

"A common state of mind among people in the contemporary world is that they become unsure about whether the world they see is actually real. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York in scenes that seemed to be unreal. As video footage of the towers collapsing were shown over and over again, some people might unwittingly and momentarily have felt they were straying into an odd world where no such towering buildings existed. They possibly think there could be a world where U.S. President George W. Bush was not reelected and the Iraq war did not break out.

I think the Great Hanshin Earthquake in January 1995 and the Aum sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March that year made many Japanese experience a sense of dissociation from reality before people of other countries. They asked themselves, "What we are here for?" My novels, except for "Norwegian Wood," do not represent what we call realism, but seem to have started being accepted the world over as works representing new realism--especially after 9/11.

At the same time, I like secular novels like those written by Honore de Balzac [1799-1850]. I wanted to write a "comprehensive novel" in my own style describing present-day social conditions from a three-dimensional standpoint. I tried to embed human life in the contemporary social climate by going beyond the genre of pure literature and by tapping various approaches that each offered something different.

"more..

Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for Letters for Ismail Kadare

Albanian narrator, essayist and poet Ismail Kadare has been bestowed with the
2009 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters.

The central theme of his work, expressed in each of his books, is totalitarianism, its mechanisms and the complicities that make it possible. This literary obsession reaches its climax in The Palace of Dreams (1993), published in Albania in 1981, when the communist dictatorship still governed. In this work, the Albanian writer builds an immense parable on despotic perversion, where in an imaginary country, a mammoth machine at the service of absolute power, the Office of Sleeping and Dreaming, controls the dreams of its citizens. Despite the fall of communism, Kadare continues to give voice to the soul of totalitarian societies, such as in Three Elegies for Kosovo (1999) and In Front of a Woman's Mirror (2002). His latest releases are Life, Death and Representation of Lul Mazreku (2007), Agamemnon's Daughter (2003) and The Successor (2005).

Michael Thomas after the Impac Prize

"It lowers the stress of chasing money around and provides some time. I can pay off whatever credit card debt I have and get off this high wire for a couple of years, and then start over again. Every opportunity I’ve had, I’ve either spurned or shunned or squandered through whatever kind of chip I’ve had, or rage or suspicion. Whatever I feel, this is a new opportunity to be a part of things, and my way of being a part of things is writing."

New insight from Granta's new editor?

"I think the owners have a really broad-reaching, dynamic vision of what a magazine should be. The world has changed. It's not an Anglo-American world anymore, culturally, metaphorically, financially. And I think we want to make a magazine that reflects that. There are great writers around the world: in Canada; in Pakistan; in the Middle East; in Africa. We need to do a better job finding them."

Okay, John, I'll be watching.

Challenges in contemporary literature

In his Wired blog, Bruce Sterling has compiled a list of eighteen challenges in contemporary literature. A very well-thought-out list. I would like to mention just two from the list.

1.Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

2.Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

Impac Dublim literary prize goes to Michael Thomas

How cool that the world's richest literary award (100000 Euros)Impac Dublin Prize this year goes to Michael Thomas, a debut novelist, who has "never really had a proper job", for his novel Man Gone Down!

Among the authors Michael beat were Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates. "Tuned urgently to the way we live now, [Man Gone Down] is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth."

Daniyal Mueenuddin: R.K. Narayan of Pakistan?

"He has been hailed as the R.K. Narayan of Pakistan, and to a large extent he fits the bill. Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection of superb short stories (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Random House) evokes the sounds and smells of feudal Pakistan with exquisite delicacy and understatement—much like Narayan. There is, however, one crucial difference. In none of Narayan’s fiction do we have a hint of sexual love, much less sexual intercourse. That was no part of the R.K. Narayan territory. Meanwhile, in Mueenuddin’s universe, sex is rampant, but always between the master and the maid, the powerful and the powerless. It is passionless sex, sketched casually and in passing. No intimacy, just the functional missionary position. And it’s quickly over."

Guess who writes this? No professional reviewer. He's a famous Indian editor with great lierary taste - something unusual for his kind of species. Yes, it's Vinod Mehta.

Harry Potter is dead!

Is anybody reading Harry Potter these days? Do you see any trace of the big wave that inundated the book industry not a long time ago?

Few or no sales of Harry Potter these days. The magic is gone.

But the publishers have alredy had their fill. So is author J. K. Rowling. Only the readers feel cheated.

In my post Potter Menace two years ago, I wrote:

It's not safe, in the face of mammoth media blitz for Harry Potter across the globe on the eve of latest book in the series, to churn out something against Harry Potter stuff and its writer J.K. Rowling. But now's really the time to stand against them.

Harry Potter was never like Cinderella or Sleeping beauty. It was overblown crap. It had nothing precious to offer to our children. It did, in fact, more harm than good to them in teaching them black magic and other sundry regressive things. It's good that finally it is in its place.

Potter is a classic example of what a marketing blitzkrieg can do to a book, and what is left of it when marketing is stopped.

Murakami's new novel after five years

1Q84
An exciting news for literary tasters: Haruki Murakami, one of the greatest living novelists, has published this morning a new novel titled 1Q84 after five years. The book - Japanese version, no translation yet -is so much in demand that its publisher Shinchosh was forced to increase its first print run by 100,000 to 480,000 copies amid a flood of advance orders.

The novel has 1066 pages, and is published in two volumes.

..1Q84 is classic Murakami, It is described as a "complex and surreal narrative" that "shifts back and forth between tales of two characters, a man and a woman, who are searching for each other".

The novel "explores social and emotional issues such as cult religions, violence, family ties and love."

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award goes to James King

James King has won the second annual Amazon contest in search of next popular novel and will receive a publishing contract worth $25,000 from Penguin Group (USA)for his novel Bill Warrington's Last Chance.

Alice Munro wins Man Booker International Prize 2009

"Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."

update on 5/29/09

Alice Munro is a true great

Anointed First-time Authors!

Lakshmi Chaudhry has an interesting column at Livemint.com about the current publishing's feast-or-famine approach to first novels.

Then there are the chosen few, an elite group of first-time authors anointed as potential geniuses and showered with gargantuan advances by the literary powers-that-be. Gautam Malkani, for example, received £380,000 (around Rs80 lakh) for Londonstani, which was over-hyped and then resoundingly panned by critics. As of last November, it had sold an underwhelming 15,000 copies.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez interview

It's actually an old interview, but since a new bio of the great author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin is out, you may like to take a look at it before you read the book.

Q:You usually attach a lot of importance to the first sentence of a book. You told me once that at times it has taken you longer to write the first sentence than all the rest of the book together. Why?

A:Because the first sentence can be the laboratory for testing the style, the structure and even the length of the book.

Q:Does it take you long to write a novel?

A:Not to actually write it. That's quite a rapid process. I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude in less than two years. But I spent fifteen or sixteen years thinking about that book before I sat down at the typewriter.

Q:And it took The Autumn of the Patriarch that long to mature. How long did you wait before writing Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

A:Thirty years.

Salman Rushdie Story review

I've read most of Salman Rushdie's novels, but never a story. In fact, I always file him under Novelist, not short-story writer. So I read through his recently published New Yorker story with a lot of interest.

In the South is about old age and its attendant downside set in Bombay, Rushdie’s favourite city. Two characters emerge, V. Senior and V.Junior, two adjacent neighbours in an apartment building, both 81-year-old, but with entirely different background, Senior having a successful past and Junior just an ordinary clerk in his working life. Obviously, circumstances put them together, but Senior hates Junior in every conceivable way.

Senior is actually the protagonist of the story. He’s cynical, cold, mean, heartless, and hates practically everybody including his second wife “with a wooded leg”. When Junior falls down in an accident while on their afternoon walk together, Senior slips away, and he is not really shocked by Junior’s death.

