Wrote about RF Kuang's 'Katabasis': more clever than compelling. thewire.in/books/alices...

Great cover: Mohammed Hanif’s forthcoming novel.

The daily news.

The “fashionable turn” toward Thomas Bernhard? How he would have hated that. dirt.fyi/article/2025...

Roddy Doyle, 2025 Booker Prize jury chair, has some gripes.

Ruchir Joshi recommends five of the best historical novels set in India, including Mukul Kesavan’s under-appreciated ‘Looking Through Glass’. fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

Booker Prize judge Chris Power on the shortlisted titles. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

“The almost lost art of phrase-making attracts the scorn of only those who have never made up a stylish phrase in their lives, as if style, somehow, had become taboo, a menace to people, gods,and cars.” - Paul West, ‘In Defence of Purple Prose’

Publishing today. (By Jeremy Nguyen.)

Man writing about a female character: “Her hair seemed to float in slow motion like one of those women in the Breck shampoo commercials.” Editor: “Probably never good to have your heroine remind the hero of a TV commercial.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

The fascinating story of how ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ came to be made 40 years ago, launching the careers of Daniel Day-Lewis, Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears. english.elpais.com/culture/2025...

When Kiran Desai visited India last winter: “I did learn the lesson that when fear enters a nation that’s almost the end of it. And I never thought it would happen in the United States as well.” www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

Douglas Adams would have given him a towel.

Thrilling: a sunken port in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea may be the site of Antony and Cleopatra's tomb. www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

“Interestingly, Homebound was picked as India’s official entry over one of the highest-grossing India movies, Pushpa 2.” How odd that box office success can be seen as a yardstick in this case.

Sigrid Nunez in the TLS.

The New Yorker feels that before you read about Jimmy Kimmel, you should read about 'The Summer I Turned Pretty'.

Some very interesting titles on the Historical Writers' Association's Crown Awards longlists, "celebrating the best in historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, published during 2024–2025". historiamag.com/2025-hwa-cro...

“Modern Western yoga is 19th-century European gymnastics with a sprinkling of orientalist fairy dust. It’s about 120 years old and very different from the meditative yoga practiced in ancient India, although some people like to confuse the two." english.elpais.com/eps/2025-09-...

For "readers looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original": A.E. Stallings reviews Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation. (£) www.the-tls.com/classics/gre...

“If you succeed, you feel like a winner; and if you fail, you feel like a loser. This thinking is functional to a capitalist system that treats human beings as disposable.” @graceblakeley.substack.com on the voice in your head. open.substack.com/pub/gracebla...

Artificial Intelligence: easy to overlook that it's another form of labour exploitation. (From the Hindu.)

By a poet, teacher, and Proust translator. Looks irresistible.

A fitting riposte to those who talk about the death of the book?

Listening to Arundhati Roy read from the opening of her memoir is surprisingly moving. open.spotify.com/episode/6FEY...

Why read? “The evidence, as it stands, doesn’t do much to justify the compelling intuition that imaginative, sophisticated, and creative language exercises make us more sensitive moral agents.” But (maybe): it “can help us improve our health.” english.elpais.com/lifestyle/20...

Goodbye, stranger, it's been nice Hope you'll find your paradise

Art in the age of AI. (From Private Eye.)

Yan Lianke: “I wouldn’t recommend surrendering peaceful nights to sleepless anxiety just for literature.” (Via the Literary Saloon.) www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/bo...

An exhibition that documents the demolition of Delhi’s Kathputli Colony – the “magicians’ ghetto” of Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’.

As Gershwin said, nice work if you can get it. (By Sarah Morrissette.)

Tourism, infrastructure development projects, and power generation activities, combined with a paucity of proper environmental impact assessments, are pushing the Himalayas beyond their ability to cope. (From the Hindu.)

Slightly diminish a book. Finnegans Cake

yeah, resistance to writing

I liked Arundhati Roy’s ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ a lot, but there’s more than a grain of truth in Becca Rothfeld’s Washington Post review: “often feels like two books sutured together: a tender and ambivalent memoir…and a withering polemic about India’s political ills.”

"Arranging them in a hierarchy, we belittle them all." Tim Parks on ranked lists of great books. (£) www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

They're still mining the Harper Lee archives? Just let her be.

Anthropic is ready to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of illegally using their work to train its chatbot. Other AI companies should do the same. www.latimes.com/business/sto...

Interesting interview with Maria Reva, author of the darkly humorous, Booker-longlisted ‘Endling’, on how “romance tours”, endangered snails, and the invasion of Ukraine made their way into her manuscript.

The longlisted titles of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction are always fascinating. This year is no exception. publishingperspectives.com/2025/09/long...

"A hundred years after Dorothy Parker’s pomp, the zingers that she muttered to friends over a Scotch, or tossed off to meet a magazine deadline, continue to circulate." (£) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“The legal and regulatory processes of states are absolutely central to the development and unfolding of capitalism, which is not and has never been about only ‘free markets’”: Jayati Ghosh monthlyreview.org/2025/09/01/p...

Unlike me.

Tanizaki, Dazai, Mishima, Abe, and (sigh) Murakami: Rie Qudan, author of ‘Sympathy Tower Tokyo’, recommends her favourite 20th century Japanese novels. fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

The shortlist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize: many titles “reflect on the fight for empowerment and independence throughout human history.” www.cundillprize.com/news/2025sho...

“Almost all the people who we call 'anti-nationals' are the ones who care.” www.rediff.com/news/special...

Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’