Month: May 2005

The third and concluding part of Amit Chaudhuri’s essay is out (click here for parts one and two).Amardeep has a brief commentary on the first two parts here. “We’ve inherited the Saidian asymmetry along with the Saidian critique; it leads us to believe that Oriental and, for our purposes, Indian history was a bucolic zone…

When Javier Marias wrote this essay on William Faulkner for The Threepenny Review last year, he may have invented the best brief author bio yet:“Javier Marías is the author of A Heart So White, All Souls, Dark Back of Time, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction; he is also the reigning king of…

Can I bear another two months of Pottermania? Time will tell. Meanwhile…“Seventy children from around the world are to meet JK Rowling and will be the first people to read the new Harry Potter book.The youngsters will get to travel to Edinburgh Castle, which will be transformed for a weekend into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft…

“The only heartbreak in the theater that night was that there was no heartbreak at all.” Daniel Mendelsohn on whether Tenessee Williams’ plays are too “fragile” for our times. He includes a neat anecdote: “In his introduction to Williams’s collected short stories, Gore Vidal recalls the result of his attempts to edit Williams’s prose. ‘So…

Philip Ball won this year’s Aventis Prize for science writing. As usual, it’s a great shortlist–on the have/ want scale, it scores perfectly. (Have three of the books on it currently, want all. Sigh. So many books, so little room.) Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, by Philip Ball (William Heinemann) The Ancestor’s…

Robert McCrum examines, with dry scepticism, the idea that digitisation of texts might lead to the end of publishing as we know it:“Both Amazon and Google are negotiating with American publishers to develop ‘search within the book’ programmes. Google already has a deal with several top libraries from around the world, including the Bodleian, to…

Lee Siegel blames it all on the good doctor:“In one important sense, Freud’s ideas have had an undeniable impact. They’ve spelled the death of psychology in art. Freud’s abstract, impersonal concepts have worn away the specificity of fictional character. By the 1950’s, here and in Western Europe, it was making less and less sense to…

About a week before Tarun Tejpal did the ritual spurned author routine, the Babu met another writer who roundly castigated Indian reviewers…for being unnecessarily kind to books like The Alchemy of Desire. (It’s so hard to keep everyone happy, ain’t it?) But we sense that now would not be a good time to tell Tejpal…

The first two parts of an essay by Amit Chaudhuri are online. You should see his face when he’s at the receiving end of the Two Questions; he looks so weary, and answers so politely. Not like another writer I know, who asked me once whether I thought the audience would mind if he took…

(Published in ‘Speaking Volumes’, Business Standard, May 10, 2005) This column was an eye-opener; it’s so much easier to read it in a format that allows hyperlinks than in plain vanilla printed-word fashion. For this post, I’ve let the original version stand for the most part, but added a few hyperlinks where necessary. This is…