Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado, which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, has been widely acclaimed. Charles Foran’s review in the Globe and Mail convinced me to read it, and I must agree with much of…

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A Handful of NOT Reviews, Sorry!

I’d hoped to do another post or two before my trip, but that’s obviously not going to happen, given the list I’m still working my way down. However, it’s important to me to at least…

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The Enchantress of Florence

17 or 18 years ago, in an undergraduate course in Commonwealth Literature (otherwise known as post-colonial lit.), I first read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I’ll admit to finding it a hard slog, at first, densely…

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That Summer in Paris

Fiction-writing often seems to be a ventriloquist’s game, the writingwriter throwing a voice into a narrator with varying degrees of credibility. Perhaps as with ventiloquism, we are swayed to find the act more convincing if…

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Tiger, tiger . . .

Pater’s recent enjoyment of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies guided his choice, in an airport bookstore several weeks ago, of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker-winning, The White Tiger, and I’m so glad that was the case.…

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Copyright

Unless otherwise stated, all words and photographs in this blog are my own. If you wish to use any of them, please give me credit for my work. And it should go without saying, but apparently needs to be said: Do not publish entire posts as your own. I will take the necessary action to stop such theft. Thanks.