All posts tagged: book review

The chilling, charming mystery of tradwife Natalie Heller Mills in Yesteryear | Books and Literature News

The chilling, charming mystery of tradwife Natalie Heller Mills in Yesteryear | Books and Literature News

An unflickring yearning for things of the past, a time one had never lived in, can make the premise of Yesteryear, the celebrated new novel by Caro Claire Burke, sound like a dream. Summaries floating about the internet described a social media influencer who suddenly found herself in the 19th century. For the hopeless romantics among us, it was enough that someone in the novel is waking up in the past, in the 1850s no less, when Dickens and the Bronte Sisters were writing their masterpieces and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was beginning to create waves. Never mind that it is a trad-wife, a creation of the internet age, that goes back to the past, it is still the past. But then there is another kind of anticipation for readers who pick up on the subject of that line: a trad wife – a woman who claims to love all that is traditional including the imposed gender roles and the lack of modern tools. She is going to a time when what she has been preaching …

Like a Karan Johar film, Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ is destined for popularity. But its MFA gloss makes exotic what was once your own | Books and Literature News

Like a Karan Johar film, Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ is destined for popularity. But its MFA gloss makes exotic what was once your own | Books and Literature News

Imagine, for a moment, a meeting to plan a TV show or even a film before the age of the Internet in America. Producers, marketing chaps, a writer or two, a director — there are any number of people in the room, deciding what’s relevant and topical. Which combination of screenplay and dialogue, characters and actors, showrunners and directors can appeal to critics and the general viewing audience? How can they break new ground without breaking any at all, challenge the viewer while at the same time pander to them? The answer would end up being something trite: It needs to be The Sopranos meets Baywatch. And from this rather cynical beginning, there may well emerge a work that isn’t great art but art adjacent. Like pickleball, pretending to be a real sport. Megha Majumdar’s second novel is brilliant and clever. After all, Oprah says so. But as Dadu, the loving father, grandfather and Calcutta man to his soul in A Guardian and a Thief, may have thought when he was younger, wittier and just …