Curiously, Senior is much too obsessive about death. We see more of his instincts in his living than any other thing, and at times he seems like a monster weakened by age. In many ways, he represents an average man of this time, but it is hard to believe that he has not a little redemptive side to his character.

Does this story, otherwise well-crafted and a great read, reflect Rushhdie’s current insights into today’s man and life? What however elevates the story is the final part when a big calamity appears,(note such calamities frequently happen in Rushdie's works) and after many, many deaths Senior sees Junior again before him. That cliche magic realism, brand Rushdie!

I'm not sure I liked the story.

Imre Kertesz on his concenration camp experience

Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz recounts in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur his experience in concentration camp.
As a child I knew nothing outside the totalitarian regime. When I returned to Hungary, I didn't find it too hard to understand what was going on there. I saw how people were turned into cogs in the machine. The signs were identical. In 1956 I saw the Uprising in Budapest. You don't intellectualise this sort of thing, you just live it. Everything was a lie, the whole world was a lie. But most of the time you were clear-headed in the midst of absurdity. I felt as if my identity was deformed, as if I'd lost my normality. But I was never able to explain it. I asked myself if my 'anomaly' had become normal. Or whether I had become someone else."

Kamila Shamsie reads Michael Ondaatje

A writer's review of In the Skin of a Lion
"There are certain books that I claim to love and that I recommend to many of my friends, but it's not really love, it's just appreciation.

I know this because there are other books that I do truly deeply love. I love them so much that I can't risk giving them to friends who might not adore them as well — how could I be sure the friendship will survive such a blow? In the end, it seems safer to keep those books for myself.

And yet, it is also a quality of love to want to announce it from the rooftops. So here I am, telling anyone who will listen, of my love for Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion."

more..

Advantage Western writers: Tash Aw

The Australian has an interview-based profile of Tash Aw, the Malayasian author of hugely successful debut novel The Harmony Silk Factory.

There is an imbalance in the system which hugely favours Western writers and assumes certain hierarchies. The publishing world assumes that Southeast Asians don't read and aren't going to spend money on books. This might historically be true, but I think things are changing. There are some very fine writers from the region now. If I can in some way influence the way publishers regard us, that will be a small but very valuable thing accomplished.

Italo Calvino: The extreme other

In the Times, Jeanette Winterson reviews Italo Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics

Cosmicomics, with its ancient Big Bang dwarf Qfwfq as the narrator, unravels the beginning of life and fuses Sixties sci-fi with the extravagant atomics of a much more ancient Italian writer, Lucretius. The reader does not need to know that Calvino is using De Rerum Natura, and its glorious conceit of life's beginnings as a series of ideas randomly colliding with each other, causing a cascade of creativity and chaos, where a cauliflower might just as easily have become the dominant life form on Earth. If the reader does pick up Lucretius, the pleasure is multiplied - pretty much like the cauliflowers.

That's the kind of writer Calvino is - yet his multilayered narratives are never showy in that dismal post-modern way of meta-text verbiage, rather they are winged. As a reader you can choose in which direction you want to fly.

Writers are Birds!

"The secret connection, I think, is that I sometimes feel like an endangered little bird – a species whose days on this earth are numbered. I like quiet, old-fashioned places. In Poland the farming industry is much less developed, and because it's poor, the landscape is full of birds. Flannery O'Connor once said that writers are unfortunately cheered by the fact that poverty will always exist because it means their kind won't die out. You don't get poorer than birds. Birds are so poor, they eat beetles."
Jonathan Franzen is now currently working on his new novel in Brandenburg near to the border to Poland. He tells Wieland Freund why he is both writer and ornithologist

Cormac McCarthy among recipients of PEN Literary Awards

Cormac McCarthy wins the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction this year.

McCarthy’s fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West—the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), and Blood Meridian (1985). All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1992, is the first volume in McCarthy’s acclaimed Border Trilogy, and was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain(1998)

McCarthy received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He is also the author of The Stone Mason: A Play in Five Acts.

PEN Literary Award 2009 recipients

He has a literary quote on his wall

"I have a quote here on my wall by Henry James in which he says, 'We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.'

"It's a wonderful quote. You kind of struggle along and hope for the best. If something works, you have no idea why. And you have no idea if it does work anyway. Honestly, no one's going to have a clue if this book is worth reading or not in 75 years. Literary history is littered with books that were huge successes when they came out and got completely forgotten in five years, and also with books that were completely ignored when they came out and are now the greatest classics of literature. Like Moby-Dick. So who knows?"

Seems like a real writer is talking. Can you guess who it's?

Amit Chaudhuri interview

Q:What kind of novel is it that you write? I wouldn’t call you a noisy novelist.

A:I’m not a noisy novelist, no. I’d say I write novels involving random digressions and distractions. I cannot dwell on one thing for too long. So I am not the right candidate to write a novel of deep psychological realism and inwardness, or a heavily researched historical novel with a kind of social-science sensibility—a type of writing I abhor, actually, but which is endemic to a lot of Indian writing. My novels deal with inwardness but also with outwardness, with allowing oneself to be seduced by distractions and interruptions, to let oneself go there.

Full interview

Elizabeth Strout wins 2009 Pulitzer Prize in fiction

"In a certain way, no, I don’t have a stake in whether people like Olive. Some people have told me they absolutely love her, and some people have said they can’t stand her but they’re still very drawn to the book. And so I don’t have a stake in their reaction to Olive, I have a stake in their reaction to the book. I hope that even if they have a negative response to much of Olive’s behavior, they are maybe still drawn into this humanity that is underneath all of her action[s]. ...

It is a haunting experience. It’s a strange experience. And I’ve though about this with each of my books, because they, in a huge way, do occupy me [within] my mind, and when I’m not writing about them I’m mulling over who they are and what they might do. And I live with them and love them for long periods of time and then they’re done, and I sort of can’t imagine they ever will be done, but then they are. And so far, luckily, there’s been another emergence of something else."

Kamila Shamsie interview

Mohammad Hanif, writer, interviews fellow Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie, shortlisted for Orange Prize for fiction for her novel Burnt Shadows in Hindustan Times.

MH: Fifth novel at such a young age. How do you react to the label overachiever?

KS: I’m pretty sure if I were an over-achiever I’d try to...climb a mountain, test all the biryani recipes in the world ... learn how to juggle. Instead, All I do is sit around and write, so clearly I’m an underachiever...doing the same thing over and over and still so far from figuring out how to do it right....

London Book Fair (April 20 - April 22)

Contemporary Indian Writing

It's spring time, folks, and the London Book Fair is there again! This year's theme: Contemporary Indian Writing. Which has astonishing lineage in modernism, says Amit Chaudhuri, the eminent writer.

What will London bring that Frankfurt and Paris haven't? Certainly, it seems to have taken the cue from the two European cities in at least one regard: it hasn't invited only those writers who are published in this country - that is, Anglophone writers of prose. So, for instance, we will have, besides Vikram Seth, Ramachandra Guha and Patrick French, the Urdu-language theorist Gopi Chand Narang, the Bengali poet and novelist Sunil Ganguly, and the English-language poet and novelist Mamang Dai from the idyllic, remote Arunachal Pradesh. In other words, the book fair should bring some intimation to audiences in London of an explosion in writing that is not 30 but perhaps 200 years old, the consequence of a venerable, many-tongued, and still astonishing lineage in modernism.

So, why is Arundhati Roy issuing a press statement this time?

