Reading: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao / Junot Diaz

I’ve never read about, known, experienced or imagined a nerd like Oscar Oao. I’m not bothered if Oscar is real or imagined. The thing is that he has overwhelmed me with his eccentricities or kinks or whatever. Towards the end of my reading, I was praying hard for him that at least for once he got the opportunity or occasion to screw a woman - any woman in fact. Thanks to Junot Diaz, he fulfilled my wish. But what about Oscar’s tons of writings, the only thing he was really good at, and which he pursued all through his brief life? 
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Such is the flair of his writing that one tends to forget that this is fiction, and a novelist is not supposed to address all of his readers' concerns. May be he has used a live model for his protagonist, but who would argue about his wonderful characterization?

Junot Diaz is a brilliant writer. He’s no sentimentalist: he knows the Dominician history inside out, he knows its present and past, its strength and follies, its spirit and limitations, its happiness and pathos. He’s a great story-teller who captures you with spare but forceful prose. He is not much of an entertainer per se - he is actually a chronicler of dark things - but he’s compelling. Once you start reading him, you go on and on, despite his pitiless depiction of torture and injustice by the powers-that-be, until your consciousness is entirely clouded. The narrative is almost insufferable at times, I had creeps and shivers  from time to time, but I could not stop reading.

Another thing I loved about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is its footnotes. They are  great to read, and you would miss out a lot on Diaz’s strength if you avoid  reading it.

Jhumpa Lahiri interview

"It's difficult for me to be aware of the noise any book creates upon its publication. My writing comes from a very private place—I don't think I'm unique in that sense—and it is a strange contradiction to take something that is so inherently private, a sort of dialogue with oneself over a period of years and years in silence, and then to suddenly be...not silent about it. I mean, the amount of hours, the energy, dreaming, pondering, writing, editing, and rewriting that goes into a book—it feels like an ocean of time and effort. And the voyage is bad; it's long and arduous. So it's hard to be on the other shore and try to encapsulate what that voyage was like. I feel altered by it and shaped by it, but it's hard to explain in a nutshell what it was like to have done it."
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Literature today: Pankaj Mishra on global novel

"Literature today seems to emerge from an apolitical and borderless cosmopolis. Even the mildly adversarial idea of the “postcolonial” that emerged in the 1980s, when authors from Britain’s former colonial possessions appeared to be “writing back” to the imperial centre, has been blunted. The announcement this month that the Man Booker, a literary prize made distinctive by its Indian, South African, Irish, Scottish and Australian winners, will henceforth be open to American novels is one more sign of the steady erasure of national and historical specificity.

Tim Parks, among others, has deplored the dominance of the “global novel” as practised by Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. Marked by an internationally identifiable and translatable literariness, not to mention cuddly-bear politics, such fictions threaten to render obsolete, according to Parks, “the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture”. More recently, the English critic Philip Hensher has complained that “a superficial multicultural aspect” of this year’s Man Booker shortlist conceals “a specifically North American taste”.

Literature is always about bygone times: Amos Oz

Literature is always about bygone times. It’s always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists and, as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity. I look at it with fascination, and I look at it with a certain smile.

                                                                  # #

Language is my craft, language is my musical instrument. I treat the language the way the violinist treats the violin, and for me the most important thing in my writing and in my teaching is precision

                                                                   # #

I never regarded myself as a prophet; I can’t read the future and I don’t have any particular wisdom which other people don’t have. I have imagination and I use it in my political thinking. I ask myself, from time to time, how would I feel if I were a Palestinian under Israeli occupation. I ask myself, from time to time, how would I feel if I were an Orthodox Jew. I ask myself, from time to time, how would I feel if I were an Oriental Sepharadi Jew in a developing town  and I use my imagination in my political manifestations. But no, I never regarded myself as a prophet.
via  

Amitav Ghosh interview

"Writing about King Thibaw was one of the most difficult things I have done in fiction. There are sources for Thibaw but very little has actually been written about him. When I was writing the opening sections of The Glass Palace, I was completely stuck for a long time. I have a rule when I am stuck—I read the Russians because, somehow, Russian literature has the answers.  In this particular case, it was Solzhenitsyn’s Aug­ust 1914. It may not be one of his great novels but there’s a long section on what happens in the head of Tsar Alexander on the cusp of the Russian Revolution. Reading that became very empowering for me; I felt if Solzh­enitsyn can do this with the Tsar, I can do it with King Thibaw."

