Why is the Babu not surprised? Sir Vidia's in the headlines for endorsing the BJP. This is the man who thinks that Babur's invasion caused a deep wound from which the country never recovered; the man who got the history of the Vijayanagara Empire wrong; the man who refused to speak out against the Gujarat riots; the man who said that he accepted the Deputy PM's personal assurance that Gujarat would never happen again; the man who has such a contempt for Indians that he can say "But Indians are not interested in the history".
He accepted an award from the RSS last year; this year it's a shawl. Unfortunately he's a foreigner and you know how the BJP feels about that, or I'd have assumed that next up was either a Rajya Sabha seat or a Padma Bhushan. Naipaul's response to his critics has always been to admonish them to read his books. Perhaps they should, more closely, because along with that measured, crisp prose is the anti-Islamic bigotry and the near-Brahminical obsession with ritual purity.

We Took The Book Quiz Together And...: I'm Catch-22. The partner's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And people still need to ask why we refuse to merge the gene pool and have brats?

Mexico's reading on the go.

Dr Seuss cooked Mother Goose's goose for me when I first stumbled across that magnificent book, The Cat in the Hat. It's his Seussentenial and you'd have to be a Grinch not to feel an inch of applause in your paws. Okay, enough bad verse already.

Passion seems to be on the verge of sparking off an Aramaic revival. Maybe we should get Gibson to do a dying-languages trilogy...

The Calcutta Telegraph has a report on the first round of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. I like the award. It ignores the fact that there is effectively no Commonwealth any more with such insouciance. It comes up with weird grab-bag lists of authors improbably lumped together simply because they come from, or write about, a particular region. It's a bit like lace doilies: it has no relevance today, but it's nice to know someone cares about it enough to cobble all those fussy bits together.

Standing Room Only: The Babu recently agreed to pitch in at a book reading on very short notice (this is easy if you ever need a guest reader: call the Babu up when he's in the middle of a siesta and he'll say yes to anything just to get you off the phone. That is incidentally why he once babysat a mongoose for a week, and why on another occasion, he ended up being engaged for three days to the wrong person. Babus were never MEANT to be called during their afternoon naps). The book's editor was out of town; the book fair was on in Delhi; the PR people at the publishers all thought the other one was supposed to tell the world about the reading; and the Babu, being half-asleep when he said Yea, told none of his friends because he went back to sleep and forgot about it till three hours before the reading, which was too late to say Nay.
Well, we thought we had an audience when we walked in, because there were seven people in the conference room. It turned out they were there for the Indo-China Strategic Discussion Group, which offered samosas and biscuits as well as tea. (We were offering just tea. And coffee.) More people came in; they left; they came in; they looked alarmed; they left. Fifteen minutes after the reading was supposed to start, we had an audience of two.
Thing is, they were too polite to leave. And we were too polite to tell them they were wasting their time.
So we read, magnificently and eloquently, to the audience of one plus one.
The odd thing is, it was kind of fun. We made a lot of eye contact. The audience was very responsive. Everyone took a break for tea and biscuits (these, I suspect, sent down by a pitying Indo-China Group). The Babu tried out different Peter Sellers accents, which he couldn't have done in front of an audience of hundreds. And no one worried about people in the back not being able to hear what was going on.
Next time around, I'm going to refuse to read unless there's an audience of exactly one, not counting the man whose job is to turn up the mike so that it squeals every second sentence you read out. These overcrowded evenings aren't my speed at all.

The Babu's been lazy--wonderful house guests, Real Work, incredibly demanding cats--and Kitabkhana apologises on his behalf. We've come back to find that we missed out on a lot of stories.
One Blog To Rule Them All, One Blog To Find Them; One Blog To Bring Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them: We also missed out on Terry Teachout's preachy admonition to all of us in the blogosphere to add links and to credit sources. (Does the man have any idea how annoying he sounds? Like the prissy lady who used to handle Moral Science class in the awful convent my parents dumped me? Who would tell us to share our tiffin--just after we'd done that already? And I'm sorry, but the whole bit about a blog not being a blog unless it has a links list is a load of crap. Some bloggers are diarists; some are linkers; some are commentators and there's space for all of us. Anyway, the Complete Review has a Complete Roundup.)

