Usha Raman I had the pleasure this last week of engaging in conversation with Pankaj Sekhsaria, author of the new release, The Last Wave: An Island Novel (HarperCollins, 2014). The conversation was part of the Hyderabad launch of the book, a story that chronicles the turmoil and change that is threatening the existence of the …
Month: June 2014
The Danger of a Single Story
I have been meaning to put this on for a while because I think everyone will enjoy it! "It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is …
The Book of Night Women: Marlon James
Published by Riverhead Books A haunting, brutal story about slavery in Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, The Book of Night Women tells the story of Lilith, and of Montpelier, the plantation she grows up on. The story is told in Patois, from Lilith’s point of view. This is not a book …
Night Vision: Kendall Hippolyte
The blurb on the back of this collection of poems from Kendall Hippolyte, a Santa Lucian poet, says “He writes in sonnets and villanelles, in idiomatic dramatic monologues that capture the rhythm of Caribbean speech, blues and rap”. This juxtaposition of the formal and informal, the old and the new, intrigued me. And I was …
Talking About Books 