The trouble with success lies in the afterword. Once you’ve crowd-surfed through dizzying fame and millions in earnings, landing back on your feet and taking the metro home is a bummer. But Yann Martel managed it differently. During his time with literary stardom, the Canadian author welcomed the success, and rejected the celebrity. Yes to… Continue reading Life Of Pi author Yann Martel on surviving fame and keeping the faith
CliffNotes: After Gone Girl and Girl On The Train, the domestic noir chain continues with The Widow. Jean Taylor plays the perfect wife to her husband Glen, who’s accused of kidnapping a two-year-old girl. But when Glen is killed in a freak sidewalk accident, does Jean let her guard slip? Told from the perspective of the widow,… Continue reading Book of the week: The Widow by Fiona Barton
There’s something desperate about reading a self-help book. Admitting that you need help with basic tasks that most other humans seem to manage, like daily exercise, getting a date or loving yourself, can seem kind of pathetic. But the lure of these books is urgent. They’re like those ads for creams that solve embarrassing body… Continue reading New age self-help books you need to read right now
Cliffnotes: Using brief, recollective episodes, Barnes constructs the fictional biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, a Soviet-era Russian composer and his steady manipulation by the ‘Power’. His opera Lady Macbeth Of The Mtsensk District is flagged unfit for consumption after Stalin walks out in disgust, and a review titled ‘Muddle Instead Of Music’ in the Communist publication Pravda costs him… Continue reading Book of the week: The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes
Cliffsnotes: A Handbook for My Lover by Rosalyn D’Mello is an erotic non-fiction memoir that chronicles six years of her love affair with a much older man that seems fated to end. Told in the form of long, lyrical letters to her lover (who does not read) – the author lays bare her desires, insecurities, sexual… Continue reading Book of the week: A Handbook For My Lover by Rosalyn D’Mello
The ELLE Book Club, supported by Bloomsbury India, celebrated literary legend Margaret Atwood at an intimate soirée during this year’s ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival. The setting was the lovely Samode Haveli, which was lit up and lined with candles and marigold flowers. Guests — including top publishers, writers, journalists and book hounds — raised their… Continue reading The ELLE Book Club celebrated lit legend Margaret Atwood
Cliffsnotes: In Other Words (or In Altre Parole) is a memoir about falling in love with a new language, written entirely in Italian (don’t fret, the English translation appears right alongside the Italian text). It describes Lahiri’s immersive learning of the language, her impostor syndrome from winning the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Interpreter Of Maladies,… Continue reading Book of the week: In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
The High Mountains Of Portugal by Yann Martel Cliffsnotes: Three men deep in grief and separated by decades bridge the novel’s loosely connected stories. In ‘Homeless’, Tomas, a museum worker in 1904 Lisbon, sets out to find a crucifix that could challenge the foundations of Christianity; in ‘Homeward’ a pathologist is visited by a woman carrying her… Continue reading Book of the week: The High Mountains Of Portugal by Yann Martel
There’s a fair bit of travel involved in Kanishk Tharoor’s debut collection of short fiction, Swimmer Among The Stars: Stories, fuelled by the writer’s “far-reaching interests in social and cultural history”. From tracing an elephant’s journey across Morocco to imagining the epilogue to climate change, Tharoor traverses time and space in these brightly original stories. And he’s found… Continue reading Name to know: Kanishk Tharoor
At just 16, Pakistani author Kanza Javed was confronting death and its devastating after-effects. “The idea of Ashes, Wine And Dust [Tara-India Research Press] came to me after I lost my grandmother and realised how pervasive and still sadness is. I had to write down everything I witnessed and felt,” says the 24-year-old. Javed spent… Continue reading Author Kanza Javed on her debut novel, Ashes, Wine And Dust
New AdultExplaining why she first resisted writing her memoir My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff said: “I didn’t want to revisit my twenties.” New Adult books describe the mental landscape of 20-somethings: sexual anxiety, career confusion, money trouble and the urgent need to just figure it out already. Try: Cora Carmack’s New York Times bestseller Losing It about a heroine so desperate to… Continue reading 5 new literary genres to get hooked to
If your scrolling habits are eating into your reading time, you’re probably not scrolling in the right places. Twitter fiction has emerged into a legit lit genre, especially with the participation of heavyweight authors like David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood and Alexander McCall Smith, who created four short stories for last year’s Twitter Fiction Festival. While 140-character tales are… Continue reading Get started on Twitter fiction
Salman Rushdie mentions in a recent interview that science-fiction, that oft (unfairly) maligned and (overly) defended genre (most recently by the great Ursula K. LeGuin, whom Rushdie names as his most “generous” critic), was one of his “earliest interests” as a writer. It’s clear that Rushdie’s always had a taste for pulp. If his most… Continue reading Should you read Salman Rushdie’s new book?
Gauri Sinh (former Bombay Times and DNA After Hrs editor) launched her second book, The Garud Prophecies last month. The story of lovers Sitara and Garud, is set in a fantasy universe where natural resources are dipping and the fight for survival is long and turbulent. The couple’s journey to escape their crumbling village Astara is… Continue reading 3 questions with Gauri Sinh
