Sanjay Sipahimalani

The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story From thunder gods to serpent slayers, scholars are reconstructing myths that vanished millennia ago. How much further can we go—and what might we find?

“If there’s a key to all mythologies, it isn’t buried in vanished languages or ancient ruins; it lies in the basic patterns of how we think, feel, and tell stories.” Riveting piece by Manvir Singh on the imaginative worlds of the earliest storytellers.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Are You Christopher Columbus? I’m India, and I Heard You’re, Like, Obsessed with Me Sorry, new kid, we’re already sitting here. Hang on, are you Christopher Columbus? I’m India. People keep saying you can’t stop talking about me. T...

“Hang on, are you Christopher Columbus? I’m India. People keep saying you can’t stop talking about me. They say you’ve been, like, looking for me? Weird.”

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/are...

Am reading about Marina Corina Machado, and they may as well have given the prize to Trump.

László Krasznahorkai in conversation with George Szirtes. (September 2013.)

www.thewhitereview.org/feature/inte...

What capitalism does to festivals.

The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist The long read: Between 2022 and 2023, as many as 170 rare and valuable editions of Russian classics were stolen from libraries across Europe. Were the thieves merely low-level opportunists, or were bi...

The Pushkin job: unravelling the mystery of the theft of Russian classics from libraries across Europe.

The crimes began after the invasion of Ukraine, with Putin’s speech evoking the “culture and values, experience and traditions of our ancestors”.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

A Palestinian writer would be great, but somehow I don’t see it happening. Happy to be proved wrong!

Intimidating behaviour towards bookshop owners on the rise – BA survey More than half of bookshop owners responding to a survey by the Booksellers Association say they have noticed an increase in intimidating behaviour towards themselves or their staff.

Intimidating behaviour towards bookshop owners on the rise. This is the pathetic world we live in.

www.thebookseller.com/news/intimid...

In Japan, satori sedai, or “enlightened generation”; in China, tang ping, or “lying flat”; in South Korea, geunyang swim, or “just rested”.

Across Asia, a retreat from a system that demands ever more but offers ever less.

www.scmp.com/week-asia/li...

Nobel Prize for Literature prediction: “I’m gonna guess the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh.”

www.the-berliner.com/books/how-to...

Review | To Steven Pinker, human knowledge is just a game In ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...,’ the best-selling cognitive scientist writes about an interesting subject but gets sidetracked by hobbyhorses

"Instead of showing what ideas have to teach us about life, Steven Pinker holds a gun to life’s head and demands it conform to his thought experiments." Becca Rothfeld eviscerates 'When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...'

www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...

If Kiran Desai’s new novel were a mansion, it would be an estate with many wings built in different styles, full of interconnected rooms and hidden passages.

My review, in which I also take a stab at comparing it with Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’.

scroll.in/article/1087...

The Prize announces 2025 shortlist The Baillie Gifford Prize rewards excellence in non-fiction writing, bringing the best in intelligent reflection on the world to new readers.

“Formidable female novelists, ghastly literary men, a faith-shaken poet, eunuchs, pirates, horny wolves, international terrorists.”

The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist.

www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/inside-the-c...

📷: Michael Nichols/National Geographic

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"Wherever, everywhere, anywhere": Jasmine Vojdani
asks Merve Emre, Becca Rothfeld, and other book critics, authors, Substackers and editors how they find the time to read books.

linkst.thecut.com/view/6356a9c...

Hard to believe.

A pleasure to once again surrender to the chiselled -- and sometimes chilling -- elegance of Banville’s prose.

Happy to see Booker-shortlisted Andrew Miller recommend Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’, an early example of a novel in fragments.

Tsitsi Dangarembga: ‘We are never completely free; we have moments of freedom’ The writer and filmmaker from Zimbabwe decries the destruction caused by colonialism in her country, and looks to rebuild an identity that has been shattered

Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga: “we have a system governing the planet that is based on the extraction of value. What makes you think that system is going to respect borders?”

english.elpais.com/eps/2025-09-...

"What if the origins of modern yoga...were based on fabricated histories and lineages, and fascist, white supremacy?" In the Hindu, Sanjukta Sharma reviews Stewart Home's 'Fascist Yoga'.

That’s better than this one, I felt.

Alice’s Adventures in the Nether World are Clever, But Sometimes Too Clever For Their Own Good R.F. Kuang’s latest novel after Yellowface takes the reader down to Hell, which is full of metaphors and shifting landscapes.

Wrote about RF Kuang's 'Katabasis': more clever than compelling.

thewire.in/books/alices...

Great cover: Mohammed Hanif’s forthcoming novel.

The daily news.

Saint Bernhard King of complaints.

The “fashionable turn” toward Thomas Bernhard? How he would have hated that.

dirt.fyi/article/2025...

Roddy Doyle, 2025 Booker Prize jury chair, has some gripes.

Ruchir Joshi recommends five of the best historical novels set in India, including Mukul Kesavan’s under-appreciated ‘Looking Through Glass’.

fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

As a Booker prize judge I helped whittle 153 books down to a shortlist of six. Here’s why you should read them | Chris Power Ben Markovits, David Szalay, Kiran Desai, Andrew Miller, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura’s books will all take you on enthralling journeys

Booker Prize judge Chris Power on the shortlisted titles.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

“The almost lost art of phrase-making attracts the scorn of only those who have never made up a stylish phrase in their lives, as if style, somehow, had become taboo, a menace to people, gods,and cars.”

- Paul West, ‘In Defence of Purple Prose’

Publishing today.

(By Jeremy Nguyen.)