Agent Provocateur
Literary agents are the new breed of professionals to infiltrate Indian publishing. The authors love them, as they get them more advance, better visibility and keep pushing the publishers to do events around the book. The publishers can’t stand them, as they are seen as pesky pipsqueaks always demanding more. So when young romance author Nikita Anand jumps ship from Penguin to HarperCollins, the literary agent, Anish Chandy, too plays an important role and is quoted in the press releases along with the author.
Book of Strife
On the lines of Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning White Tiger is a new slim book called The Private Life of Mrs Sharma by Ratika Kapur. On first glance it seems like a simplistic tale about a Delhi housewife, but is a sharply observed story of the various clashes going on in most cities in India, between modernity and tradition, between gender stereotypes, between the new economy. And much like The White Tiger, it has a devastating end.
Terrible Rotation
As reported in Bibliofile earlier, Morissey this year won the bad sex award for his debut book, List of the Lost, for gems like “giggling snowball of full-figured copulation” and “dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation”. Morissey, of course, is enraged. When asked, he hit out: “There are too many good things in life to let these repulsive horrors pull you down”.
