Michel Houellebecq interview

In Paris review, Susannah Hunnewel interviews Michel Houellebecq, France's most famous living writer.

Q:What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality?

A:There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things. Now I sound like Saint Paul.

Haruki Murakami interview

Asahi.com publishes an interview with Haruki Murakami.

Q: Do you believe in the power of writing?

A: I trust in the power of stories because the story leads me somewhere meaningful.When I start writing, I have no plan. I am blank. I go down into the darkness in myself to find a story. I bring that story into this actual world, and I write it into my fiction. I think that power helped me to live.

Subimal Misra interview

It's nice to see that Tehelka newsweekly has published an interview with Subimal Misra, an underrated but real Bengali writer,who I have known long since - personally as well as through his writings. V. Ramaswamy has recently translated his earlier stories in a book entitled The Golden Gandhi Statue from America (Harper Perennial)

Q: What have been the major changes in your stories since the stories in The Golden Gandhi Statue from the 60s?

A:There have been many phases in my writing over the past few decades. Getting out, and then getting away from montage, collage and cut-up, I tried to make my voice more pin-pointed, so that even without seeing the writer’s name people could know for certain that this was Subimal Misra’s writing. (There are both positive and negative aspects of this.) In my writing, I have used the form of the story, my own secret diary, reportage, excerpts from advertisements, pornography, slang – even a series of interviews with dacoits from south Bengal. Everything was mixed up, to became a unified whole. I walk along my own path through all this, whether this is an advance or not – I don’t know. I am unable to say how much of it is story, and how much simply text.

In my writing, and especially in my current writing, there is a conscious tendency to abandon “meta-narrative”. There need not be a definite, fixed meaning of all the words, all the time. One may discover that the same words may have been used in diametrically opposite ways in the same text. Or one may find that the text is broken up and thus de-constructed and made inter-penetrating and inter-dependent. In the sequential flow of the narrative, “yes” and “no” become mutually interdependent.

What I sense now is that if a person continuously and consistently wants to rebel, then at a certain juncture he also has to become a rebel against his own rebellion. Finally the business of de-construction has itself to be de-constructed.

Fiction & Truth

"..fiction, believe it or not, is the best tool available to us to tell the truth."( via Publishing Perspectives)

"Language of war is narrow and functional":David Grossman

"The language of war is narrow and functional. Writing is the opposite. You describe your reality in the highest resolution even when it's a nightmare and in doing so, you live your own life, not a cliche others have formulated for you."

Jonathan Franzen is on Time's cover!

It's intriguing that even in these times, when literary fiction is reportedly on life support, Jonathan Franzen can be a cover story for Time!

The trend in fiction over the past decade has been toward specialization: the closeup, the miniature, the microcosm. After the literary megafauna of the 1990s — like Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace, who was a close friend of Franzen's — the novels of the aughts embraced quirkiness and uniqueness. Franzen skipped that trend. He remains a devotee of the wide shot, the all-embracing, way-we-live-now novel.

Gunter Grass interview

SPIEGEL publishes a great interview with Gunter Grass.
Q: Do you fear the end of your life?
Grass: No. I've realized that, on the one hand, one is ready for it. I also realize that I've retained a certain amount of curiosity. What will happen to my grandchildren? What will the weekend football results look like? Of course, there are also some banalities I still want to experience. Jacob Grimm wrote a wonderful piece on aging, and I also found the following sentence in another one of his works: "The last harvest is on the stalk." It touched me, and of course it immediately prompted me to reflect on my own age. In doing so, I didn't discover any predominant fear of death.

Fear of writing about the real world?

Christos Tsiolkas's take on contemporary fiction
"In the English-language novel there is a fear of writing about the real world. I don't read a lot of contemporary fiction that's true to the world. I read to have my assumptions challenged, to be scared, to cry. That novel isn't being written at the moment."

Norman Spinrad on publishing

Norman Spinrad, well-known writer, literary critic, and expert on publishing, has an interesting post at his blog NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE.

Hey, I learned the business of publishing from the gutter up as a 24 year old anonymous wage slave in the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. I’ve been president of two writers’ organizations. I’ve written a whole book on the publishing industry. I’ve been called a Communist, a Fascist, an anarchist, a punk, a bastard, an asshole, and a prick. But one thing I’ve never been called is naive.

Now I have to do it to myself.

Boy was I naive about the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf!

Boy was I naive about its maven, Sonny Mehta!

This is not only going to be a sad story, it’s quite embarrassing to have to tell it.

Publishers, take note

How revelatory that Nilanjana S.Roy,a former editor of a big publishing house, now feels guilty of having played volumes-versus-quality game in publishing.

"It’s time for publishers to start being gatekeepers again, to step away from the mediocre, the easy successes, the frozen-pizza school of writing — easy to sell, easy to consume, of no nutritional value whatsoeve."

But would any publisher really care?

Lydia Davis interview

In the Observer,William Skidelsky interviews Lydia Davis, who is famous for writing stories that are sometimes one-sentence long.

"I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating Swann's Way. There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn't make me recoil exactly – I loved working on it – but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke."

In the opinion of ex-professor of literarture

Amis, McEwan and Rushdie are like "prep school boys showing off".

Arundhati Roy in Forbe World's most inspiring women list!

What gall Forbe World clubs Arundhati Roy with actor Angelina Jolie, former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, first lady Michelle Obama and author J.K. Rowling! Even Oprah Winfrey, the topper of the list, is a mismatch when compared to Arundhati!

I wonder how Arundhati could be a role model for Forbe World's business-savvy readers.

Yet another ploy to suck in the great-look author by the corporate world?

Post-literate age?

"It's not a disaster that there are no good novels being written. There are wonderful novels written. It's that our brains are being disassembled right now and being put back together in a whole different shape, and that is not going to be conducive to reading a 300-page thing that doesn't have any links."

David Mitchell interview

In the Vanity Fair, John Lopez interviews David Mitchell.

Q:James Wood in the New Yorker was describing your books and he jokingly came up with the phrase post-postmodernism. If there were such a thing as post-postmodern literature, what do you think that might be?

A:Oddly enough, I’m not sure if novelists are the best people to ask whither-the-novel questions. For me, it’s a little like I’m a duckbilled platypus and I’m being asked a question about taxonomy. You won’t get much of an answer out of a platypus because they’re busy going about their business digging tunnels, catching fish, and having sex. You really have to ask a critic, or a taxonomist. I feel like I should have a pithy answer because I’m a novelist and you’re asking a question about the future of the novel, but the biggest question I ever get to is, “How can I make this damned book work?” I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called global literature is going.

Seismic shift in narrative structure

"A new generation of authors are starting to think in more multi-linear ways about the way they can structure narrative."

Faulkner online

In the late 1950s, William Faulkner spent two years as the writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, where he talked about his fiction, did some readings, and interacted with students. Now all of these have been digitalised and published online.

