Market(share) for literature

 Literature takes up 10 percent of the entire Chinese book market, while it is 40 percent in the United States and 35-40 percent in Europe. 

Rereading as therapy

Rereading is therapy, despite the accompanying dash of guilt, and I find it strange that not everybody does it. Why wouldn't you go back to something good? I return to these novels for the same reason I return to beer, or blankets or best friends.

Alexander Ilichevsky interview

 “I am currently finishing a novel… about why morality collapsed in Russia and how it has shaped my country as it is today. But in fact, it is a tragic kind of ‘love story’”.

Anne Tyler interview

"I don't have intellectual curiosity, I have curiosity about people." 

Lit news: Mario Vargas Llosa donates his 30,000 books

Nobel Laureate  Mario Vargas Llosa  donates the 30,000 books of his personal library to his hometown of Arequipa.

Salman Rushdie's India Today Conclave speech

"This word, freedom. It's a beautiful sounding word, isn't it? Who would be against freedom? It's a word everyone would automatically be "for", one would think. A free society is one in which a thousand flowers bloom, in which a thousand and one voices speak. And what a simple and grand idea that seems. It's like that copper goddess standing in the harbour, enlightening the world. 

But in our time, many essential freedoms are in danger of defeat and not only in totalitarian or authoritarian states. Here in India also, a combination of religious fanaticism, political opportunism and, I have to say, public apathy is damaging that freedom upon which all other freedoms depend: the freedom of expression." 

Ian McEwan on originality

In literature, everyone is first. We do not need to ask who was first to write Don Quixote. Better, in fact, to consider the possibility of being the second – Pierre Menard, who in Borges's famous story independently reconceives, centuries after Cervantes, the entire novel, down to the last word. The worst novelist in the world can at least be assured that he will be the first to write his terrible novel. And mercifully, the last. And yet, to be first, to originate, to be original is key to the quality of a work of literature. However minimally, it must advance – in subject matter, in means of expression – our understanding of ourselves, of ourselves in the world.

Elif Shafak interview

"Extremist ideologies all around the world are telling us that you have to make a choice, but it’s important to recognise that people can have multiple attachments"

Ivan Klima interview

I'm just finishing a book of many very short stories. Now it's 100 pages, and it's more or less finished. Twenty short stories all written in the past two years. What is specific about them is that they are very short, sometimes only half a page or one or two pages. I'm trying to be very strict and brief. Some are very short meditations or very quick observations of something and nothing more. It's something new in my writing.

Programming & Writing

“You’re talking to defined interfaces, not making up a whole world. With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn’t express, not really. It’s a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That’s what’s hard about it.”

Read an E-Book Week starts today!

"Read an E-book" week kicks in today.  Being an ardent indie, I offer my novel Shadowland (Coupon code RE 100) for free during this period ( March 4 -10) to those interested, especially to readers of  literary fiction.

Thanks for your reading. I'll appreciate any feedback from you.

Shalom Auslander on Franz Kafka

"Everything Kafka wrote began as a joke, that Franz, in his wisdom, took very seriously, taking it, in the words of Milan Kundera, into the "dark depths of the joke". Singing mice, talking apes, men who turn into bugs, cops who arrest you for no reason. This was Kafka's hilarious idea: life itself is a joke, and a joke we have no choice but to take seriously. That, however, doesn't mean it isn't funny."

What can writers do in times of crisis?

 At a panel discussion hosted by the Southeast Europe Association and the Traduki-Network in Munich last weekend,  popular Greek author and "Faust" translator  Petros Markaris , Hungarian author György Dalos and Albanian author Lindita Arapi have their take on writers' stance in times of crisis.
Only two attitudes survive till the end of the battle: "leftist cynicism" and "rightist hypocrisy." Hate leaves little room for constructive criticism and is only exacerbated by political divisions.

Teju Kole interview

"The biggest source of novels is other novels. But, occasionally, I will doff my cap to the other stuff I assume my reader has read. In Open City there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in Dubliners. That is because a novel is also a literary conversation."

José Edmundo Paz-Soldán interview

"The main character is based on a real serial killer who was an undocumented alien.  "[Interviewers] sometimes will ask you about your moral responsibility as a writer; 'you should create positive, uplifting images of Latinos or Hispanics.' That's not the way I see it. Part of the responsibility to tell the whole story is to show the negative side as well."

A tribute to Adonis

A major tribute at the Mosaic Rooms ( 03 February to 30 March) to the great Syrian poet Adonis, including an exhibition of stunning drawings and a series of literary events. 

Amitav Ghosh on book festival tamasha

" Public life in India is now a whirling continuum that seamlessly unites cricket, politics and Bollywood. Each domain leaks into the other and the major figures are all closely linked. It is no coincidence that many of these elements are also much in evidence at book festivals. The intention evidently is to make the book world another link in the tightly joined whirligig of Cripollywood. It is easy to see the attractions of this, especially for writers who are striving to bring their work to public notice. But there is a price to pay: we need to remind ourselves that Bollywood movies are routinely re-edited to accommodate protests of various kinds. Recent incidents in Jaipur and in Kolkata, where Taslima Nasreen was also prevented from participating in a festival, suggest that Indian publishing will have to adapt its practices to those of the film industry if it is to pitch its tent beside the three-ring circus of the tamasha culture."

