September 11, 2020
Puritanism, Old and New: In Conversation with Marly Youmans on her New Novel
Marly Youmans, author of several books of poetry and fiction, released her new novel, Charis in the World of Wonders, just as the country was going into pandemic lockdown. I […]
August 14, 2019
The Story the Storytelling Tells: A Note on the Ramayana
Every God has his consort, his corresponding Goddess—so Brahma, the Creator-God, has Saraswati, the Goddess of arts and letters, a match made in heaven, so to speak. Shiva’s consort is […]
April 13, 2019
Review: Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems
Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Poems. Translated by William Radice. Penguin Modern Classics (India), 208 pages. Some writers write different things the same way over and over again. All of Emily […]
March 30, 2019
Review: Kural by Tiruvalluvar
Tiruvalluvar. Kural. Translated and edited with an Introduction by P. S. Sundaram. Penguin Classics India, 1990. 168 pages. The Kural generally goes by the title Tirukural, where the “Tiru” […]
March 25, 2019
On A TALE OF FOUR DERVISHES by Mir Amman
Amman, Mir. A Tale of Four Dervishes. Translated from the Urdu with an Introduction by Mohammed Zakir. Penguin Classics (India), 1994. 158 pages. Continuing my exploration of Penguin India’s […]
March 17, 2019
On The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau
In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau. Translated by Paul E. Losensky and Sunil Sharma Penguin Classics India, 2011. 164 pages. The Introduction to this […]
March 9, 2019
Review: Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra
PATANJALI’S YOGA SUTRA. Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction and Commentary by Shyam Ranganathan. Penguin Classics India, 2008. 319 pages. During a recent visit to the Jaipur Literary […]
January 13, 2017
Goodbye, Marcus Aurelius
Blaming Russia for the outcome of our recent election is, among other things, a way of offloading collective guilt for its result. The same goes for blaming the electoral […]
October 15, 2016
Bob Dylan Won the Nobel Prize [!/?]
Learning of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature this week, I found myself observing, as if from a great distance, the point that the Committee was making (oral and […]
October 8, 2016
Order and Stability
I can’t help but notice the word “instability” getting used, in political writing, to refer to widespread and continued lawlessness, violence, rioting, and so on. A “stable” society is one […]
April 2, 2016
Sound and Sensibility: or, How to Make Some Noise
My old high school French workbook carried the title Son et sens, or something very close to that, while my English textbook, in an odd coincidence, was called Sound and […]
March 3, 2016
Civis Americus Sum
Historical analogies between Ancient Rome and contemporary America never get old for a good reason: The parallels are uncanny, and, however imperfect, are consistently more striking than the divergences. The […]