Back to stories I missed: Naomi Wolf says Harold Bloom felt her up back when she was a student. Camille Paglia (is she still around? and why?) threw a hissy fit about Wolf's years-after-the-event disclosure. The story's here and here andhere and here; Yale responds with a no-response responsehere. And following The Teachout Model, we saw the story here...and here... and here. Like the rest of them, I saw the story first at The Observer, but hey, Mr Teachout says we must give credit where credit's due. Amen.

I also missed the Iris Murdoch story. Elias Canetti had his memoirs embargoed for thirty years after his death; they're out now, and the God-Monster has made unpleasant mention of Murdoch. The Independent quotes this passage: "Then the strangest thing happened as soon as we had kissed. The settee on which I always slept was near. Iris undressed herself swiftly, one might say, as fast as lightning, without my laying a finger upon her, she wore things that had absolutely nothing to do with love, woollen, ugly, but they were piled so swiftly into a heap on the floor, she had already laid herself under the blanket on a settee. There was no time to look at her things or at her. She lay unmoved and unchanged, I hardly noticed that I was inside her, I did not feel that she noticed anything."
But this is so much more revealing of Canetti than of Murdoch, isn't it? He is affronted by her almost absent-minded control of the situation; offended by the fact that she wore normal lingerie (what was he expecting from Iris, the latest in Victoria's Secrets seduction line of innerwear? Come on!); threatened that she lay not just unmoved, but unchanged, by his presumably transformatory lovemaking. She broke every rule of the conventional affair: she refused to play the part of the kittenish woman dying to be seduced, she refused to buy into the myth of the woman whose Underwear Reveals All, she refused to be the passive, seduced, unresisting partner. She took what she wanted from Canetti and moved on; perhaps that's really what offended him, what cut him to the core of his manhood, which sounds like a damp, shrivelled, insecure thing from this account.

Kamila Shamsie has been travelling in India: "It's one of my favourite things in Karachi, the evening sea breeze that transforms a hot day, and to find it in Bombay was like meeting, for the first time, the sibling of someone you love and in that stranger's features encountering utterly beloved expressions."

Seamus Heaney is on my wishlist again.

"Only men learned to read and write Chinese, and bound feet and social strictures confined women to their husband's homes after marriage. So somehow -- scholars are unsure how, or exactly when -- the women of this fertile valley in the southwestern corner of Hunan province developed their own way to communicate. It was a delicate, graceful script handed down from grandmother to granddaughter, from elderly aunt to adolescent niece, from girlfriend to girlfriend -- and never, ever shared with the men and boys.
So was born nushu, or women's script, a single-sex writing system that Chinese scholars believe is the only one of its kind." India has women's songs, women's secret diaries; I'm not sure that we have a secret language for women, though. Anyone willing to enlighten the Babu, please do write in.

On a glowing morning in Edinburgh, one of those days when the light angled into the city and illuminated old and new alike, I heard Colm Toibin reading from a draft of his Henry James book. He read the passage where James is waiting for his play, Guy Domville, to be greeted with applause on its opening night, but instead has to steel himself against the jeers of an audience that judged him and found him wanting. Toibin wrote about how James walked, and walked away, but could never escape that sound. The book's out; the Babu desperately wants a copy.

Ouch. "At times, one feels that Naipaul's editor, Pankaj Mishra, is selecting essays in the way that the Keystone Kops selected banana skins."

"[It] may be all right to utter the worst obscenities on prime-time television, but it is no longer acceptable in British broadcasting to make fun of anyone's religion or any religious figure. If one takes a hard look at this, one is obliged to acknowledge that, while Salman Rushdie may now be free to walk around in Bombay avoiding hostile mud-facials, all those evil, power-hungry mullahs and murderous "community leaders" who led the campaign against The Satanic Verses may have won substantially after all.
And, of course, their victory isn't confined to the British Isles.
For, piggy-backing on that ground-breaking campaign, you have jumped-up little fascists the world over trying out all sorts of cultural land-grab." Ruchir Joshi is in form, people.

The outsourcing thing just moved a step closer to home. Bertelsmann is taking a hard look at Indian publishing.

"Reader's evaluation: Although it displays a solid vocabulary, Mr. Hemingway's essay lacks specific examples and clear topic sentences. Too undeveloped to be good. Grade: 3 out of 6." Mr Shakespeare and Ms Stein didn't fare any better when The Atlantic decided to see how they'd do on SAT scores. You can help rewrite Shakespeare--enter the Princeton Review contest here.