Tom Stoppard on writing

"Writing mostly boils down to what will be the next line. If a play works out well, the author should be feeling lucky rather than clever."

Susan Bernofsky interview

" Every sentence takes you on a little journey somewhere, and the question is where that journey is going and in what order are we hitting the landmarks."

Shame! A Jaipur rerun in Kolkata Book Fair!

The ongoing Kolkata Book Fair witnessed Taslima Nasreen getting the same treatment from the State as Salman Rushdie in Jaipur Lit Fest. The organisers of the book fair - claimed to be the largest in Asia - promptly cancelled the scheduled launch of Taslima's autobiography 'Nirbasan"(Exiled) as some fundamentalist groups protested against its release. According to the local media, there was a verbal directive to the organisers from Kolkata police.

But Kolkata being Kolkata, the lovers of literature assembled in large numbers before the office of the organisers, and brought out a procession, with Taslima's book in their hands, shouting protest against their decision. And before the police could take any effective action, the publisher of the book, People's Book Society, had the book launched by Nabarun Bhattacharya, the eminent writer. Sujata Bhadra, well-known human rights activist and other intellectuals were present on the occasion.

Personally I see it as the triumph of literature and free expression over vote-bank politics, but I'm really concerned that the bigots are increasingly invading our cultural space with support from the State.

. 

Jonathan Franzen on technology

"“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it." 

Peter Carey interview

''The real anguish is just making the thing and then, after that, well, it's awful to be criticised and it's awful to be not liked, it's awful to be any of those things. Basically, the writer of fiction is the person who comes in every day and puts his head up his bum and goes to work.''

Salman Rushdie interview, post-Jaipur Lit Fest

NDTV's Barkha Dutt has a long and interesting interview with Salman Rushdie soon after the "black farce" in just-concluded Jaipur Literatur Festival.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that and then I put it out there and say to you, "What do you think?" I hope that you think well of it, obviously. If you don't that is not great for me but that's the only way to make it. The only way to make it is to make it with the fullness of your personal vision.

What is a lit Fest?

"It’s a private party and even though the line says “Everyone’s Invited”, they retain the right to decide who “Everyone” is. Or anyone. All that money, all that effort, all that energy, organisation, coordination, travelling, planning, operational logistics, talking and debating, sassing and faffing, boozing and schmoozing, it’s not about books at all. It’s about riding on the goodwill and glamour generated by books and literature, great writing and great authors, taking all that classy chic intellectual pride and amortising it into sponsor-sized chunks of social currency."

Rushdie a coward: Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, who is sometimes called female Salman Rushdie, now slams Rushdie for cancelling his Jaipur literary Fest.

"Cancelling his India trip is his latest cowardly act," she says.

It may be recalled here that Taslima's books have been banned in her own native country Bangladesh as well as in India for the same reason as that of Rushdie for hurting religious sentiments of the Muslims, and she has been on exile for a long, long time.

Is Taslima braver than Rushdie, one wonders. But why does she call him a coward?

As we now understand, Rushdie was fooled into believing that he was under threats from the mafia. The fact was, it was a ploy to keep him away from the fest. The cancellation of the visit does not necessarily make him a coward.

Rushdie cancels visit: "a stain on India's international reputation"

"very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to "eliminate" me. Will do video link instead. Damn"
SalmanRushdie Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie dropped from Jaipur Lit Fest?

Salman Rushdie is an unwanted writer right now in India. The Rajasthan Government does not want him to attend the Jaipur Lit Fest (20 -24 January, 2012). Nor do the powers-that-be in Delhi. Do the organizers of the fest want him? Perhaps not, at this moment. So the unstoppable Rushdie has no other option but to skip the fest.

The government says that Rushdie's visit may cause a law and order problem. But if you dig  it a little, there is a series of things that lead to this decision. First, the head of a Muslim group protests against Rushdie joining the fest. Then a Congress leader in Delhi echoes him more or less along the same line. Now it is the turn of the state government to pick up the thread and go ahead with the request to the organizers that Rushdie be persuaded to stay away from the festival. And what do you expect from the organizers? They would go with their jamboree anyway - with or without Rushdie.

But how Rushdie could be a law and order problem? He's a serious writer and thinker. You may not like him for your primitive instincts or lack of intellectual capacities, but how can a government bar him from attending  a lit fest? India is where Rushdie was born, and he has visited India a number of times. And we all know he has always promoted pluralism.

So, what do you read in this Rushdie visit ban decision? First, the Government has scant regard for  writers or artists.Remember how it behaved with Taslima Nasreen or Makbul Fida Hossain in the past?

Secondly,  those in power can bend over to just do anything to appease the minority community - in the interest of keeping its vote-bank intact and unchallenged, literature/art be damned. And now is really election time in five states in India.

And lastly, can we say that  its secularism is a fakery (to borrow a word from Rushdie) of the highest order?

I would like to see what Rushdie tweets on this.

Pakistan's English-language novelists

 Stephanie Nolen has an interesting article on Pakistan's English-language novelists in The Globe and Mail. 

