New posts coming up

I am finally close to the completion of something that's taken up most of the last two years - I hope it's close to finished - and once that's done I'd to work on some essays I've been formulating in my head the last few months but have been unable to write.

Here are the titles of some of the things I hope to put up here in April and May:

"Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare" (Anjum Hasan's debut novel Lunatic In My Head was on my list of books of the year for 2007)

"Schoolteachers and accountants in the fiction of Kunal Basu"

"Books, music, time and death in José Saramago"

and "The unpoetic poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz"

I also hope to have an essay up on David Levering Lewis's fascinating God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, which I've just finished reading.

Also, as Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic ticket goes from strength to strength, my post from last year on his excellent book The Audacity of Hope has suddenly become one of the most-read pages on the Middle Stage. So here you are, all ye American readers, there's no need to go through Google any more.

Finally, here is an old review from Mint last year of Nalini Jones's exceptional debut collection of stories What You Call Winter. The essay begins with the question "Is fiction useful?"