Here is another general commentary on Indian culture, this time by a well-known Indian writer. It is difficult to assess which level of reader the book is really meant for as it is written in a very broad sweep.
There are times, usually of media hype, when I don’t read a new novel that I would otherwise have read. Then there are novels I don’t read immediately because I am told by friends that I am certain to like them.
Growing up, I used to treat going to my nani’s house for a sleepover as a great event. I would very seriously pack my night clothes, my tooth brush and my towel, and then toddle off down the road to her house.
Good intentions in anthology-making are never good enough unless they are backed by a clear sense of direction, a balanced overview of the ground under survey, and—if it is an anthology of translations—an uncompromising stand on the quality of translations coupled with a precise awareness of the ‘other language’ audience and its standards.
V.I. Braginsky could as well have been describing Parveen Talha and her book of short stories, when he wrote in a review of Anna Suvorova’s Nostalgia po Laknau1 that ‘it is characteristic of her scholarly style to find a specific leitmotif to thread through each of her works and define the essence of discussion.
Shakespeare is easily the most written about dramatist, so much so that one feels he might have taken fright, had he lived, to see his plays interpreted on so many levels—some of them well beyond his ken. And this has been the case mainly with his tragedies…