Here is my stop in an author blog tour, a self-interview equivalent of a chain letter, except nice. I was tossed this opportunity by Devyani Saltzman, a writer and literary programmer who I first met when she brought me to ……
read more
Another very kind letter from a reader, republished with his permission. I wanted to post it here not only because of his very kind praise but because it includes a personal recollection of the era of the bombing, the perspective ……
read more
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 ……
read more
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 ……
read more
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. ……
read more
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 ……
read more
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 ……
read more
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 ……
read more
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 ……
read more
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 ……
read more