The Hindu Lit Review

This month's Literary Review from The Hindu is up; highlights include:

An interview with Stephen Greenblatt:
"I am actually quite interested in the range of works from different parts of the world that have now been put in play in literary studies. It is a large world and it is appropriate that there should be many things read and studied. But, there are practical problems in anthology making. The Norton Anthology, for instance, is 6000 pages long and we can't make it longer. The question is, for every Anita Desai, Naipaul or Achebe that we bring in, what is it that we take out? As an editor you have to figure out where the centres of interest might be now. But this is an ongoing problem."

Amitava Kumar on innovation and the Indian novel:
"How is newness to come into the world? In India, didn't all those who found fault with the innovations of, say, Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy, or Raj Kamal Jha — didn't those readers and critics show similar impatience with what was new by finding it gimmicky or overwrought or incoherent? How were the detractors able to separate what is merely show-offish and self-indulgent from that which is unanticipated and truly brilliant?"

Pradeep Sebastian echoes some of my feelings about writing a long-running column on books. There's always the fear that you're repeating yourself:
"An old friend who I had not seen in some time told me he has been reading 'Endpaper' whenever he chances on it, and added as an afterthought, "you seem to be saying the same thing in all of them." Was I really repeating myself? I wondered later."
And there's a sense of privilege at being part of a conversation:
"...Writing about the intellectual life of a reader wasn't some fringe literary subject; that it was long overdue...With "Endpaper", I wanted to speak for book lovers here, and so, apart from writing in a confessional way about my own literary obsessions, I included, from time to time, other book-haunted voices. It has been fun and instructive to look so closely and for so long at this obsession, this gentle madness."