We're going to turn this slot into a regular feature, headlined 'He/ She Got How Much?" Plot summary: "His hero, Tom Ripple, is an insignificant cog in an import/ export company. Married in the early 1970s to an ideologically-minded social worker, he lives near the North Circular road in London and has a paedophile neighbour. His son grows up gay, but marries. The tale ends with the 2000 millennium celebrations." Coda: And Charles Chadwick lived happily ever after with the mandatory huge advance that is now being used to hype It's All Right Now.

Doctor Zhivago returns to Russia, after being out in the cold for 30 years. After a dismal season of book bans in India, it's kind of nice to be able to report the lifting-of-the-ban story for a change.

"These writers who are big followers of the patriarchal system are furious that a woman wrote about sex, they find it very unusual. They think only men can write about women?s bodies and about women...?? Taslima Nasreen is in Delhi. And she's furious. And because the Indian state doesn't at the bottom of its dry little heart believe in freedom of speech and writer's rights, you can't buy her book at the ongoing Delhi Book Fair--it's been banned from the fair, even though it isn't officially banned from the capital. How much sense does that make?

McSweeney's wants your Weird Short Stories. (Personal: This means you, Mag, Indy, Avtar and a certain author who included my name in his list of dedications.)

Cory Doctorow's paper on e-books is worth reading in full, but here's a tiny sample of what he has to say about the difference between e-books and paper-books: "Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file."

* In memoriam: Reetika Vazirani: "[Rita Dove] spoke of her eyes that 'shone out with a clear, invigorating joy' and of her poems 'whose musicality was threaded through with pain and yet, simultaneously, the ironic acknowledgment of pain's passing'. She wondered whether Reetika's artistic perfectionism meant that she 'could not confess, even to her closest friends, the unfinished, unpolished despair that drove her to take leave of us'."


"My poor Saraswati! She now has vandanas sung to her by people who burn books, not read them, who claim to be her bodyguards, but who can see her only in clay and brick, who have never visited her country of knowledge ? a country that does not always shine or make us feel good, but that belongs to every one of us." Githa Hariharan dissects the India Shining campaign.

"The moral of the story, it seems to me as one who has both written and received reviews, is that it is better to leave well enough alone," says Shashi Tharoor in his column for The Hindu. He can't quite do that himself, but being a diplomat, he merely alludes to the "minor literary controversy in the pages of the New York Times, whose editors felt compelled to acknowledge to their readers that the author of what is politely called a 'mixed' review of my recent book Nehru: The Invention of India had himself received a mixed review from me some years earlier for one of his books".

At least Tharoor would never be guilty of the self-review. A glitch on Amazon revealed that some of those readers from St Louis and Alabama were authors, plugging their own books or putting in a good word for friends. Julian Barnes sums it up for me: "I would not do it--probably out of prudence as much as morality."

The Three Wise Gender-Neutral Word. Webster's 1913 dictionary, however, defines magi in fairly gender-specific terms--"any holy men or sages of the East".

* The NYT interviewed Anne Tyler over email. This is about the most interesting part of the exchange:
Could we meet ? for lunch, tea, a conversation?"No, I'm sorry, but thank you for asking."

Joyce's descendant is a party-pooper.

Anuradha Roy's Cooking Women has won the third Outlook-Picador India Non-Fiction Competition. Links to the essay not available just yet, but the Babu raises his hat to Anuradha nevertheless.

Why Authors Don't Like Valentine's Day: "I learnt early that convents exist only in case I proposition someone: one word from me, and women flock to them." Thomas Keneally on that first fine careless rapture. Hari Kunzru had an equally bad time: "My friends rather helpfully made up a little rhyme: "Lisa Chow, you silly cow, have it off with Hari now."

Sara Nelson comments that the Nannies had become the authors from hell. This apparently happens a lot in publishing: "According to a long-time publicist at a major conglomerate, books that are grossly disliked and clearly 'not ready' for publication are released every month, and in the rare event that a substandard book is canceled, the publisher often doesn?t bother to try to recoup whatever portion of the advance it has already paid?unless the author is subsequently successful in placing it elsewhere." It's always good to know that those giant conglomerates are keeping standards up, right?

First it was Roddy Doyle: "Ulysses could have done with a good editor." Now it's Dale Peck: "It took an imagination as literal as Joyce's, a temperament as dogged, an ambition as lacking in nuance, to turn a book as lively as The Odyssey into a stale monument to everything that had so recently failed the world." Anyone else got a hatchet they want to bury in the great man's corpse, join the queue.

