I have waited nine years to see VS Naipaul. The last time he was in town, he was fresh from his Nobel win, and I was still star-struck from my introduction to his work in a postcolonial lit class. I bought tickets the day they went on sale. Unfortunately for me, Joe took ill (or so he claimed!) about half an hour before the talk, and I didn’t make it. Lucky for me, Naipaul is a prolific author much sought after on tour, so I did get to see him recently. My latest NRI piece reflects on the talk, and the lack of Indians in the audience. Here’s the intro:
V.S. Naipaul is a small man, rounded in the middle and eloquently spoken. His accent is educated and British, his movements sparing, as if all his energy has been spent on interpreting the world, then presenting it in text. Naipaul, at 78, is an archetypal, intellectual NRI: born in Trinidad, he’s a postcolonial novelist, often writing on some level about the sense of belonging, or lack thereof, felt by NRIs; in 2007, he called on his fellow Trinidadians to let go of Indian and African, and instead embrace Trinidad. He’s been criticized for his pro-Western views, his stance on the “Muslim invasion”, and his arguably neo-apologist comments.
P.S. I once stopped Joe from seeing William Gibson. It’s an old argument we fall into pretty easily, and runs much like this:
Joe: You stopped me from seeing William Gibson!
Me: There was a snow storm!
Joe: It was still on! You said they’d cancel, and they didn’t!
Me: We didn’t have a car, there were no buses, and you’d have literally had to walk up a hill knee deep in snow!
Fairy tale literature, once mostly stock standard retellings of The Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, is moving on. Old fairy tales are still being retold (Book of a Thousand Days), but new ones are constantly being written, too (Once Upon a Marigold). Of course, that leaves dedicated fairy tale readers like me in a bit of bind–there’s so much to read that sometimes the best books get lost in the bookshelf shuffle. Here’s a list of some of the great fairy tale lit you may have missed. Some titles listed are younger than a YA audience, but fun reads all the same. (Have something to add to the list? 
Fairy tales
Last week, 
Young adult fiction is full of phonies. It’s not surprising–after all, the majority of YA is written by authors in their twenties, at the least. And teen vernacular is always changing. Words that were popular a few years ago (“wicked” comes to mind) are dated now, pushed aside as a new crop of words creeps in. But forced coolness and past-their-teen authors are just the tip of the phony iceberg. The true issue, lurking like only a giant, submerged slab of ice can, is style.
Once upon a time, only professional reviewers wrote 
Dystopic fiction is nothing new. According the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used (created of his own free will) by philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1868. Mill used the word in a speech to the British House of Commons, denouncing the Irish Land Act (“What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.”). Since then, dystopias have become a staple in fiction, cycling through literary, science fiction, and fantasy. The current YA dystopic trend may signal the end of of dystopias as a wandering subgenre–perhaps even bringing them into the mainstream.
fiction and fantasy are often looked down upon by “serious readers” and, sadly, some “serious writers”. Dystopic fiction, though, depends on elements common to both: