Far From The Madding Crowd

In the New York Times Art Section , Michiko Kakutani writes about British poet Craig Raine’s new book, T.S. Eliot, calling Raine’s description a “new, more accessible T. S. Eliot, an Eliot he describes as a virtuosic fox in terms of style, and a single-minded hedgehog when it came to themes.” Indeed, Eliot was both forbiddingly learned and maddeningly enigmatic, but he was also incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure. An excerpt of the preface follows:

T.S Eliot was bron in St. Louis, Missouri, on 26 September 1888. By the time he died in London, aged seventy-seven, he was the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the same year, the recipient of the Order of Merit, England’s most distinguished honour, in the personal gift of the reigning monarch. He was the most influential and authoritative literary arbiter of the twentieth century and a publisher of great distinction at Faber and Faber, where he published W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. As the editor of the influential magazine The Criterion, from 1922 until 1939, he published Proust, Gide and Thomas Mann—an indication of his cultural pan-Europeanism as well as his access to the literary firmament.

An excerpt from the novel “Conducted Tours” by Savia Viegas

Their names were Parvati and Naga. They were from Karnataka. Naga was a bonded labourer who had worked for a Brahmin landowner. The Brahmin’s wife had run away with him unable to bear his tyranny. Naga was in his early twenties while the woman seemed older. For three days the Brahmin landlords searched for him in the hovels where the bonded labourers had lived. They came with torches at night and forced open doors, kicked the women and asked for the dog that had kidnapped the Brahmin’s wife.

But Naga had by then entered the Dandeli forest where he was sheltered by the Siddhi tribals.

A week later he heard that his aged parents and younger sister had all perished in the blaze after the bustee where they had lived had been torched.

They crossed over to Karwar, heard from the travellers on the ferry that Goa was a good place to work and ended up in Carmona ragged and dirty. They had a child and needed a place to stay, so Thette was able to bargain for cheaper wages. They quietly settled in the non-descript and safe environs of Carmona. Who could have imagined, that a landless labourer who had stolen a Brahmin’s wife, a double-dealing ‘promiscuous’ Brahmin woman, in caste-ridden Karnataka, would survive? But in Carmona they did. They both worked as daily wage workers doing odd job. In the course of time they had twelve children who lived with them in a hovel at the end of the village.

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The large, swanky bookstores are no longer confined to the metros as this article points out. Inspired by the Oxford Bookstore in Calcutta, Imran Hussain, a young enterprising commerce graduate, has decided to give the business of buying books a whole new meaning by opening one such store in Guwahati.

Although Oxford Bookstores themselves seem to be catching up….

Today’s edition of Business Standard reports of Prashant Singh, a former investment banker with HSBC in UK and Fidelity Investments in Boston, who has created a fictional character, Ballay Shera.Described by Prashant Singh as both “an Indian superhero” as well as an “Indian Harry Porter”, Ballay Shera hits stores this weekend. Singh is hoping readers will be able to relate to a hero from their own milieu.

Ballay Shera’s magical powers come from a ring which has two stones, one of which turns the superhero into a humorous character, the other into a strong one.

The 18-year-old Sikh hero hails from a small village in Punjab.

This list, of the top 10 smelly books, is definitely worth sniffing…

I chanced upon this interesting website that allows you to indulge in magnetic poetry. Simply drag and place the words to express yourself. Warning: This could be a very addictive pastime.

An interesting article in The Sunday Express on the recent trend to look into detective novels and murder mysteries for information on places abroad.

Indeed, every new day is an opportunity to learn something new. I came across this article on chapbooks and, as my curiosity got the better of me, realized what an intrinsic part of culture this seemingly worthless collection of pages, stitched together, has been.

The Life of Anne Frank, published by Macmillan books, aims to fill in many of the lesser known details about her, such as her life before she went into hiding, her arrest and how she was betrayed, the BBC’s Geraldine Coughlan reports.

Anne Frank and her family hid in a cramped secret annexe in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands for two years between 1942, when she was 13, and 1944. Her story and similar others like that of Helga Deen have  captured the imagination for decades since they were discovered.

Many articles, including a few on this blog, have trumpeted the arrival of India on the global publishing scene. In his article on Blogcritics, Richard Marcus laments the lack of attention given to India by global publishers inspite of the potential it has.

India has probably one of the largest, educated English-speaking populations in the world right now. Its economy is booming, and more and more of her people have the money to spend on books and other forms of leisure. How hard would it be for an imprint to reach an agreement with an Indian press and start delivering titles for publication?

But with the exception of Penguin India, no one seems to be doing very much to take specific advantage of the market. Even Penguin treats India like another foreign country and gives preference to American publications. What this means is that while Penguin can dump as many American-published titles as it wants onto the Indian market, it only exports a few Indian-published titles to the States.