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”.