                                                                **

 "The Shadow Lines had no hype when it came out, I wasn’t even in India. Ravi, who I miss so much, believed in it and it had a succes d’estime but over time it found an audience. My next book, In An Antique Land, was non-fiction and it sank without a trace. There go four years of my life, I thought, but today, it’s the most read of my books. There are translations in Arabic and Hebrew. There was no single turning point; books accrue a readership over time."

Writing stories in this tech-savvy time

 “With a mobile, the colonel does have someone who writes to him.”

Amazon's book world: Jonathan Franzen's take

Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they're the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you're not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification ("Overnight free shipping!").

Junot Diaz interview

"A lot of artists are figuring out how to make fucking money. I’m not saying that’s what these cats are doing – Lethem’s been in the game from the beginning. He started out as a hardcore genre writer and became a literary writer. But ultimately, I think it’s a matter of privilege. Literary writers can attack new markets without ever losing their cachet as literary writers. I don’t think that tide has raised the boats of genre writers. A literary writer who writes a sci-fi novel will get a fucking Guggenheim. A genre writer who is classically genre, writing a genre book, will not get a fucking Guggenheim
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I’m less interested in a kind of artistic zeitgeist as much as I am in IPE, international political economy. If there were no money to be made from genre, would anyone be doing this? Part of my interest in doing a genre book was actually to put that question front and center. Because the funny thing about being a person of color is you’re already being considered a fucking genre, you know? Or better yet, you’re already being considered science fiction."

Lit News: Pynchon's new novel BLEEDING EDGE is out

Bleeding Edge , Thomas Pynchon's new novel, is out today. Will it be Pynchon's best novel ever?

"Every book critic, novelist, internet mogul and private eye is as much a living, breathing cartoon as those that Pynchon creates. Whether we see each other as superficial caricatures or flesh and blood is our choice, and we face that choice every time we pass each other, above ground, below it, or online."
via

What e-books sell, and why

No one knows what sells, or why. Having a well-known name, lots of publicity, a brand, a blog, 10,000 Twitter friends--none of that makes people buy books. All of my experience points to the majority of my books sales due to Amazon's algorithms and website structure (reviews, bestseller lists, also bought, search engines.) Who I am outside of Amazon.com doesn't seem to matter much. 

--Joe Konrath 

Literature and social media

 Literature is to society as the part of the brain called the hippocampus is to memory. The hippocampus is a small, seahorse-shaped part of the brain necessary for long-term storage of factual and experiential memory, though it is not the site of such storage. Short-term memory is transient; long-term memory can prevail for many decades. If the hippocampus is injured or atrophied, there is no memory. I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture — no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened.
--Joyce Carol Oates in The Washington Post

David Mitchell on Buddhism

: I am a kind of secular Buddhist. I meditate and find it very helpful, and Buddhism doesn't ask me to sacrifice my rationality or my common sense, it doesn't ask me to believe the impossible. I find it helpful to keep my mind under control, sane and calm. What happens after we die — I don't know, and I'm happy not to know. I feel I have no choice but to not know. Buddhism doesn't care if I don't accept its cosmology, I don't have to believe it all. 
 via

Gonçalo M. Tavares interview

"Evil is one of the themes that most interests me. In a certain way, the series of novels that I called The Kingdom (Jerusalem, Joseph Walser’s Machine, etcetera) are novels that try to understand evil, its emergence, its apparent concealment, its hovering over our heads. It might be wrong, but I have the sensation that evil is always around us, suspended, looking at us, waiting for us, as if from one moment to the next we could be the object of evil, victims therefore, or the subjects, of evil: tormentors. Evil circles around us, we can’t fully free ourselves from it. I’m very scared of people who say that they’ve already completely distanced themselves from evil, or those other people, naive ones, in my view, who say that some things that happened in the 20th century will never happen again because people, they say, have learned a lesson. I don’t believe that, and furthermore, I think that naïveté is the terrain where the greatest evil develops. Hence, for me, the importance of literature. If you asked me, in a word, what I think literature can give to a person, I would say once again: clarity. That is, the opposite of naïveté. I believe that evil is always present, threatening or tempting, and naïveté can lead people to confuse evil with other, much more enjoyable things. Literature, good literature, can help us, as readers, to be aware, to detect the symptoms of evil emerging. It’s not about becoming suspicious and cynical, it’s not that. It’s about becoming people who are aware; people who do not necessarily view the things that the whole of humanity seeks to acquire as good, wonderful things. We have to be aware of the signs because I think that history often repeats itself, only it becomes more and more violent. History, it seems to me, tends toward the repetition of evil but with more technologically advanced means each time. Hence, the state of awareness shouldn’t be, not even for a minute, suspended. Literature can help with this, but, obviously, there are many other things, beyond art and artists, that can help us to be aware: social media is, in that regards, one of the most relevant instruments. Moreover, it seems to me that one of the mottos of every newspaper, of every television or radio station, should be to increase the amount of clarity by the square meter. And literature should try to do the same."

