Pankaj Mishra
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Art as Moral Privilege
For the New York Times Bookends column, Rivka Galchen walks us through a deceptively simple poem by Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate a philosophy that supports both the abstract and the moral responsibility of art. She posits that “there is a way in…
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Writing from the Margins into the Universal
Sahota takes it further in “The Year of the Runaways”: “What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare things.” With an eye on…
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The Moral of the Story
At the New York Times, Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra discuss the role of moralism in the novel—and conclude that authors should seek to question and provoke rather than preach: Not only does moral preoccupation corrupt the artfulness of fiction, but…
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Books for Ladies
When an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own…
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Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow, Nobrow
Critics have been locked in debate over the Internet’s effect on cultural production and reception for as long as most millennials can remember, exclamations like “democratized content” and “death of the novel” appearing at every click and turn. In this…
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Do Writers Also Have to Be Protesters?
Pankaj Mishra has always been a politically outspoken writer, so when Mo Yan, who has defended the Chinese government’s censorship, won the Nobel Prize, Mishra was the last person anyone expected to defend him. But he did, asking, “Do we…
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Fiction or Non fiction: That is the question
Is it true that nowadays nonfiction is more relevant than fiction? Pankaj Mishra and Rivka Galchen answer the question and both their answers are dissimilar. Mishra answers, “Even writers working within the old verities of stability and coherence — we…
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From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra
Kaya Genç reviews Pankaj Mishra’s FROM THE RUINS OF EMPIRE today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.