Akhil Sharma (who visits tomorrow) in a Salon interview this past Sunday:
You’ve said that you want this book to be “useful.” Useful how?
Because the subject matter of this book is so important to me – illness, children in difficulty, the Indian immigrant community – I care a great deal about being able to provide comfort to people who are in a similar situation to the one that I and my family were in.
Bestselling novelist Manil Suri will deliver a powerpoint presentation about the mathematical thinking behind his new novel, The City of Devi (2013), Friday, 8PM, UAlbany Campus Center.
From a Mumbai-based reviewer:
"The highlight of the programme was Suri’s power point presentation (ppt) on his novel. It was definitely the most entertaining ppt I’ve ever sat through in my life, besides being the first one by an author on his novel."
"Suri had included sound effects, cut-outs of faces to represent his characters, and used visual elements such as a maze and a pomegranate to illustrate the various aspects of his novel. The most fascinating dimension of his writing process was the mingling of the literary and the mathematical."
"He had actually plotted the various narrative arcs, only to end up with ‘mathematical proof’ that The City of Devi could not be written. Just as he was ready to give up, his agent/editor wanted to take a look at whatever he’d written till then. He decided to polish the draft one last time before sending it to her. And that’s when he found a way to approach his material afresh, and eventually managed to ‘balance’ the fictional equation."
Read more in DNA India: http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/1792748/report-third-degree-manil-suri-and-the-mystery-of-the-closed-door-book-launch
More on Suri's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/suri_manil13.html
Manil Suri, mathematician and novelist who visits Albany this Friday, is interviewed in the Times Union.
Q: When did you start to write? And did your math colleagues think you were crazy?
A: It began as a hobby, once I started teaching in 1983. I looked around me at all my colleagues busy doing math and nothing else, and decided I needed another dimension in my life. So I started writing — purely as a hobby — maybe a story or so every year. I kept it a secret. I wanted to be taken seriously as a mathematician, get tenure. I even drove all the way to Washington, D.C., to attend writing groups so nobody would know what I was doing.
Read more of Elizabeth Floyd Mair's interview here: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Math-figures-into-The-City-of-Devi-4427739.php
Read more about Suri's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/suri_manil13.html
Introductory Remarks for Jospeh Lelyveld, Written and delivered by Tara Needham April 3, 2012, Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, University at Albany.
In a New Yorker review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (2011), by Joseph Lelyveld (who visits today), Pankaj Mishra says:
"Mohandas Gandhi was the twentieth century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics. But was he also its most spectacular political failure? The possibility is usually overshadowed by his immense and immensely elastic appeal.... And yet the Indian leader failed to achieve his most important aims, and was widely disliked and resented during his lifetime." Read more.
Here's an exerpt from Great Soul, Joseph Lelyveld's bestselling new biography of Gandhi, which he presents tomorrow at the New York State Writers Institute:
Prologue: An Unwelcome Visitor
"It was a brief only a briefless lawyer might have accepted. Mohandas Gandhi landed in South Africa as an untested, unknown twenty-three- year-old law clerk brought over from Bombay, where his effort to launch a legal career had been stalled for more than a year. His stay in the country was expected to be temporary, a year at most. Instead, a full twenty-one years elapsed before he made his final departure on July 14, 1914. By then, he was forty-four, a seasoned politician and negotiator, recently leader of a mass movement, author of a doctrine for such struggles, a pithy and prolific political pamphleteer, and more-a self-taught evangelist on matters spiritual, nutritional, even medical. That's to say, he was well on his way to becoming the Gandhi India would come to revere and, sporadically, follow."
More on the Powell's Books website.
Joseph Lelyveld, who visits the Writers Institute this coming Tuesday, April 3rd, talks about his new biography of Gandhi this week in a video interview on the New York Times blog "India Ink."
Gandhi was “a tough nut to crack,” Mr. Lelyveld said.
“I thought the book might be controversial because here is a foreigner lecturing Indians on what Gandhi might have meant for India, and telling them that India had disappointed the father of the nation,” he said.
Read more on the New York Times "India Ink" blog and watch the video clip.
Joseph Lelyveld, former editor of the New York Times, visits April 3rd to present the paperback edition of his new biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. The book caused a firestorm of controversy in India last year, and was banned in Gandhi's home state of Gujarat.
NPR's Bilal Qureshi discussed the controversy in March 2011:
"Sir Ben Kingsley in a universally acclaimed bio-epic? Definitely not this time around."
"Joseph Lelyveld's new biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India hasn't even hit bookstores in India, but it has already unleashed a firestorm of controversy."
"The state of Gujarat, where the icon of the Indian Independence movement was born, has already banned the book. There are some Indian leaders now calling for a national boycott of Great Soul, the latest work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who once covered India for The New York Times." More.
Teju Cole, who visits 2/10, talks with India Realtime about why photography beats literature:
"I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it’s because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph – luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.
In the case of literature, so much of what’s on the page is you really making an effort to put it there. So people can give you the credit for what you’ve written down and praise you for writing that sentence.
But in the case of photography, although it also takes a lot of preparation and work, it can give the illusion of chance, of magic: How did you make it happen? How did you happen to be there? And maybe that’s a reaction I’m much more at home with."
More.
Featured photo is from Teju Cole's website. See more of his work on Flickr.
From the WSJ's Scene Asia, Jan. 18:
"[The Jaipur Literature Festival] attracts rising stars as well. Teju Cole, whose debut novel Open City found its way onto many critics’ best-of-2011 lists, sees the festival as a way to meet readers and inspire new ones. “You turn up to a city that you’ve never been to before, sometimes a town, and if it’s a well-organized festival, there’s an auditorium full of people, many of whom have actually read your book,” says Mr. Cole. “You are out there advocating for your work, in a sense advocating your vision of the world, in a very direct way.”
“I find that quite enjoyable,” he says. “I am participating in the life of my book.” More.
Teju Cole visits Albany February 10th.
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