Tag: writing
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Joan Didion and writing
In the 1970s, Joan Didion did an interview with Tom Brokaw. “It’s the only aggressive act I have,” she says of writing. “It’s the only way I can be aggressive.” Didion died this week at the age of 87, leaving behind a towering legacy as a journalist, a memoir writer, a novelist. Over the years, […]
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Black River, and endings
When is a novel done? When you know that you have to let go of these characters — these people, their lives, their landscapes, their hopes, their unspoken dreams and wishes, their griefs and heartbreaks, their struggles, their failures, the moments of transition and transcendence — and you are finally at peace with that.
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A clutch of covers
The year went by in such a whoosh of edits, columns and tentative dabs at some new writing that it took me a while to realise that The Girl Who Ate Books had actually been finished, dented, painted, buffed and handed over to Somak and Krishan at HarperCollins. (Backstory here.) And that The Wildings and […]
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The BS column: “Carve out my own heart”: Mo Yan
Mo Yan’s books speak louder than the writer’s public silence (Published in the Business Standard, October 16, 2012) If the task before a writer is to be a spokesman against injustice, a defiant risk-taker who is unafraid to criticize his state openly and often, Mo Yan is a failure. As many dissident Chinese writers and […]
otter of books 