When Arundhati Roy issues a press statement, you have to sit up and take notice. This time it's about Dr. Binayak Sen, the brilliant doctor who spent whole of his life working amongst the poor and underprivileged. Though his contribution to society has been recognised in india and abroad - even among the academics - he has been now languishing in jail for 22 months for a framed-up charge under a draconian law. Few have raised a voice against this State behaviour( Tehelka did a expose-all cover story without any impact on the administration or judiciary). Even in this election time, no political party spares a word about the good doctor's stay in jail without any hint of justice. Under the circumstaces, who can you look to except Arundhati Roy who really can, in an amazingly free and fearless way, speak out against any kind of atrocity perpetrated on an individual, a community or a race by the powers-that-be anywhere in the globe?

The press statement:

Dr Binayak Sen has been in prison for 22 months, arrested under one of India's most draconian laws, the Chattisgarh Special Public Security Act. This Act has such a vague, diffused definition of 'Unlawful Activity' that it renders every person guilty unless he or she can prove their innocence. Dr Sen's bail application was dismissed twice, both times at the very outset, by the High Court of Chattisgarh and by the Supreme Court of India. On neither occasion was there a discussion on the merits of the case. On the 2nd of December 2008 the High Court of Chattisgarh once again turned down his bail application, without a discussion on the merits of the case, saying that there had been no change in circumstances.

more..

Why Roberto Bolano Now?

Because once again, literature in the West seems to have grown complacent: it isn't so much written as manufactured. The genres dictated by mainstream publishing are suffocating. We're in need of a prophet - or an enfant terrible - to wake us from our slumber.

The enlightened world of Pico Iyer

Writer of Global Life of Individual

I write because I have to. All I have learnt in life is to read and write. And as I read and write more, I move further and further away from making a living.

In the April issue of The Hindu: Literary Review, Ziya Us Salam has an interesting article on Pico Iyer.

Another Charlotte Roche interview

It's not that I like Charlotte Roche's work anyway. In fact, from reading of extracts from her controversial novel Wetlands, I understand she's no real writer by any means. But then she is honest and outspoken in an obsessive silly-funny way. So, another interview here, in which she says:

And it is not allowed for me as a young feminist to say that women are masochistic. I am and all my female friends are. We stand in front of the mirror, we are naked, and we feel ugly as fuck. We see everything as wrong. We try and fight our body to become prettier and work on it. It's not at all free and self-confident. I don't want it to be like that, but I see that it is

IMPAC Dublin literary award 2009 shortlist

The IMPAC Dublin literary award 2009 shortlist, just announced, has eight finalists:

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

2. Ravel by Jean Echenoz, translated from the original French by LInda Coverdale

3. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

4. The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland

5. The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen, translated from the original Norwegian by Don Shaw and Don Bartlett

6. The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

7. Animal’s People by Indra Sinha

8. Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

Is writing now timid?

“Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it. Writing is now timid because writers are now terrified.”

The novelist Hanif Kureishi, a friend of Rushdie’s since before the fatwa, has a new take about the impact of the campaign against The Satanic Verses

Milan Kundera is 80 today.

Milan Kundera is eighty today. Yes, he was born on April 1, all fools' day.

Is there any one out there who knows how the great writer is - after the crushing, made-up controversy which must have taken a heavy toll of his old age?

Has he written any novel after Ignorance?

Do people still love high seriousness and low humour of his novels?

Is Kundera fading away in this intellectually downtime?

Hottest literary event of the season

Jonathon Littell's The Kindly Ones

The Kindely Ones is a holocaust novel by an American who wrote the book in French. In French alone it has sold more than 800,000 copies and walked off with the Prix Goncourt and Grand Prix du Roman. Spanish writer Jorge Semprun, who was on the Goncourt jury, described it as “the literary event of the half-century.” It has been praised for its breadth and grasp of the events of the Second World War.

A 975 pages of dense text, often with a single paragraph forming a veritable wall of type that extends over several pages. Jonathon Littell, the writer, wanted it this way: “The text must consist of great blocks, blocks that are suffocating to the reader, who must not be able to get through them too easily.”

But as one critic puts it: The Kindly Ones,” is a nearly bottomless cocktail of gleefully pornographic violence and philosophical rumination.

Mahasweta Devi in Man Booker International Prize longlist

I'm so happy Mahasweta Devi, eminent Bengali writer and activist, has figured in the Man Booker International Prize longlist.

Mahasweta is one of Bengal's few respected writers with a long record of writing about the poor and repressed section of Indian society in a vibrant way. Whether it is the Naxalite movement in late 60's or the recent uprising in Nandigram, she has already explored it, and her oeuvre has had some protagonist, some hapless mother whose only son was killed by the police, or a recently widowed woman whom the administration refused to hand over her husband's body, working up in her narrative. Her works are chronicle and history combined. They are current and epic at the same time.

Mahasweta's activism is another aspect to her persona. Few writers are so aware and knowledgeable about common man's problems as she is. She is especially concerned about the tribals' status in India, and has worked among them over years to uplift their abysmal condition. She travels widely even now (she's about eighty) and is constantly in touch with the victims of Indian society. To know how much she is involved with the humanity, you have to read her column in the Statesman (Bengali) published from Kolkata.

Mahasweta Devi has had to pay a heavy price for her anti-establishment and lack-of-political-correctness posture throughout her life. The Congress Government fired her from her job on the ground that she was a Marxist. But the subsequent Marxist Government - long since in power in Bengal - is not kind to her either for her outspokenness.

Mahasweta has thousands of admirers across the world. Her works have been translated in many languages. Many awards have already come her way, Magsaysay award being one of them. She is a serious contender for the Nobel Prize.

If the judges award her the Man Booker International Prize, they would do a service not only to a real writer, but also to the prize itself.

Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 longlist

Debra Adelaide The Household Guide to Dying

Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress

Lissa Evans Their Finest Hour and a Half

Bernardine Evaristo Blonde Root

Ellen Feldman Scottsboro

Laura Fish Strange Music

V.V. Ganeshananthan Love Marria

Allegra Goodman Intuition

Samantha Harvey The Wildernes

Samantha Hunt The Invention of Everything Else

Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog

Deirdre Madden Molly Fox’s Birthday

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Gina Ochsner The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight

Marilynne Robinson Home

Preeta Samarasan Evening is the Whole Day

Kamila Shamsie Burnt Shadows

Curtis Sittenfeld American Wife

Miriam Toews The Flying Troutmans

Ann Weisgarber The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

Charlotte Roche interview

German television presenter turned novelist Charlotte Roche, of Wetlands fame, is interviewed at Publishers' weekly. Roche courts controversy with the sexual and grooming habits of her 18-year-old protagonist, Helen Memel.

I had a contract for a book for seven years—so for seven years, I lived with a very bad conscience. But I didn't want to write a stupid TV book by a TV presenter. I realized that a good book had to be honest, something I knew about and something special to me. And I'm fascinated by sexual hygiene. I love talking about things I feel embarrassed about. I love talking about hemorrhoids at parties.

Daniel Mueenuddin's story review

I've not yet checked if Daniel Mueenuddin's debut story collection has hit my bookstore. But my good friend V. Ramaswamy has sent me by e-mail files of three stories included in the collection for my reading. And of these three stories, I chose A Spoiled Man to taste and test Mueenuddin's writing.

The story is about Rezak, an underdog, who was employed by the American wife of a Pakistani feudal lord, to look after their weekend home garden. Physically deformed, alone, away from his brothers, elderly he had a make-shift home, and made ends meet with some manual job which he didn't get so often. After employment, he had a good and regular pay-packet every month. So he went on to marry a mentally subnormal girl. Rezak took time and patience to tame the girl. But one day she ran away. While he was on a desperate search for his wife, he was taken to the police station by the police on the pretext that he sold away his wife. The police tortured him terribly, apparently to extract a confession. Finally, they set him free, and he returned to his job. He's now in a bad health but crazily got to buy costly marble for his tomb. Rezaq dies soon after.