Thor Kunkel's Final Stage is about porn films shot by the Nazis; two months before its scheduled release, his publisher took it off the list. The German author reacts: "This is totally ridiculous. It's outrageous. What I've tried to do in my book is modernise one of the darkest chapters in German history. My novel takes place in 1941 when not a single bomb was falling on Germany. It starts at the turning point in the war, when Germany invaded Russia. The book is about the morbid leisure society of the Third Reich. It's not that I'm trying to ignore the Holocaust, it's merely that it's totally pass? as a theme. Who does Fest think he is?"

If you fit this profile, Harlequin thinks you should be reading romantic fiction: "A 46-year-old woman who is (or has been) married, living in an average-income household. She is more likely to be retired/at home than working, if she does work, it is as likely to be part-time as full-time. She is educated to high-school level and watches television channels Seven and Nine. She reads a tabloid paper (if she reads a paper at all) and women?s gossip magazines. She doesn?t use public transport, preferring to travel by car." Right. If you're 45 and you read three newspapers, they'll take your pulp fiction away from you.

"But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people..." (Proverbs) John Powers didn't get quite as Biblical, but he's pretty good on the subject of why we need to stop despising words. And proverbs.

So the buck doesn't stop with call centres. * Reuters is outsourcing journalism jobs to India--just six at present in a pilot project, but this could be the start of a brand-new white-collar sweatshop era. Here's why we're in demand: "'It's a place where you can get people who understand English, understand financial statements, understand journalism and who are educated to a very high standard and eager to do this kind of work,' David Schlesinger, global managing editor of Reuters, said in a telephone interview. They are also relatively inexpensive, he added."
I have very mixed feelings about this. Yes, the Indian media pays its journalists pitiful salaries (don't even ask about the pittances freelancers get) and yes, I know plenty of people who'd grab a Reuters job like it was manna from heaven. But the report also makes it clear that they're coming to India to get the grunt work done cheaper: these blessed few won't be interviewing corporate chieftains or covering the big business stories. More cynically, I expect that foreign media groups who haven't taken a stand on the call centre outsourcing debate will be tempted to take a harder line if their jobs are on the line. Publishing, incidentally, has already experimented with outsourcing in India: that's what Dorling Kindersley was trying to do when it set up a division out here, and it was followed (briefly) by the Encyclopaedia Britannica group.
Call me backward (what the heck, call me Ishmael if you like), but the Babu finds the prospect of being hired as discounted-down, dollar-starved, over-educated labour mildly disquieting. Just how disquieting depends on the difference between the relative size of what an overseas employer considers a pittance versus the actual size of a pittance out here. (Send all howls of dissent to hurreebabu@yahoo.co.uk.)

What's chilling is that this doesn't come from yet another journalist inveighing against the cult of the big advance, but from W W Norton's Robert Weil. "With all of the attention paid to bigness, advances, like sports stars' salaries, have increased exponentially for the lucky few... Indeed, the advances paid for hundreds, if not thousands, of these projects are so extraordinarily large that the publisher is often unable to recoup the advance, much less break even. Thus, publishers gravitate all the more frequently to celebrity books and 'proven' bestselling authors, dead or alive, with huge audiences that can justify the advances that have been paid. The unending cycle results in a pattern of higher write-offs and the inevitable disposal of assets, as evidenced by the carcasses of more than two dozen publishers that have been relegated to literary junkyards."

There were other victims too. "On July 30, 2003, the Wednesday after Mackay?s death, a copy of Jacob?s Ladder dropped through the letterbox of Calder?s Edinburgh flat. With the book was a note. 'This is to let you know I am dead,' it read. 'I committed suicide on my birthday, Saturday 26th, because continuing to live with my lack of talent was really too squalid a burden to be tolerated any longer.' Calder was taken aback by the book. 'It was extraordinary,' he says. 'I have to say I found it un-putdownable. If someone chanced upon this manuscript in 100 years? time and didn?t know what it was, they would reach the conclusion that they were coming across a post-Dostoevskyan work of fiction.'" The book is being published. It should do very well, given what the media likes to call "the hook". (Link via the incomparable Maud Newton.)

Girl, Interrupted: Anyone want to nominate the authors of The Nanny Diaries for the Bulwer-Lytton? This is how the introduction to their second--rejected--novel starts: "In New York City, if you are of any age, denomination, or race, and own a penis, you can say anything that comes into your penis-owning head to anyone, of any age, denomination, or race, who does not own a penis."

