Thursday, February 10, 2011

What is Kenneth Slawenski reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Kenneth Slawenski, author of J. D. Salinger: A Life.

His entry begins:
The Golden Gandhi Statue from America by Subimal Misra

A crazy old beggar living in a tree rescues a near-dead young woman. Frightened by her disease, her neighbors have exiled her from the village and left her to die. In time, the old man nurtures her back to health – but he demands sex as payment once she is healed. When the villagers discover the girl has been defiled, they kill the crazy old man with “righteous” indignation.

This is one of twelve short stories – parables, really - contained in The Golden Gandhi Statue from America by Subimal Misra. Revered in his homeland, the collection is Misra’s first publication outside of India. His stories are...[read on]
Among the early praise for J. D. Salinger: A Life:
"[A]n invaluable work that sheds fascinating light on the willfully elusive author..."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[Slawenski's] research is remarkable, given the paucity of material on the author available to the public. Still, Slawenski has read everything that can be read and has constructed a surprisingly coherent version of a life that is likely to remain clouded with uncertainty for decades to come.... [T]his biography, by far the most complete so far, will kick Salinger fever into another gear."
--Booklist (starred review)

“A first-rate book which is especially good on the links between Salinger’s fictions and their thematic developments ... The passages on Salinger’s own war show that Slawenski can be an excellent storyteller himself, as he follows his subject through the thick of the horrors from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge.”
--The Daily Telegraph
Visit Kenneth Slawenski's Dead Caulfields website, and read more about J. D. Salinger: A Life at the publisher's website.

Writers Read: Kenneth Slawenski.

--Marshal Zeringue