Saw Wai interview

In The Irrawaddy, Aye Chan Myate interviews Saw Wai, the artist and poet, who was released from prison recently after spending more than two years behind bars for publishing a poem in “The Love Journal” that contained the hidden words: “Power-hungry, insane Gen Than Shwe.

Q: In Burma, artists are not able to write about certain topics or use certain types of images.

A: Overcoming such difficulties is a big burden. In every era under any kind of government, artists must work to create new things that speak the truth. If we are united, one day things will get better.

To Kill A Mockingbird :50th anniversary of a no-publicity bestseller

In the Independent Helen Taylor re-evaluates Harper Lee's only novel.

Harper Lee observed clearly and wrote prophetically. For all the novel's occasional sentimentality and whimsy, she produced a powerful indictment of American racial history at a crucial moment, one which remains relevant to today's multi-cultural US. This book deserves its long-standing success.

Salman Rushdie interview

In the Hindu Literary review,Gauri Viswanathan interviews Salman Rushdie.

I think relativism is the dangerous death of liberalism. If you will justify anything that anybody does because it comes from their tradition, it means you abdicate your moral sense and you cease to be a moral being. Going back to the article you mentioned which talks about the question of women, if you were to take religion away as the justification, nobody would tolerate that for a minute. The kinds of limitations that women have been placed under and the crimes against women in the name of religion are so profound, and yet somehow people don't get as agitated about them as when the same things are done by somebody who wasn't using God as the reason. That seems like nonsense to me.

Whither Indian publishing?

Aditya Sudarshan has a thoughtful article Indian publishing needs to get less fun
in the Hindu Literary Review.

In the world of Indian English publishing, kitsch has begun to dominate the mainstream. Penguin India publishes ‘Metro Reads', books that they call ‘fun, feisty, fast'; Random House India produces the ‘Kama Kahani', a series of Indianised Mills and Boons; Hachette India openly states that it cares most about commercial thrillers; and with its latest, highly-marketed release, Johnny Gone Down, HarperCollins India seems to be headed in the same direction. These are all books that openly disclaim any particular literary merit. They are projected instead as ‘fun' reads — with the implication that only a killjoy could possibly protest them.

Lit News: H.G. Alder's "Panorama" to be republished

Good news for literature lovers: to mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of H.G. Adler, his autobiographical novel "Panorama" is going to be republished. Rated as "among the greats of world literature", Panorama was written way back in 1948, and it took twenty years before a publisher had the guts to publish it.

Ilana Hammerman interview

Haaretz publishes an interesting and lengthy interview of editor and writer Ilana Hammerman.

Society has taken in so many innovative things that it has become immune. No one is knocked off their feet anymore - not by art and not by reality. Once people were shocked by Dadaism, for example. Now, if they see a toilet in the museum, so what? After all, they show us dead bodies and mangled limbs - what isn't shown and visible everywhere? Civilized society can digest anything.

'A' Literature !

"It's important to churn them out, it's important to be everywhere. Most importantly, it's all in the title...all title names should be 19-characters long."

Joyce Carol Oates interview

Q:A few months ago, you finished writing A Widow’s Memoir, an account of the death of your first husband, Raymond Smith. Can you comment on the process of writing it?

A:It isn’t a time I remember very clearly now. I had difficulty sleeping and would often write late at night, on sheets of paper folded lengthwise, which can fit neatly into a book which I might be reading, or trying to read. My normal concentration was shattered and so I “took notes” in the hope that some time in the future I could bring these fragmented passages into some sort of coherent whole. The effort seemed enormous at the time—like hauling myself up by hand, pulling on a thick rope.

Dzanc's Alternate List of 20 writers to watch

In an obvious response to The New Yorker's list of 20 best ficton writers under 40,
, Dzanc has now published an alternate list of 20. It's a relief to see that the Dzanc at least does not take into consideration a writer's age to make its list, and has a more comprehensive and wider view of fiction publishing.

Translating Haruki Murakami

The Danwei has published translating experiences of two Chinese translators of Haruki Murakami.

Just from the title 1Q84 it is obvious that Haruki Murakami is a naughty writer who likes to play word games. He likes putting heterogeneous things together; here it’s numbers and English letters.

Olga Yokarczuk interview

"Literature is always political"
Q: In the past, writers were seen as very powerful members of society, people who were capable of influencing the masses. Has that changed? What is the role of writers in contemporary society?

Olga Tokarczuk: The role of the writer has always been political, in the broadest possible sense of the political. When I say political, I mean a conscious approach to the reality that surrounds us. More often than not, such an approach should involve, in my opinion, the writer finding vantage points that will allow us to see the imperceptible.

The curious case of David Davidar

David Davidar, the publishing don, had quickly quit his job before his company was to fire him on charge of sexual harassment by his subordinate Lisa Rundle. An impressive line of writers, editors and publishers - most of them benificiaries in one way or other of Davidar's grand position in the publishing world -now stand by him. But is he really clean?

The point I’m trying to make here is that I’m not some outsider sitting on a fence and bitching because of some personal grouse. On the contrary. I’m being brutally honest and saying that sure, David had some excellent qualities. But he had some major vices too. And some were unacceptable. He drank way, way too much. He admitted to me that Frankfurt and London Book Fair were basically excuses for him to get drunk and stay sloshed for days on end, alongwith a group of other equally inebriated editors of major international houses who often pitched one another books and bought and sold one another’s pitches, sometimes for million dollar advances. He exulted in the sheer power he wielded and while he was always a thorough Gentleman in the best old-fashioned sense of the word, he also suffered from the classic Gentlemanly vices – a love for the company of other powerful decision-makers with fat chequebooks and money (not their own) to splurge as they pleased, a bottomless expense account, loads of alcohol…and, in David’s case, women. He loved women. He adored them. That was fine in itself, perhaps. But David had a problem: He fell in love with women at the drop of a spoon. He was always either in love with someone or other or had just been in love with one and was now in love with another…it was quite a mess. Everyone who knew David well knew this and while I can’t speak for the women he worked with, at least two other mutual friends that I know of – Dom Moraes and Jeet Thayil – were quite aware of David’s fondness for romance. He loved wooing women with roses and champagne, chocolates and nightgowns, candlelit dinners and long night drives. He lived for it. He was a man of big appetites and his biggest hunger was always for the romance of romance.

I was a publishing pariah: Lionel Shriver, Orange Prize for Fiction winning author

"I had made no money and I was a publishing pariah. I had no clout. The book came within a whisker of not being published. My former agent hated it and suggested I rewrite it as a comedy or without the school massacre."

Ruskin Bond interview

The Statesman has published an interesting interview with Ruskin Bond, the evergreen writer.

Do you think good writing often comes unbidden?
It can because sometimes, quite spontaneously, you might feel the urge to write a poem or an essay or just a personal entry in a journal. You’d call that spontaneous writing. It’s often the best that a writer does. Of course, there’re kinds of writing that require planning and organisation like long novels or biography. As far as poetry goes, even the essay at times, or even occasionally a short story, can be the result of spontaneous urge which is often unplanned.

