Rajiv Kalsi, whose sister was on the Air India flight whose bombing seeds my novel, wrote me a letter, reprinted here with his permission. Mr. Kalsi’s email was enormously moving to me. Novelists cannot know, and must renounce a desire ……
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Adam Gopnik has a very entertaining and thoughtful article in last week’s New Yorker summarizing the detection efforts of two teams of antiquarians: one that believes it has a reference book that once belonged to Shakespeare, and another that has ……
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Yesterday, I conducted a public conversation with Joyce Carol Oates. I opened with some questions of my own, and then she fielded questions from the graduate student audience. One asked what advice JCO gives students in representing violence in fiction. ……
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I’m a longtime truehearted fan of Amitav Ghosh, a writer of enormous intellectual breadth and literary ambition. I wrote to him recently to let him know that my new novel owes a debt to an article he wrote for the ……
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In a week when I’m grateful for having had a great deal of media coverage, the item that has most touched me is my first note from a reader, Mr. R. K. Moorthy, who agreed to let me post his ……
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Readers’ responses to the 4th of my National Post Afterword pieces, The Novelist Wakes, has moved me to say something about its genesis. As I said in my last post, I struggled with these pieces. Toughest was coming up with ……
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Today, the fourth of the four pieces I wrote as guest editor for the National Post Afterword blog will be published online. Most of their guest-editors contribute short essays on writing and culture or writing culture. One especially elegant set ……
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And Lata Pada came to the party. Lata is most justly famous as one of Canada’s premier choreographers of Indian classical dance. She also lost her husband and daughters in the Air India bombing, the central event from which my ……
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Thank you, SeeTanyaRead, for what you said about my book. @padmav has written such a terribly brave book in THE EVER AFTER OF ASHWIN RAO. It's just stunning. — tanya boughtflower (@SeeTanyaRead) March 14, 2014
Read Mavis Gallant’s “When We Were Nearly Young” with my students on Friday, my first time teaching her work since she died, and maybe it was a little too soon, because I got all verklempt! My students looked a little ……
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