A hunger for access to that reality has, in the past few years, created an opening for Pakistan’s English-language novelists: Intense Western interest in the country has vaulted the work of a handful of Pakistani writers on to prize lists and foreign bookstore shelves. “There’s a collision of talent and interesting times – something is really happening there in terms of writing,” said John Freeman, editor of the British literary magazine Granta. The issue focusing on Pakistani writers was the bestseller of the past three years. 

New, phenomenal interest in Albert Camus!

This phenomenal revival of interest in his work is pregnant with a significance that deserves scrutiny for it can reveal a thing or two about the world we live in today. Clearly, the present generation in France acknowledges Camus as a contemporary. It regards his literary and philosophical output to be of topical relevance to its insecurities. Here, they say in substance, is a man who saw through the conceits of the reigning ideologies of the day, the delusions of religion, the tyranny of dogma, the arrogance of power and the dubious complicities of intellectuals with those who invoked reasons of state to plunder, loot and murder.

László Krasznahorkai interview

Q: Many people have the impression that your books are hard to readand to understand. That’s a myth, but don’t you think you’ve got some bad PR?

László Krasznahorkai: You know, the problem is that anything that’s the least bit serious gets bad PR. Kafka got bad PR, and so does the Bible. The Old Testament is a pretty hard text to read; anyone who finds my writing difficult must have trouble with the Bible, too. Our consumer culture aims at putting your mind to sleep, and you’re not even aware of it. It costs a lot of money to keep this singular procedure going, and there’s an insane global operation in place for that very purpose. This state of lost awareness creates the illusion of stability in a constantly changing world, suggesting at least a hypothetical security that doesn’t exist. I see the role of the tabloid press somewhat differently. I can’t just shrug it off and say to hell with it. The tabloid press is there for a serious reason, and that reason is both tragic and delicate.

Mikhail Shishkin interview

 If you say to yourself: “I will write for such-and-such areadership,” you immediately stop being a writer and become a servant.

Indian publishing to boom in 2012?

"The new thing I have discovered is that Indian writers and readers are no longer taking their cues from the West. They are making their own decisions about what is relevant to them and concentrating on what they enjoy writing or reading."

Tehelka's "Original Fictions :4"

Tehelka, though a news weekly, loves literature ( may be because Tarun Tejpal, its editor, is a literary writer himself) and every year devotes an issue to original fictions by Indian writers writing in English and other languages on a theme pre-determined by the weekly.

This year the theme is romance.

I started casually flipping through "The Foreigner" by Amitava Kumar, and was instantly hooked. Great style, odd but interesting characters, funky dialogue, and perfect story-telling. I had a sense of a well-crafted piece as I was done with the story.

I'm sorry I can't say the same things about any other story. Our Nabarun Bhattacharya, writer of that great short novel Herbert, under-delivered. He seems like a misfit in this group.

Then there were stories which were excerpts of soon-to-be published first novels by their writers. They read like crap. Not original in any way.

Finally, the editor of this issue should have been more careful in selecting the stories. After all, romance has not really disappeared from the surface of our world, and it can still touch our chord if the writer can work it the right way.

Dag Solstad interview

" I may not be the Norwegian writer with the most numerous female readers, but I have the best."

Writing as a career

" If you want a career that makes sense, don’t work as a writer."

V.S Naipaul interview

"But if you’re a writer, you do the one book, then you have to go on to do the second, and then the third… It never ends. At the age of nearly 80, I am still tormented by this need to go on a little bit more... So perhaps a lot of the discoveries about the nature of writing came to me from this need to go on."

Teju Cole in A Public Space

"At this fractured moment, our American agora appears to be dominated by noisemakers. Political debates are “won” by those who shout loudest, op-eds are written on little more than conjecture, and popularity counts more than anything else. The more thoughtful and reflective spaces are being silenced. And yet a self-preserving and self-nurturing instinct tells us that the essential work of interpretation is best found in a culture’s quieter spaces. We need reports in fiction, nonfiction, and photography that are engagé without being ephemeral and are steeped in a proper thoughtfulness."

Another e-book: a plug for myself

I have another e-book out, this time at Amazon.com. It's a novella called Delhi Riddle. It is about an artist who encounters a strange physical relationship between a man and a woman, both married separately, while in Delhi during a group show, and is so deeply moved that he tries to capture it on his canvas.

Of course, it's literary fiction: not the dull, stodgy kind, but an easy, fast-paced narrative. In it, though, I have handled such things as love, sex, art, urban life in post-globalisation India.

The book's cover is done by my artist-friend Basudev Ghosh.

Please read the book if you feel interested, and give me feedback, if you have time.

Umberto Eco interview

"Literature is a perverse game because it’s too easy to say that the teller pretends that Little Red Riding Hood or Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina is a fiction. Step by step, I want you to lose your critical control and start crying about the fate of Anna Karenina. But then I know that once you finish reading the book, you come back to reality and at the second reading you don’t cry any longer but simply appreciate the way in which I obliged you to cry the first time. That is the perverse literary game. Simonini is more cruel. He wants you to believe. He doesn’t want to show his inner strategy. The writer desires that you discover my strategy. Simonini, no. Every forger wants to be taken seriously."

Indian Litfests: "Buy my book."

In today's Hindustan Times, Farrukh Dhondy has an interesting - and brutally honest - take on Indian literary festivals that are so common now-a-days( sorry, no link is available).

