Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) I thought the footnotes would make it fun (like in a Steven Haywood short story); I was more focussed on the ‘wondrous’ than the warning of brevity. In fact, Oscar’s life emerges from dictatorship and constricted choices, and you
In which there is talk of the slim stories which have travelled with me within the city, while bulkier volumes stayed home. Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1are awkward travelling companions. As are some of the skinnies in my current stack, like Iris Murdoch's
Sometimes the body count in my reading is high. Of late, the un-body count has been rising. I noticed the presence in W. G. Sebald, when I began reading Austerlitz (2001; Translated from the German, 2011) earlier this year. In the photographs which accompany his narrative, there are no
Anosh Irani's "Circus Wedding" appears in the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Eighteen Bridges, a fabulous magazine. His novel, The Parcel, also considers voices which are often pushed to the margins. Here, too, Raju inhabits a precarious existence. Here too, Anosh Irani takes a small character and reveals their big dreams.
In which pages are turned, at a faster rate than usual. Character-soaked, but still fast-paced storytelling. Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) is set in a future in which the dominant culture has determined that the blood of indigenous peoples holds an inherent value for healing. Exploitation and genocide ensue. This
