Month: July 2006

This has become almost too easy–take a famous book by a well-known author (in this case, a Nobel Prize winner), send out a few chapters to publishers and agents and rake in those rejection letters. Even so, it’s fun when it’s Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm being rejected by a score of Australia’s…

Like tons of people out there, I’m irritated at the Blogspot/ Typepad/ Geocities block (Neha has a running update on the situation at Within/Without), chiefly because whoever ordered the ban borrowed his script from Kafka via Monty Python. Is there an official block on these domains? Sorry, we can’t tell you. If there isn’t a…

(“Exquisite Corpse: Game of folded paper played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration or collaborations. The now classic example, which gave the game its name, was drawn from the first sentence obtained this way: The-exquisite-corpse-will-drink-new-wine.“–André Breton (Waldberg, 93-94)If you’ve never played Exquisite Corpse before, here’s how,…

Roger Cohen compares Zidane to…Camus? Camus, writing during World War II, the son of a man killed in World War I, captured a 20th-century senselessness in his story of a man driven to an irrational act for which he feels no remorse, for which in fact he feels nothing. The story of Zidane in the…

In the Washington Post, Hank Stuever asks the really big question (link courtesy Griff): Marvel or DC?Back when it mattered, you used to be certain. You would ally yourself and endlessly argue the merits in comic-book stores or at a convention at the airport Ramada. DC Comics, led by Superman, was for people who adored…

What Kenneth Neill Cameron described as “One of the unsolved mysteries of Shelley bibliography” can now be solved, for a copy of the pamphlet has been discovered and is in the possession of the booksellers Bernard Quaritch. But no. Shelley’s long-lost Poetical Essay, the pamphlet he published anonymously the same year he was expelled from…

Victor Rangel-Ribeiro on Raja Rao, who died this Saturday in Texas at the age of 97: Because I belong to the generation of Nissim Ezekiel (b. 1924), which came two decades after the triumvirate of Indian fiction writers (Mulk Raj Anand, born December 12, 1905; R.K. Narayan, born October 10, 1906; Raja Rao, born November…

Samit Basu does a wonderful series of posts/ essays/ interviews on speculative fiction in India–archive this immediately. Here’s a sample, from the essay on IWE and the genre of speculative fiction: “Spec-fic to friends, is essentially an umbrella, a bar where a number of disgruntled genres come to hang out, its leading patrons being fantasy,…

I’m coming in late on this, but bear with me.This is what happened: Prufrock, who runs an admirable lit blog, spotted a paragraph in Mahmood Farooqui’s 1,500-word review of Jan Dalley’s book on The Black Hole in Outlook, that had been lifted directly from Anne Garvey’s review of the same book in The Independent. Prufrock…

The excellent Naresh Fernandes on the life and bizarre career of Captain F D Colaabavala, ex-Indian Army (and Navy) man who hitchiked around the world, wrote colourful and almost certainly exaggerated accounts of his exploits (Time Out Mumbai link: might require subscription/registration): He walked on the wild side. In Indian Mafia in Action, he set…