Typing Fast and Sitting Still
Blogging and stillness seem to be contradictory activities: I, along with many others, think of blogging as the relentless and hasty documentation of modern life on the go, news-in-brief for…
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Padma Viswanathan
20 posts
Padma Viswanathan's most recent novel is The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. More at her website: WWW.PADMAVISWANATHAN.COM
The Sound of Passion
Yet another reason to park your child in front of classical music appreciation videos: she’ll be first responder for your next baby! The Sound of Passion.
Reading Lists on Serious Topics From the Back Pages of the Newspaper
Our view of the world is so often sculpted by front page and home page, so here is a look at some long-ongoing crises of self-determination that only occasionally surface…
John Keats, Sleep
John Keats’s tribute to sleep—called, fittingly, “To Sleep”—equates it, winsomely, with death. The poem is an invocation of that state which can be elusive, particularly to those with overactive or…
We Are Each Other’s Spiders
Burnt Shadows is the most admirable new novel I have read in a long time, a work of astonishing naturalism, wisdom, and grace.
A Second Class Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
Hermione Lee’s marvelous biography of Virginia Woolf tells us that Woolf applied the same clear-eyed and unstinting analysis to her father, Leslie Stephen, that she did to most of her…
Padma Viswanathan: The Last Book I Loved, Dancing With Cuba
The most recent book I have loved–a term I apply only to those few books that get a place in my personal canon–was Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing With Cuba. Guillermoprieto’s books…
The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks
It’s a tricky thing, a memoir of a death: you know how it’s going to end. The challenge for the writer (not only with regard to the conclusion) is making…