Hans Fallada's anti-Nazi novel sells 100,000 in three months

A Bestseller after 60 years!

Written in 1947, the novel is a chilling portrayal of extreme fear under dictatorship. It is about an ordinary Berlin couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, who in a small way stage a protest against the Nazis after their only son is killed in action in 1940 by denouncing Hitler in postcards which they leave across the city. It is also an exciting thriller about the Gestapo detective pursuing them.

Amos Oz interview

"It is not exactly the way I write stories, it's the way I think, since each time I am among people who are strangers: at a railway station, an airport or in the waiting room of a clinic. I look at people and observe them, I look at their body language, their clothes, I overhear snatches of conversations between them and I imagine their lives. It's a wonderful pastime, I recommend it to everyone to try to imagine the other, because with the help of imagination we liberate ourselves from the prison of the self into a broader conception of human nature"

Is novel just a pastime?

"The proper subject of each and every novel is the replacement of one state of affairs by another. Every such novel is a challenge to the status quo, an act of sedition that maps a revolution."

American PEN Literary Service Award Speech

"Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be."

Yann Martel Interview

"Reality is a 100 million details. Right now where you are, if you think about it, you are surrounded by 100 million details on which you could focus your attention. Everything, from chemical, scientific details to cultural details to personal emotional details... now some of that has to be lost. Time, you know, is an eraser. It all goes. [We need] something we can hold on to. It's called history. But even history has hundreds of thousands of details and sometimes it's overwhelming and it's hard to get to. The forte of the arts, the forte of the imagination is that it can take some of those details and give them immortality. A painting, a story, a song can float across the ocean of time like a lifeboat. So you can get to the essence of an event and convey it in the form of art. It can be like a suitcase, taking the essential and preparing you for a trip to elsewhere...

Two Faces of Amitav Ghosh?

Dan David Prize Controversy
Not long ago - in March 2001, to be exact - Amitav Ghosh withdrew his book from Commonweath writer's prize on moral ground, but this time he's going to Tel Aviv on May 9 to receive the $1 million Dan David Prize in presence of Israeli President Shimon Peres despite calls from anti-Israeli intellectuals to reject the prize.

"It's surprising to have to raise Israeli colonialism with a writer whose entire oeuvre seems to us an attempt to imagine how human beings survived the depredations of colonialism. Gosh, even the Dan David judges like the way you evoke "the violent dislocations of people and regimes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."...What can you be thinking of? Please, think again."

"I write to destroy memory"

Jacques Rouboud In Bomb Magazine.

I write every night. I never correct, I never go back—I just go on and on. Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project. I want to say something about it, but I digress as soon as I start saying something, because I remember something else that I then begin to explain, and so on. So the structure is a bit meandering. I begin The Loop with a very old childhood image of snow in Carcassonne, where snow is very rare. I’m in my room and it’s very cold outside. At night there’s frost on the windowpane—I write and make pictures on it. So that’s the image: there’s an outer and an inner space, memory and the present. That’s the first image of the book, which at the end, returns to it.

David Mitchell Interview

"No, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t run short of imagination. You can get jaded, myopic and maybe sluggish. But imagination is...? it’s more a place actually, or a lab. Stories are infinite. You help yourself to as much as you want. You. Your kid. The human mud of your marriage. It’s all material. For that to run dry — it’s unthinkable. It would be like a fish worrying about water when it’s in the sea. The world has infinite plots for me.”

Aharon Appelfeld Interview

Q: Have you ever felt that you have exhausted this subject or period -- the period of the Holocaust -- or that you might want to write about another period of your life?

A I write about ideas. It's not memoir, it's not history, it's not psychology, it's about the human being in the world, all of the good and bad that a person encounters in life. This is what I have written 40 books about. I have written books that take place in Israel, and I have written about other periods, not just about the period of the war. Also about other times in Jewish history. I don't write history, or memoirs of the Holocaust. Of course, in the Holocaust, many horrible things happened. So many "interesting" things. Take the case of a boy living with a prostitute. This doesn't happen every day. And if I myself hadn't lived with a prostitute, I couldn't have written the book. Things like this couldn't have happened in regular times.

Jeanette Winterson on writing

So I keep on writing the story — for myself, for others — knowing that the flexibility and energy of an emerging narrative — why we always need new books and new voices — is the antidote to the rigid moribund narratives of vested interests and mass culture.

The Big Mysterious World of Roberto Bolano(3)

You get another new character in Part 3: Oscar Fate, a New York reporter who comes to Detroit to interview an ex-Black Panther, but finally shows up at Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match. Just around this time the city was convulsing with frequent and random killings of young women by a suspected serial killer. Fate gets interested and wants to write an article about it, but his editor in NewYork rejects the idea, and asks him to go back just covering the boxing assignment.

During his stay in the city, he comes in touch with a gang comprising a local reporter, a film buff and a woman called Rosa Mendez. He also meets a Mexico City reporter who is investigating the killings of women. Just after the boxing match Fate goes along with the gang who had with them a pretty woman called Rosa Almafitano, daughter of Oscar Almafitano whom we knew about in Part 1 and part 2.

Fate sniffs something foul, and suspects that Rosa is going to be killed. He salvages her, and later takes her along into US, following in her fater’s advice.

This part reads like a thriller, though with Bolano touch throughout. It however leaves me somewhat clueless about the core of theme. I have a feel that the story is derailed and loses its consistency. But of course I’m not so sure of it.

Literary lion chooses e-publishing

John Edgar Wideman, a fixture of the American literary establishment and two-time winner of the prestigious Faulkner Award for fiction, has chosen to e-publish his latest work, breaking from the traditional model he has used to successfully publish more than 20 other works.

When E-publishing is the only option

DNA, a Mumbai daily, has published an article So what if you can't publish my book after talking to some e-book authors(yours truly among them).

The Big Mysterious World of Roberto Bolano (2)

Part 2 is no continuation of Part 1 in the real sense, and you can read it as a separate text, as if Bolano begins the novel anew forgetting that he has already written the first part. Amalfitano, the Chilean professor, showed up in Part 1 as a guide to four academics in their search for the elusive writer Archimboldi, but he then didn’t attract the readers as others.

So Amalfitano deserved a 68-page treat: The part about Amalfitano. Lola, Amalfitano’s wife, also occupies a part of it. Lola is a queer woman who abandons him for the sake of a poet living in an asylum. The poet dodges her, and she goes out into the big world and wanders around aimlessly, and finally contracts AIDS.

Amalfitano comes across as a lonely, depressive figure, and when he is not taking classes in the university, he reads, ruminates, dreams, hallucinates and thinks. He may seem like a bore, but to me, he’s quite an interesting intellectual who lives his own way.

