The Middle Stage

The Marathi writer Hamid Dalwai (1932-1977) was, like many writers who came to maturity in the decades immediately after India's indepe...

I'm in Kolkata for a couple of weeks and don't know a great many people here, but I must talk to live, else I'll never get any w...

Saul Bellow's Seize The Day is considered one of the greatest short novels in the English language. It appeared nearly half a century a...

The journalist and writer Krishna Kripalani is remembered today, if he is remembered at all, for a biography of Rabindranath Tagore he publi...

Vikram Chandra's novel Sacred Games is written in English, but it is an English that meets its characters halfway – we find in it a se...

I'm interviewed today on Bloggasm , a media website featuring interviews "from the most interesting blogs around". I've t...

[A slightly different version of this review of Vikram Chandra's novel Sacred Games appears today in the Scotsman .] THE CITY OF BOMBAY...

The short stories of the Israeli writer Etgar Keret are among the more unusual pleasures in contemporary fiction. They really are short , of...

The work of the Spanish writer Javier Marias is notable for its attention to the nature of the temporal, to our experience of time and our ...

In a recent essay the British philosopher John Gray writes, about the new series brought out by Atlantic Books, " Books that shook the...

On Late Style , the second book by Edward Said to be published posthumously (after Humanism and Democratic Criticism in 2004), is a book ab...

I've forgotten myself yet again, I've made myself hard to find, I've hopped aboard a different train, And left myself behind. No...

In a week in which Mumbai was badly shaken up by a series of heinous bomb blasts (I got off a train on the Western line just half an hour b...

My story "Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name" appears this month in First Proof 2 , Penguin's yearly anthology of new India...

A recurring figure in modern literature is that of the Questioning or Dissatisfied man - distanced, for this or that reason, from the custom...