| The lockdown seems to be never-ending, however, we are not the ones who are facing its ugly side. We are privileged people sitting at home and we have a wonderful gift: literature. Not many of us can leverage it. Several factors and actors go into creating and making what our current political system is doing; the way it is behaving as if it is “distancing” from the reality: from its job to protect people from the novel coronavirus outbreak. What we can do is help by providing our support, morally and financially, if we are earning. There are several avenues to help, please choose in whatever way you want to support and help people. For people like us, who have the gift of literature and can help themselves in the crisis, books are providing a great deal of support. And as usual, let us trust books more, and read more; and fight our inner demons by delving into the books that have, and will, show us the way. Reading books – this novel idea – has a cathartic value to it, and provides utmost relief, for anything, virtually anything. And in that hope I present to you Writerly Life’s Third Newsletter. |
| Release Update: Soon Juggernaut will be treating us with this absolutely brilliant piece of literary fiction, a novel by the much famed Bharatnatyam dancer, writer and Kalarippayattu teacher, Gitanjali Kolanad: Girl Made of Gold. Read the excerpt on Juggernaut’s Medium account. |
| Independent bookstores are open. My favorite ones, too, in Delhi, The Bookshop (Jor Bagh), May Day Bookstore (Shadipur), Bahrisons (Khan Market, Saket, Galleria Market); please support them and buy books for you have to stock up on books. This is one such hoarding of stuffs that I will happily endorse. (Also: This is NOT a paid advertisement, and nothing in this newsletter is and will ever be. Like always, it is one more shout out straight from the heart.) |
| Last month, I wrote a critique of “We Should All Be Feminists,” published by Gasyi Family. If you’ve loved the book – which I did, too – then you must read it to learn what I opine went wrong.In brief: Shapes of Water by Abierto Reino (Leaf Publishing House, 2020) is experimented with the form. I loved it for the effort to construct a prose-poetry work. However, I’d say, it didn’t quite work out very well. Somewhere this book was out of balance. |
| Watch: Paul Auster Interview: How I Became a Writer (YouTube) Blast From the Past: Mother and Son, a short story by Akhil Sharma. Published in Granta, April 16, 2007. Read: David Foster Wallace on Writing, Death, and Redemption (Brain Pickings) Recommendation: 1. Photo Memoir: Wish You Were Here by Sunil Gupta (Read what I thought of it on Gaysi) 2. Nonfiction: All These Years: A Memoir by Raj Thapar (Published in 1991 by Seminar, this is one of the few books that must be read by all in order to gain insights into the making of Indian democracy and how we came here, to its present form.) 3. Fiction: Solo by Rana Dasgupta. (A book that has not been given its due. If I were a bookseller, I would keep several copies of this book always. For those who do not know it recently won the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Award in 2019.) |
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