But why is this part like it is? Is Bolano loading us with details of Santa Teresa’s men and milieu before he proceeds with his story further? Is he giving us a low down on Mexican mind and spirit? Or is he at an experiment with his text? You would notice Bolano incorporates some geometrical figures in the part– not quite relevantly.Is he at this point tired of communicating in words ? Does he believe in an imperfect but spontaneous text? No doubt he is an experimentalist here, and does not care for the traditional form of a novel. But he is vibrant, funny and even hilarious, especially when he dwells upon important characters of his times, like for example, Pinochet or Boris Yeltsin.

I find this part hugely amusing, celebral and enjoyable.

Don DeLillo interview

“In the 1970s, when I started writing novels, I was a figure in the margins, and that’s where I belonged. If I’m headed back that way, that’s fine with me, because that’s always where I felt I belonged. Things changed for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but I’ve always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing.”

The Big, Mysterious World of Roberto Bolano (1)

I hope you won't think me indiscreet, said the doctor, but I'm writing a biography of our friend and the more information I can gather on his life, tne better, wouldn't you say? Someday he'll leave here, smoothing his eyebrows, someday the Spanish public will have to recognize him as one of the greats, I don't mean they'll give him a prize,hardly, no Principe de Asturias or Cervantes for him, let alone a seat in the Academy, literary careers in Spain are for social climbers, operators, and ass kissers, if you'll pardon my expression.

.Guees who writes it? Yes, Roberto Bolano, who I've started reading at last. I'm reading two of his books simultaneously - 2666 at home, and Savage Detectives in my clinic. I find Bolano's writing totally gripping for me. I like his narrative, his style, his voice, even the matter-of-fact way he describes sex acts. His tastes totally match mine, and it's impossible to put down his writing. I find Bolano much more interesting and natural and unpretentious than Salman Rushdie or Garcia Marquez or Orhan Pamuk.

His first part of 2666 deals with four fans of Archimboldi, the reclusive German writer(of course, imagined). Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini and Norton - four different nationals associated with different universities - are in search of real Archimboldi. They roam different locations across the globe, and finally arrive at Santa Teresa based on a rumour that the great writer visited the city some time back.

In the process of this search, Petellier and Espinoza get intimate with Norton, the only lady in the group, but Morini, being handicapped and wheel-chair bound, keeps at a distance from her. Norton sleeps with both Petellier and Espinoza separately and in one occasion together. In course of time, she gets offer to marry any of them. But Norton turns down the offer, and in a strange move, marries Morini.

I don't know how long we'll last together, said Norton inn her letter. It doesn't matter to me or to Morini either(I think). We love each other and we're happy. I know the two of you will understand.

It's a delicate and wonderful love story. But this also leads Petellier and Espinoza to believe, more strongly than ever before, that Archimboldi is here and this is the closest they'll ever be to him.

A.S.Byatt interview

Q:In a recent interview, American novelist Philip Roth predicted that the novel would become extinct as a genre in 25 years at the most. As one of the most important novelist of our age, what is your opinion of his prediction and how do you foresee the future of the novel?

A:I don’t see the novel disappearing. It represents a prolonged communication from one person to one person and it uses language, still the most complicated method we have devised for talking to each other. It may well change its format -- become electronic, for instance -- but it will take a long time for it to disappear. All the blogs and Facebooks we now have are in fact evidence of our need to read and write. Commonplace novels may be replaced by these methods. Good novels will still be needed. And good writers will need to pay attention to the blogosphere and to Twitter, et al., to see what is happening to the medium.

Dumitru Tsepeneag interview

"For me, literature is the daughter of music: a bit heavy and more level headed than its mother. Literature submits to the same principles of successive perception, which allows it to build progressively. The narrative image has more dimensions than the painted image—literature is more complex than painting. Initially, this complexity represents a disadvantage, because the reader has to concentrate much more than when they’re looking at a canvas. It gives the author, on the other hand, the opportunity to feel like a creator: they can offer their readers a world in which there’s room for everyone, as every reader has their own reading and vision."

Full interview

Mueller's favourite for the Nobel Peace Prize

Liu Xiaobo, Chinese Writer
In a rather unusual but warm and genuine gesture, Herta Mueller, the Nobel Laureate, writes a letter to Nobel Foundation and recommends Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer, for the Nobel Peace Prize.

"I, too, believe that Liu Xiaobo deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because in the face of countless threats from the Chinese regime and great risk to his life, he has fought unerringly for the freedom of the individual.

Dear Marcus Storch, I know that as a Literary Nobel laureate I am not allowed to nominate candidates for the Novel Peace Prize. But I am writing to ask you to pass on my support for Liu Xiaobo to Norway."

Martin Amis interview

".. fiction has been nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, and the gulag. But the impulse each time was literary. I’ve just written a piece about writing Time’s Arrow, and begin by quoting the often-asked question that I heard, “why did you decide to write a novel about the Holocaust?” I never did. I never decide to write any novel of mine. They emerge. “Decide” is completely the wrong word, and “about” is completely the wrong preposition. You find yourself writing around a topic, but not after thinking “someone ought to do something like this,” nothing like that."

J.D.Salinger quote

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.... I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

J.D.Salinger in The Times (1974)

Review: The Land of Green Plums

Just finished reading The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller. This is the first book I have read this year. For constraint of time, I had to read it one or two pages at a time, over a long period. But that way I enjoyed the book more because Muller is not the kind of writer who makes you turn pages like crazy. Quite the opposite, her terse and understated prose demands a slow and thoughtful reading.

TLOGP is about Ceausescu regime and its all-pervasive and bloody repression on the people represented by a four-member group (including the writer herself) in this narrative, who refuse to toe the lines of the regime and Lola, a party loyalist. The state emerges in the form of Captain Pjele who dogs the group members relentlessly, interrogates them whenever and whatever way he wishes, raids their homes and addresses at whatever hour, and searches their belongings evry which way. And the award of punishment varies anything from performing dance before the Captain to secret killing in an odd place.

In a land where there is practically no rule of law, and sign of civilization, the dictator had his shadow everywhere. And the only thing palpable was fear.

Lola, outside this group, despite being a party member, commits suicide, and then her party disowns her. A student,in her fourth year, extremely poor, who would support her studies by prostitution, she was made pregnant by her gym instructor, of course a party bigwig. Two days after Lola’s death, the party members sit in a big hall for denouncing Lola's suicide ,and the gym instructor takes the initiative to expel her from the party and exmatriculate her from the university.

In her wonderfully consummate voice, Muller paints the regime as real and horrendous as it really was. “Everyone lived by thinking about flight. They thought of swimming across the Danube until the water becomes another country. Of running after the corn until the soil becomes another country. ..They hope for fog in the field and fog on the river so they can avoid the bullets and the guard dogs , so they can run away, swim away.”

