Using an unconventional, exaggerated and highly subjective style, often when the reporter is part of the story
(Note: The following is a longish excerpt from a short story by the enigmatic great Urdu author Naiyer Masud. I discovered him through गंजीफ़ा और अन्य कहानियाँ. The hindi translations in this collection have been done by Mahesh Verma, Neel Ranjan Verma, Nazar Abbas and Maulana Mashqur Hasan Qadri. A heartfelt thanks to them for [ ]
Primo Levi is a deeply unsettling writer. In the pantheon of Holocaust literature, Primo Levi s voice is uniquely different (not for the obvious reasons). He is unsettling because he doesn t talk about what you think is the actual horror. Amid all this death and devastation and utter despondency, he is talking about the living. Amid [ ]
Work is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, 'for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.
Extract from Primo Levi s book If This Is A Man, from the chapter The Drowned and the Saved. Indeed, we are convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not always positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing. [ ]
I am on a bus, going home. 9 pm, the daily commute. Throat dry, hungry, bitter with the day s indignations. More immediate because Monday. I have not written in a long time. I distinctly feel that I have forgotten to write, how it felt to write. I have frequently been too overwhelmed, or paralyzed to [ ]
Vinod Mehta died today. Was a footnote in the day s news. I feel so very sad and dejected and pulled down under, and I am not even a fan of Mr. Mehta. Just, death, so impersonal, so quick. I finished watching the fourth season of Mad Men. Two scenes. One, Don having a panic attack [ ]
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is a tough book to read. If you are in tune with how Wolfe is talking, on the bus so to say stylistically, one is inclined to be incensed with the sneering tone used. A sneering tone towards a gentle experience they hold dear. Like someone making jokes on stage [ ]
YOU WEREN’T BORN choking on no silver spoon, you know how it goes when you go looking for a job and you need one: You wait in the first indifferent room, ink in the forms, apply in another room with linoleum that’s waxy and squeaks and overhead lights that don’t miss a thing; then there’s [ ]
I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total [ ]
The following discussion is from the Introduction to the otherwise shallow non-fiction book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Pictures are not part of the book) The Author is discussing the 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, the book where the phrase The medium is the message originated. Understanding [ ]