Perhaps to build enthusiasm for its annual book festival that took place this past weekend, The LA Times Op-ed section featured a moving ode to books (free registration required) by one Salman Rushdie (tip from Apul).

Books, since we are speaking of books, come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill, and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.

That’s some deep stuff. Walking around the festival yesterday I stumbled across a modest line of people waiting for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to sign her book at the Artwallah table. Artwallah incidentally just released their book Shabash! which they refer to as “the hip guide to all things South Asian in North America.” The highlight of my day was when I made it over to listen to Jared Diamond speak about his book Collapse. Fascinating. Book festivals kick ass. Continue reading →

Defamer, a Los Angeles gossip blog, publishes a reader’s report about an Indian-themed party at Brian Grazer’s house. The celebration was in honor of a new book by Cheryl Howard Crew, the wife of Ron Howard:

The whole affair was abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous with an Indian theme (seems as if the book, which I didn’t take, is about an American girl who travels in India) and beautiful Indian dancers doing their thang all over the backyard. But I did feel bad for the poor catering staff, who were all white girls subjected to the torture of wearing saris and showing off their not-quite-brown stomachs. Thankfully the Grey Goose on tap allowed me to forget all my sympathy. [Defamer]

Crew’s novel, “In the Face of Jinn,” carries the following description:

Two American sisters, Christine and Elizabeth Shepherd, are on a silk-buying trip in India for their business in California. After Elizabeth mysteriously disappears, Christine is compelled to challenge the ineffectual U.S. and Indian bureaucracies and venture alone, with various strangers as guides, to find her sister. Disguised in the traditional female garb of some Islamic cultures, Christine continues her search in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She navigates the mysterious tribes of the Pashtuns, has a dangerous encounter with the Taliban, and learns to fear the “Jinn,” the devils that dominate the superstitions of the people she must understand in order to survive. Inspired by her own extensive travel throughout the region, Cheryl Howard Crew has written an unforgettable story with a strong determined heroine who rises powerfully from the pages of this novel. [St. Martin’s Press]

Don’t know anything about the book, but do have a sincere plea for Ron Howard: Please, please, please don’t let Fox cancel “Arrested Development.” That is all.

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While there’s considerable debate as to whether residents of Los Angeles read books, at the very least, we hold big festivals celebrating them. The tenth incarnation of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books lands later this month on the UCLA campus, and offers tons of signings, readings and discussion panels. Chitra Divakaruni, Pico Iyer and Ved Mehta are among the authors expected to hold court on the following topics:

Saturday, April 23

10:30 AM – The Challenges Facing Latin America: Politics & Art
Moderator: Marjorie Miller. Panelists: Ann Louise Bardach, Pico Iyer, Alvaro Vargas Llosa and Tom Miller.

11:00 AM – Writers in Exile
Moderator: Karen Stabiner. Panelists: Chris Abani, Ved Mehta and Loung Ung.

Sunday, April 24

11:30 AM – Fiction: Searching for Our Ideal Reader
Moderator Paula Woods. Panelists: Elizabeth Berg, Chitra Divakaruni, Janet Fitch and Lisa See.

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Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City,” an account of Bombay’s two-decade transformation, was beaten out yesterday for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction by Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,” an in-depth exposé of the CIA. Mehta’s book was a nominated finalist along with “The Devil’s Highway,” by Luis Alberto Urrea. Winners of the annual prize receive $10,000, and get to emboss a gold seal on the cover of their book. Pulitzers are administered by Columbia University, which gave the award’s highest honor to the Los Angeles Times for its series exposing medical problems and racial injustice at King/Drew Medical Center. A full list of winners is available on the award’s official web site. Past recipients of the prestigious award include Jhumpa Lahiri, David Mamet (I couldn’t resist), and a bunch of other folks. The first South Asian to capture the award was Gobind Behari Lal in 1937, for his coverage of science at Harvard University (via Sreenath Sreenivasan). Yep, we were science geeks even back in the 30s.

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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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Very recently someone asked me where we, the bloggers of Sepia Mutiny, find all our news stories from. How are we so on top of things? I told him that it was a trade secret but that it involved a few dozen well-trained chimpanzees sitting in front of computers in a basement in North Dakota, twenty-four hours a day. If PETA ever found out… You think that’s farfetched? Well, more about that in a moment.

The New York Times reviewed a book this past Sunday titled, THE RISE OF THE INDIAN ROPE TRICK: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History.

When John Elbert Wilkie died in 1934, he was remembered for his 14 years as a controversial director of the Secret Service, during which he acquired a reputation for forgery and skullduggery, and for masterly manipulation of the press. But not a single obituary cited his greatest contribution to the world: Wilkie was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. Not the actual feat, of course; it does not and never did exist. In 1890, Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, fabricated the legend that the world has embraced from that day to this as an ancient feat of Indian street magic.

How did a silly newspaper hoax become a lasting icon of mystery? The answer, Peter Lamont tells us in his wry and thoughtful ”Rise of the Indian Rope Trick,” is that Wilkie’s article appeared at the perfect moment to feed the needs and prejudices of modern Western culture. India was the jewel of the British Empire, and to justify colonial rule, the British had convinced themselves the conquered were superstitious savages who needed white men’s guidance in the form of exploitation, conversion and death. The prime symbol of Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks — as the British imagined — frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner.

When you’re certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool. Indian street magicians have a repertory of earthy, violent tricks designed for performance outdoors — very different from polite Victorian parlor and stage magic. So when well-fed British conquerors saw a starving fakir do a trick they couldn’t fathom, they reasoned thus: We know the natives are too primitive to fool us; therefore, what we are witnessing must be genuine magic.

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SAJA is hosting a remarkable literary festival, an evening of readings in Manhattan.

Those reading include Suketu Mehta, Jhumpa Lahiri, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Kamila Shamsie, Manil Suri and Meena Alexander. Those mingling include Akhil Sharma, Jonathan Franzen, Kiran Desai, Marina Budhos, Pooja Makhijani, Meera Nair the author, and S. Mitra Kalita. Park Slope is apparently emptying out for the evening.

And the wine and samosas are for a good cause: SAJA is putting together fellowships to report the tsunami in-depth well after the initial reports fade.

The idea is to help a group of journalists… from the U.S. and Canada cover the affected areas SIX TO NINE MONTHS after the disaster and have their reporting available to a wide global audience… A New York Times story… explains it all… “All too often when disaster strikes, the relief mission seems to last only as long as the media attention.”

Buy tickets here.

Update: Please note the new schedule, which has been moved up by two hours.