The end is along the expected lines: George, perpetually on the run, dies falling from a 5th floor window under mysterious circumstances. Kurt, tired of struggle, hangs himself in his apartment with a rope. As for the writer, she gets fired from work without showing any reason, and the regime sees to it that nobody offers her any job whatsoever. Luckily for her, she somehow manages to escape from Rumania to Germany. So does her friend Edgar.

TLOGP is a great novel, not only because of its unique story-telling, but also for its in-depth and nuanced study of psyche of people who has to live in intense fear every day of their life under a repressive regime. More to the point, it has a very contemporary theme because there are large swaths of people in different parts of the world today who go through the same harrowing experience, and many more lands of green plums would surely slip into repressive regime in times to come.

Jonathan Lethem Interview

"Voice is the great persuader. When something’s working, it’s because the implicit narrator, the fictional writer who’s writing everything, slips into a mode of authority and persuasiveness that can put over whatever it likes. And you see that in Bolaño now, and people have been very inspired to radical strategies by Bolaño’s freedom to authorize himself to use all sorts of different modes simultaneously. But fundamentally it’s just his persuasiveness and brilliance and charm that make that work."

Jonathan Lethem gives a long interview to the Rumpus.

Jaipur Literary Festival is here again!

Jaipur Literary Festival, billed as the Big Fat Indian Litfest, is here again (January 21-25). And from all indications, it's going to be more spectacular this time. More than 150 writers from across the world would attend the fest this year. The budget is around 2.4 crores in Indian currency. DSC, an infracstructure company, sponsors the fest for reasons best known to it. William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, as usual, are its directors. Tina Brown has already had her blessings for the fest.

Like in previous years, the organisers are trying to rope in as many superstar writers as possible this year - Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka being one of them. The buzz is that two Booker winners and five Pulitzer winners would attend the fest this year.

What is however depressing for the organisers is that Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga and Amartya Sen have declined the invitation. Arundhati Roy was of course not invited. So you would not see many of our IWE writers this time. But there is Chetan Bhagat,our pop fictioneer, to make up for what would be missing on Indian side.

The easiest way to become a bestseller writer

"Young writers are over-pampered -- one of the easiest ways to become a bestseller writer today is simply to be young. In such an age-discriminative time, the writers who really need some gentleness and care are, in fact, the old ones!That said, the commitment to optimism in today's literary world can also be traced to Stalinism, which didn't permit what was called defeatism. If there had been camps for literary characters back then, Eeyore the melancholy donkey -- with whom I closely identify -- would have been among the first inmates. The contemporary literary marketplace is almost as repressive. It rewards only the artistically obedient, the adaptable, the diligent, the optimistic. Optimists, after all, are the only reliable consumers."

Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic in an interview with Boston Glove in 2003.

Laszlo Darvasi interview

"A really good book is a very selfish thing, it is interested in nothing but itself. And suddenly it will do something that cannot be learned or predicted, because it's not in the instructions. A creation like this is a lonely act and the novel feeds during its creation, on this inviolable experience of loneliness."

more..

50 most inspiring authors in the world

Poets and Writers has published a list of most inspiring authors in the world. Not a great list -of course,US centric - but it's heartening to see some of my favourite authors in the list, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, J.D Salinger. Also interesting are the comments about the authors.

Gabriel García Márquez
He makes the most magical of circumstances believable. And this nonsense that he's finished with writing? Don't believe it.

Haruki Murakami
He consistently demonstrates how far the narrative form can bend and proves that a story with surrealist tendencies can be both moving and compelling.

Salman Rushdie
Possession of The Satanic Verses will still get you arrested in much of the Muslim world. It's probably worth it.

J. D. Salinger
He found a way to write characters, dialogue, and scenes that seem effortless. And he's managed to stay hidden for decades—how is that even possible in the twenty-first century?

But why Barack Obama? Is he really a writer in the sense others in the list are?

Imre Kertesz Interview

"If there really is any demonstrable similarity between the writings of Szomory and myself, as you maintain, then that must be due to the virtually identical social class and background. That is how the Jews of Budapest were; a very particular type. I take it as a great compliment that Szomory’s novel Gyuri [1932; new edition by Múlt és Jövő Könyvek, 2008] could have been a forebear of my own Gyuri Köves in Fatelessness. Hungarian Jews, the petty bourgeoisie, had their own vernacular, their own context, they had their own allures and their own little fibs; everyone had to make compromises in their life, if only to kid themselves that they were not in danger."

Full Interview

Literature distancing from life?

Anita Nair has an interesting article in DNA about the place of literature in the common man's life.

Does anyone read poetry at all except for students of literature? Instead what we consider poetry is lyrics of film songs and music videos. Rhyming ditties that draw from the epidermis of emotion rather than any serious soul searching.

Herta Mueller on importance of literature

"I always had my poems which I could repeat to myself. Even under interrogation. It's like singing in a prison camp. You never grow tired of it. You can rely on given forms, lean on them. I have often thought it was like praying, for people who don't believe in God. And its nicer than praying. It requires more individuality. It's less mechanical. Even today I still copy down sentences from books that give me support."

more..

Herta Mueller's Nobel Lecture

In today's Nobel Lecture, Herta Mueller tells the audience about a handkerchief which is not really a handkerchief.

"I wish I could utter a sentence for all those whom dictatorships deprive of dignity every day, up to and including the present—a sentence, perhaps, containing the word handkerchief. Or else the question: DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF?
Can it be that the question about the handkerchief was never about the handkerchief at all, but rather about the acute solitude of a human being?"

more..

1Q84: 2,230,000 copies sold in Japan alone!

A Japanese visitor to this blog has sent me the following e-mail:
"Hi from Japan! Today, on Dec. 4 was announced on the TV news that 1Q84 has been voted The book of the year 2009. Some 2,230,000 have been sold so far."

And mind it: English translation of 1Q84 has yet to come to the market. Haruki Murakami has millions of fans outside Japan, and they're keenly waiting to buy the book in the English version.

Is 1Q84 going to create a new sales record in literature?

Bolano's Last Interview

Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003, got bits of recognition and some fame - not money- during his last days. Several magazines interviewed him during this time. Meliville House Publishing has published a book compiling Bolano's last interview and other conversations.

Q: Have you shed one tear about the widespread criticism you’ve drawn from your enemies?

A: Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.

Fuentes's New Novel

“There have been times without novels, but never a novel that does not somehow reflect the times. And dealing with the times is to deal with history."

PEN appeals for release of Liu Xiaobo

A Writer in Peril
Pen American Center has appealed to President Obama to pressurize China for the release of Liu Xiaobo, a dissident writer, who has been detained since Dec 8, 2008 by Chinese authorities.

Liu Xiaobo is a renowned literary critic, writer, and political activist based in Beijing. He was a professor at Beijing Normal University and has worked as a visiting scholar at several universities outside China, including the University of Oslo, the University of Hawaii, and Columbia University. He served as president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center from 2003 to 2007, and holds a seat on its board.

more

Daniel Kehlmann interview

"So much civilization and so much horror...What a combination!"
Daniel Kehlmann

HAARETZ.com publishes an interview with Daniel Kehlmann , the author of "Measuring the World", now regarded as a masterpiece.