Read a Subimal Misra story

Hey, look, there’s Gandhi!
A staff fashioned from seasoned bamboo in his hand, he gazed vacantly at the road in front of him, in the direction of the thickly grown line of krishnachura trees, and the people crowded all around, threw money at him, at his standing image, they threw clinking, easy money. The same shaven head (did Gandhiji have a shaven head – oh, I don’t know), draped in a thin, sheet-like something, the dhoti he wore not quite touching his knees. Only if you looked carefully could you discern that his staff was not so well seasoned, and had not been pared, while Gandhi’s staff had been of seasoned bamboo, finely-pared and polished with oil. Cut-Ball did not hold such a finely-pared bamboo in his hand. 

Read on ...

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Last days of a real writer

Luis Borges quote

 “I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.”
via

The curious case of a Bengali writer being shot dead in Afghanistan

How do you react to the news of a writer - a lady Bengali writer at that - being shot dead in Afghanistan by suspected Talibans?

Sushmita Banerjee captures the headline in all of Kolkata's morning dailies today. She is the author of Kabuliwala's Bangali Bou (A Kabuliwala's Bengali wife), a bestseller.

I haven't read the book - it's the not the kind of stuff I usually read - but I've come across her name in my newspaper  many a times. She was quite a daring lady, had her own set of rules in social life, but she was not what we call a non-conformist; she was also a bit of an adventurer. She married  a Kabuliwala who was a money-lender by profession, not by any means respectable to Bengali culture to which she belonged.

She had a miraculous escape from the clutches of Talibans when she went to Afghanistan the first time to live with her husband. Since then she had been living in Kolkata. But she went again recently, after a gap of some some fifteen years, to meet her husband. The Talibans did not miss their target this time.

How sad and bizarre!

Jáchym Topol interview

If there’s anything I hate more than the newspaper business, it’s the literary machinery, the author reading system, the festivalization of literature, the fact that nowadays authors aren’t just read but maybe even more so seen and heard.

via The Quarterly Conversation

Cormac McCarthy quote

I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Andrea Hirata's story of literary stardom

“It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer"

Nadeem Aslam interview

"People always say to me that my books are very melancholy, very sad, even bleak. I am aware that I work in the tragic mode. Plenty of people don’t. They write comic novels. I am not one of them. I like to put people under pressure within a certain set of circumstances and see how that reveals their true character.

There are some writers who want to leave politics out of their novels. I don’t. Any number of writers: Dostoevsky, Orwell, Milosz, Tolstoy, Gordimer, Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul; any number of them have made use of politics in their books. Political horror is at the center of the New Testament, isn’t it? What is the story of the death of Christ if looked at through secular eyes, if not about the corruption and compromises within the political system? Cynthia Ozick reviewed J.M. Coetzee’s Life and times of Michael K in the New York Times when it was published, and in the first sentence she states that “the literature of conscience is about the bewilderment of the naïve.” The people we consider mentally defective, the children, the powerless, the people who actually ask the question: why? Why is the world this way? I think at the deepest level, that is what I am trying to do, to ask the question why."
via Guernica

Andrey Kurkov interview

“I have been watching Ukrainian politics for years and years and I analyse it like a chess player, trying to see who is going to do what.”

Happy hundredth birthday to Boris Pahor

Reading: Maidenhair/ Mikhail Shishkin

What is maidenhair? 

