Bibliofile

Come on, guys! Literary celebrityhood doesn’t always lead to writer’s block. Look at Zadie Smith—all the bitching by literary hacks couldn’t stop the 27-year-old from performing a miracle: surviving the hype to write a second book, and that too in less than eighteen months. The buzz is that it’s good, with the London papers declaring, albeit grudgingly, that Zadie’s The Autograph Man, is as good, if not better, than her debut bestseller, White Teeth. So there’s hope yet for all our famous one-book wonders. One of them, at least, is determined to rise above the hype and stun the critics who butchered him. Raj Kamal Jha’s comeback second novel, If You Are Afraid of Heights, will hit the bookstores in the high season in October/November this year.

It doesn’t pay to rubbish your publisher. Poet-columnist C.P. Surendran, after daring to say in bold print what he really thought of Penguin India ceo David Davidar’s debut novel, House of Blue Mangoes, is naturally having qualms about going back to Penguin. He has given his second book, Canaries On The Moon, a collection of 68 poems, to a brand new publishing house called Yeti. Let’s hope this publisher won’t write a novel!