"Because fiction is a way to 'correct' the official ways history is written. If you read Humboldt you often get the impression that he does not narrate things exactly the way they happened to him. He cannot have been as relaxed, detached and aloof as he wants us to believe. Therefore in my novel the Humboldt-character often decides to write down things differently from the way they happened - a technique by which I am trying to show what I tried to do as a novelist: giving both versions, mine and his. In some cases my version might even be closer to the truth ... Only a novelist can do that, a journalist or a historian cannot. Only by making a contract with the reader, stating that nothing he or she will read is supposed to be taken at face value, can a novelist give us a form of truth that only literary art can provide."

How to fight a dictatorship with a pen

It's lethal to even want to fight a dictatorship. But Herta Mueller, the Romanian writer who got the Nobel Prize this year, fought it ever since she started writing. The consequence being that she was intimadated, chased, interrogated and interned by the secret services all through her life.In the process she had a whole range of experiences of terror unleashed by the state. How did she take it? Signandsign.com publishes a great narrative by the writer herself.

For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.

Mavis Gallant is 86

"...osteoporosis has bent her at the waist, diabetes rendered her frail and arthritis tightened her fingers in curls that make holding her once-perpetual pen painful.."

Philip Roth Interview

“People have very little else to say about fiction. They don’t know what handle to pick a book up by; and the only handle they can think to pick it up by is one that doesn’t even exist, and that’s the biographical handle. And that’s really another species of gossip. If you don’t allow them that handle to pick it up by, they’re mute. They’re silenced, they have nothing to say.”

more..

Arundhati Roy's second novel

Most Indian dailies and periodicals dodge Arundhati Roy, the Booker-winning novelist, for her strong anti-establishment voice. But the DNA, a relatively new daily, has published an interesting interview with her

Q:How far are you from finishing your second novel?
A:Very far.

An Excerpt from Herta Mueller's new Novel

While a debate is now raging on about how Herta Mueller could be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, signandsight.com publishes an excerpt from Herta Mueller's new novel "Everthing I Own I Carry With Me"

"Everything I have I carry with me.
Or: everything that's mine I carry on me.

I carried everything I had. It wasn't actually mine. It was either intended for a different purpose or somebody else's. The pigskin suitcase was a gramophone box. The dust coat was from my father. The town coat with the velvet neckband from my grandfather. The breeches from my Uncle Edwin. The leather puttees from our neighbour, Herr Carp. The green gloves from my Auntie Fini. Only the claret silk scarf and the toilet bag were mine, gifts from recent Christmases.
Read on ..

Dar Spiegel on Herta Mueller

"Authors like Herta Müller are patriots of an estranged homeland. The literature of the last 20 years suggests that hardly anyone who has stayed home can write about the rule of violence and the silencing of the victims as effectively.

With each of her books, Herta Müller fights against forgetting, against the frenzy of concealment and trivialization which has prevailed in Eastern Europe since 1989 and which seeks to pass off one of the worst periods of degradation and destruction of the individual as a regulated normality. (Unfortunately, this is an attitude that has also taken hold in the so-called "West," as could be seen in the completely uncritical reception to the recent election of communist apparatchik Irina Bokowa to the post of UNESCO director-general.)"

Herta Muller:another surprise Nobel Prize winner in literature

When Austria's Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004, most had asked, Jelinek who? The same question is now being asked about this year's winner German writer Herta Muller. Like Jelinek before the Nobel, she is an obscure, virtually unknown writer - even neglected in Romania, her own country.

One of the beauties of the Nobel Prize is that the Nobel Committee has almost always picked up a truly real writer for the Prize, irrespective of his/her country, language and popularity. Without the Nobel, we would have never known Elfiede Jelinek or Orhan Pamuk.

At a time when everything gets to be dumbed down - and lierature is being frowned on and cornered - it's truly a great job for the Nobel Committee to ignore the market forces in selecting its winner.

Jelinek impressed me hugely despite her bleak complexity. I hope I would also like Herta Muller who "depicts the landscape of the the dispossessed".

Hilary Mantel wins the 2009 Man Booker Prize

The 2009 Man Booker Prize to Hilary Mantel is sure to delight the fans of historical fiction. Wolf Hall is a narrative set in sixteenth century, and about the rise of Thomas Chromwell - the blacksmith boy who became Henry V111's right-hand man. Sure there are many takers for such stories, including our Booker judges, but literary fiction gets a jab this time. Watch out: historical fiction is coming back!

Hilary Mantel interview

Who will win Man Booker Prize this year?

Tomorrow is the D-day. Of the six short-listed writers, only one will win the Man Booker Prize. And it's simply impossible to guess the winner. The prestigious Prize has been with us for forty years, and it's a big brand now - second only to the Nobel Prize. But you can always question about its selection process.

The process is arbitrary from the start: novels can be submitted for the prize only by publishers. Authors cannot enter their own books. Each publisher is allowed to submit two titles. (Past winners are automatically considered, and judges can call for a few titles.) Gossip networks claimed that Rushdie made it a contractual obligation for his publisher to submit The Enchantress of Florence. What of writers like Yann Martel (winner, 2002), whose The Life of Pi was a first book? Would it even have been submitted for the prize if, instead of a small press in Edinburgh, the book had come out from a monolith dominated by literary superstars? Another debut, Adiga’s The White Tiger (winner, 2008), was published by an independent press with a small list — one reason it was submitted for the prize at all.

Too Many Aspiring Writers in India

Anita Desai, the well-known novelist, has an interesting article in the Guardian on aspiring writers from India.

By the number of manuscripts that arrive daily and hourly from India on the desks of British and American agents and publishers, I would guess no country has more aspiring writers than ours. While it is curious - and a little sad - that writing only became a "respectable" profession once it began making money, it is very gratifying to know that a young, talented person can make such a choice today and not be consigned to "loser" status. It is actually possible at last to make a living by writing, to be self-supporting and thus self-respecting. The importance of this cannot be stressed enough. As long ago as 1929 Virginia Woolf knew this and wrote of it in her seminal A Room of One's Own

Twitter-ized novel gets a book deal

When Matt Stewart started posting his novel - literary fiction - on Twitter, I congratulated him for the sheer novelty of using a social networking tool for a serious pursuit. I'm now enormously happy that he has just landed a book deal with Soft Skull.

Denise Oswald, the Soft Skull editor, has this to say: The manuscript drew my attention initially. I thought Matt handled the twitter campaign brilliantly. It was the right time for something like that and he had the vision to jump on that opportunity. I think you'll see a lot of writers following suit but I'm doubtful it will be to the same effect, unless they can find a way to make that kind of broadcast their own.

Congratulations once again, Matt!