On page 452 of the 506-page eponymous novel, you get its first mention. "We roamed among the ruins, and she broke a fernlike twig:What's this? Maidenhair." But you get a clearer picture on page 500: "For us, this is a house plant; otherwise it wouldn't survive, without human warmth, but here it's a weed. So, you see, this is in dead language, signifying something alive: Adiantum capillus veneries,Venus hair, Genus Adiantum. Maidenhair. God of life."

I mention this because this is the key to understanding the novel. Of course, it's a difficult novel - for me at least - and I found it hard to grasp and appreciate.

I got to reading the novel with enthusiasm as ever. The interpreter who was interviewing hordes of hapless Russian asylum-seekers to locate the genuine among them seemed to be the protagonist of the novel. His accounts and insights about varied people and their awful conditions were quite fascinating. Then the 'soliloqui' began, and I was lost. Parts of it being inaccessible to me. I could not figure out where the novel was heading..

Then you get access to a singer's diary as if for a distraction. This portion is a light read: the artist's days of struggle, her love, her stardom, her beyond-glory days. You enjoy reading them up to a point, then it begins to suck. I had problem linking it with the interpreter's narrative.

A bit disappointed, I kept the novel aside for a couple of weeks, then, on a rainy evening when I stayed at home, I took it up again. Read it all through in one sitting. Loved the last pages of the book - even the soliloqui incorporated in this part.

So what's Maidenhair about? It is about civilization, history, religion, philosophy, art, music, war, brutality, depravity, dehumanization, but it's first and foremost about human conditions in different times and spaces down the ages.

It's a modern classic.

I recommend it - for the right reader, that is.

World literature today

"Today’s World Lit is more like a Davos summit where experts, national delegates, and celebrities discuss, calmly and collegially, between sips of bottled water, the terrific problems of a humanity whose predicament they appear to have escaped."

"Global Literature can’t help but reflect global capitalism, in its triumph, inequalities, and deformations. In the English language, World Literature has its signature writers: Rushdie and Coetzee at the lead, and Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie among the younger charges. It has its own economy, consisting of international publishing networks, scouts, and book fairs. It has its prizes: the Nobel, of course, but more powerful and snazzier is the Man Booker, and the Man Booker International. Its political arm is PEN. And it has a social calendar full of literary festivals, which bring global elites into contact with the glittering stars of World Lit. Every year, sections of the dominant class fly from Mexico City to have Julian Barnes sign books in Xalapa, or from Delhi to Jaipur to be seen partying with Mario Vargas Llosa. The Hay Festival, started in Hay-on-Wye in rural Wales, now has outposts in Dhaka, Beirut, Nairobi, and elsewhere. “Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias” is an accidentally funny phrase — Sí, hay festival — redolent of a strange new intimacy between global north and south."

New Murakami novel in 2014

The English translation of Haruki Murakami‘s latest novel  Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage is likely to be finished by the end of 2013, according to a Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group source.

So if you're a Murakmai fan like me and  read Murakami only in English, expect to get it sometime in 2014
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A reviewer says of the novel, "I felt that the Great East Japan Earthquake loomed in the background of the novel. I had the impression that Murakami faced the disaster straightforwardly. The book has strong messages and many encouraging words."

The novel has sold one million copies each week in Japan since its publication  in April this year.

America's Nobel | E L Doctorow quote

'America's  Nobel: The Neustadt International Prize for Literature
 “The jurors would probably be more subject to the impact of writer’s reputation and world status if they were primarily critics or book reviewers. However, they are always writers who are discussing their peers when they deliberate, probably people they know and possibly collaborated with at some point. Thus, as “insiders” in the writing world they know so much more about who is writing and what people are writing than the reputations could convey by themselves. As such, the jurors are incredibly sophisticated judges, and they tend to see each writer within a very large context of what is happening in world literature. They may know that a particular writer is famous or his or her work is trendy at the moment, but since they know so much more about that writer than his or her fame, they are “immunized” in their decision making by their high level of knowledge about all of the writers being considered for the prize.  The fact that the juries are made up of professional and highly accomplished writers shapes a lot of what happens on these juries and is probably the secret of why the Neustadt prizes traditionally have gone to such appropriate and deserving writers.”

 E L Doctorow quote
 Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Julian Barnes on Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis

And if Flaubert in his monasticism and exemplary pertinacity is a writer’s writer, Davis was described to me recently by an American novelist as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’.

