‘Huckleberry Finn’ through the eyes of Jim
Everett’s breezy, fast-moving retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is about putting in some due respect.
1m ago
Residence
I plead but I know there is nothing I can do. Akbar, in a rare fit of courage, tries to intervene. But the old man does not budge. Maybe he knows about Mina and me.
2m ago
Manufacturing praise
Sometime ago, a writer reached out to me with a request. His debut novel was being published later in the year and he was wondering if I would be open to reviewing it. I was aware of the book, having read it when it was still only a draft. The author was not someone I only knew, either, but a mentor who had supported my writing in many ways, even through monetary means. Refusing him, then, felt tantamount to betrayal. But I had to in the end, and though he understood, I still came out of the exchange feeling guilty of being unhelpful or, worse, ungrateful.
3m ago
A “knockout” debut from Rita Bullwinkel
The eight girls in Headshot clearly hope to escape the chaos of their lives in the ring.
3m ago
Whom is the propaganda on X for?
The disinformation game is now increasingly a part of our political makeup.
3m ago
Rabindranath’s rebellion
“The liberation that comes through sorrow is greater than the sorrow,” says Nikhilesh, in Home and the World. I quote from Penguin’s Modern Classics edition, in Sreejata Guha’s translation.
3m ago
We must never let such an environment of fear reign again
Fear cannot ever lead to forgetting.
3m ago
When death is a performance
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is unruly and endearing. Akbar’s years as a poet has given his debut novel an honesty that shines through the book’s arduous structure. And for all of Martyr!’s exhilarating tone and emotional trek, the difficulties of writing a novel on addiction, martyrdom, death, and meaning is evident when one reads it.
4m ago
September 19, 2023
The records of resilience
Much of the reminiscences in The Murti Boys encompass the grittiness of staving off the Pakistanis with little weaponry and a great deal of quick thinking.
September 14, 2023
The occult thrills of ‘The Centre’
Rarely does a book arrive, a debut no less, that feels as inventive and accomplished as Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre. Her novel is built on the crossroads of interpretation and ownership, of the power of language and of those privileged enough to reclaim it.
August 28, 2023
The minority report in India
In Another India, Pratinav Anil unambiguously faults Nehruvian secularism—the very mantle championed by historians such as Mushirul Hasan for whom “the congress best represented the Muslim interests from the fifties on.”
August 10, 2023
The straight and narrow vision of ‘Crook Manifesto’
Colson Whitehead’s sequel to his novel Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021) is a continuation of the exact same order.
July 5, 2023
The pirates of Madagascar
In this posthumous effort, 'Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), Graeber posits, in characteristic fashion, that the Enlightenment would not have happened if not for the pirates around the Malagasy coast.
June 19, 2023
Cormac McCarthy: A great American novelist
For a nation that cannot boast of a Cervantes or Rabindranath, there will always be a need to find an All-American, a unifier who assures them of their place in the hallowed halls of literature. Cormac McCarthy, more than any other writer of his generation, was equipped to shoulder that title.
June 3, 2023
Like father, unlike son: Martin Amis’s place in literature
Perhaps Martin Amis’s works do not grab me for the most part because it veers too far away from the humanism of, say, Saul Bellow—a writer Martin greatly admires and has written about extensively.
April 6, 2023
Love and caste collide in Perumal Murugan’s 'Pyre'
It is the story of young lovers, Kumaresan and Saroja, who get secretly married and run away to Kumaresan’s village to start a new life. Murugan has written before about the intricate tragedies of domestic life and how they bring about the worst of our community.
January 26, 2023
On Prince Harry's memoir: Spare us the drivel, please
Harry’s dig at the paparazzi is the underlying theme of his life-story.
January 19, 2023
To be human for the corporation: Olga Ravn’s ‘The Employees’
These characters, human and machine alike, are invited to provide witness statements about their working environment to a commission, which form the entirety of the novel—a design that helps Ravn bring about an atmosphere of tension.
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