Unpublished: Old man and the Sea

Do you remember reading the Hemingway novel Old Man and the Sea? I read it in my school days, and still remember the old fisherman going out to the sea to catch his fish everyday, day afer day, but without any success. What determination and grit!And what a great subject for a novel!

Life has now published a series of pictures online about the great novel's setting, and Hemingway's writing habits. ( Link from Donigan Merritt)

Future of Literary Fiction

Future of literary fiction is now being discussed and written about in various journals and forums. A few days ago the Salon had an article Glenn Beck is the future of literary fiction. Now, in the ongoing 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival, one T. Cooper has said, "The future of literary fiction is co-writing vampire and/or zombie novels with famous directors."

Censorship in Frankfurt Book Fair!

Frankfurt Book Fair 2009, scheduled from Oct 14 to 18, will have China as its guest of honour this year, but the organisers faced a unique problem this time. Uninvite those authors, said China as one of its pre-conditions, or we would pull out altogether.

The authors included Dai Qing, the well-known investigative journalist and environment activist, Hang Hui, professor of Humanities at Tsinghua University and a pioneer of government-critical "new left" in China, and Bei Ling, poet and political commentator, who lives in exile in the USA.

Shame the organisers have followed the directives from China, and don't want the authors they invited first to attend the fair. Which virtually means they have become a party to gagging the free speech. Ha!

Now, are you still interested in this year's Frankfurt Book Fair?

Man Booker 2009 Shortlist announnced

It's six books this time, out of a longlist of thirteen. A.S.Byatt, J.M. Coetzee,Adam Foulds,Hilary Mantel, Simon Mawar and Sarah Waters have been shortlisted.

Byatt and Coetzee are veterans, Byatt winning the Booker Prize once(1990) and Coetzee twice(1983, 1999).

Sarah Waters was earlier shortlisted twice.

Adam Foulds is the youngest in the list, being only 34.

Bahaa Taher Profile

The National publishes an interesting profile of Bahaa Taher, the iconic Egyptian novelist, now 74, who recently launched his latest novel Sunset Oasis.

“I am still against the same things I was against when I was young: social and political injustice, especially against women or people of different origins or ethnicities. What’s different is that the hope I had at one time no longer exists. Hopefully things will change – but not, I think, very quickly.

Northeastern Indian writing today

Tehelka has published in its current issue a supplement on Northeastern Indian writing today(an odd topic for a newsweekly, but Tehelka famously takes on such issues)

"..Life in the Northeast (as elsewhere) is not all bleak, tragic or violent. There is love and hope in the human spirit. There is the serenity of the region’s mountain streams and the immense silence of its forests. Writers like Esther Syiem, Temsula Ao, Kynpham Nongkynrih and Mamang Dai are moored in their traditions, giving their writings a certain depth. But Ao feels that younger voices from Meghalaya and Nagaland — more urban, cosmopolitan, “westernised” than an earlier generation — have lost touch with their roots. Manipur has a strong tradition of theatre and dramatic writing spanning cities and villages. Many members of an energetic rural Womens’ Writers Group, led by writer Binodini Devi, have published books. In Mizoram, where writers earlier wrote on insurgency, they now write of the Church. There is also a definite desire to go back to a time before Christianity, to discover their roots. First apparent in Mizo music, this is now beginning to be felt in writing as well."

Mario Bellatin Interview

PRI's The World interviews "Beauty Salon" author Mario Bellatin.
Q: You have referred to literature as a “game.” Does your subversion of literary tradition owe anything to writers from the 1960s or later? Do you see yourself as a “post-modern” writer?

A: I still don’t understand very well what people call post-modernism in literature. And in spite of not understanding it, I have seen it come into the world and die as a term many times. That’s why I think it’s something dangerous. It has the capacity to accommodate to any kind of situation that in some way escapes a more traditional canon. The only thing I believe in relation to this topic is that literature can’t be something that doesn’t move, something static, as certain literary studies pretend to approach it. Literature must be in constant motion, forward and backwards, discovering again what has already been discovered, and plowing fields it’s supposedly not concerned with. In a way, I believe that each writer must reinvent writing, begin from the presupposition that there was no one preceding him or her, perhaps only the sacred phrase, now so trite, which states that first there was being.

Future of Fiction?

"The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century. "
Do you agree?

James Kelman Frisson

James Kelman, Scotland's only Booker Prize winner, is in his 70's, but he can still speak up his mind with great aplomb.

"If the Nobel Prize came from Scotland they would give it to a writer of f****** detective fiction, or else some kind of child writer, or something that was not even new when Enid Blyton was writing the Faraway Tree, because she was writing about some upper middle-class young magician or some f****** crap."

'Inherent Vice' Review

Tedious, Shallow, Monotonous, Flippant..

While I fully appreciate Pynchon in the abstract, as a literary-historical juggernaut—a necessary bridge from, say, Nabokov (with whom he studied at Cornell) to David Foster Wallace—sitting down with one of his actual books makes my eyebrows start to smolder. I find him tedious, shallow, monotonous, flippant, self-satisfied, and screamingly unfunny. I hate his aesthetic from floor to ceiling: the relentless patter of his Borscht Belt gags, his parodically overstuffed plots, his ham-fisted verbs (scowling, growling, glaring, leering, lurching) and adjectives (lurid, louche, lecherous), the tumbling micro-rhythms of his sentences, the galloping macro-rhythms of his larger narratives. I hate the discount paranoia he slathers over everything with an industrial-size trowel. I hate the cardboard cutouts he tries to pass off as human characters, and I hate—maybe most of all—his characters’ stupid names. (I even hate his name, which makes him sound like some kind of 29th-century sci-fi lobster.) I hate the fake song lyrics he invents for his characters to sing and the fake restaurants (Man of La Muncha) he invents for them to eat at and the stupid acronyms he invents for them to pledge their lives to.

In Support of Literature of Social Change

Call for Submissions for the Bellwether Prize

From the Press release
The Bellwether Prize supports the writing and publication of serious literary fiction addressing issues of social justice in culture and human relations, underlining the political power of literature. No other North American endowment or prize specifically supports a literature of social responsibility.

“Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level,creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger,” said Kingsolver. “Artists can be the bellwethers of social and moral progress. Think of Nadine Gordimer writing about race and power in South Africa, or Pablo Neruda writing with sarcastic, visionary wit about corporate imperialism in Chile. So many important novelists have written beautifully constructed social critique. We have that tradition in the U.S. as well, with John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath or Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. These are literary novels that argue eloquently for greater consciousness of human justice, and are also spectacular, enduring literature. But in the modern era, writers with this kind of vision do not find a lot of advocacy in our publishing industry.”

Adam Thirlwell interview

Adam Thirlwell made waves with his debut novel Politics six years ago. The British mini-Kundera, as he is sometimes called, has a new novel now.

Q:What are the roots of your own passion for literature?

