Being afraid. Being very afraid… and yet, not.

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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How to Irritate Joyce Carol Oates

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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Amitav Ghosh wrote back

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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First Fan Mail.

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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