The central idea that emerged, at least in my mind, was that the lack of critical response and debate, the total absence of criteria of what is good, bad, necessary, imitative, blatantly stolen, fresh, redeeming, skilful, pioneering etc will give us a consumer industry in books but no 'culture' of literature.

Dhondi further writes:

The Colonel Sanders and the Ronald McDonalds of the Indian literary scene can be seen at all all the litfests peddling their goods and there is no one, literally no one, to discuss, raise the questions or debate the nourishment or debilitating obesity therein.

Anita Desai interview

The guardian.co.uk gets writer Kiran Desai to interview her mother Anita Desai, the well-known writer.

KD Your books often refer to a mix of languages. You quote Iqbal and Byron in Clear Light of Day. In Custody is about Hindi and Urdu. You quote a lot of literature in all your novels, mingle it with every geography.

AD Yes, I always give myself away! Well, Urdu was what we heard spoken in Delhi, and it was spoken very beautifully in those days. Then there were the books we bought for ourselves. My father would read Byron and occasionally he would burst out and recite snatches of what he remembered from his schooldays, Byron, Swinburne, Browning, the same scraps over and over again. Oddly enough, he never brought Bengali music into the house, which was such a pity. But perhaps because he came from a political family – he had a soft spot for communism – he loved Russian music. I remember hearing "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" played and played on our gramophone, thinking it so oppressive and dreary. Oma brought back a piano with her, had whole albums of Beethoven and Brahms, Schubert lieder and also her German library, beautifully embossed leather books in the old German script. When my father died and she left Delhi, she gave her books to the library of Delhi University, which had a German department.

Publishing today: editor is a banker now!

"There was a time at the Frankfurt Book Fair when we would rush back to our hotel rooms in the evening to read manuscripts. Now, it all works with a two-page outline. A publisher reads two pages and writes a $100,000 (around Rs.50 lakh) cheque. It’s about investments. The editor has become a banker."

Anne Enright interview

"Recently people have been starting to say that it’s all about sales, that the companies behind it are very proud of the sales of the books, and nobody’s talking about the books. There’s quite big PR machine behind it, and we know how PR machines are. The writer is a kind of incidental figure in the middle of this global PR exercise. Presumably writers dream of having such a thing happen but actually what we dream of is the fantasy of suddenly breaking free from your critics, which is not actually what happens. You’re freed from a certain amount of financial tension, but if you weighed money too much in the balance you’d never become a writer in the first place. When you get into it, it’s for whatever kind of reward is there. Though I am very interested in what money does to people, because I’ve had money and I haven’t. The years from 1993 to 2007 were pretty thin. I’m interested in how stressful it is not to have money, but also how, if you do have money, you cannot imagine what it is not to have it".

Hanan al-Shaykh interview

“In the West they need to label you to understand what you do. I tell [Westerners] that all those tags have become a real burden to me. I also tell them not to pigeonhole everybody. This is racism.”

1Q84: Four reviewers

• "And when, after 900 pages of crepuscular sex scenes alternated with sentimental thoughts about adolescent sexuality, the novel turns out to be a shaggy dog story, it no longer seems a guilty pleasure but instead a tremendous waste of the reader’s time."

• "1Q84 is the only of Murakami’s translated works that’s ever struck me as overwritten. There’s a lot of internal monologue that simply revisits events and dialogue that have already transpired, that attempts to explain subtext or analyze weird happenings that we’re better off left to engage with on our own. Yet it would be wrong to assume that this ambitious novel’s flaws emerge from what might be deemed as padding or a lack of focus on the narrative core; the more 1Q84 strays from its ostensible plot the better it gets."

• "You tend to forget the books the moment you finish them, and this is no less true after an immense production like "1Q84." It floats in a globalized ether. His literary forebears also peered into the abyss of lost identity, but they stood on the hard ground of venerable tradition. Mr. Murakami's books are wrapped in a cocoon—or an air chrysalis—of cultural amnesia. It's one last paradox: They are themselves too empty to say anything meaningful about emptiness.

• Murakami really does stand alone, as much a "foreign element" as his heroes: a sport, an outlier, sui generis, inimitable, if often imitated. Which other author can remind you simultaneously of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter but on the same page? Viewed through the "postmodern" lens, his exemplary blend of a light touch and weighty themes, of high literature and popular entertainment, ticks every box. Posh and pop, sublimity and superficiality, history and fantasy, trash and transcendence: they switch positions and then fuse as the metaphysical speculations of an Ivan Karamazov meet the death-defying adventures of a Harry Potter.

Haruki Murakami on George Orwell

“I guess we have a common feeling against the system. George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer. . . . I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.”

Man Booker Prize 2011 for Julian Barnes

"Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading."

Salman Rushdie on Intellectuals

"Intellectuals are not saints, and can sometimes be very stupid indeed. In the United States, it is very difficult for intellectuals to have an impact on society, whereas in Europe it is more possible. I never knew Foucault. I met Jacques Derrida several times and he had a level of personal vanity which distorted the way he expressed himself. When you look at events, things look chaotic and shapeless, but there is a strong human need for form and shape. What intellectuals can offer amid the shapelessness of the everyday is a sense of 'how to look,' so that you can begin to discern shape and form. They can be fools, but they are about finding meaning and about understanding the world you live in."

Murakami madness!