It was indeed hard for me to believe that Rezak could be the topic of a short story in these times. Who is after all interested in "a small bowlegged man with a lopsided, battered face" in today's world? But Mueenuddin's narrative, though traditional, is gripping, and draws you in with his realistic details and observations. Obviously, he knows about these people intimately. And he knows about Pakistan, his country too. Mueenuddin writes effortlessly, and tells his story like he's chronicling something intently. It's an extra-ordinary tale of a very ordinary and tormented soul representative of any common man anywhere in the world.

Yes, a real writer has arrived at our literary scene after a long time. I'm going to buy his book In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

England launches Roberto Bolano publishing offensive

"Deep down, the question doesn't lie in the distinction between realist and fantastic but in language and structures, in ways of seeing."
Roberto Bolano.

So,England now launches its Roberto Bolano publishing offensive. Picador has recently acquired the rights to ten other titles, from the slim novellas with which Bolano began his fictional career to a full-length novel, The Third Reich, written in the 1990s.

Both The Savage Detectives and 2666, his two novels that have so far made it into English, combine vicious punk energy with a seemingly effortless capacity for beauty at the sentence level. But they're also gigantic shaggy-dog stories, crafty and self-delighting, ready at any minute to drift off from the main road into pastiche, reportage, politicking or poetry.

John Cheever biography review

Susan Cheever reviews the new biography of her father, "Cheever: A life".

A lot of what has been written about my father stresses his dark side. Yes, he was a difficult, alcoholic, closeted gay man who was sometimes mean to his family. What seems to have been lost with time is his extraordinary humor. History rewards reverent earnestness, while the jokes and pratfalls and wit are often lost in translation. Darkness survives; lightness is ephemeral.

Orhan Pamuk visits India

The Hindu, a venerable daily newspaper published from Madras, reports Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's visit to Mumbai on the front page.(thanks to V. Ramaswamy for the e-mail pointing to Hindu news).

Here are some quotes randomly taken from his conversation with the media at British Council.

"I don’t belong, I always felt the sense of otherness. I don’t think I feel at home in the West or in a non-Western country. I have the anxiety of belonging wherever I go and most of the writers I admire are like that."

"Living in the same place does not mean I am comfortable."

"I will never write a campus novel."

More..

2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize short lists

Is Aravind Adiga from Australia? We know he's an Indian, and lives in India.. Now, read the list.

Africa

Best Book
Damon Galgut (South Africa) The Imposter Penguin
Tim Keegan (South Africa) My Life with the Duvals Umuzi
Sindiwe Magona (South Africa) Beauty's Gift Kwela books
Mandla Langa (South Africa) The Lost Colours of the Chameleon Picador Africa
Zoe Wicomb (South Africa) The One That Got Away Umuzi

Best First Book
Jassy Mackenzie (South Africa) Random Violence Umuzi
Uwem Akpan (Nigeria) Say You're One of Them Abacus
Megan Voysey-Braig (South Africa) Till We Can Keep An Animal Jacana Media
Chris Mamewick (South Africa) Shepherds and Butchers Umuzi
Sue Rabie (South Africa) Boston Snowplough Human & Rousseau
Jane Bennett (South Africa ) Porcupine Kwela Books

Canada and Caribbean

<Best Book
Marina Endicott (Canada) Good to a Fault Freehand Books
Kenneth J Harvey (Canada) Blackstrap Hawco Random House Canada
Nino Ricci (Canada) The Origin of Species Doubleday Canada
Jacob Ross(Grenada) Pynter Bender Fourth Estate
Jaspreet Singh (Canada) Chef Véhicule Press
Fred Stenson (Canada) The Great Karoo Doubleday Canada

Best First Book
Theanna Bischoff (Canada) Cleavage NeWest Press
Mark Blagrave (Canada) Silver Salts Cormorant Books
Craig Boyko (Canada) Blackouts McClelland and Stewart
Nila Gupta (Canada) The Sherpa and Other Fictions Sumach Press
Pasha Malla (Canada) The Withdrawal Method House of Anansi Press
Joan Thomas (Canada) Reading By Lightning Goose Lane Editions
Padma Viswanathan (Canada)The Toss of a Lemon Random House Canada

Europe and South Asia

Best Book
Chris Cleave (United Kingdom) The Other Hand Sceptre
Shashi Deshpande (India) The Country of Deceit Penguin
Philip Hensher (United Kingdom) The Northern Clemency Fourth Estate
Jhumpa Lahiri (United Kingdom) Unaccustomed Earth Bloomsbury Publishing
David Lodge (United Kingdom) Deaf Sentence Harvill Secker
Salman Rushdie (United Kingdom) The Enchantress of Florence Random House


Best First Book
Sulaiman Addonia (United Kingdom) The Consequences of Love Chatto and Windus
Daniel Clay (United Kingdom) Broken HarperPress
Joe Dunthorne (United Kingdom) Submarine Hamish Hamilton/Penguin
Mohammed Hanif (Pakistan) The Case of Exploding Mangoes Jonathan Cape
Murzaban Shroff (India) Breathless in Bombay St. Martin's Griffin
Rowan Somerville (United Kingdom) The End of Sleep Weidenfield and Nicholson

South East Asia and the Pacific

Best Book
Aravind Adiga (Australia) Between The Assassinations Atlantic Books
Helen Garner (Australia) The Spare Room The Text Publishing Company
Joan London (Australia) The Good Parents Random House Australia (Vintage Imprint)
Paula Morris (New Zealand) Forbidden Cities Penguin New Zealand
Christos Tsiolkas (Australia) The Slap Allen and Unwin
Tim Winton, (Australia) Breath Picador

Best First Book
Aravind Adiga (Australia), The White Tiger Atlantic Books
Nam Le (Australia) The Boat Hamish Hamilton
Mo Zhi Hong (New Zealand) The Year of The Shanghai Shark Penguin New Zealand
Bridget van der Zijpp (New Zealand) Misconduct Victoria University Press
Preeta Samarasan (Malaysian) Evening is the Whole Day Fourth Estate
Ashley Sievwright (Australia) The Shallow End Clouds of Magellan

Gunter Grass's diary

Fiction-writers may be great at depicting realities, but not as good when it comes to analysing politics and making their predictions. Gunter Grass is perhaps no exception to it. Monika Maron gives her impressions on reading Grass's just published 1990 diary.

I'm not saying that to err is shameful. Indeed Grass's diary could be seen as a testament to the fears of a man who has learned from history, and who saw Germany's state unity as a disaster waiting in the wings and which, luckily for him and the rest of us, never did. For Günter Grass, though, it is proof of his prophetic powers, or more modestly perhaps, of his political vision, or it quite simply shows that he was right, yet again.

But in actual fact, he is doing precisely what he accuses others of doing: he is colonising, if only mentally. He decides whose opinions are valid, he knows what's right for those gullible, backwards, Deutsch-Mark crazed East Germans, what they should want and idiotically don't want, and he steps up to intercede in their best interests, as if they were too stupid to articulate them themselves. He decides what succeeded and what failed. And German reunification was a failure for Grass, today and 18 years ago when, on 13 January 1991, finally reunited with his beloved Portuguese cacti he writes. Should, if have time and energy, take stock again next October 3rd in my usual 'dogmatic' way.

Satanic Verses: New insight?

Twenty years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini declared fatwa on Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Fatwa is still on, officially at least, but Khomeini is dead and our Rushdie keeps hale, hearty and unharmed. But the controversial novel seems to be under re-evaluation.

Though The Satanic Verses is essentially a novel about "migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay" and castigates Western materialism in a comic tone, it got involved in a blasphemy controversy for wrong reasons.

Now a writer In Tehelka says that the book remains keen specifically for that which it is supposed to negate — it is a supremely sensitive examination of our need for religious feeling.

