Hungary's Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the winner of the Man Booker International Prize, poses for photographers with the trophy shortly after the award ceremony at the Victoria and Alber...
Author Hilary Mantel won the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her Bring Up the Bodies.
Authors, from left to right, Malaysian Tan Twan Eng, Deborah Levy, Hilary Mantel, Will Self, holding his book, top, Alison Moore and Jeet Thayil, from India, shortlisted for the Ma...
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), R.I.P. The novelist, best-known for Fahrenheit 451, died in California on June 5, 2012, his daughter Alexandra said.
Writer JK Rowling has hinted that the sequels to Fantastic Beasts will throw light on relationship between Albus
US President Barack Obama visited a local bookstore here with his two daughters – Sasha and Malia – to buy boo
Through the violence and bloodshed, and the failed dialogues and trust deficit, Kashmir continues to wait for the time whe
The 28th Moortidevi Award for 2014 has gone to the work Vyomkesh Darvesh written by noted Hindi writer Vishwanath
Sahitya Akademi today announced Bal Sahitya Puraskar for this year, in which five novelists, four writers of short stories
"Harry Potter" series' evil-wizard Voldemort is more famous than most of the Republican Presidential candidates.
Ruskin Bond continues to weave a magic spell on his readers with his stories, but the veteran writer feels "stumped
Author J K Rowling has released a new riddle on her 'Harry Potter' publishing website Pottermore which includes Vampires a
Author J K Rowling feels guilty about killing the little-known character in her Harry Potter book series,
The University of Texas has refused to release the contract and purchase price for the archive of Colombian novelist and N
New Delhi, Jan 31 (PTI) Indian-American physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee has been longlisted for this year's Well
New Delhi, Jan 29 (PTI) The Capital played host to the third edition of the Noir Literature Festival with crime writers fr
James Wood in the New Yorker on Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story:
The author jokes about how Iran is subconsciously practicing “the late Roland Barthes’s theory of the Death of the Author,” and likens this control to political torture and disappearance: “So it is that many stories . . . in maneuvering their way through the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance either are wounded, lose certain limbs, or are with finality put to death.”...
...the novel’s insistent argument [is] that a modern Iranian love story can hardly be written at all, because it is contaminated not only by the fact of censorship but by the idea of censorship, and bound by literary conventions. ... In one of his many mischievous authorial interventions, Mandanipour notes that ancient Sufi love poetry often likens the body of a woman to a cypress tree, her eyes to those of a gazelle, her breasts to pomegranates, and so on. He implies that this level of figurative ornament is a kind of self-censorship by simile. So the tale of Sara and Dara is not only scored by the censor’s markings; it is constantly lapsing into cliché and conventional euphemism, because direct erotic language is not possible. “Sara’s lips resemble plump ripe cherries with their delicate skin about to split from the heat of the sun,” the author writes, knowingly.
Read the full piece here
In the New Yorker:
The day that Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising from the floor below, the loud pelvic thrusts of an “item number” dancing across a neighbor’s TV, a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong sweet coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree. Senior and Junior, two very old men, opened their eyes in their bedrooms on the fourth floor of a sea-green building on a leafy lane, just out of sight of Elliot’s Beach, where, that evening, the young would congregate, as they always did, to perform the rites of youth, not far from the village of the fisherfolk, who had no time for such frivolity. The poor were puritans by night and day. As for the old, they had rites of their own and did not need to wait for evening. With the sun stabbing at them through their window blinds, the two old men struggled to their feet and lurched out onto their adjacent verandas, emerging at almost the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in fateful coincidences, unable to escape the consequences of chance....
Clearly, we need to thank Padma Laksmi for this one. But one minor quibble:
D’Mello had grown up in another city, Mumbai, the legendary bitch-city, urbs prima in Indis, and had to be spoken to in English.
And I thought His Salmanness only referred to the city as Bombay and not as Mumbai...