Release of 1Q84 being barely a week away, you already see a kind of Murakami madness all around. Frankly, I'm also caught in it.

My translator-friend, V. Ramaswamy, himself a Murakami fan, sends me a link to a recent Murakami interview.

By sheer coincidence, though, I'm now reading Kafka on the Shore. I feel addicted to a novel - after a long time. It's a real page-turner,and no cheap material in spite of lots of sex. In fact, I'm having a great time with Kafka, Nakata, Colonel Sanders, Oshima and Hoshino. These characters, not the plot, drive the novel. They are not very real but not unreal either. Hegel, Rousseau, Beethoven, Mozart all pop up during your reading journey, and they help you glean insights about the characters and the life you live. Add to it the dollops of humour that Nakata provides through his naivete and "not being bright'. Murakami is not only a seasoned pro, he is also a writer of huge intellectual capacities.

I also read an old Haruki Murakami interview published in the Paris Review to know about the novelist and his art of fiction.

Michael Ondaatje interview

"What is very strange is that  I write a fiction like In the Skin of a Lion  or The English Patient , you can pour more of yourself into them because they are fictional. It is very strange."

Chinua Achebe on literature and ethnicity

"The creative enterprise is a magical space onto itself - the mind in mutual collaboration with the world and its elements to produce something of aesthetic value. Creative writers are like painters, using words to paint a literary tapestry. I think that words have a magic, that human situations- one's environment, culture, ‘ethnicity' as we have spent time re-discovering - can be unburdened to join other factors wordsmiths use to create literary magic - that extra dimension that the writer can conjure up by placing ideas about the human condition side by side on paper.

I suppose that cultural contexts is another name for what we have so far been calling the factors of ethnicity. Quite clearly these factors do shape literature. The cultural context within which a writer finds him/herself is relevant in so far as it brings something of literary value - contributes to the world story - and does not claim superiority over, deny, obscure or jaundice, even oppress other perspectives or stories. But having said that let me now admit that there are other factors and not least among them is the genius and free-will of the author."

What I write is politics: Arundhati Roy

"What I write is politics. Traditionally this is what writers have done. So to separate commentary from writing, from politics, minimises politics, minimises writing, and minimises commentary. This has historically been the role of writers. I could surely go and wear a khadi sari and sit in the forest and become a martyr but that’s not what I plan to do. I have no problem being who I am, writing what I have because I am not playing for sainthood here. I am not playing for popularity. I am not asking to be hailed as a leader of the masses. I am a writer who has a particular set of views and I use whatever skills I have, I deploy whatever skills I have, whatever means I have to write about them, not always on my own behalf but from the heart of the resistance."

Chad Harbach: a writer to watch out for!

If you consider it in material terms, the last big writer was J. K. Rowling. She has lived her full course with glory and all, but she is dud now. So who would be the next big writer? The long search seems to have come to an end. And the new winner is a a young man in her early thirties: Chad Harbach, born and raised in Racine, Wisconosin, a founder- editor of n+1 magazine.

His 500 -page book is being released this week. A whopping advance( $665000), rave reviews even before the publication, excerpts in a popular magazine, authors like Franzen showering praise on the debut author, and the usual hypes that the publishing business embellish their blue-eyed boys with. The mammoth publicity machine is already at work, touting him as the rare hitter of contemporary fiction.

As ever, I have my doubts. Note the title of the book is "The Art of Fielding". Sounds atrocious as a fiction title. No play of imagination. Then it's about baseball. I don't want to mean that there can't be a good literary(?) novel about baseball. But it's somewhat repulsive for me.

Nevertheless, I find Chad a bit intriguing too. He seems kind of awkward, polite, candid, and even authentic in this interview. May be he's a real writer.

Before I sold this book I was kind of pretending I had money by spending so much time by working on N+1 and writing when I didn't have any money at all. I was kind of just barely...well, I was actually in a pretty dire financial situation. The point is I was devoting an awful lot of time to the magazine and I didn't actually have the luxury to do that.

I should have been working at a job that paid me money because I did not have any money. So after I sold the book, it wasn't hard to think about how I am going to spend my free time when I'm not working because I had this book to edit and I already had all this work I was doing for the magazine which I don't get paid for but have been doing anyway. But now I can do it without being kind of anxious the whole time. So it has changed my life in that I'm less persistently anxious.

Ben Okri interview

"The fundamental freedom is the freedom to be exactly what we're capable of being, and as a writer that's a very huge problem because every writer comes into the world with a geographical label on them. My ambition is to be a true, living, clear-seeing writer, and it's the most difficult freedom, as first you've got all your own internalised negativities, your mind, to get over. On top of that you've got the rest of the world saying you should write in the way your tradition has laid down. The challenge is constantly trying to escape straitjackets and see clearly without any labels."

Le Clezio on print books

"It (the book) is a tool as indispensable as hammer, knife, lamp or teapot, and as delicate as violin, flute and percussion instrument."

Haruki Murakami interview

The New Yorker has an interesting interview with Haruki Murakami.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me. I don’t see this novel as a departure, but I do think it has been a major step in my career. Formally speaking, this is the first full-length novel I have written from beginning to end in the third person.

