Month: January 2006

(Written for the Business Standard, November 30, 2005) Among the albums Sony released last month on CDs backed with its patented DRM (Digital Rights Management) system were Suspicious Activity by Bad Plus, Nothing is Sound by Switchfoot and Invisible Invasions by The Coral. Prophetic titles. On October 31, Mark Russinovich discovered that Sony’s CDs installed […]

The Hutch Crossword shortlists for 2005 were announced recently in three categories: original fiction in English, Indian fiction in translation and original non-fiction in English. English fiction: Shauna Singh Baldwin: The Tiger Claw (Penguin)Rana Dasgupta: Tokyo Cancelled (HarperCollins)Siddhartha Deb: Surface (Picador)Cyrus Mistry: The Radiance of Ashes (Picador)V S Naipaul: Magic Seeds (Picador)Salman Rushdie: Shalimar the […]

From James Frey’s Powell.com essay, written before The Smoking Gun blew the facts in his Oprah-backed bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, into a million little pieces:“I wanted to be the first me. I wanted to write in a voice that was new and different, consistent with the voice that I felt in my heart, […]

Elif Batuman analyses Franco Moretti in this brilliant piece for n+1. Here’s how she sums up Graphs, Maps, Trees: Moretti’s fascinating new book, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History—three essays originally published in the New Left Review, plus an afterword by geneticist Alberto Piazza—brings a science-fiction thrill to the science of fiction. […]

Indicaribbean, they do things differently; indibloggies, everyone gets to vote. Ok, that was a terrible pun.Here’s the list of nominees.Go vote. I’m shamelessly canvassing for good friends and blogger faves in these categories: IndiBlog of the Year: India Uncut, Indian Writing, SEA-EAT, Death Ends Fun, A Walk in the Clouds… The rest are pretty cool […]

..are up.Here they are: English Fiction, Indian Language Fiction Translation, and a new category, English Non-Fiction. Amitav Ghosh, 2004 winner for English Fiction, will announce the shortlist at Crossword, Kemps Corner, Bombay, at 7:00 pm, Tuesday, 17th January.

The first reviews of Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss are coming out; it sounds pretty good. From The Boston Globe:Kiran Desai’s ”The Inheritance of Loss” spans continents, generations, cultures, religions, and races. Like Desai’s acclaimed first novel, ”Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” its primary setting is India, in this case the remote province of Kalimpong […]

I was noblogging, but that’s noreason to have missed Nick Gillespie’s thoughtful coverage of the MLA. From the fourth and final part of his article (go read parts one, two and three first), here’s a sample of what he has to say: “Perhaps more important — and this is something that Fiedler recognized in his […]

Using “a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours of computer time, and 5 man hours,” Tom Owad discovers how easy it is to find “documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens.” (Link via BoingBoing, not that they need Kitabkhana’s puny traffic numbers, but go browse anyway.)“…few things tell you […]

Smith’s The Accidental beat out Rushdie and Nick Hornby for the Whitbread, which is now looking for a new name and a new sponsor. From The Scotsman:A former English lecturer at Strathclyde University, Smith, 43, gave up her job and began to focus on her writing after falling ill with chronic fatigue syndrome. After moving […]