February 2009 - Posts - Bookends

February 2009 - Posts

Second-guessing Dan Brown

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
So reports have it that Dan Brown has finished his first book since The Da Vinci Code . The project had been named, tentatively, The Solomon Key , although that title will probably change. Whatever it's called, it's three years late -- but maybe selling 70 million-plus copies of your last book entitles you to take a year or three off. Here's...

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Outsourcing your novel

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
When I was a (slightly nerdy) young boy surrounded by (slightly nerdy) friends, a popular game, especially for large groups on boring road trips, involved taking it in turns to build a story sentence by sentence. The Internet is perfect for this: It is, after all, essentially a very large group on a very boring road trip. Naturally, then, there have...

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How do you "nationalise" literature?

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Recently, as a part of its budget announcement, the Tamil Nadu state government announced a plan to "nationalise" the works of two writers, Kannadasan and Sundara Ramasamy. The term, in a context so profoundly non-economic, sounded strange; only on further reading did I manage to understand its exact import. The government, in effect, had...

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The "karma-dharma exotica" of Slumdog Millionaire

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
There are all sorts of interesting differences between Slumdog Millionaire and the book that inspired it, Vikas Swarup’s Q and A . This morning, watching the Academy Awards and the little snippets of scenes from the movie, one difference in particular struck me as fascinating. Four years ago, when Q and A was published, I interviewed Swarup for another...

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