Confession: it was really hard to pick just five, but when a new platform, Shepherd.com, asked if I would try, I couldn’t resist. I’m excited to be teaching a course on doubles in literature this fall, and making this list ……
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A personal essay in LitHub Publishing The Charterhouse of Padma, a novel with a mirrored narrative, has got me thinking–and writing–about why I’m so obsessed with doubles in life and literature. This essay exploring two doubled architectures, one imagined, one ……
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In which, after weeks of desultory efforts to get my head around the origins, dynamics, status and potential consequences of ISIS (as connected to our war on terror, the Syrian civil war, and various other difficult vectors), I realize that ……
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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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