Vladimir Sorokin interview

..with every book, I want to open up something new for myself. That is why they are so different from one another—that is, so to say, my principle changes. With every new book I am a little bit changed. (pointing to an edition of Day of the Opritchnik) I am not going to write this way from now on. After this one, I wrote something completely different—The Blizzard, which is a quiet book, like a long and hopeless Russian winter.

via BOMBLOG

Russian Literature today | Jennifer Weiner on Book Clubs' selection

"Two distinct polarities appear to have emerged among the current spread of literary genres in Russia: on the one hand, there is a yearning for nonfiction, including biographies, "true stories", travelogues and investigative novels; one the other hand, there is "a fortunate impregnation of fantastic elements into realistic narratives", as writer and critic Alisa Ganieva puts it. She goes on to say: "There is an obvious drive to record the reality as true to lofe as possible (your non-fiction fad), while simultaneously looking beyond the horizons and trying to perceive what awaits this country and all of humanity in the future, taking the country's current political and social system and projecting it into a not-so-distant future. In other words, it is in a way realistic prose posing as fantasy."

Jennifer Weiner on Book Clubs' selection 
   
“A book club will by all means pick up Franzen. It’s being written about everywhere — you can’t avoid it. But are they going to read ‘The Unknowns’ or even [Meg Wolitzer's] ‘The Interestings’ — books with covers that are not playing into warm and fuzzy feelings or with a portrait of a woman shot from the back, the kind that say to book clubs, ‘This one’s for you’?”

Claire Messud interview

"If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge, it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it."

Excerpt from Luis Borges' newly translated lecture on Johnson and Boswell

Dr. Johnson was already fifty years old. He had published his dictionary, for which he was paid 1,500 pounds sterling—which became 1,600 when his publishers decided to give him one hundred more—when he finished. He was slowing down. He then published his edition of Shakespeare, which he finished only because his publishers had received payments from subscribers, so it had to be done. Otherwise, Dr. Johnson spent his time engaged in conversation.

Read on..

Orhan Pamuk interview/2

Maybe we’re not so interested in what is happening in London, but we’re interested in what’s happening in Zadie Smith’s new novel. I think the form has immense possibilities.

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Orhan Pamuk interview /1

Booker's Dozen: Colum McCann's TransAtlantic (review and author interview)

Review TransAtlantic
Readers and writers will find much to admire in McCann’s TransAtlantic: the birth of story, the sweeping narrative range spilling into numerous points of view, and the breathtaking details of life, flight, hope and death.

Colum McCann interview
It’s the idea of becoming an alternative historian that really interests me: a historian of the smaller, more anonymous moments. It’s a privileged position for the fiction writer, one that opens up a lot of pores – and sometimes wounds, as well.

Laurent Binet interview

"It was complicated. to be faithful to character, to facts; not to make things up and to resist the temptation to make things up. And so I felt it was an interesting problem and I decided to share all my thoughts about it. And you could see all my doubts, questions. Instead of erasing my mistakes or erasing when I couldn't resist the temptation to make it up, to use it for a discussion with the reader.'' 

Writers are of two kinds: Martin Amis

"A great part of writing is hoping to make things as nice as possible for the reader — be a good host, have them put their feet up by the fire, pull up a chair, get out a good wine. The writer who loves the reader always feels that; Nabokov would always give you his best chair.

But there have been one or two writers who didn’t give a shit about the reader, like Joyce — partly because he had patronage, he didn’t need the reader to earn a living. And Henry James, who went off the reader in a huge way, which is why those last few novels became impenetrable. If you look at early James, he’s almost middlebrow, then you get The ambassadors  this incredibly convoluted thing. Joyce and James became bad hosts: If you wandered into their house you wouldn’t be welcomed. You’d stagger around while they were in the kitchen making some vile concoction which might amuse you, but it would taste disgusting and eccentric.

via

Booker's Dozen: The Kills by Richard House

                              The Idea behind The Kills
"When I was about half way through writing The Kills, I began wondering, what’s the worth of fiction? What does fiction do? I think most writers get to this point where you walk into a bookstore and you see thousands and thousands of books, and you wonder what the worth of that is. Are you just getting more trees chopped down?
Then I read Bolano’s novel 2666 and was inspired by how an idea can be extended across such a vast landscape. It seemed to me that that kind of enquiry was entirely worthwhile. As a reader I felt I was being engaged and entertained with a thriller, but also given a space where difficult ethical issues were being discussed. I loved how intelligent that was. I wanted to do that – to do something where a reader could be involved in the stories as thrillers, but also able to connect the pieces."