An excerpt from Murakami"s 1Q84

Here is good news For Murakami fans who have been waiting impatiently to read 1Q84(English translation) since 2008. The book is going to be released in US sometime in October this year. But you can read an excerpt from the book now, thanks to the NewYorker which has published it.

Sunil Khilnani on "The Valley of Masks"

It is his scabrous psychological insight and well-chilled writing that turns a simple narrative into a brain-bang of a reading experience

Haruki Murakami banned!

A New Jersey School District has banned Haruki Murakmi's Norwegian Wood from its summer reading list for graphic depiction of a lesbian sex scene between a 31-year-old woman and a 13-year old girl.

David Davidar profile

The Globe and Mail has an interesting profile of David Davidar, the controversial and over-rated publisher who quit Canada after an allegation of sexual harassment by one of his colleagues.

Former Penguin Canada president David Davidar left Canada under a particularly dark cloud early this year. But somewhere over the Atlantic, that cloud dissipated, and he landed here to an open-armed welcome. He has resumed his place at the top of the flourishing Indian literary world, and that nasty allegation of sexual harassment in the (other) colonies is yesterday’s news.

What's good writing?

Good writing is what you bestow upon yourself, your own most faithful, loving, and observant fan. If you don't write for the emotional benefit of that reader, I believe your chances for fame will vanish.

Uninspired literature!

"Today's Chinese literature is uninspired. It's true not only in China but also across the world, and it's related to many factors, like materialism oriented by consumption, the nationwide trend of seeking entertainment, information dissemination brought by new technologies. All these things are making bubbles in language and literature."

--Bei Dao,the Chinese poet at the opening ceremony of the festival in Xining,

Contemporary writers on canonical books

Dante is a crashing bore. Shakespeare seems wordy; Faulkner too. Yet Balzac, Stendhal, and Proust hold up. Swift, Byron, Joyce—where is the gleam?

Mohammed Hanif interview

“I am a very dedicated scribbler. I am a very great recycler as well so I don’t waste anything. For me the act of writing is a bit like reading — when you’re reading, if it’s a good book then you’re discovering what’s going to happen next. So for me it’s mostly like that — I have vague ideas — notions about things — but if I knew what was going to happen, what the story was, then I would immediately lose interest.”

Ann Patchett interview

Q:Your novel follows a traditional narrative, with a hero, a villain...

A:I like a real sense of a story, which could make my work seem old-fashioned, because a story and a plot isn’t something you see often today.

No Indian author in 2011 Booker long-list!

Out of a total of 138 books, only 13 have been included in the 2011 Booker long list. No Indian author this year. India has an impressive list of Booker-winning authors ( Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy among them), And Booker Prize is regarded highly in India. It is really frustrating to see that none of the authors figures in the list. Not even Amitav Ghosh whose River of Smoke is getting rave reviews in newspapers and magazines. Does not the Booker judges consider it worth it? or is the novel short of literary merit?

Is the literary author on the point of extinction?

The literary author is on the point of extinction.

Who says the literary author is out?

Way to save literature!

A Venture by Harvard Alumni

"We push literature without borders and we try to push material with some kind of social dimension to it. It’s not art for art’s sake.”

Alain Mabanckou: Africa's Samuel Beckett

Mr Mabanckou is the first writer from Francophone black Africa to be included, and is now published alongside Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre. A Légion d’Honneur quickly followed. Presenting it in March, France’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, gushed over him, calling him “Mabancool” and a “shining ambassador for the French language”.

Tea Obreht interview

"Since a novel is a personal project, it's of course about some personal things, but the stories are not just mine. A novel is about people, not about ideas, about human stories and not about historical stories."

Mikhail Shishkin interview

Q:What is your ideal reader like?

Shishkin: Well he stands beside me and likes everything I like. And hates what I hate. The risk with this is that you are left alone with your ideal reader. But I was lucky enough to have lots of real readers in Russia, in my homeland. The prizes are great, so are the stage adaptations, but the most important thing for me was meeting my real readers in the provinces. A year ago I went on a reading tour through the small towns of the Vologda region, a hotbed of small-town mentality. It was a gathering for provincial intelligence: teachers, apothecaries, librarians. And they all had my books on them and were talking about how important they were for them. I found it very moving. The role and importance of literature in Russia is hard to compare with any other country in the world. Reading in Russia is a struggle for self-preservation, for maintaining human dignity in the face of degrading political reality.

Amitav Ghosh's "Ibis" novels: History book in disguise?

In an interview In The Hindustan Times' Brunch magazine, June 26, 2011 (Sorry, no link is available), Amitav Ghosh was rightly asked if his "Ibis" novels could become a history book in disguise. His answer:

"I could never write a history book in disguise really because..because I am a novelist. I am a writer of fiction. That's what I do. To write history is a very particular thing. It calls for specific talents, which are not ma talents, you know. It's not something that can happen. First and foremost, I'm a storyteller."

I have no problem in admitting that he's an astute storyteller. But is the stuff that Ghosh has been churning out for some years now can really be called literature?

Reading: The investigations of a dog/ Franz Kafka

I had to read it twice. At first reading it seemed like a riddle. So, what was it that the dog was trying to tell us? What was the finding out of his investigation? In my second reading, I simply replaced the "dog" with "man" (in Kafka's world, they are interchangeable any way),and cracked the message of the story.

It is about a metamorphosed society dominated by terror.

