Posts From Author: india

Seriously Questioning…Aatish Taseer

Aatish Taseer is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands and three acclaimed novels: The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize; The Temple-Goers, which was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award; and Noon; and, a new work of nonfiction, The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a contributing writer for The International New York Times and lives in New Delhi and New York. On March 26, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Seeing Blindly, alongside Patrick Radden Keefe, Elizabeth Keenan, Safiya Sinclair, and Greg Wands. We spoke to Aatish ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? We went, my mother and I, to a colony market in South Delhi, and bought Coleridge’s poems. I must have been five, or six. In weak fluctuating light, she read me In Xanadu. It was the purest connection I have ever known with sound as a semantic force in its own right. For years, I knew all the words, and never thought it even slightly important to know what they meant. What is […]
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Comedy = Tragedy + Time: A Chat With Natalie Haynes

You know that bit of clip art your computer used to throw up when you typed in drama? The two classical masks, one happy, one sad? That’s sort of like Natalie Haynes’s career. Not in a bad way, though. Thalia, the Muse of comedy, oversaw her first act — as a hugely successful stand-up (she was the first woman to be nominated for the prestigious Perrier Best Newcomer Award at the Edinburgh Fringe). Now it’s Melpomene’s turn, as the Muse of tragedy, to take over for Act II. The Furies (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), just published in the States, is a clever synthesis of Greek tragic tropes and modern crime fiction, set largely in a pupil referral unit in Edinburgh. (Read my review here.) Her earlier (nonfiction) book The Ancient Guide to Modern Life (Overlook Press, 2011), with its irreverent but perceptive rediscovery of contemporary culture through Greco-Roman eyes, bridged the gap. Natalie was kind enough to drop by the blog for a chat about Sophocles and Mickey Rourke, patricide at school, and the drunks of East Anglia. Charles Arrowsmith: Hi Natalie, thanks for your time. So The Furies is ostensibly a book about what might happen when you mix Greek tragedy with troubled […]
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