A: Aged 13, on a summer holiday, I discovered poetry. In some terribly Freudian way, it was related to having my mother's attention. I discovered words could be so much fun without even understanding them. I've always been interested in words when they go a bit haywire and the sound and sense get dislocated. I was 18 and I'd gone to Prague and visited Kafka's house. I bought Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. I'd never thought of the novel as a poetic form. What I've got from Kundera is that a novel can be as playful as a poem. More and more, I think of writing as a way of creating your own map of the world, discovering what is possible, and describing a reality that is most Adamish. You can impose your own patterns on what is lacking in pattern. One of the games of writing is that some repeats are fruitful. It's also a game of constant contradiction.

Imre Kertész wins the Jean Améry Prize

Imre Kertesz, the 2002 Nobel Laureate, wins this year's 12-thousand- euro Jean Amery Prize sponsored by the Austrian Erste Bank and the Stuttgart publisher Klett-Cotta – which is conferred every second year at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

"The oeuvre of Kertész as an essay-writer works on the basis of Enlightenment thinking, which has learnt the lessons of the barbarism of Fascism and Communism, and works for a Europe that will either become an enlightened and free Europe or it will not exist at all"

Times' Best 60 Novels of the past 60 Years

The times has published The best 60 books of the past 60 years to celebrate the Cheltenham Literary festival anniversary.

It begins with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and ends with The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. In between, you see lots of really good novels. But how is it that each year has produced only one good novel?

While I'm glad that Boris Pasternek, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, J.M. Coetzee and many other worthy writers are there in the list, I'm shocked Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago and Aleksandr Solshenitzyn don't figure at all. Shame, this omission!I knew they would not include Elfride Zelinek.

And a word about the titles. Why Love at the time of Cholera in stead of One Hundred Years of Solitude? They could include both the titles.

And if you think A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is worth it, how can you not include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things?.

However, I admire this passage from Erica Wagner's introduction.

There will never be a single list, however, of “the 60 best novels of the past 60 years”; you can’t please all of the people all of the time. For what you love to read depends on who you are; what made you read it; where you were when you first discovered a book; who pressed it into your hand; what mood you were in the day you turned the first page; whether the scent of the pages reminded you of libraries past.

Return of short story

It is an enigma that even in these busy times readers opt more for novels than short stories. But things are changing, says Nilanjana Roy, an Indian writer-critic.

There are signs that the three-to-four decade-long obsession with the novel at the expense of the short story might be changing. Some of this has to do with the power and clout exercised by better-established writers; some of this has to do with the influence of major prizes, such as the Man Booker International and the Pulitzer. And, I hope, some of this may have to do with the changing tastes of the reading public; if publishing is faced with a growing demand for short stories, the industry can no longer hide behind the excuse that “short stories don’t sell”.

Pynchon's commercial venture!

Can you believe that Thomas Pynchon has written a thriller, and a commercial one at that? Much is being talked about his new novel Inherent Vice, which comes out on August 4.

As one of his fans, I'm rather surprised that Pynchon is finally surrendering to a genre (detective novel) that serious writers abhor. Is he tired of writing too complex books dealing with postmodern, heavier themes that today's readers are not fond of? Or, is he just in a relaxing mode to crank out a quick, popular novel while he's gearing himself up for another serious novel like Gravity's Rainbow?

What does Thomas Pynchon look like now?

2009 Man Booker Prize longlist announced

The judges of the Man Booker Prize, after having travelled through a "fertile landscape". settled on 13 books out of a total of 132. James Naughtie, the chair of judges claims it to be "one of strongest lists in recent memory." and "an outstandingly rich fictional mix."

The longlist has two former winners, four past-shortlisted authors and three first-time novelists. It is conspicuous by the absence of any Indian author this time.

Here's the longlist.

Alternative Sexuality latest literary subject?

Alternative sexuality is the latest literary subjct, says Neel Mukherjee, one of the recipients Of Crssword-Videophne Award. His winning novel Past Continuous is of course a saga of a lonely young gay who flees sexually-conservative Kolkata to the freedom of London.

Now, it seems like quit a bold statement. The savvy publishers and lit agents would definitely vote for Neel. A market has already been created in US and Britain with gay and lesbian literature. Now India is opening up. Nothing could be more welcome.

But economics apart, what do you read into this statement?

You see a self-indulgent solipsist, who is incapable of thinking outside of his own small, vacuous world.

Does sexuality, of whatever kind, count anymore in this digital age?

Literature is about an individual's perilous journey through life, and this is the literary subject of all times.

And there are far more important things in our planet than this alternative sexuality.

Ali Sethi: another Pakistani writer

I haven't yet read Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker, but liked his interview in the Outlook.
Your favourite writers?
Faiz, Ghalib, Tolstoy, Arundhati Roy.
Roy’s fiction or non-fiction?
Both. To quote her, the two are like jam and jelly. Both can achieve great results.

Another interview, lengthier, is at I am SANE.

The Blind Owl: An Iranian Classic

One of world's "most intense" books
Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World, reviews at length Sadeq P. Hedayat's classic novel The Blind Owl at Barnes & Noble Review.
Somewhere I must have read a little about Hedayat (1903–51), for I knew that he had committed suicide and that The Blind Owl was regarded as one of the great novels of 20th-century Iran. I knew, too, that it was phantasmagoric and macabre, somewhat in the manner of Poe, with a touch of The Arabian Nights, but also philosophical, indeed existential. Hedayat was said to have been a disciple of Sartre. Having now read the book, it does seem influenced by Sartre's Nausea, for its narrator finds existence dizzying, an Escher-like realm of repetition, shifting perspective, and illusion.

Vikram Seth Interview

Outlook India interviews Vikram Seth.
Q:You are the first writer from India who wrote literary fiction that sold like commercial fiction, blurring the distinction between the two. Do you deliberately aim to be readable?

A:I certainly aim to be readable because those are the kind (of books) I like to read. I like to make things as clear as possible within the limits of the complexities of human relations and the structure of language. I don’t try to make things simplistic, though. I do hope this distinction between the literary and the commercial is one that will be increasingly blurred. It never used to be like this in the 19th century. Writers like Dickens and Austen were read very widely. I don’t see why in the 20th century writers started writing in such an abstruse manner that unless you have a degree in English Literature—and perhaps not even then—you can’t read or enjoy their books. Critics say that the so-called airport novel is a kind of shlocky, formulary fiction. But for all its shlockiness, at least it is a page-turner, you want to know what’s happening. Basic issues of human interest—honour, ambition, love, enmity, family, money, intrigue, death—really matter, rather than the etiolated idea of writing some over-dense, over-referential literary construct.

Another Arundhati Roy Interview

Here comes another Arundhati Roy interview in the wake of publication of her new non-fiction title "Listening to Grasshoppers".
"Years of imprisoning and beheading writers never succeeded in shutting them out. However, placing them in the heart of a market and rewarding them with a lot of commercial success, has."