Longlist for 2013 Man Booker Prize is interesting without big name authors

The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker prize for fiction, announced today, has a diverse and international flavour, with authors from Malaysia, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

Margaret Atwood joins the call against ethnic cleansing in Israel

An Open Letter by Canadian writers
We, the undersigned, urge Israeli leaders to heed the call by David Grossman, Amos Oz, AB Yehoshua and 21 other Israeli writers to halt, immediately and permanently, the eviction of about 1000 Palestinians from their homes in various villages in South Hebron, West Bank (occupied Palestinian territory), in order to clear land for an Israeli army firing zone. These Palestinian villagers have inhabited their homes for several centuries. Evicting them would violate international law and cause extreme hardship.

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Martin Amis on writers' business

"...and all writers know this, that they’re exposing themselves a hundred per cent when they write a book. You can write a poem without giving much away but a novel tells the right kind of reader everything… what you do for someone like John Self is you take the one per cent of your character that is like that with the gamble, the strong hunch, that everyone has one per cent of him in them and then you make a whole character out of it. But it’s round the edges and the way it’s shaped, the decisions the writer is making – a good reader can get the whole picture from that.” 

Related
 Martin Amis interview

Adam Bodor interview

I do not think of this when I write, nor do I think of the reader, it would only cause problems, as speculation, or even calculation, would enter the creative process, depriving writing from its virginity, its original value. I only obey my own artistic expectations when I write, and when I tell only as much as I do. This may sound as a facile procedure, but I only keep in mind the fact that I am not omniscient, I cannot always look behind the facade of things and characters, I do not know everything about the real motives of the story. So it is the sheer spectacle that remains, often with certain riddles and gaps that the reader may or may not fill. I must pay attention to providing the reader's imagination with data that make her the writer's partner to a certain extent.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi's 2006 Urdu novel creates buzz in English translation

 The Mirror Of Beauty

I was hoping that if young people read this book, they will learn more about themselves – where they came from, how they were formed — the pain of separation, of discontinuity [from] what the world was before 1857. Though it was already crumbling, they had a world which was self-conscious, which was sure of its self-worth, which could match with any other culture or any other society anywhere – but for the adverse information and propaganda handed out to us by our colonial master.
- Shamsur Rahman Faruqi in an interview with The NYT

Tan Twan Eng interview

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.
- See more at: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=20&curr_index=37&curPage=archive#sthash.9yr5CVrX.dpuf

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.
- See more at: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=20&curr_index=37&curPage=archive#sthash.9yr5CVrX.dpI feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.
- See more at: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=20&curr_index=37&curPage=archive#sthash.9yr5CVrX.dpuf

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.
- See more at: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=20&curr_index=37&curPage=archive#sthash.9yr5CVrX.dpuf

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.
- See more at: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=20&curr_index=37&curPage=archive#sthash.9yr5CVrX.dpuf

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.
- See more at: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=20&curr_index=37&curPage=archive#sthash.9yr5CVrX.dpuf

I feel that as a writer you're alone in your own boat in this vast ocean; you're not thinking about other people. I've always worked alone, and I prefer to work alone, so being part of a generation hasn't been a factor for me.
- See more at: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=20&curr_index=37&curPage=archive#sthash.9yr5CVrX.dpuf

Deborah Levy on writing and reading

"...writing and reading aren’t about always knowing where we are going or declaring our certainties – it is about airing our doubts because it is our doubts that are the route to getting into the whole mystery of life."

Related 
Deborah Levy on mainstream literary publishing

Fate of novels and novelists

"It was Orwell who said the only real critic of literature is Time. It winnows out the grain from the chaff. Unfortunately, where novels are concerned, it doesn’t. Novels that “last” typically do so by happenstance. Take, for example, the classic book of our year, 2013, the novel that has done wonders for the sale of silk shirts in Jermyn Street. Have a guess. How much money did The Great Gatsby make for Scott Fitzgerald in his lifetime? Eight thousand dollars (less than the cost of Jay Gatsby’s “custom Duesenberg” automobile). In the last year of Fitzgerald’s life, Gatsby earned its author barely enough to buy him lunch. Fitzgerald was, he said, when he received that last royalty statement, “a forgotten man”.

