Yours, Exhausted
"The secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he’s written," says Rushdie. And thus "drive him to write another." He should know—in the US alone, he did a 29-city book tour. In comparison, Amitav Ghosh’s recently-concluded seven-city tour should have been a breeze, but wasn’t. A first of sorts—the only other Penguin author so widely trotted out this year was Shobhaa De—the author tour, gruelling though it was, seems to have yielded results: 23,000 copies of Sea of Poppies sold in hardback in the very first month.
Ruling Ink
Indian writers seem to have taken over the $10,000 Man Asian Literary Prize—at least in the longlist. An overwhelming 10 of the 21 longlisted entries are by Indian authors, including Anjum Hasan, whose earlier Lunatic in My Head was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize.