Franz Kafka foresaw the emergence of a capitalistic society in his times, and quite prophetically imagined the condition of common man under the new system.

"Even in those days wonders did not openly walk the streets for any one to seize; but all the same dogs - I cannot put any other way- had not yet become so doggish as today, the edifice of dogdom was still loosely put together, the true Word could still have intervened, planning or replanning the structure, changing at will, transforming it into the opposite; and the Word was there, was very near at least, on the tip of everybody's tongue, anyone might have hit upon it. And what has become of today? Today one may pluck one's very heart and not find it. Our generation is lost, it may be, but it is more harmless than those earlier ones. I can understand the hesitation of my generation, indeed it is no longer mere hesitation; it is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times; and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time?"

Colum McCann interview

“Ireland is my home, it always will be, but so is New York – and America, New York, is a very good place for a writer.”

Publishers are sheep!

To some extent, publishers are sheep. I honestly think they don't know what they want until somebody else wants it too. Don't get me wrong, I know many creative and brilliant publishers who discover great new things all the time, but it is nevertheless always very helpful if something comes to them already endorsed, either by a prize such as this, or else a quote from someone like Martin Amis telling them how great it is. Anything, really, to convince them of its worth before they have even read a word.

Jorge Semprún interview

I have often said I am not a “real” novelist, because for me the true novelist can use elements of reality to create a world that is more true to reality than reality itself, precisely because it is completely imaginary. I love that line by Boris Vian, “In this novel everything is true because I made it all up.” That, in my view, is a novel. And I will never be able to do that because I feel pulled inexorably toward the autobiographical material.

Arundhati Roy on fiction

"I don't have subjects. It's not like I'm trying to write an anti-dam novel. Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything."

Andreï Makine interview

Alternaissance, don’t forget this title, because although it is not very well known at the moment, it will be an important novel and will gradually become known. It is about what happens if we start to refuse to be complete idiots, if we’ve had enough of this great machine we are living in. People watch soccer, they work, they make kids, they eat... and then everything starts all over. It is society that has made people such idiots. This way of life suits everyone. And why? Because such people do not revolt. They don’t bother. They accept everything. Their salary is reduced – they accept it. Thus society produces its own slaves. In communism people were given a small flat with a bit of salary so that they won’t make problems, and the same thing happens in Western societies. Brains are filled with emptiness, while we feel that they are full, because there is a bit of soccer, a bit of salary, a bit of food in them. But that’s it and no more. The biological and social creature exists for perhaps a mere twenty thousand days, and then he dies. Just like a small fly. If a human being wants to revolt and says ’no, I am something else as well’, in that case they decide for alternaissance.

Michal Ajvaz quote

"When I am writing a book I have a feeling that the book creates itself and that I am only writing it down. I don’t know the exact meaning of the book and I think that the book doesn’t have one exact meaning.”

Lit news: Chiki Sarkar new publisher of Penguin India.

The search for a new publisher for Penguin India has come to an end at last with the announcement of Chiki Sarkar, the former Chief Editor of Random House, as publisher. Interestingly, Ms. Sarkar, is the daughter of Aveek Sarkar, who owns Penguin India jointly with Penguin Group.

Santiago Roncagliolo wins the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for "Red April"

"I feel comfortable telling stories - not in the priest's or philosopher's role."

Do writers read?

When people ask whether I've read this or that book, I've found that a safe answer is, "You know, I don't read, I write." That shuts them up. Although some of the questions come up time and time again: "Have you read Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair?" I ended up giving in and trying to read it, on three different occasions. But I found it terribly dull.
Umberto Eco.

Aminatta Forna interview

"There is an increasing pressure on writers to serve up easily digestible
stories which don't tax readers. There is room for fun and escapism in the act of
reading, sure. But the job of the writer is to do more than simply entertain."

Aminatta Forna has won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Why do Western publishers like elite and wealthy Indian authors?

Why is it that Salman Rushdie and his elite friends, mostly from the upper middle class or wealthy families and elite schools, hog 90 per cent of the sales and advances granted to Indian authors by Western publishers?

David Albahari Interview

Q:I’m interested in your choice of form. Leeches is basically written in a single paragraph, with no chapter or paragraph breaks. It’s a form you also used in Götz and Meyer. What about it appeals to you?

A: Well, first it’s an homage to the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, who influenced me. I also liked the idea of it visually: when you look at the pages, everything is covered with words. I think writing should be a process of discovery, both for the reader and the writer who should become united in trying to get through this labyrinth. You have to fight with this form to reach the end. Not all readers like it, I’m aware. But I simply don’t want to give up on it.

Serpent's Tail is 25

"Pete Ayrton is perhaps one of the few persons happy to have his name taken as a byword for noir. Noir in all its literary forms: from sinister to subversive, horrific to humorous, profoundly misanthropic to frivolously mischievous. The heterogeneity of Pete's reading habit crosses linguistic boundaries with equal ingenuity."

Are literary prizes important?

literary prizes are nothing more than a means to sell books; only fools confuse them with the recognition of literary merit.

Philip Roth wins Man Booker International Prize 2011

Philip Roth wins fourth Man Booker International Prize.

"For more than 50 years Philip Roth's books have stimulated, provoked
and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience. His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally."

