The Middle Stage

In 1993 the writer Pankaj Mishra, then in his early twenties, was living in a village called Mashobra in Himachal Pradesh, working on a nove...

"The Vice-Principal" , a story by the Iranian writer Houshang Moradi-Kermani , is one of the most tender and sublime comedies I...

Some kinds of artistic creation, like painting, are experienced across space - we understand them by organising all their elements visually ...

Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red is that rare book: a contemporary work that can already be thought of as one of the truly essential ...

A few minutes into Nagesh Kukunoor's new film Dor - after a set of early scenes of great tenderness and beauty featuring two pairs of n...

Every writer has a private map of literature, a vision of what the best books are. He considers some books overpraised, and others unjustly ...

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...