Accidental Blogger
A general interest blog
Category: Books, Authors & Poems
-
"And a flower is crying / Along with the Roma" Reading DUKH / PAIN by Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic – Sukrita Paul Kumar The very title of Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic’s Dukh/Pain draws me as an Indian to this book of poems. The bi-lingual title does not merely suggest a linguistic proximity to Indian languages but much more.…
-
An interesting poem by Maurice Leiter – of life examined and punches pulled. To have lived this long in admiration of children authors of the book of laughter cartographers of the map of solutions whose commentary can always be trustedTo have lived this long in fealty to women without understanding them…
-
"Even though my poems don’t seem to be happy, I think I like to sing." Fady Joudah Fady Joudah is a poet from my neck of the woods. The winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Joudah is not exactly a run-of-the-mill poet. His taxing day job makes his poetic pursuit a true…
-
Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection of short stories "Unaccustomed Earth" left me with the feeling of watching life unfold in slow motion. I felt as though as I was walking through treacle, time slowing down to a crawl as I took a break from reading to venture out on a short shopping expedition. Luckily, the…
-
Via Abhi at Sepia Mutiny, I came across this article in the New York Times. It is funny and refreshing to read an essay in which the choice of books (rather than other trendy habits), figures as the deal maker (or breaker) in a budding romance. Although I didn’t choose my own mate based solely…
-
A few weeks ago, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin was spirited away from Delhi, India to a destination unknown. Controversial and banned in the country of her birth, she was denounced and subject of a fatwa in Bangladesh in 1993, leading to her fleeing to Europe and later India. In the wee hours of Wednesday, exiled…
-
It was my first foray into the ‘Adult’ book section at the British Council Library, a neat white building with a red tiled roof. I walked past the A’s, B’s and stopped at the C’s. There, displayed in a separate group of books was a short story collection titled "The Nine Billion Names of God…
-
Need to burnish the image of a town? Beautification, public amenities, reasonable cost of living etc. go a long way in keeping residents happy and outsiders impressed. So do law and order. Being tough on criminals is a selling point for mayors, district attorneys and the local chambers of commerce. In 1838, Houston, the rag…
-
Apropos of our conversation a few weeks back about hard-boiled fiction, I’m proud to say I have a review of the new Richard Price novel up at the New York Observer. The novel is definitely worth a read if your tastes run to procedurals — even if the new book is a bit disjointed compared…
-
There seems to be a sudden rash of fake memoirs unmasked this last week. Notably, a Holocaust memoir by Misha Defonseca. She apologizes to her readers thus: Now, 11 years after publishing her memoir and almost two decades since she went public with her story, Defonseca has admitted that she is actually Monique De Wael,…
-
"The quietest magnificent book I’ve ever read," says author Jim Harrison on the cover of Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders. Cross Annie Dillard’s incisive observations with Erma Bombeck’s outrageous knack for finding humor at the kitchen table, tone it down, round off the edges and you have something akin to Kooser’s sweet cadence of story telling.…
-
This post contains the writings of Narayan Acharya, a previous contributor and occasional commentator on A.B. who has now acquired the official status of "guest author." Narayan’s reminiscence about S.J. Perelman was in part inspired by a recent humorous piece in McSweeney – Rilke’s Letters To A Young Plumber. He suspects that the McSweeney letters…
-
Dukh – Pain, a book of poetry by Bosnian writer Hedina Sijercic has been brought to my attention by the book’s publisher, Roland Hönsch of Magoria Books. The poems are in Romani. See a preview here along with the English translation of some of the poems. Romani, the language of the Roma or Gypsies, belongs…
-
(Thanks to Ruchira for the idea). Dr. Vandana Shiva , world-renowned ecologist, activist, editor, and author of many books, has been in the limelight recently, appearing in an interview on PBS.
-
I came across this article in the NYTimes, just as I was preparing to write a review of Devra Davis’ recent book "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" and it seemed remarkably apropos of the subject at hand: "We have enormous gaps in our understanding of how these chemicals affect health and the…
Accidental Blogger 