If there were only one playwright you could study with intent to learn the craft, let it be Tom Stoppard. Characterized by his use of paradox, juxtaposition, reframing, narratives which are disguised philosophical inquiries but carried out with a joyous sense of play; his works display a whole toolkit of authorial tricks in works … Continue reading Tom Stoppard, on his birthday July 3
“Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come”, Franz Kafka. Of Franz … Continue reading Franz Kafka, on his birthday July 3
To Herman Hesse, my first literary love, I shall be eternally grateful for the doors of possibility which he has opened, and which his writing continues to do for others as the tides of history roll on. In my thirteenth year I found his great and classic books, which I read in the order … Continue reading Herman Hesse, on his birthday July 2
History interprets the past, while poetry changes the future; the work of Czeslaw Milosz is nothing less than to guide the adaptation and survival of our humanity in times of catastrophic change. To conserve what has sustained us, to embrace what may renew us as we shape ourselves to the future; his twin arts of … Continue reading Czselaw Milosz, on his birthday June 30
There is no literature without Sartre. One must read the novel Nausea, the play No Exit, the short story The Wall, the philosophical essay Being and Nothingness and its guide To Freedom Condemned, the lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, and his magnificent work of literary scholarship Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. Beyond … Continue reading Jean Paul Sartre, on his birthday June 21
A Suitable Boy is an Indian national epic in the way that the Iliad served the Roman Empire as its origin story; but instead of an ancient oral tradition codified in final form as propaganda by an Imperial government working through teams of scholars, here we have a personal vision of national identity which springs … Continue reading Vikram Seth, on his birthday June 20
Author of surrealist fantasies written with a musical lyricism, the whispers of a strange and subversive dreamtime, his stories highly personalized reshapings of archaic myths, in a free and Joycean prose; championed by Dylan Thomas, influencer of Wole Soyinka and indeed all subsequent anticolonialist literature, Amos Tutuola is a foundational figure of African literature and … Continue reading Amos Tutuola, on his birthday June 20
Midnight’s Children and Independence, Shame and Partition, The Satanic Verses and the founding of an alternate-world Islam (if you don’t like it you can always write your own book- there are endless possible realities to choose from), The Moor’s Last Sigh and modern multiethnic India (my favorite book ever at one time), The Ground … Continue reading Salman Rushdie, on his birthday June 19, 2025 revision
Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski. His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of … Continue reading Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday June 14
Djuna Barnes is Promethean in her rebellion, a thief of the fire of the gods, a figure out of Milton or Blake, wielding her Lacanian vision into character and the human condition like the Eye of Balor, starting fires everywhere she looks, ablating illusions and subliming us her readers into purified figures like the … Continue reading Djuna Barnes, on her birthday June 12
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 