Daniel Klein: a real real writer

Berkshire Record Online publishes an interesting profile of Daniel Klein, who started his writing career as a ghost-writer, and went on to get his first book published after being rejected by as many as forty pubishers.

Klein's new novel “The History of Now" has received highly favorable prepublication reviews, and has been compared to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Empire Falls” by Richard Russo, also set in a small New England community. The American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent bookstores, has designated it a “notable” new book.

I like small towns, where life is comprehensible. I’ve lived in Great Barrington for 30 years, and I’ve liked hearing the stories about people I meet every day on the street when I go from the office to the post office. These are the incremental tales of real people in real life.

Why Murakami accepted Jerusalem Prize

Ghaza is no problem for the Japanese novelist

"I asked myself -- is visiting Israel the proper thing to do? Will I be supporting one side.

"I gave is it some thought. And I decided to come. Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told.

"Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with heir own hands. So I chose to see. I chose to speak here rather than say nothing.

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Daniyal Mueenuddin: new comet of English writing?

Oulook news magazine publishes an article on Daniyal Mueenuddin

For the first time possibly in the subcontinent, we have a writer who is not only a first-rate craftsman of words, but is equally comfortable writing about a fading feudal aristocracy as about a class of characters that has been largely absent in English language fiction in the subcontinent: cooks, servants, electricians, hangers-on and thieves.

In the same issue, Sunil Sethi reviews Daniel Mueenuddin's book In Other Rooms, Other Words

Mueenuddin’s stories are contemporary, their observation of the rhythms of rural life in Pakistan made acute by the glinting knife underneath. The outbreaks of disaster are presaged by illicit relationships across boundaries of class, community and the age gap. (In many of the stories, lonely married men set up with indigent younger women till the mirror cracks.)

Aamer Hussein Interview

London-based Pakistani writer Aamer Hussein is interviewed at Tehelka.

Good books find their readers eventually. Qurratulain Hyder's splendid postmodern saga, Fireflies in the Mist, was virtually unnoticed when it first came out in her own English version in the mid- 1990s, but it’s been reprinted to some acclaim now that she is being given her due in anglophone circles as a major writer rather than merely a major Urdu writer.

Is active politics right for a literary writer?

News: Former United Nations diplomat and writer Shashi Tharoor is set to enter politics. He’s already been approached by the Congress to contest upcoming LokSabha elections.

The question is: why is Shashi joining politics? When does a writer join politics? Is it right for a writer to do a plotician's nasty job?

Or, was writing just a passtime, never a vocation, for Shashi Tharoor? Mind you he was a diplomat for the best part of his life and even contested for UN's general secretary's post. His diplomatic career is now over, and he's kind of unemployed right now.

We've heard of activist writers like Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy and Hasan Azizul Huq. Shashi's is not definitely a case of activism, but plain careerism. Some say he built up his writer's reputation, not so much by his merit or passion or talent as by using his position. May be he now hits the end of his road, and what other option than to join politics in this Indian soil!

The other Saadat Hasan Manto

A NEW PORTFOLIO ON A REAL WRITER
It's interesting to note that the new issue of A Public Space includes a portfolio on Saadat Hasan Manto, the great Urdu writer who lived in Bombay in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps best known for his Partition stories. But Matt Reeck has put together a portfolio that looks at his other great subject: Bombay

It was a blow to have to leave Bombay, where I had lived such a busy life.
Bombay had taken me in, a wandering outcast thrown out by even his family. She had told me, “You can live happily here on two paise a day or on ten thousand rupees. Or if you want, you can be the saddest person in the world at either price. Here you can do whatever you want, and no one will think you’re strange. Here no one will tell you what to do. You will have to do
every difficult thing on your own, and you will have to make every important
decision by yourself. I don’t care if you live on the sidewalk or in a
magnificent mansion, I don’t care if you stay or go. I’ll always be here.” I
was disconsolate after leaving Bombay. My good friends were there. I had
gotten married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. There
I had gone from earning a couple rupees a day to thousands - hundreds of
thousands - and there I had spent it all. I loved it, and I still do!

Tarun Tejpal : a literary animal

Tarun Tejpal inhabits two worlds: journalism and literature. In the world of investigative journalism, his status is that of a high-profile rock star. In literature too, he's making waves.

I came to journalism because there was no vocation at that time called ‘full time writing’ really possible on the subcontinent.” Describing himself as a “literary animal”, he explains that the tide has turned now. “There been so much success and involvement in journalism that this has become my life. Today, I see no dissonance in that... I straddle two worlds: that of the kind of journalism I wish to do and that of the fiction which I love to write.”

It's good time to be a Pakistani writer

I've read bits of Kamila Shamsie and like her writing. I'm interested in works of Mohammed Hanif and Nadeem Aslam. I've read Moni Mohsin's interesting columns in an Indian daily. I've recently read an interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin, and though unimpresed, I would like to read one or two of his stories.

But Pakistani writing in English is hot to Indian publishers right now. "It’s grittier, blacker, more sardonic and more engaged than much of contemporary Indian writing in English", saya an editor-in-chief of a publishing house. She must know.

Kolkata Book Fair ( Jan 27 to Feb 9 )

Kolkata Book Fair, Asia's largest book fair, and the most attended book fair in the world - about 2 million visitors- has shifted its venue to Milan Mela ground this year. The venue - way too distant from the centre of the city - is conspicuous by its lack of structure. It does not have any transformer for proper arrangements of elctricity or any water supply system, let alone any adequate fire-fighting measures.

I've been so put off by the venue and its lack of structure that I've decided not to visit it this year. Oh, I remember I didn't visit last year's book fair even. Actually, I have never been a book fair regular.

But I've some happy memories when the book fair was held in ever-green Maidan. One of my favourite haunts was the Bangladesh section of the fair. I visited the Bangladesh Publishers' stalls with sharp eye on new titles by authors across the border. On one occasion, I remember I bought complete works of Syed Waliullah. On another occasion, I was frantically looking for a new title by Hasan Azizul Huq, but most stalls were selling crappy bestsellers by Bangladeshi authors. At long last I got the book in a small stall.

Yet another lingering memory is that of Subimal Misra, the anti-establshment fictioneer, selling his books under a big and colourful umbrella with placrds requesting audiences to read anti-establishment writers and writing.

Last time I visted the book fair at Maidan, I bought a translated copy of Don Quixote, and a novel by Henry James. But both were awful, the first one for bad rendering, and I never got around to reading those two books.

New Yorker's homage to John Updike

He was American literature’s great noticer, and his work was always a reminder of the texture, the detail of life: of flesh, of the drape of clothes, of a way of speaking, a quality of light. Two works, neglected by the obituarists, stay in my mind: a lovely essay on the experiences of being barefoot on Martha’s Vineyard, and the utterly persuasive Africa of his novel “The Coup.” He helped us see. I regard him as a master, appreciative in ways that enlarged his vision and made his writing sing.
Paul Theroux

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10 forbidden classics

Just in time for Valentine's Day, HarperPerennial is releasing new editions of ten “erotic tales” under the flag Forbidden Classics. Have you read any of these titles?

1.Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleaure by John Cleland

2.Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue by D.A.F. Marquis de Sade

3.Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Maso

4.The Way of a Man with a Maid by Anonymous

5.The Autobiography of a Flea by Stanislas de Rhod

6.Sadopaideia by Anonymous

7.The Pearl: Two Erotic Tales by Anonymous

8.My Secret Life by Walte

9.Venus in India by Charles Deverea

10.Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan, translated by Lowell Bair

Short short-story

Lying down beside his 14-year old son, he dreamt he was being greeted, amid a houseful of curious men, women and children, by a young, nattily dressed lady, her face encased by shampooed wavy hair, with a twinkle in her eye.

Title: DREAM
Word count:40

What do you think of it?

