Amritesh Mukherjee

2 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Amritesh Mukherjee |Ilangovan Rajasekaran |Vaishna Roy

The pope is dead. So is the premise of the Robert Harris novel Conclave, a high-stakes political thriller, dressed in sacred robes: Only, this time, the crisis is spiritual. Pope Francis inherited a church with a hugely tarnished legacy—fundamentalism, sexual abuse—that he had to steer in the right direction. A papacy defined by such moral turbulence was bound to inspire fiction, as it did for Harris. But he’s not the only one.

2 months ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Amritesh Mukherjee |Vaishna Roy

What is originality? Is there even such a thing? Or is all of art a series of new brushstrokes over an already existing painting? Is it the absence of influence or is it the courage to twist tradition into something unrecognisable? Every artist builds upon what came before them. But some do more than inherit. Some break away so completely that they force a new shape into being. Krishna Sobti, born on February 18, 1925, did not write to fit within literature’s long tradition.

Jan 9, 2025 | frontline.thehindu.com | Amritesh Mukherjee |Vaishna Roy

In the summer of 1988, as Salman Rushdie appeared on one talk show after another, striding confidently into the limelight to promote his latest book, TheSatanic Verses, little did he know of the metamorphosis that awaited him. This metamorphosis mirrored the fate of his own protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, who would find themselves transformed after a drop of 29,002 feet from a hijacked jetliner.

Nov 20, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Amritesh Mukherjee |M.C. Childs |Susannah Rand |Catherine Rockwood

“The first words were born in the voices of the first Speakers.” (p. 285)Close your eyes and think. Think of words as living beings. Not the living, breathing entities that can be meek or overbearing as we know them in our minds, but physical, sentient beings with emotions, personalities, and speech. Anxious might trot and stutter at infrequent intervals, fretting about the state of the world and the hiccups she’s been having throughout the week.

Nov 18, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | M.C. Childs |Catherine Rockwood |Amritesh Mukherjee |David Lewis

Content warning:Show warningsSomehow we’re now Harold Lloyd/Jackie Chan, letting go of the minute hand, droppingourselves right onto Magritte’s moving steam locomotive:If we time it just rightI bet we could get it tocatch us,dead on thetailbone. Right betweenthe washout plugsand whistle. Zero-backspin earthunder us, itty bittycloudsall around us. Like this:Like Loading...