fiction

Fall Fiction

Rajni George

The return of a Latin American literary idol, a Holocaust morality tale, pre-WWI England, stories from the shadowlands, a Victorian saga of closeted lesbians and a gay parallel narrative in seventeenth-century Amsterdam

Small Things for Empathy

asanna

How literary fiction makes one more empathetic and better at reading people

Manufacturing Hope

Devika Bakshi

Lavanya Sankaran’s aptly named first novel The Hope Factory is the latest in formulaic fiction from the Subcontinent

The Hermit

Gunjeet Sra

After years of putting off a lifelong passion, Kishwar Desai finds she must shut herself off from the world in order to write—but the world still seeps into her writing

Blood on the Border

Arindam Mukherjee

A new crop of writers are adapting the the tried-and-tested spy thriller to an Indian context, for an Indian readership, with a familiar villain

The Binge Writer

Devika Bakshi

Madeline Miller can write for 14 hours a day and still maintains she does not deserve to be called a writer. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012

Finding Fact in Fiction

Kalpish Ratna

Real life intrudes on fiction all the time. Kalpish Ratna indulge in some literary detection as they search for clues to the true character of Arthur Conan Doyle in Sherlock Holmes’ life and movements

Death of the Reader

Tabish Khair

Readers who ignore historical silences in fiction by authors like Zadie Smith and Khalid Hosseini are just buying into the feel-good myth of multiculturalism

‘Writing has a Religious Character’

Shaikh Ayaz

Aatish Taseer believes writing is an ‘intense form of concentration’, and when immersed in it, he often feels he can live without friends, family or lovers