on new fiction:
Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Manjushree Thapa's book of stories Tilled Earth,
Daniel Kehlmann's surprise bestseller Measuring The World,
and possibly Sandor Marai's The Rebels
and non-fiction:
Christopher de Bellaigue's The Struggle for Iran,Jeffrey Goldberg's Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divide,
and Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels With Herodotus
.
5 comments:
This is a great blog for writers learning to be. Sorry, didn't quite know just where to spring in this appreciation. Really enjoy your writing and analysis.
Why 'probably'? Please do the Marai. I'd like to know what you think of it.
Prashanth - Thanks very much for your very kind words.
Space Bar - Well, I've got to convince the authorities to let me review it first! It's not always easy making a case for a Hungarian novelist who died two decades ago.
But I'm a great admirer of Marai's work - *Casanova in Bolzano* is one of the best novels I've ever read. In fact I was very pleased to see that a couple of sentences from a review I'd written of that book are on the back-cover quotes of Knopf's recent edition of *The Rebels*.
a couple of sentences from a review I'd written of that book are on the back-cover quotes of Knopf's recent edition of *The Rebels*.
Aha! An accidental blurber! :D
So does this mean you're only going to put up on your blog what you write for other papers? That's sad. I can understand that it might be difficult to find the time, but it would be nice if you could, some day, do a post on Rebels just because you wanted to and not because this was an archive of work that's appeared elsewhere.
Space Bar - But it's not an archive! Even if most of the posts here are reviews for the papers, most are rewritten somewhat, have long quotes from the book, and links afterward. They're more discursive and bloggy than the pieces in the original form.
Yes, to some extent I agree with you - it'd be nice if I could write more pieces just for the blog, as I used to in the past. But one piece a week is about ideal - any more and it'd be too much. Anyway, I promise to write about *The Rebels* some time or the other this year.
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