Future of novels and novelists

Just read this Time article. It makes some cool observations, with which I agree in full. But it leaves me wondering how the future novelists will have any income from their books.

Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

Hasan Azizul Huq's debut novel review

Aagunpakhi invokes Partition trauma and memories 

 So I bought and read Aagunpakhi at last. It has been exactly three days since I finished it. I’m still under its spell, though in a much diminished form at this moment. It’s a great Bengali novel written by arguably the best living short-story writer of Bangladesh, Hasan Azizul Huq. 

 Aagunpakhi is about a woman’s lone struggle and determination to stick to her homeland in the wake of Indo-Pakistan partition even when other members of her family, her husband included, left for Pakistan for security and new home. She never could bring herself to believe that she was no more wanted in the land where she was born, raised up, married, gave birth to her sons and daughters and lived through her childhood, youth, prosperity of her groom, famine, world warII and Hindu-Muslim riots upto the partition of the big land that was India. Her poignant  query as to why this land - moral wasteland actually - was no longer hers simply because of her being a Muslim dumbed and overwhelmed me as a reader. I could not check back my tears at her predicament. 

 But while reading the novel, I was wondering – I like to deconstruct novels, especially the debut ones - why Hasan was writing about the partition after such a long time. Partition, as a theme, is no doubt a bit stale these days. The last chapter provided the clue to my question, and the protagonist suddenly seemed familiar to me. As a Hasan aficionado, I have been tracking him since I loved to admire his work. 

Hasan was born and raised in a Burdwan village in West Bengal. After his school, he went on to East Pakistan to live with his elder sister and her husband. I noticed such a character in this novel. I presume Hasan draws heavily - as any real writer should and does – from his childhood experience to write this novel. And the protagonist is actually his mother. Hasan gives an intimate portrait of this lady – simple, naïve, humanitarian - against a Bengal countryside complete with social and demographic details in his original, realistic and pared-down prose. Her transformation in the end to a rebel of sort, though a bit abrupt, touches our chords.

 P.S. Some translator should step in immediately to grab this novel for translation.

Farewell to John Updike

John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

Is Yu Hua a real writer?

Just finished Pankaj Mishra's The Bonfire of China's Vanities in the NewYork Times Magazine. A long sprawling piece, but readable, though you sometimes lose thread of the article. So, is Yu Hua, the writer of the largest-selling novel Brothers (due to be published in English soon)in China, a real writer? I've my doubts.

100 novels everyone should read

Of course, UK-centric. And far from being comprehensive. But most are real writing by real writers. I've read about 50 novels out of this list. But I miss some:
God of Small things by Arundhati Roy, and A fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry immediately come to mind. I'm glad Boris Pasternak's Dr.Zivago is there.

Guardian 1000 Novels To Read Before You Die Meme

Of course, it's a very long list. Anyway, have a look.

Jaipur Literature Festival(21st to 25th January 2009)

Jaipur is a long way from where I live, and I'm no fan of such literary festivals. Honestly, I'm pissed off by William Dalrymple (Is he a real writer?) and his ilk. As I understand, it's a no-holds-barred jamboree with plenty of music, dance, dinner, drinks, you name anything, with a few literature-related events sloted in between. A perfect melting pot for our fake and fashionable writers!

In the list you find names like Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Vikas Swarup, even Chetan Bhagat. Do you miss any real writer? Yes, Arundhati Roy being one of them. The list gives you an idea of what bullshit they are going to talk about or discuss in the name of literature and in what fashion.

Who's sponsoring this extravaganza in this time of global economic meltdown?

But the festival finds favour with India's English media.

Lit News: The novel that landed its writer in a jail

Harry Nicolaides, an Australian writer, was sentenced to three years in prison for insulting Thailand's royal family in his novel, a rare conviction of a foreigner amid a crackdown on people and Web sites deemed critical of the monarchy

Mr. Nicolaides, a 41-year-old from Melbourne, was charged with insulting Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej and the crown prince in his 2005 book “Verisimilitude,” a piece of fiction that only sold seven copies.

Tejpal's second novel launch

Tarun J. Tejpal comes up with his second novel called The Story of My Assassins (HarperCollins). His first novel The Alchemy of Desire, published three years ago, also by the same publisher, was a big success, and sold more than 3 lakh copies woldwide so far. He is perhaps the most widely read modern Indian writer in English.

Tejpal is primarily a journalist and edits the famous weekly newsmagazine Tehelka. But he has a literary side, and though he devotes "almost 99 per cent" of his time to running Tehelka weekly, he managed to "put together this 500- page novel about the real India, real people and its million turmoils, by shutting his mind out in the few minutes he managed to steal from his hectic schedule."

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Current climate for new writers

Q:What do you make of the current climate for new writers?

A:I do not envy them. It's a hostile environment. The old way of just writing a book, signing an agent, finding a publisher to nurture you is long, long gone. But also, how exciting to be working right now, when things are changing. You have to be fluid and quick on your feet and inventive, but that stuff is all fun.

Jessa Crispin, hugely experienced and savvy blogger of Bookslut, is interviewed here.

An exiled writer's last hopes

Taslima Nasreen on Bangladesh's new government

I am pinning my last hopes of a secular government on the Awami League. Will it act like the forces that banned my Amar Meyebela (My Childhood) and prevented me from returning home to meet my ailing mother and father? Will it all change? Will they allow me to return home? I doubt that.

Full article here..

Tao Lin: a real writer?

I've been reading Tao Lin for quite a while: his stories, his blog, poems, just anything by him that comes my way. Not that I like his writing. In fact, I doubt he's a real writer. But it's fun to watch out on all of his activities. May be he's a genius.

The name of his first novel was Eeeee Eee Eeee. I don't know how he got it published. He sells his own manuscripts, doodles, page proofs, notebooks—on eBay, and last summer he generated international attention by selling, six “shares” of an unfinished novel for $2,000 each. He recently launched a tiny press that publishes, among other things, Gmail chats. He is very good at gimmickry.

Tao Lin has some fans, Jessa Crispin, the well-known book blogger, being the most illustrious among them.

Read Tao Lin, Lit Boy.

Six owls and a writing geek

Has an owl, or a bunch of owls, anything to do with a writing geek?

The thing is, they have recently landed my neighbourhood - a cluster of apartment buildings, without any trees or greenery in it. They're now staying in here, silent all day, but as the dark falls, they start hooting, and contnue it all through the night until the daybreak.

A few days ago, when I was leaving for my clinic in the evening, I saw some boys chasing a timid-looking ugly creature through entrance of my apartment. I didn't know it was an owl. It was cowering in a dark corner, and looked heplessly around as if it did not know how to fly. But it flied at last and sat itself on a cornice of our adjacent apartment building. It began to hoot soon after.

Its shrill voice is really disturbing particularly at bedime. Its hoot keeps piercing your eardrum on and on, and you hear it when you go to sleep, during your sleep, and even after sleep if it's not yet daybreak. Oh, what a nuisance! You can compare it only with a fake writer's work which you some times have to read in absence of a book by a real writer.

Then one of the owls died, probably from elctrocution from a near-by transformer. A crowd gathered around its body in front of my apartment building. There I heard some wag tell that as many as six owls were visiting the neighbourhood at the moment, and they were parched at different positions waiting to hoot as the night sets in.

The hooting however continued as ever, and there was no respite from it. My wife, a bit insomniac by disposition, cursed them regularly, but suggested at the same time that the people here contact the forest department so that these creatures could go back to where they belonged.

Another owl died yesterday.

My driver said that yet another owl had died one day back. So, with this death, only three owls remain.

Last night I heard the hoot, but it was a bit subdued as if someone was mourning. May be two owls - one male, another female - were hooting together so long, and one of them had died yesterday.

