Bibliofile

Company Matters
Willie Dalrymple and Amitav Ghosh have been trying to meet up for some time now, but with no luck. They even managed to miss each other when staying in neighbouring villages in Goa. But when they did meet on Tuesday at a packed literary event in London’s Asia House, they found they had more in common than writing books. Both had ancestors living in Ghazipur, the centre of opium production, at the same time in the late 18th century. It goes without saying that Willie’s ancestor turned out to be the more colourful one: a former lover of Marie Antoniette, he was sent away to work in the Company in Ghazipur and took on a half-Bengali wife.

Yellow Splatter
Fiction books don’t usually cause this much trouble—unless it is Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. But word got around in Pakistan’s small publishing circle that Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, spelt Big Trouble. As a last resort, Hanif’s old employers, Newsline, decided to leap where others didn’t dare. But days before the book was to hit bookstores in Pakistan, Newsline’s printer backed out: someone at the printing press apparently woke up late to the risks of printing a novel that blurs the line between fiction and facts.

Fault Free
What happens when an author takes a big advance and fails to deliver? In the West, the publisher goes to court, like HarperCollins did last week when a writer failed to deliver the promised memoir of her mafia don father. But here, publishers prefer to write off the advance: usually it’s too piffling to take the trouble of recovering it from defaulting authors.