nilanjanaroy.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Watching One Hundred Years of Solitude, spooling the episodes out slowly so as to let the memory of the book return. Many years ago, GGM set conditions for film-makers: the entire book must be filmed, but only one chapter, two minutes long, was to be released each year, for one hundred years.

submitted 77 days ago • 1 comment

Persons of the Year — two whose courage and integrity under extreme loss and horror stood out to me: Gisèle Pélicot, who spoke for so many when she said that "shame must change sides". And Wael al-Dahdouh: "They took revenge on us through our children." www.theguardian.com/world/2024/o...

submitted 79 days ago • 0 comments

🧽 Squeaky Clean by @callummcsorley.bsky.social and ⚫️ Black River by @nilanjanaroy.bsky.social BOTH @thetimes.com Best Paperbacks of 2024! www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

submitted 83 days ago • 0 comments

lovely piece on the threat AI poses to book translation, which doubles as an ode to translators: www.ft.com/content/3dff...

submitted 82 days ago • 11 comments

The good news keeps rolling in! BLACK RIVER by @nilanjanaroy.bsky.social is one of Crime Reads Best Crime Novels of 2024! crimereads.com/the-best-cri...

submitted 81 days ago • 1 comment

When @parodevi.bsky.social writes about chilli cheese toast, best of hot gooey messes. "The sharp chilli bites your tongue, the plump salty cheese caresses it, and so it can go on infinitely, a sweet lick of tomato sauce keeping the excitement fresh." www.mid-day.com/news/opinion...

submitted 84 days ago • 1 comment

Erik Pedersen and I chat about books, reading and crime fiction. For the OC Register and other papers: www.dailynews.com/2024/12/06/b...

submitted 84 days ago • 1 comment

Non-fiction by Indian women writers: Urvashi Butalia, Ghazala Wahab, Neha Dixit and I have a few suggestions. In Namita Bhandare's column: www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/abso...

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

Sharp insights from @rahulabhatia.bsky.social. "By not naming that group, the receiver of the communication was left to take that last step of making the connection. That gives the suggestion of power because making a connection is a proactive act; it comes from you."

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

I hope the Assad regime’s millions of victims find justice, and a divided world can get its act together to help Syrians in what’s certain to be a tough and risky transition 🇸🇾 🇸🇾 🇸🇾

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

A headline for the ages 🇸🇾 🇸🇾 🇸🇾 Syrian rebels seize Damascus and topple Assad dynasty on.ft.com/49oa91X

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

In 12 days I’ll be 71. This was the year I had the courage to publish my novel. It was a strange process, the fiction world, but made easier by @saltpublishing.com who’ve been fantastic. I’m lucky to have had some amazing reviews, ❤️ to everyone who read it and said encouraging things

submitted 84 days ago • 3 comments

A photo I posted of graffiti in Syria in 2014. "One day the war will be over and I will return to my poem" I hope they will return to their poem

submitted 84 days ago • 50 comments

A Bluesky starter pack of major news outlets that have joined the platform, including CNN, The Guardian, Reuters, NPR, Financial Times, WSJ, Wired, and USA Today. [bsky.app]

submitted 86 days ago • 4 comments

As "The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community" begins to appear on shop-fronts in India, here's what Rachel Dwyer, professor emeritus at SOAS University (who taught Gujarati, besides other subjects) said, after she read the book :-)

submitted 86 days ago • 3 comments

Love it when something human breaks through the algorithm. "Sunny and beautiful."

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

"What I hear again and again is a deep longing to be in right relation with the natural world — and the willingness to act on it." www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/b...

submitted 85 days ago • 0 comments

In January, Israeli historian Lee Mordechai released a 124 page report with 1,400 footnotes detailing evidence of Israel’s genocide, which he continues to update. How many of you heard about it? witnessing-the-gaza-war.com/wp-content/u...

submitted 86 days ago • 22 comments

"PEN International documented the cases of 13 writers and poets who have been killed between October and December 2023, marking it as the deadliest conflict for writers in recent history." www.pen-international.org/war-on-write...

submitted 85 days ago • 0 comments

Includes Arundhati Roy, Bisan from Gaza, Gisèle Pelicot, Sally Rooney and other idols. The @financialtimes.com's 25 most influential women of 2024 — free to read.

submitted 86 days ago • 1 comment

The human relationship with writing is so strong, and hard to measure in numbers. The National Mission for Manuscripts estimates that India has ten million manuscripts. That doesn't include lost, destroyed, uncollected manuscripts. All those minds from the past, placing their faith in writing.