There was an old smuggler who lived in a shoe/ He had so many children's books he didn't know what to do/ So he hollowed out their pages again and again/ And stuffed Mother Goose with crack cocaine.

* "But for 14 years, she said, she was a member of one of the country's most secretive and powerful clans, observing its inner workings, its rigid social code, the quarrels among its members and, ultimately, its common front." It kind of helps that her name is Carmen bin Ladin. At least, it kind of explains why the book's a bestseller.

The Bookslut's going mainstream. Read her round-up of graphic novels here.

Thelwell was one of my favourite cartoonists (I discovered him around the same time my parents decided it would be a good idea to give their rotund Bengali offspring riding classes). RIP.

Caryl Phillips on the perils of translation: "My worst experience was with my first German publisher," Phillips said. "The book was called 'The Final Passage'; I really liked the title-- a play on the middle passage-- I was a little perturbed when I was handed the book and there was a parrot on the cover. The book had been renamed 'Leaving a Tropical Island'."

I'm a Gibson groupie, but Pattern Recognition was a bit been there, done that. He's got competition for the Arthur C Clarke, what with Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson also on the shortlist.

"We understand how the secret name works, and that it must and will be treated with respect. Who would not be careful in the face of the Ineffable? Who would invert Pascal's wager, and walk into the Holy of Holies, and utter The Name? Someone, perhaps, but not you or I." David Mamet on the power of names.

What Was The Bard's SAT Math Scores, Again?
Frank Kermode: Looking for problems to talk about in a lecture, I lit upon the duel at the end of Hamlet. Relaying Claudius?s challenge to Hamlet, Osric tells him that the King has
?laid on twelve for nine? (in terms of ?hits?) in favour of Laertes. But nobody (including Arden editor Harold Jenkins, in an extremely long note) seems to have figured out the odds.

Serendipity is one of those words that instinctively makes me flinch. Michael Dirda explains why: "In his closing reflections, Merton laments that serendipity has now become 'little more than a Disneylike expression of pleasure, good feeling, joy, or happiness. For those who have consulted dictionaries for the word, its typical appearance between serenade and serene may bring a sense of tranquility and unruffled repose. In any case, no longer a niche-word filling a semantic gap, the vogue word becomes a vague word.'"

Jared Diamond gave a talk at Princeton University recently. (Link via Emergic.)

Orientalism is dead, long live Occidentalism, somewhat fuzzily defined by Ian Buruma: "Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West, the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder."

The Babu admires the graceful economy with which Ravi Dayal puts the knife in: "Such a complete collection could have been a treasure. Alas, the present volume is shoddily put together. It is too fat and looks ugly and squat and the pages don?t remain open, which makes reading difficult. They have also not been consecutively numbered and, because the text is merely reproduced without any resetting, it is a messy mix of typefaces. The contents? list has no page numbers either, making it difficult to locate anything."

The Babu's feeling lazy today, so here's a smattering of short-shorts until Kitabkhana updates in more detail tomorrow. Enjoy the weekend.
"What a literary parlour game to list your ten favourite novels, and, in great detail, outline their plots, then renew your acquaintance with these to find out how you have scarred, beautified, or mutilated them." Decades ago, Bernard Berenson suggested a version of this game to Ray Bradbury. Now he's inviting us to the board.

You're a Better Analysand Than I Am, Charlie Brown. (Link via Arts & Letters Daily.)

It's in SMS-speak. And it's in French. Two reasons why I'm not going to be queueing up to buy this book.

He's not married to the Mob, he was just using the Gambino gambit.

"The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers,'' Grisham said during an interview with The Associated Press to publicize his 17th book. "They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.'' It's that word "literally". It makes the Babu think of a bunch of retired high school teachers patiently shredding the latest John Grisham bestseller to bits while another bunch, forming a second semi-circle of armchairs, picks up the fragments until they have enough to make fourteen pages of notes. Interesting how Grisham's become the New Messiah Of Lowbrow Lit. Yes, he's more literate (yeah, despite the "literally") than most bestselling writers; yes, there are times when I've looked at the latest on the critically applauded charts and wished I was reading--well, not Grisham, unless Danielle Steele is the only other alternative--something less lyrical and more meaty; but he's no Faulkner. Can we at least agree on that?

