Satisfy the voyeur in you by peeping the literary orgy in Manhattan:

	Pankaj Mishra, in puffy shirt and boho beard, was the absolute star with a hilariously barbed passage from Butter Chicken in Ludhiana.
	Only two of the authors reading were second-gen: Jhumpa Lahiri and Vijay Seshadri, the O.G. ABCD in his 50s who teaches at Sarah Lawrence. ‘Thelma,’ a love poem from The Long Meadow: baritone wit, a thatch of gray hair and vulnerability.
	Read his iconic passage on the Bombay monsoon from Maximum City.
	Spying a courgette in his ex-lover’s hand, Shamsie’s protagonist asked, ‘Is that domesticity or a dildo?’
	Flip-haired, moddish diplomat with the rich tones of a British lord read aloud about book markets in Baghdad.

Anna, Turbanhead, Prashant Kothari and Deepa represented. We left the authors and their groupies at a dimly-lit bar and gorged on tricorner dosas shaped like pirate hats. Over dinner, one moblogger and one guy checking email. Gay racehorses and fowl necrophilia were on the table, and a tipsy mutineer kept yelling, ‘This is so gonna be blogged!’ The wine was free, oh yes, the wine was free.

Update: DesiLit has more.

Earlier we pointed you to Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith’s latest novels, due this fall. Bibliophile Punjabi Boy has tracked down the plot synopses. Whoever bowdlerized these vigorous authors managed to strip most appeal, like film trailers badly cut. Or both authors really are succumbing to that artistic curse– damn you, marital bliss.

Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie): Maximilian Ophuls, former Resistance hero, postwar economics guru, counter-terrorism expert and a popular US Ambassador to India whose tenure was abruptly ended by a scandalous liaison with a dancer, is murdered in his old age on his daughter’s doorstep in Los Angeles – his daughter India, who dislikes her name. ‘She didn’t feel like an India, even if her colour was rich and high and her long hair lustrous and black. She didn’t want to be vast or subcontinental or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World.’ The assassin is Max’s driver, who goes by the name of Shalimar, a handsome Kashmiri man in his forties, a former tightrope-walker and clown in a band of travelling players. Salman Rushdie’s new novel is the story of the dead man, his killer and his daughter; the story of the violent termination of an extraordinary life stretching from Nazi-occupied Strasbourg to Hollywood via India, Kashmir, and many of the world’s most dangerous places. [Amazon UK]

Avoiding Lahiri-itis and Mukherjee syndrome (taking ‘write what you know’ as the Eleventh Commandment), On Beauty will be Smith’s first novel set mainly in America.

On Beauty (Smith): Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn’t like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington, a New England Liberal Arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists… Then Jerome, Howard’s oldest son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly, the two families find themselves… enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. [Smith’s agent]

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