From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify?
Left to right: Avni Doshi and her book, Girl In White Cotton.
“How many times must a performance be repeated before it becomes reality? If a falsehood is enacted enough, does it begin to sound factual? Is a pathway created for lies to become true in the brain? Does the illogical eventually get integrated with the rational?”
Girl in White Cotton (HarperCollins, 2020), a story about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, makes for a somewhat beautiful, disturbing read – evocative stories mingled with love-hate emotions. Born in New Jersey, Doshi is an American novelist of Indian origin currently based in Dubai. Equipped with a BA in Art History from Barnard College, New York, and a Masters in History of Art from University College, London, she went on to win the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2013 and the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia the following year.
Barbara Lane May 3, 2021
Is there any good fiction featuring excellent or even better-than-average parents? OK, once in a while we get an Atticus Finch or Marmee, but, by and large, negligent or even abusive parents are behind many more great stories.
Avni Doshi’s impressively assured first novel, “Burnt Sugar,” opens with this: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” And it’s no wonder. Tara, the mother at the center of the novel, escapes her arranged marriage and highly critical mother-in-law to join an ashram, where she becomes the guru’s lover and completely neglects Antara, her young daughter, to the extent that she “would disappear every day, dripping with milk, leaving me unfed.”
Bay Area Book Festival Begins With A Star-Studded Roster
Bay City News Service
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The seventh annual Bay Area Book Festival, going all virtual for the second year in a row, launched its nine-day run on Saturday and is such a high-wattage affair, attendees may want to consider donning sunglasses to tune in.
The literary luminaries who will be featured include Nobel Prize laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, 2020 National Book Award winner Charles Yu, renowned journalist and China expert Orville Schell, 2020 Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart, Pulitzer Prize winner (and former U.S. poet laureate) Tracy K. Smith and prolific (more than 100 books!) novelist Joyce Carol Oates.