Category: Books
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Homage to the master, William Zinsser
Period. Over. Life has come to a full stop for America’s famous writing coach William Zinsser. He died at his home in Manhattan on May 12 at the age of 92. He was in his early 80s when he came out with the revised and expanded 30th anniversary edition of…
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The Norton Anthology of Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Poetry is one of the best and most comprehensive collections of English poems from Old English to the present day. I was going through the poems after reading about the death of the literary critic MH Abrams. Abrams, who died on April 21 at the age…
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Postscript to World Book Day
What would have Gutenberg thought of Kindle books? Insubstantial books weightless as air you can read only on a slim handheld computer screen. Books you can’t open, shut, or leaf through with your hands, which you can’t underline or jot notes on, which won’t rest on your tummy when you…
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The most written about Shakespearean tragedy
Hamlet is the great Shakespearean tragedy most frequently mentioned in books. Check the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which charts the frequency of any word or short sentence found in print since the year 1800. And you will find Hamlet mentioned more often than the other great Shakespearean tragedies.
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Booker and Pulitzer winners since 1969
The Booker Prize is possibly the biggest literary award in the English and certainly gets the biggest publicity. However, Donna Tartt, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel, The Goldfinch, possibly sold more copies of her book than Richard Flanagan, who won the 2014 Booker Prize for…
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Gunter Grass and Calcutta
This is why I love the internet. After hearing the BBC report the death of Gunter Grass, I remembered he had spent some time in Calcutta (now Kolkata). So I googled and came across what appeared not in Indian newspapers, but in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.…
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Love and romance in books
Love is appearing more often in books now than 50 years ago. But not as frequently as in Shakespeare’s time or that of his successors. The writers who followed Shakespeare — John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Sir John Suckling — were the ones who wrote most frequently about love.
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How to write? Anne Lamott’s way
Anne Lamott celebrated her 61st birthday two days ago, on April 10. She shares her birthday with Paul Theroux, who turned 74 on that day. Book lovers and wanna-be writers will enjoy reading her classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Here’s what she wrote about what’s…
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Paul Theroux on travel, old age, India and Singaporeans
Paul Theroux, who is celebrating his 74th birthday today, is eminently quotable. I was going through The Great Railway Bazaar, his runaway bestseller published in 1975, and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, published in 2008, where he once again travels by rail from England to Japan and back, and…
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Wordsworth and I
Today is the birthday of William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850), a poet who grows on you. He strikes a deeper chord in me now than when I was young. Many of his poems, of course, can be appreciated at any age. For example, I Wandered Lonely as…
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