submitted 86 days ago • 2 comments

Between the earthquake/tsuanmi scare, the UnitedHealthcare shooting and the South Korea martial law stuff this week, it feels like Bluesky is getting more and more critical mass around breaking events that made Twitter so sticky and useful.

submitted 86 days ago • 342 comments

A year ago, on this day, the IDF targetted and killed Refaat Alareer. A little later, I recorded this poem he wrote which the world knows now. [In the recording, I say it was written on 14th October, 2023, but I later found that he had written it many years ago.]

submitted 86 days ago • 1 comment

Everyone should be sharing this story about the Amnesty International report because yes many of us have long acknowledged that it’s a genocide but there are still people who need the validation of a report from an org like Amnesty to believe it’s true zeteo.com/p/amnesty-co...

submitted 87 days ago • 32 comments

Back to typing with a cat batting at my hands. (Second one is lying across the keyboard. This should be fun... for them, if not your humble writer, and is an accurate answer to the question: "Why haven't you finished the next book?")

submitted 87 days ago • 4 comments

Meanwhile, the AQI in Delhi is a delightful 194 — a mere 120 in some parts of the megacity. It's strange how swiftly your definition of "breathable air" changes after exposure to 999+ levels. It's still toxic soup, but clear soup. How little we ask of our politicians in India.

submitted 87 days ago • 1 comment

Much of my unease about AI comes from being old enough to remember the first stirrings of the Internet. It went from anarchy to group hug central to Ankh-Morpork to a Big Four corporate playground, but it had an organic evolution. Today's AI was born as a product. Marketed, ubiquitous, inescapable.

submitted 87 days ago • 0 comments

Brian Eno on the limits of AI: "I’m intrigued and bored at the same time: I find it quickly becomes quite tedious. I have a sort of inner dissatisfaction when I play with it, a little like the feeling I get from eating a lot of confectionery when I’m hungry." www.bostonreview.net/forum_respon...

submitted 87 days ago • 0 comments

Powerful acceptance speech by Amitav Ghosh: "It is important to note that violence was not incidental to the geopolitical ascendancy of Western empires; it was central to it." erasmusprijs.org/en/laureates...

submitted 93 days ago • 1 comment

You're back! 😍 Congratulations.

submitted 93 days ago • 0 comments

Salvador Dali, pattachitra style, by Bhaskar Chitrakar

submitted 100 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote this story about the migration to Bluesky, what it means and what it tells us about oligarchdom, state actor propaganda, big tech and whether you're the user or the product. Tell me what you think. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-fun...

submitted 95 days ago • 84 comments

Perhaps the biggest shift, aside from a sense of greater safety: the Bird Site became all about likes, followers, clout. Blue Sky feels like it prioritises community, and has conversations baked into the DNA. All credit to the Blue Sky team, who've coped graciously with millions of us newishbies.

submitted 94 days ago • 1 comment

You know what would really disrupt the publishing industry? Fair contracts and decent pay for authors. No AI training without the creator’s consent. Artists and translators on the cover. No NDAs for ghostwriters.

submitted 95 days ago • 40 comments

We want Bluesky to be a great home for journalists, publishers, and creators. Unlike other platforms, we don't de-promote your links. Post all the links you want — Bluesky is a lobby to the open web.

submitted 95 days ago • 513 comments

Cat Chaos Day. One Rosebudded two Zoom meetings. Passively resisted arrest in a Gandhian manner while piteously mewing SOSes. One spent the morning stuffing her pet mice into the gap in the spines of books. (Goodbye, Proust.) And one has executed long slashes across my draft chapter printouts.

submitted 95 days ago • 1 comment

Incredible. The New India is on NYT’s list of 100 notable books of 2024. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

submitted 96 days ago • 0 comments

Goddamn. (And thank you. Completely unexpected. It feels great, and unreal, to see Black River among books I've loved, read, reviewed.)

submitted 96 days ago • 2 comments

For crime and noir fiction readers — a grazing board. A small selection: from hard-hitting, dirty realist rural crime (Hurda, by Atharva Pandit) to Mughal-era detectives (Madhulika Liddle), gritty big city crime (Anita Nair, me) to light-hearted romps (Unmana, Samyukta Bhowmick). #Indianwriting

submitted 99 days ago • 5 comments