Bangladeshi feminist writer Taslima Nasreen has been flown out of the Indian city of Calcutta after violent protests by Muslims, calling for her Indian visa to be canceled.
Rioters blocked roads and set cars alight. At least 43 people were hurt. More than 100 arrests were made. Critics say she called for the Koran to be changed to give women greater rights, which she denies. Ms Nasreen fled Bangladesh in the early 1990s after death threats and has spent the last three years in Calcutta after an initial stay in Europe.
Kremlin lament’s growing contempt for literature
The former Soviet Union was once the best-read country in the world, but modern post-communist Russians prefer trashy reality TV and glossy magazines.
This lack of reading has even affected the bedtime story for children. In the 1970s, 80% of parents read aloud to their children. Today the figure is 7%.
Independent publishers rule
According to Alison Walsh of the Irish Independent, Indie publishers are giving the big boys a run for their money. Since they cannot match the financial muscle of the big publishers they are getting books from elsewhere, bypassing the 'gate keepers' (the literary agents?)
Andrew Franklin, publisher at Profile Books, who has had two of the biggest hits of the past few years, Eats, Shoots and Leaves and Why Don't Penguins Feet Freeze? says: "Independent publishers look at things mainstream publishers wouldn't publish. They make some difference to what is being published, but secondly, they publish in a different way: they can be more experimental in how they publish and the audiences they try to reach, just because they are not part of a great big machine that churns out 1,000 books a year."
And one of the biggest successes in recent years has been fiction in translation such as Carlos Ruiz Zafon's In the Shadow of the Wind. Others are like The Life of Pi (two million copies) and The Tenderness of Wolves.
Not bad, yah?
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