Regional writing Vs writing in English

“When people like the late Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolhatkar wrote in Marathi, the established lot tried to belittle our work saying it didn’t count as literature because we were doing out-of-the box things with form. When we write in English, we are blamed for hogging the limelight."

Interest in literature goes in waves!

“International interest surrounding literature goes in waves. First it was all about India. I would think it started with Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children. Then came the likes of Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and a whole lot of others. Now Pakistani writers are making their mark. You have Hanif, Daniyal Moenuddin, Uzma Aslam, Kamila... Bangladesh's time will come too. There are fine stories waiting to be told.”
- Tahmina Anam

Gary Shteyngart interview

It’s tough being a writer these days, writing in a slow medium like the novel.

Amélie Nothomb on writing about happiness

“I think it’s much more difficult to write about happiness than to write about any other subject, so I needed almost twenty years to be able to talk about it."

Salman Rushdie interview

Q: Are expatriate writers going to focus more on India now?

A:I think that writers' careers don't go in a straight line, they go in loops. You go back and forth. I've written books about India and then not about India. Then, everybody said you stopped writing about India and then the next book was about India. Then, people said, Oh, you are going to write about India all the time, and the book after it wasn't about it. So you know writers' imagination goes backward and forth and doesn't stick at one place.

Bi Feiyu interview

“I love the written word. Although a good novel can do a lot of things – such as reflect on life, comment on political or socio-cultural issues – without a good command of the language, you will not be able to write a good book.”

Vladimir Sorokin: a literary monster?

“In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist…. I was influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical. This was one of our favorite anecdotes: As German troops marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That was our attitude — you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life.”

What made Midnight's Children?

"..re-reading Midnight’s Children today is a strange experience. The book has a breathtakingly transcendental playfulness, but one also discovers in it weird echoes of an unborn future with references, for example, to “Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add: I don’t want to offend anyone)” and to a wife eerily named Padma (“a consolation for my last days”). Reading it today one wonders about the enormous risk that Rushdie took, investing five years of his life on writing this seemingly self-indulgent novel, crammed with India-specific cultural references that the Western reader would never entirely catch."

Writers with vocal chords!

Having learnt about Franz Kafka’s petrifaction and Philip Larkin’s diffidence about reading in public, I’ve always assumed writing and reading must be judged independently. Having seen Orhan Pamuk display, as a speaker, a teacherly style that sits oddly with the lyricism of his prose or heard the seemingly stone-hearted VS Naipaul confess that listening to other people read aloud from his work moves him to tears, I’ve realised that writers as people of flesh, blood and vocal chords are not to be measured exactly against writers as people we encounter in print..

Anjum Hasan, novelist and Books editor, has an interesting article in Tehelka newsmagazine.

William Trevor interview

I think the bond between the writer and the reader is very important. One writes the story; that is the writer’s part done. Then the reader gets to work; reading is his job. I have always enjoyed that connection with the reader I haven’t met but feel I know because of having shared an experience: the story.

William Trevor, one of world's finest writers, is interviewed at Irishtimes.com

Reading: Norwegian Wood/ Haruki Murakami

Who is the best and most interesting character in Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood? Naoko, Midori, Reiko? Nagasawa,Kizuki, Hatsumi? Watanabe himself?

In my recent read, I find the novel a bit mushy, and not as good as Haruki's other works. May be this was his debut novel - which made him famous, though - and he was still trying to find his own voice and style.

NW has plenty of sex scenes which seem like the printed version of yesterday's blue films, but the thing that astounds me is that they look like natural in the setting of the narrative involving an adolescent and his friends. There is not much you can complain against the writer because he writes it as convincingly as it happens in real life. Kind of new reading experience for me.

The narrative is not that strong: Nagasawa is womaniser and careerist without any sense of morality, Hatsumi and Midori are regular girls aspiring for happy conjugal life. Naoko is a bit incredible as a character who,like her former boy-friend Kizuki, commits suicide in the end. Her long relaionship with Watanabe has not exactly got to a logical end and the readers are not given any clue about her exact illness.

The best portrayed character is Reiko. And she actually saves the novel.

V.S Naipaul interview

The certainty that all is going to be all right since one was serving this noble cause.the thought of being a writer - there's a kind of purity, a blessing, and I'm trying to define this thing about being a writer. This sums it up quite well. It gets the solitude, the touch of aggression and it also makes clear why people don't always like young men who are writers - not always attractive, because unhappy a lot of them, unfulfilled. I used to suffer from rages during this period. In public. But that was a passing phase.

Jennifer Egan interview

Q:There’s been a lot said about your writing process — writing on yellow legal pads without re-reading a word until you start feeding the words into the computer. How did that method evolve for you?

A:Well, when I started writing, in high school, I had a manual typewriter. And then I had an electric typewriter. So in those years, writing by hand was the most flexible way to go. By the time I started using a computer, halfway through college, I was used to handwriting my fiction. I did write stories on a computer for a year or two, but then I drifted back to my old ways. The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.And there’s no way for me to achieve that effect while staring at every word I write in typeface. So I’m led, inevitably, back to the legal pads, and ord I write in typeface. So I’m led, inevitably, back to the legal pads, and my illegible scrawl. It isn’t so much that I don’t reread as that I can’t, without serious effort.