TRENDS
'Off Again, Gorgeous Day': One man’s impossible mission to climb Mount Everest
Ed Caesar’s new book, The Moth and the Mountain, is an engrossing and probing account of British mountaineer and aviator Maurice Wilson, who is known for his ill-fated attempt to climb Mount Everest alone in 1934.
TRENDS
From Cold War shenanigans to the excesses of capitalism: John le Carré was much more than a spy thriller writer
The seedy, shape-shifting characters created by John le Carré and the shadowy, compromised world they inhabit stand their own against the work of most writers of literary fiction.
TRENDS
Caught between the fascism frying pan and the Nazi fire
Marco Balzano’s new novel, I’m Staying Here, now translated into English by Jill Foulston, vividly illustrates that competing ideologies and nationalisms may be all very well on a global stage, but it’s often the people on the ground who have to pay the price.
TRENDS
The joys of reading books about books
Reading books about books will bring back to us what it’s like to be lost in a book. Two new books by Michiko Kakutani and Cathy Rentzenbrink are also not an exception.
TRENDS
Book review: Dealing with cross-cultural love, language and loss
At a time of dislocations and identity clashes, Xiaolu Guo’s A Lover’s Discourse is also a reminder of the fragility of relationships and the importance of bridging differences.
FEATURES
New novels in conversation with America
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, and Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam compellingly bring out what it means to live in America – and elsewhere -- during this fractured era.
TRENDS
From banning books to banning readers
If book bans are seen as increasingly ineffective, one way around it is to start banning readers.
FEATURES
Some sentences about sentences
Sentences, more than words, are the basic building blocks of all we write. They are containers to organise thoughts and describe the world. Beautiful sentences, as William H. Gass said, are “rare as eclipses”.
TRENDS
The packaging of Haruki Murakami
Writers, of course, are under no obligation to live up to anyone’s expectations but their own. One can’t help but wonder, though, whether in trying to make him palatable to the West, Murakami’s team of translators, editors and publishers have rendered him a bit too slick.
TRENDS
Hari Kunzru’s new novel of paranoia, politics and puppetmasters
'Red Pill' is absorbing, often gripping, and raises insightful questions of how our perceptions of reality can be shaped and even disfigured by political forces out to achieve their own ends.
POLITICS
The Bloomsbury brouhaha is not about free speech. It’s about legitimacy
This could be one way for Indian publishers to have their cake and eat it, too — without jettisoning basic principles of fact-checking and other editorial standards, of course
FEATURES
What we talk about when we talk about talking
In her timely new book, Katherine D. Kinzler stresses that there is no inherently good or bad language and way of speaking. Language reflects social life, and there is no right or wrong way for it to evolve.
TRENDS
Book review | Utopia Avenue - not quite a great rock-n-roll novel
The novel is structured as a series of albums with individual tracks as chapters. These are set-pieces involving individual members of the band, studded with public triumphs and personal tragedies.
FEATURES
Novel coronavirus novels that have remained unwritten
But what if writers of earlier generations had written their works during the spread of COVID-19? How would it have affected their novels? Here, in no particular order, are some ruminations.
FEATURES
The very large pleasures of very short works
While a majority yearns for the immersion that a full-length novel can deliver, such immersion can also be provided by stories that are shorter than usual.
TRENDS
Stoicism and its Contents: Why this philosophical discipline still matters
Over the years, especially in times of turmoil, countless people have found comfort in the lessons and lives of the Stoics. But, as Sellars emphasises, the real benefit arises only if we incorporate these ideas into our daily lives.
TRENDS
Ten words to understand China
Many contemporary Chinese writers have offered us a window into the country’s lived reality. Among them is novelist Yu Hua whose work, from early avantgarde to grotesque realism, critiques China’s development from the Cultural Revolution to its modern-day variety of hyper-capitalism.
TRENDS
When words wear masks: A new lexicon for a new normal
It can take some skill to understand what individuals say and what they mean.
TRENDS
Book review: A French novel of bleak interior and exterior landscapes
'Winter in Sokcho' is yet another reminder that when it comes to fiction, short narratives can penetrate states of mind more deeply than longer ones.
TRENDS
How re-reading reveals more about the reader than the book
Re-reading can tell us more about ourselves than about the book in question. In a larger sense, it can also reflect how times have changed.
TRENDS
Books not to read before you die
Reading at whim will make you stumble across books you really like, which will lead you to more books, which will lead to yet more.
TRENDS
Book Review: Jerzy Kosinski’s 'Being There', and how we interpret the way leaders speak
The glee with which Kosinski skewers the pretensions of movers and shakers is infectious, and it is evident on almost every page of the book.
TRENDS
We’re all living in the world of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’
It’s the victimisation at the heart of an utterly ordinary situation which makes ‘The Lottery’ so unnerving, and which caused its first readers to react the way they did.
CURRENT-AFFAIRS-TRENDS
Writers on the state of being in limbo
The current lockdown limbo brings to mind a sentence from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
