This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am — James Joyce
“Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, [...]
In October 1963 Jean Paul Sartre visited Prague as a guest of the Czechoslovak Writers Union and predicted that the great novel of the second half of the twentieth century would be produced by the search for truth about the experiment of communism. Earlier that year, in July, when he was in Moscow for another [...]
Victor Hugo once said: “If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” Great novels are not dated in any essential sense as they capture the timeless human condition and longevity is the ultimate test for them. A vexing question for writers is as to [...]
During my school days in the eighties there was a lot of Russian literature that I had easy access to courtesy Progress Publishers and one of my uncles. My uncle is an avid reader and those days his library was flush with Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov and also innumerable folk tales from Russia. Some 5-odd [...]
When Afghanistan took on India on Saturday at the World T20 championship American novelist Marvin Cohen’s words came to my mind: “Life is an elaborate metaphor for cricket.” War-ravaged Afghanistan’s journey from refugee camps to the elite league of cricket is nothing short of heroic and they played extremely-well considering the context. One Afghan player [...]
Today Random House is one of the leading publishing houses of the world. Its origin, though, can be traced to the Modern Library that was founded in 1917 by Boni and Liveright. It was reborn when Liveright, needing the money (he had bought off Albert Boni), sold the Modern Library to one of his employees, [...]
When I first saw the movie Mystic River I was hit by a thunderbolt; Clint Eastwood is so precise in what he wants as a director and two of his actors pulled out performances of their lifetime—Sean Penn as Jimmy Marcus and Tim Robbins as Dave Boyle are electrifying in this superbly-crafted screenplay of a [...]
In the spring of 399 BC, three Athenian citizens brought legal proceedings against Socrates. He was accused by them of failing to worship the city’s gods, of introducing religious novelties and of corrupting the young men of Athens. The severity of the charges called for a death penalty. In Symposium and the Death of Socrates, [...]
“In 2010 the only thing harder to sell than a newspaper will be a newspaper company,” Michael Kinsley, a columnist and editor-in-chief of a new website to be launched in 2010 by the Atlantic, wrote in an essay for a special issue of The Economist titled ‘The World in 2010’. The good news, if any, [...]
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