Thoughts of Kaye, bodice-rippers and historical novels sent me into the arms of I Allan Sealy. (Figuratively speaking. The Babu is a highly moral Babu, as Babus go.) From The Trotter-Nama, page 561:

How the Raj is done:
I wish to shew how the Raj is done. This is the play of children, good adept, rest easy. You must have the following ingredients. (It matters little if one or another be wanting, nor is the order of essence. Introduce them as you please, and as often.) Let the pot boil of its own.
An elephant, a polo club, a snake, a length of rope, a rajah or a pearl of price (some use both), a silver moon, a dropped glove, a railway junction, some pavilions in the distance, a chota peg, a tent peg, a learned brahmin, a cruel king, a chapati (or chaprasi), a measure of justice, gunpowder (q.v.), equal portions of law and order, a greased cartridge, a tamarind seed or else a cavalry regiment, a moist eye, some high intentions, two pax of Britannica, Glucose biscuits, an ounce of valour, something in the middle, a Victoria Cross, a soupcon of suspense (q.v), a bearer, a dhobi (or dhoti), a chee-chee, a dekchi (or deck-chair), a pinch of dust, a trickle of perspiration, a backdrop with temples or mosques (some use both), a church pew, a little fair play, a boar, some tall grass, a tiger, a rain cloud, a second snake or a mongoose, a flutter of the heart, a sharp sword, a bared ankle, walnut juice or burnt cork (some use both), a boy of British blood unsullied, a locket.

There's another one-million-dollar author out there, she's the Irish PM's daughter, has written a book where even the blurb sucks, and is described as elfin. From the That's-All-You-Need-To-Know department.

Gambit Publications asked readers to submit eye-catching titles for chess books. The finalists include: How to be a Complete Bastard in Chess (John Graham, USA), Chainsaw Massacre Chess (Douglas Ryan, Canada), Thoroughly Dominate your Opponent Until He Starts to Cry, then Checkmate Him (Alexander Allain, USA), Learn Kick*ss Chess (Ari Hyv?rinen, Finland) and the brutal Hardcore Chess: floor your opponent, nail him down and deliver right into the face, mate! (Stefan, Germany). There were gentler titles too. Like Lord of the Kings. And the eminently useful 101 Ideas on Seducing a Grandmaster.

M M Kaye is dead. I still remember reading The Far Pavilions with a blend of incredulity (could anything have been more baroque, more overwritten?) and guilty delight (the bodiceripper had not found India lacking). Her India, despite the Post's generous remarks, consisted of: maharajahs (often evil, scheming and ugly), princesses (usually beautiful, even when evil and scheming), British officers (the Empire at its best and most alluring), retainers (Indian, faithful, disposable) and the scenery (insert burble here).Kaye, who was born in India, venerated Kipling, wrote a series of pretty mediocre 'Death in (fill in Exotic Location)'mystery stories and inspired several wannabe Kayes.
Rebecca Ryman, author of Olivia and Jai and The Veil of Illusion, was one of them--this was apparently the pseudonym adopted by a gently nurtured woman (the Kaye style is catching) who lived in Calcutta until her death a few months ago.
If you're really missing M M Kaye, go see the Far Pavilions Musical, which sounds every bit as syrupy as the original book. Excuse me if I pass. I have an aversion to puking in the aisles.

Wanted: Gameplan for author upgrading from 'Popular' to 'High Literary'. The rest is silence, says Liz Hoggard in The Guardian.

"We drove, and Walcott pointed out the handmade signs dotting the hamlets we passed through. Many of the signs, advertising drink in English and French ('Boissons Coca-Cola!'), had perfectly rendered black faces, some with red lips, floating around the calligraphy.
Walcott said, 'Look at the beauty of that. And then you think of someone like Vidia'--Naipaul--'saying that there is no culture down here. That we are primitive. That we make nothing. Crap! Well, there it is. Take a look.'" The New Yorker hangs out with the poet of the Caribbean.

No. 15 Usher's Island has been restored; I can imagine Miss Kate, Miss Julia, Lily, the caretaker's daughter and Mary Jane joining their hands together in ghostly applause.

Eating People is (tick one): a) right b) wrong c) the shortest route to a book deal. Johnny America speculates on The Diary of Armin Meiwes. If anyone comes across the Armin Cookbook, don't bother sending the Babu the link; he has a sensitive stomach.

No mo' po-mo. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.