Published by Penguin / Vintage, 1995, 160 pages. Original version published in 1994.Translated from Spanish by Edith GrossmanReview by Thomas Peak Once, under a stifling October sun, Gabriel García Márquez, the great Latin American writer, observed the unceremonious wrenching open of a centuries-old tomb. As the sacred stones were smashed into rubble, bundles of luminescent golden …
Continue reading Of Love and Other Demons: Gabriel García Márquez
Published by Scribner, 2000, 320 pages. This book on writing starts with two contradictory epigraphs: “Honesty is the best policy” and “Liars prosper”. Good fiction is a mix of the two. Writers invent, but also draw upon what they know. This book is far more than a primer on writing well. Stephen King starts and …
Continue reading On Writing—A Memoir of the Craft: Stephen King
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith / The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal / The Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak / The Black Box by Alek Popov, translated from Bulgarian by Daniella and Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de LupePublishing details belowReview …
Published by Doubleday / Black Swan, 2003, 416 pages. A portrait of the Bangladeshi community in London, Brick Lane follows Nazneen, a young girl from a village in Bangladesh who is married off to Chanu, an older Bangladeshi man, and moves with him to the UK. During her early years in London, Nazneen’s world is …
Mark A. Heberle reviews Minae Mizumura's The Fall of English, which looks at how English dominates not only science and the internet, but also publishing, and what this means for other languages, especially Japanese. To quote from the article: "This powerful, insightful work analyzes the predicament of world languages and literatures in an age when …
Continue reading Minae Mizumura on the Hegemony of English: from The Claremont Review of Books
Published by Viking / Penguin / Riverhead, 2005, 272 pages. New Year’s Eve, London, Toppers’ Block, named for the number of people who commit suicide by jumping off the roof. Martin, a disgraced TV presenter, has decided to end his life. He is ready for the job—he has brought a stepladder and wire cutters to …
A wonderful piece by George Saunders on writing. Saunders is a short story writer, and his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, has just been published. He writes about how the idea for the book came to him, and what it takes to move from an idea to a finely honed piece of writing. "A …
Continue reading What writers really do when they write: George Saunders (from The Guardian)
Published by Pan / Penguin, 2005, 512 pages. When I mentioned to a friend that I enjoyed Susanna Gregory’s medieval whodunits, she lent me the entire series of novels set during the time of Henry VIII with a hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, as the main character. Having just finished the first one (although strictly speaking, …
Adam Kirsch New York Times, 17 January 2017 Adam Kirsch on the problematic relationship between truth and lies in writing. "Reality is the ingredient that turns a bad fiction into an enthralling one. "This dynamic is part of the novel’s origins. The earliest English novels, from 'Moll Flanders' (1722) to 'Clarissa' (1748), were published anonymously, …
Published by Simon & Schuster, 2016, 528 pages. It was in the early 80s that I first heard Bruce Springsteen. Looking for new music, I raided the tiny music shop in Secunderabad (India) and picked up Born to Run. I was hooked. The music spoke to me, although I was from a different culture and …
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