‘Swerving to Solitude’
ChrestomatherNice to receive a copy of the poet Keki Daruwalla's new novel, 'Swerving to Solitude: letters to Mama.' It's an interesting and idiosyncratic meditation on history with some evocative scenes…
Two Assamese Novels
Rita Chowdhury’s compelling historical novel, Chinatown Days, is about a community that was founded by a handful of Chinese workers who came to Assam in the 1830s at the…
Extreme Reading
Tabish Khair, picture by Christopher Thomsen Rarely has a novel seemed as timely as Tabish Khair’s Jihadi Jane. As the title implies, this is the story of a radicalized young…
A Voice for the Anthropocene
Because of my recently-concluded lecture series at the University of Chicago the Anthropocene has been much on my mind of late. It was serendipitous then that I happened to read Swimmer…
Some Recent Reading Recommendations
Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment (Penguin, 2005): A novel of extraordinary power, written in a voice that is at once lucid and half-crazed with rage; the words explode…
Sly Company
Amitav GhoshRahul Bhattacharya: The Sly Company of People Who Care, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 2011. An account of a year in Guyana by an Indian cricket writer who…
‘Day-Scholar’ by Siddharth Chowdhury
Day-Scholar by Siddharth Chowdhury (Picador, 2010) An enjoyable tale of life in Delhi University in the 1990s. I was struck by how much the university, and indeed, the…
‘Brazilian Adventure’ by Peter Fleming
Published in 1933, Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure is an immensely entertaining account of a hare-brained expedition into the interior of Brazil. The expedition was mounted, ostensibly, to search for traces…
Modernism and the Museum
I cannot remember when I last came upon on a book as stimulating as Rupert Richard Arrowsmith’s Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London…
6 Tanyin Alley, Liu Zongren
Liu Zongren: 6 Tanyin Alley, China Books, San Francisco, 1989. A deeply affecting story about China's turbulent '50s and 60's, as seen through the eyes of the people who…