Chika Unigwe: Every line costs me sweat and blood

I embark every new story, every new novel with self-doubt. Every line costs me sweat and blood. I polish and polish, because I never think it is quite good enough. I don’t think that’s ever going to stop.

Why Vikram Seth failed to deliver "A Suitable Girl" in time

The news: Vikram Seth fails to deliver the ms of A Suitable Girl in time, and his publisher now demands million dollar refund from him.

I remember when I read the news that Seth was writing "A Suitable Girl" as sequel to "A Suitable Boy" and was being paid a huge advance for it, I wondered who was the crazier of the two: his publisher or the author himself? Could it really be a viable deal, all things considered?

A Suitable Boy was a long, boring story which Seth had, in all probablity, churned out with efforts. I don't know how it climbed the bestseller list.May be the readers at that time wanted to have a taste of India, may be it was something noble in the early phase of Indian writing in English, or may be his publisher went overboard with its publicity campaign, or may be due to effect of all these things put together.

Times have changed. So have readers' taste and preference. Who would be interested in A Suitable Girl  in these times? Does the publishing company, in its new avatar, realize it now?

Vikram Seth is no ordinary hack. He must have realized it too that it was no longer possible for him to plod through such a stupid theme. Writer's  block must have waylaid him.

So don't blame Seth. It was an absurd and ludicrous deal, and the ineviable has happened.A lesson both for the publisher and the writer.

Uday Prakash: A writer with a difference

“A writer,” he says, “doesn’t have any place in society, in its hierarchy. I feel my dignity when I am in my room, when I am with my books and papers. When I go outside…” He doesn’t finish his sentence. 

Tehelka has a comprehensive coverage of  Uday Prakash, the angst-ridden Hindi writer, who writes with great empathy about Mohandases (the underdogs) and hates the powerful, the rich and New Delhi's well-connected writers  in an odd but intense fashion..

Hari Kunzru's idea of self

I’m interested in the self. I’m trying to get a slightly more sophisticated understanding of subjectivity than that which is often presented in narrative fiction. Firstly, we maintain the fiction that we are continuous, and that we are substantially the same throughout our lives, but I think we are more broken up than that. The way that we actually experience the world is more complicated. We are in some ways swarms rather than bounded individuals. Our sense of self branches out of a lot of neurological processes working in tandem; you could say that the self is an effect or an aura. These things are important for fiction to engage with.

Naveen Kishore Quote

"I publish what I wish to. My presence in the U.K. and the U.S. is in itself an interesting reversal of traditional market strategies! It also offers a model that no longer suggests that Indian publishers must buy rights only for India. Seagull buys world rights, because our distribution through the University of Chicago Press allows us to sell across the world. It is a globalised world; your geographical location is of no consequence. The market has a responsibility too, you know! The market must learn to find you. And it does. It takes time, but it does."

Related
Naveen Kishore on Mo Yan 

Karl Ove Knausgaard interview

"I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest motivation, and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form; the temper, the voice, the style; all in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead. "

What is literary fiction?

"Writers and editors continue to struggle ad nauseum over how to define literary fiction. I recently heard the editors of one indie house (of like mind and spirit to Atticus) speak of their goal and mission in terms of just knowing idiosyncratic work when they see it. You might say we’re all curators and perhaps even taste makers in this business, but the truth is we’re not in hard sciences here. Art belongs in murky waters. You can never describe how extraordinary marine life is to a person who has no interest in snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef … without getting frustrated. Some things are better left to be experienced than explained."

  

Failure is what writers do: Anne Enright

I have no problem with failure - it is success that makes me sad. Failure is easy. I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work, I have wasted whole years writing the wrong things for the wrong people. Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do. It is built in. Your immeasurable ambition is eked out through the many thousand individual words of your novel, each one of them written and rewritten several times, and this requires you to hold your nerve for a very long period of time – or forget about holding your nerve, forget about the wide world and all that anxiety and just do it, one word after the other. And then redo it, so it reads better. The writer's great and sustaining love is for the language they work with every day. It may not be what gets us to the desk but it is what keeps us there and, after 20 or 30 years, this love yields habit and pleasure and necessity.

