In 1958, the Indian writer Yashpal published the first installment of This Is Not that Dawn, an eleven-hundred-page novel and feminist epic written in Hindi. The book presages many of the biggest controversies affecting India today. At Page-Turner, Karan Mahajan reads the novel, explaining why he believes it to be “the greatest long novel about India.” Related: Mythilo G. Rao pays a visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
After the Dawn
On Her 126th Birthday
“Her poems shimmer most when they reflect on the yearning to rebel against the constrained space granted to women’s voices in literature and life.” On her 126th birthday, The Guardian argues that Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s poetry — not her reputation — should be remembered and celebrated. Pair with: an essay on being an uneasy, untamed women writer.
Villain’s Law
Over the weekend, Canada’s National Post ran a book review by our own Michael Bourne, who contributed a piece on Bright Lights, Big City this week. In the review, Michael reads Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle, which he says reaffirms the rule that bad guys are always more interesting.
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That Was How He Was
“The last line of Saul Bellow’s ‘A Single Dish’ is nothing like poetry. I can’t tell you what any single one of those words means. Imagine you’re a lexicographer and you have to define the word that, or how. And on top of this, there’s none of Bellow’s typical play with rhythm and language—it’s almost a non-sentence. And yet, when I get to it in the story, I weep.” Ethan Canin at The Atlantic on how Saul Bellow packs so much emotion into a single sentence. Here are a couple Bellow-related Millions links for your perusing pleasure.
Tuesday New Release Day: Newitz; O’Rourke; Kent; Peery; McDermott
Out this week: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz; Sun in Days by Meghan O’Rourke; The Good People by Hannah Kent; The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs by Janet Peery; and The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Helpful Elves
Fact: 4 percent of books are written by secret government agencies, while a full .5 percent are authored by helpful elves. How do we know? The New Yorker said so.
Karan Mahajan is a *he*
Thanks for that, CP. It’s fixed.