For someone who loves traveling and who loves reading, I read surprisingly few travel books – its sort of like the way I love chocolate and I love ice cream, but I don’t like chocolate ice cream – however, I am always in search of good travel books, in the hope that some day, one…
Three ways of writing a short story
R.L.Stevenson says: There are, so far as I know, three ways and three only of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or, lastly, you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons…
The modern audience – have we lost our patience?
I am sitting at the most comfortable spot in our sofa, playing with Bolano’s 2666 in my hands. It was a birthday gift from six months ago and I still haven’t got to it. I want to read it, oh! I have wanted to read it for so long – but I am thinking of…
Excerpt: The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is not easy to find good travel writing – most of the time, they read like an itinerary of “I did this, and then that, and that” and you are left wondering whether you picked up a brochure rather than a travelogue. Sometimes, the writers go overboard and describe each little stone on the…
Review: The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison
The Orange Prize Short List had been announced, Waterstones screamed a 40% off with free postage, and I had the irresistible urge to buy a book. I mulled over which book to pick – I don’t have the time to read all the six books on the short list, but wouldn’t it be awesome if…
Short Story: Edgemont Drive by E.L.Doctorow
Have you read a short story written entirely in dialog? The latest issue of New Yorker has one such story by E.L.Doctorow. No quotation marks, no ‘he-said/she-said’s, no explanations or descriptions – just lines and lines of dialog. Stylistically very chic, don’t you think? So he’s there. What—hitting on your wife? No, that won’t happen….
Short Story: The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie Minor
If you had told me yesterday that I would be recommending a short story set in 2024 with impossible science-fictionesque assumptions and which features a father who encourages his son on his first experience with drugs, I would have laughed at the improbability. But today is different. The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie…
Distance makes the heart grow fonder
In the recent issue of P&W, Michelle Wildgen writes this: “After years of thinking setting didn’t inspire me at all, I have come to realize that it does—but only after I’m gone. I’ve learned not to try to write about a place until I’ve left it, whether I was traveling or living there. For instance,…
Singapore, the misunderstood child
A mail from a friend who has just moved to Singapore reminded me of this post – I had published it on another blog that I no longer maintain and was in danger of being forgotten forever. So this might be the first in the series of reposts from my almost-dead-other-blog, as relevant today as…
The Smell of Rice
A heart-rending story (via Bloomer) – “ […]Her family was hungry, but her neighbors had rice; the smell of it was tormenting her. So her mother hugged and comforted her, which made her realize that her mother’s smell was so much more important to her than that of the rice. Then her mother died, but…