Will Self on Failure

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one. It follows that to continue writing is to accept failure as simply a part of the experience – it's often said that all political lives end in failure, but all writing ones begin there, endure there, and then collapse into senescent incoherence.

From a 1996 Live Online David Foster Wallace interview

Q: Do you mine the bleakness of our culture for your work?
A:I don't think one has to "mine" the culture any more.It's what we breathe. It's all around us.

Q: I read your cool piece on Dostoevsky in the village voice. Do you think "dosty" informs your work in any way?
A:Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.

 Q:What's the worst character flaw of your work?
A: My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think
my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and
boring for people around me.

(Edited from a long, though interesting, transcript  now available at here.)

Alice Munro retires from writing

It's nice to go out with a bang.

Related
Is there any creative spark for writing?

Getting published at 52

I had crossed a threshold, too old to imitate anyone.

Most of the readers love bad books!

Since book publishing became a mass-market business, the quality level is constantly sinking. But there are still very good books around, in every country! The problem is that people can’t get them because they are hiding. People thought that with digitization, the good books would be easier to get. But the problem is that most of the readers love bad books! I have no explanation for the fact that modern societies have invested tons of money into schools and universities only to find out that horrible books are much more loved than the good ones…

Bloomsday arrives!

Something worse than obscurity and opprobrium has befallen Joyce.

Shahmush Parsipur interview

Q: Why are you censored in Iran? 
  
 A: They like women who are sheep. This is the main reason. They don’t like women like me.Throughout history they have silenced powerful and intelligent women. They don’t like women in the highest places in culture. They like to hide women in homes.

London Science Museum publishes a novel, the first time

Shackleton’s Man Goes South by Tony White tells a "new tale of climate change refugees who are fleeing to Antarctica instead of from it as Shackleton had done, in a hot world rather than a cold one, but where the Shackleton story has become a founding myth of the new continent, much as the story of Christopher Columbus gave symbolic value to historical migration to the United States of America".

Simon Crump interview

I belong to the school of ordinary middle-class, middle-aged blokes who sit in their sheds day after day, night after night…trying to come up with a story which isn’t total and utter crap.

Roberto Bolano's poem

Toward the end of 1992 he was very sick
and had separated from his wife.
That was the goddamn truth:
he was alone and fucked
and he tended to think there was little time left.
But dreams, oblivious to sickness,
showed up every night
with a loyalty that came to surprise him.
Dreams took him to that magical country
he and no one else called Mexico City
and Lisa and the voice of Mario Santiago
reading a poem
and so many other good things worthy
of the most ardent praise.

Read on ..

Related
The Big, Mysterious world of Roberto Balano 

John Green against self-publishing!

"I'm in the book business, the idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding, storytelling business. And I am not going to get out of that business. So fuck Ayn Rand and fuck any company that profits from peddling the lie of mere individualism. We built this together and we're going to keep building it together."

Kevin Barry wins the €100,000 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award.

“It’s a big money prize, and it’s always useful for a poor writer to be put in the vicinity of stacks of cash. It’s an unpredictable life and it’s great to be able to buy time to sit in my little room and invent these demented little words.”

The Art of Reading Literature

“Like clog dancing, the art of analyzing literature is almost dead on its feet. A whole tradition of what Nietzsche called ‘slow reading’ is in danger of sinking without trace".
- Terry Eagleton in How to Read Literature

Read an excerpt from Jhumpa Lahiri's forthcoming novel

East of the Tolly Club, after Deshapran Sashmal Road splits in two, there is a small mosque. A turn leads to a quiet enclave. A warren of narrow lanes and modest middle-class homes.
Once, within this enclave, there were two ponds, oblong, side by side. Behind them was a lowland spanning a few acres.
After the monsoon, the ponds would rise so that the embankment built between them could not be seen. The lowland also filled with rain, three or four feet deep, the water remaining for a portion of the year.

Read on..

Edurado Halfon interview

‘In Europe and the United States, there is still this idea that Latin American literature is defined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the magical realist boom. They are looking for the new Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but magical realism exists only among a few writers. Throughout Latin America right now, the writing is far harder edged, far grittier, and much harder to classify or unify. There is a history we share, and a language. But as for literature, there isn’t a lot of similarity between one country and another.’

Franz Kafka Prize for Amos Oz

Acclaimed Israeli author Amos Oz has won the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize in the Czech Republic.

Related
Amos Oz interview