Review: Ed Conway (2023) Material World. Knopf.
What do Donald Trump and Chairman Mao have in common? The belief that “IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY.” Frank Zappa thought you also need a beer—but that’s neither here nor there. Conway’s 2023 narrative science doorstopper is here to deliver a slightly different, less zingy but more…
Words Vanquish Swords Again
In the final section Pampa Kampana, coming to terms with the decline of the Vijayanagar empire, reflects that “words are the only victors.” Rushdie is alive to that scruple and will not let the moralising impulse detract from the power of words. Let those who want to learn something from fiction be…
Spare No Blushes
Prince Harry’s subversion of the usually triumphalist genre has paradoxically accomplished the feat of making him come across as a loser who is disingenuous due to and not just despite his performative authenticity. One thing’s for certain: the royal family he’s estranged from would’ve spared him from this disgraceful public tantrum by…
Review: Avner Landes (2021) Meiselman: The Lean Years.
The titular protagonist of Meiselman: The Lean Years has at the age of thirty-six had an epiphany: he’s been a pushover ever since he can remember, and he doesn’t want to be the good guy who finishes last. He is neither a hero nor a celebrity, neither likeable nor engaging though he…
Review: Anya von Bremzen (2023) National Dish
“Focusing on iconic dishes from Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca, and Istanbul von Bremzen attempts to bring light rather than the usual heat to the concept of a national dish in a globalized world where surprisingly nationalism is resurgent. She doesn’t to her credit pretend that stories about a few dishes from…
Review: Sarah Thankam Mathews (2022) All This Could Be Different. Viking.
Sarah Thankam Mathew’s All This Could be Different has been marketed, and widely reviewed, as a novel in which electric prose serves a calling higher than the merely aesthetic. The prose here is au courant, fluent in the meme-inflected argot of the relatively young extremely online reader, and exemplary of the transparent,…
Review: Blake Bailey (2021) Philip Roth: The Biography, Skyhorse Publishing.
Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth biography has something for everyone: it satisfies the reader who wants to relive the rapture of reading Roth at his best, the literary dilettante who wants to bone up on dinner table banter about notable priapic penpushers, and aspiring heirs to Roth’s ballpoint sceptre.
Kevin Kwan Explains “Crazy Rich Asians”
David Sedaris’ Tips for Humour Writing
Anybody can be a storyteller and a humourist because interesting things happen to everyone, and there is humour to be found in almost every indignity. “Everything’s funny eventually” says Sedaris, and he must know as he’s able to laugh about having a flexible metal tube inserted into his urethral meatus as part…
Salman Rushdie’s Tips for Writing & Storytelling
Novices and accomplished writers alike seem to agree that writing is hard. One would be a fool, then, to pass up on hard won insights from an author of twenty novels, and the winner of the Booker prize and the Booker of Bookers prize. Salman Rushdie Teaches Story Telling and Writing, a…
Review: Jonathan Franzen (2021) Crossroads. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In “Crossroads” Jonathan Franzen flaunts his complete abandonment of any pretence to style; substance and form have fought each other, and substance stands undefeated, gloating, on the corpse of form.
Review: Indra Nooyi (2021) My Life in Full: Work, Family, & Our Future. Portfolio/Penguin
For her meteoric rise to be a satisfying story the rags-to-riches-heroine needs to start from a position of complete destitution. Put her in a middle class home with its usual opportunities, joys, disappointments, and brushes with tragedy, and then even her rise to the presidency of the United States is immediately less…
Review: Anuk Arudpragasam (2021). A Passage North. Hogarth.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, A Passage North is concerned with the experience of war removed from violence on the ground and consumed second-hand through news and videos on the internet.
Jaipur Literature Festival Toronto 2021: Marcus du Sautoy on Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut
Marcus du Sautoy talks about mathematics as the art of the shortcut, promoting his latest book at the Jaipur Literature Festival Toronto 2021.
Jaipur Literature Festival Toronto 2021: Najwa Zebian & Shashi Bhat on the Self as Safe-Space
A home within needs to be a 5 room independent house with a garden, Zebian says; this is a floor plan for what you deserve not what you can afford. In a world saturated by manuals for washing your penis, Bhat’s fables seem less propagandistic.
Bad Art God
Prometheus wants ongoing recognition of his everlasting sacrifice.
Overcoming Adorno’s Aesthetic Critique
Adorno observes in his posthumous opus Aesthetic Theory: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore” (2). Adorno’s pessimism about art in his time and ours arguably presupposes a problematic definition of art and artistic merit. In what follows I’ll rehearse his arguments, give a charitable gloss of considerations which…
Jhumpa Lahiri Shares Her Trade Secrets
How Much Should Zomato Delivery Partners Earn?
Before making the case for higher pay or declaring these workers exploited, it is worth asking what the appropriate earnings should be for a job where the skills required are the ability to ride a bike or scooter, and the very basic education needed to operate a mobile App.