It seems like we would get rid of the owls soon(they are anyway doomed to die in this urban no-tree environs), but what bugs me is why and how they made their way down here.

Why you should listen to fiction writers

"However, writers such as Grossman in Israel or Arundhati Roy in India, who live amid some of the world's bloodiest conflicts, choose not to be somewhere else when triggers are being cocked and pulled. Their views demand respectful attention even when they provoke sharp disagreement. For they have consistently witnessed, and often spoken out, at considerable personal risk, against the ominous transformations within their countries: the emergence of powerful revanchist movements (Hindu nationalism, settler Zionism) the suppression of religious minorities and occupied territories with brute force (Gujarat, Kashmir, West Bank and Gaza); the diffusion of a shrill media culture on the American model, a contagion of ignorant TV anchors and "experts" who together with a reactionary political elite manufacture a consensus about how to deal with internal and external enemies (usually, with force and then much more force)."

Guess who's writing it? Pankaj Mishra, the brilliant literary critic and essayist, who's now writing, alas, for the international media only. Where does he live now?

Full article here.

A writer as 'thinking men's sex symbol"!

News: Indian origin author Jhumpa Lahiri, with her "hypnotic eyes", has been named among the top 10 "sex symobls of the thinking man" for 2008, which put Serbian tennis player Ana Ivanovic in the number one slot.

Now, do such news bothers you? I know the media today thrives on such news - and some people think our world now needs this kind of news. But I wonder where it would all end up.

Bangladeshi writer Taslima gets a home in Paris

"I am a wanderer in search of a nest in this vast world. I am a helpless woman, who, for over a decade now, is in search of a home of her own, in a city where she wants to live. I am Taslima Nasreen of Mymensingh, Bangladesh."
How sad, though reasuring, that Taslima gets a home - a rent-free apartment - at last, in Paris - far, far away from Dacca or Kolkata where she mentally belongs!

My New Year non-resolutions

You'll notice that I didn't do any list like "My best books in 2008". Not that I didn't think about it, but I found my memory blocked. Did not I read any important book last year? Yes, of course - Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown,and Donigan Merritt's
Possessed by Shadows, for example, but not many. I had read some stories by Clezio and Bolano desultorily, mainly from the web. In retrospect, I bought far fewer books last year.

Now I reckon that the web has changed my reading habits without my knowing it. In stead of lengthy works, I now find myself reading shorter pieces mostly on the web. There's little time for buying books from the bookstore. And library is something I've lost contact with since a long time ago. Another thing, I've read much more about writers than their works. This is bad enough.

As ever I'm obsessed with real writers. In my scheme of things, I have no space for fake or fashionable writers. So why did I post pieces on Chetan Bhagat or Sobhaa De? Actually, I had read them to see for myself what crap they are dishing out to capture the attention of today's readers. Admittedly, they have some popularity among a section of scatterbrains and shallow raders(One of Bhagat's fans recently sent me an e-mail querying about Bhagat's best 'nobel'). Don't get surprised if you see me posting occasional pieces on them. The fact is, I hate the fashionable writers, and always have an issue with them. Why? Because they are cornering the real writers, taking advantage of our shallow and superficial times. They are invading the space of what real writers should have.

One of my objectives, as a writing geek, is to introduce my readers to real writers and real writing so that they can have a taste of literature. Literature is not passe, as many people think, and needs to be cultivated more in these times for preserving our sanity. A piece of real writing says much more - in terms of substance and value -than any of your audio-visual work today. As Le Clezio said in his Nobel lecture,"Literature—and this is what I have been driving at—is not some archaic relic that ought, logically, to be replaced by the audiovisual arts, the cinema in particular. Literature is a complex, difficult path, but I hold it to be even more vital today than in the time of Byron or Victor Hugo.”

This year I want to do some serious reading. Roberto Balano tops my TBR list. Another writer I'm yearning for these days is Hassan Azizul Haque. Hassan is a real Bengali writer based in Bangladesh, and short stories are his main forte. He has a novel published recently, and it has created a buzz. Hassan took a decade's time to pen this novel. I'm going to buy and read this novel soon.

Tehelka's "original fictions"

Has a newsmagazine got anything to do with literature? Not really. Things it churns out every week are mainly politics, not literature. But this is Tehelka, India's most controversial and real newsmag, which has a track record of fighting fiercely with the Establishment, and suffering in the process interminably at the hands of the power-that-be, but still elects to fight doggedly for people's cause. Interestingly, it has devoted its year-end double issue to "original fictions" by 15 writers.

Why?

"..every journalist and politician -people who shape the public domain - should read at least one literary novel every year," writes Tehelka's esteemed editor Tarun J Tejpal. "Just so they can step out of the halogen of self-aggrandisement, look at life bottom-up rather than top-down, enter other lives through backdoor rather than the front, and connect with their own inner lives rather than the image on the screen."

Have you ever read any such comments from any newsmag editor? Who, among our newspaper editors, has such refined tastes and insights?

My sincerest thanks to Tarun for adding this new dimension to his weekly.

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Harold Pinter

What a shame that Harold Pinter's death news did not appear on the first page of the morning paper I read; it was tucked down in a single paragraph in the bottom of seventh page!(I'm changing my paper every year, and may perhaps end up without having one. Newspapers are really a shit these days).

Harold Pinter was such a rare personality: real writer, courageous, outspoken without fear of consequences, politically incorrect, with a genuine compassion and concern for the mankind.

Of his all works, I loved his
Nobel Lecture hugely.

Ten best short story collections, 2008

BookFox offers ten books for
Best Short Story Collections of 2008. Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth is the only book in the list that I've read partially, but frankly didn't like her banal family theme. But I'm a bit amazed that short story collections are still published - in US, specially-, and there must be some readers like our BookFox who love them.

Why Arundhati Roy is a threat for Indian males

Arundhati Roy is derided by the Indian male as she refuses to be slotted into the “liberated” position that Aishwarya Rai is in. Unlike other Indian women, Arundhati will not be bullied or subjugated into accepting a controlled choice. To us she is closer to the Kali persona than the feminine cult of Sita and Lakshmi, which Indian society so much venerates. Like Kali she is the rebel, the outcast - the slayer of all masculine power. All hail Kali.

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Bolano story review

Story: Meeting with Enrique Lihn

The story has a single-paragraph text which could have been divided in many, many paragraphs. But why would Bolano do it? He's not your MFA-trained writer that he would be bothered about the look of the text; he must write his own way. Yet it's a wonderfully smooth read: compact, gripping, moving, insightful, evocative and full of experiences, histories and images like you find in big classics. I expected, though, some anarchic element in it.

Look at its opening line:
In 1999, after returning from Venezuela, I dreamed that I was being taken to Enrique Lihn’s apartment, in a country that could well have been Chile, in a city that could well have been Santiago, bearing in mind that Chile and Santiago once resembled Hell, a resemblance that, in some subterranean layer of the real city and the imaginary city, will forever remain.

Everything happens in the writer's dream. The vivid but unnostalgic narrative of his poet-friend Enrique Lihn - as if a non-movie rewind of a colourful life lived in real time and space - unfolds in a very apt and surreal milieu.

I get a feel that Bolano encapsulates a novel's material in the short space of a story. His effortless blend of the real and imaginary, fact and fiction, present and past is simply amazing.

And what a great end:
And we looked and looked, and the façades were clearly the façades of another time, like the sidewalks covered with parked cars that also belonged to another time, a time that was silent yet mobile (Lihn was watching it move), a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia.

Read the story here.

"New good sex" by famous writers!

It's of course a crazy idea that the world, now deep in recession woes, needs new good sex for its survival. But it's exactly what the new e-book service Ravenous Romance thinks.

What is more, this e-venture is being backed by,among others, John Updike, the well-known American writer and literary icon, who has entertained readers with his varied depiction of sex for quite a while.

