Bibliofile

Hanif Kureishi, the author and playwright whose father was born in Madras, speaks of the pangs of boredom and self-loathing he suffered when he first became a full-time writer. In his new book of essays, he writes: "As soon as I began something, I wanted to get to the end of it. I wanted to succeed rather than search. I wanted to be the sort of person who had written books, rather than a person who was merely writing them."

Who says there is no money in writing books in India? The figures are out for Khushwant Singh’s autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice. His publishers, Penguin India and Ravi Dayal, made a record-breaking Rs 22 lakh on the book released early this year. The royalty cheque alone was a whopping Rs 5.5 lakh. And this is only the returns for the first quarter!

Q: What do Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lord Byron, Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allan Poe, A.A. Milne, George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust, Jane Austen, Hans Christian Andersen, Henry Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth have in common? A: They all began their writing careers by self-publishing or, at least, pitched in with some of the cost of publishing.