How do you feel about this venture? Is it selling soft porno in new garb? Does it point to bankruptcy in ideas? or, do you like it?

Arab Booker shortlist

Six Arab authors were short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2009 (IPAF) in London.The prize was launched in Abu Dhabi in April last year in association with the Booker Prize Foundation and with the support of the Emirates Foundation. Gulfnews link

short-listed authors:

1.Mohammad El-Bisatie

2.Fawwaz Haddad

3.Ina'am Kachachi

4.Ebrahim Nasrallah

5.Al Habib Al Salmi

6.Yousuf Zaydan

I've read Mohammad El-Bisatie's novel Hunger partially. A wonderfully gripping novel about a theme most writers would avoid these days. Real writing.
An excerpt from the novel .

Bolano, Bolano!!

"2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve."
Slouching Towards Santa Teresa: Roberto Bolaño's utterly strange masterpiece.

“He didn't set out to do this just to prove something, to experiment, or to make some nihilistic statement. As he said many times, writing was for him a radical way of living, and thus he had to find a vital and arresting and, in some ways, anti-literary approach to fiction.”
A Great Conversation on 2666

Nobel Lecture,2008

"If there is one virtue which the writer's pen must always have, it is that it must never be used to praise the powerful, even with the faintest of scribblings."

Read Le Clezio Nobel lecture
here.

Toni Morrison: alchemy of fact and feeling

Even for Morrison — a Nobel laureate and one of America’s most celebrated living authors — making black stories bearable is a daunting task. Several years ago, she described to me the challenges of crafting Beloved, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a woman named Sethe who murders her young daughter to keep her from being returned to slavery. The baby reappears years later to Sethe as a grown-up ghost with an insatiable appetite for love.

Kafka's office writings

Princeton University Press has just published a selection of Kafka's Office Writings in English. Three scholars -two professional Kafkans, Stanley Corngold, and Benno Wagner, and a law professor and a civil rights attorney, Jack Greenberg, have appended their commentaries, charts, prefaces and postface to these writings.

Despite Kafka, it's excruciatingly boring to read his office writings. So you have to read them as companions to demystify his novels and stories. There is an obvious connection between his office writings and his fiction.

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"Kill till the last breath": Mumbai terror strike

New terrorism stuff for real writers
Azmal Amir Kasab (not his real name, I suppose) is 21, handsome, educated, fluent in at least three languages, techno-savvy, and a master killer. He is the sole member of the Mumbai terror strike team, who remains alive as if as a historical necessity, as a clue to the ghastly plot, as a trail to whoever and which way the operation was masterminded.

Amir reminds me of Salman Rushdie's terrorist-protagonist in his brilliant novel Shalimar, the clown. But he was an illiterate Kashmiri guy, and the premise of his turning a terrorist was that her beautiful wife was eloped and subsequently abused by the American Ambassador whom he would blast to death in an operation.

We don't know anything about Amir's premise. But given his profile, it seems he took to terrorism by choice. Gone are the days when the terrorist outfit could employ only illiterate, poor and strong youths from the backyards of a country. Terrorism is a hot new industry now, and have many lures for the educated young folks. Remember Pheerboy who was arrested by intelligence agency sometime back? He was a top-notch executive of Yahoo.

During his training Amir must have fed on enough of radical Islam theology and rhetoric. ”Kill till the last breath!” is just one of those dictums. No wonder he killed at random as many people – innocents, police and army personnel, and foreigners – in as many ways as possible. He's a gigantic killing machine, and in his perception, men are just objects - no living things.

The intersting thing is, he did not even try to kill himself when he fell in the hands of Indian security personnel despite potassium cyanide with him. Which testifies that his survival instinct was intact in him and got the better of his master's tutorial.

Now, his interrogations have begun. Expectedly, after his intial reluctunace, he would reveal most important things though with a lot of cooked-up and fabricated details. His masters, successfully, turned him a crazy and hardened criminal, but he still values his life.

Like any other ideology, radical Islam is also a construct, and however powerful the ideologue’s rhetoric, most of its followers are wrong-headed and cowards. All it can foster is rabid fanaticism and senseless killings.

Terrorism has now come to such a state that it's no longer easy to tackle it. George W. Bush who is the most vocal champion of "war on terror" actually stoked terrorism by attacking Iraq on a false and motivated pretext, and ravaging the country physically and intellectually. Is it hard to imagine that this is one reason why the terrorists in Mumbai strike sought the Americans and British citzens first in Taj and other hotels?

Now, do you think our netas (politicians) will do anything to curb terrorism? Not really. While many of them are accomplices, complicits or benificaries of this terrorism thing, all of them love this crisis, and cash on it to get their political mileage. The latest example is that of Narendra Modi, the hated genocider, who rushed to Mumbai to announce his donation package to terror victims. He was brilliantly rebuffed though.

As of now, you're left with no clue whatsoever to face terrorism. But you can certainly hope that terrorism will one day get jaded and stop after running its course. Meanwhile, get ready to see more gore and bloodbath.

Roberto Bolano makes it - posthumously!

How fascinating and sad that Roberto Bolano, a post-modern response to Gabriel Garcia Marquex, generates the buzz (and getting evaluated in the process) five years after his death! His recently released tome "2666", is flying off the bookshops at a time when book sales are flat and declining. It's the best book of 2008, according to some critics.

"It’s special. It’s weird. I don’t entirely understand the commercial side of it”, said Lorin Stein, editor of “2666” at FSG.“This is a difficult and very sad book, and adults rarely follow a literary author’s career the way they used to. It’s like an intellectual Harry Potter.”

James Kelman interview

The crucial factor is the ability to earn a living, this is what is taken from writers who work on/from the margins. Your question suggests it is a fair go, an even fight, or some such nonsense. It isn’t. One side has power and authority and the other doesn’t. One has the power to stop the other from earning a living. It is better to be acknowledged as a writer than have to continue proving it all the time.
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Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award

Iain Hollingshead wins Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards this year for a passage in his first novel Twentysomething (Duckworth).

The awards were set up by Auberon Waugh with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels. Previous winners include Tom Wolfe, AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks, and Melvyn Bragg.

Josef Winkler interview

In writing I discovered where I came from. Only in writing did I discover what had happened. Had I not started writing, my life would have remained a matter of three lines. Now it is thousands of pages.

Who's Josef Winkler?

Australian novelist Josef Winkler was born to a farming family on March, 3, 1953 in Kärnten and has worked as a novelist since 1982. He lives in Klagenfurt where he teaches at the university. He has been recently awarded the Georg Buchner prize - Germany's top literary award.

Winkler has already been honoured with the Berlin Literature Prize, the Alfred Döblin prize and the André-Gide prize.

He has written thirteen books about death.

Taslima shunted out, again!

Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen has again been "forced" to leave India after her brief stay here, prompting the controversial writer to question the country's alleged secular credentials.

Nadine Gordimer visits India

Who's a real writer?
Dr. Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Laureate from South Africa, is now visiting India. She read excerpts from her books in Mumbai (09 Nov 08), delivered the Second Nobel Laureate Lecture in Kolkata on 10 Nov 08. She would be attending a book reading session followed by Q&A session at 1700 hrs on 13 Nov 08 in New Delhi.

In Kolkata, she spoke for about thirty minutes. She said that the literature of the new age was to reveal the secrets of hearts, not sequence of events. A writer was a political being, he could not be insensitive to what went on in the world, she said.

She added that a real writer's job was not only that of witnessing, he must go deeper to understand the significance and meaning of what was happening around him.

She had this quote from Albert Camus: "The moment when I'm no more than a writer, I will cease to be a writer."

When asked about her views on globalization, she quipped, "It's nothing more than trade pacts."