Books

Olivier Lafont, the French actor who played Suhas Tandon in 3 Idiots, launched his epic fantasy novel Warrior with Penguin India in late 2014.

December 4, 2014 · 1 min read

A 2014 conversation with Koral Dasgupta, author of Power of a Common Man — on Shah Rukh Khan’s marketing genius, her research with 2,000 fans, and writing

November 17, 2014 · 3 min read

Koral Dasgupta's Power of a Common Man uses Shah Rukh Khan as a case study in branding and consumer behaviour — an academic, Westland-published look at

November 7, 2014 · 1 min read

The 'Chai, Chat with Books' club reviews Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn's devilish thriller of a marriage gone bad, deceit, and two narrators you can't trust.

October 15, 2013 · 3 min read

Part 3 of a three-part interview with Amish Tripathi: the Upanishads, his favorite books, why Shiva, and the future after the Shiva trilogy.

October 3, 2013 · 3 min read

Summer season was heralded by a hot discussion on the book of the month, ‘Paris Wife’. The book’s theme is the joys, trials and tribulations shared by…

July 10, 2013 · 3 min read

India's women crime writers — Kalpana Swaminathan, Madhulika Liddle, Swati Kaushal — on plotting murders, female detectives, and gender myths in fiction.

April 3, 2013 · 8 min read

A Naperville book club takes on Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning 'The White Tiger' — and splits three ways over its brutal portrait of class and caste.

February 14, 2013 · 4 min read

Our book club’s pick for the month was “Three Weeks with My Brother” by Nicholas Sparks and Micah Sparks. One of the members of the club was going on a…

September 26, 2012 · 4 min read

The 2012 Summer Writing Program in Naperville wraps up on July 26 — with the possibility of year-round lessons, and student work to be published.

July 10, 2012 · 1 min read

Snigdha Nandipati's 2012 Scripps win on 'guetapens' made five straight Indian-American champions — and turned the spelling bee into a study of preparation

May 31, 2012 · 1 min read

A proposal to barcode every human at birth resurfaced in the early 2010s. Privacy, religious, and pragmatic objections killed it — but the anxieties behind

May 23, 2012 · 1 min read

No living writer knows censorship like Salman Rushdie. His decades-long argument: censorship protects the powerful, never the weak — and it has only

May 15, 2012 · 1 min read

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novels map the interior lives of Indian and immigrant women — and much of their power lies in what her characters leave unsaid.

May 9, 2012 · 1 min read

Bill Gates rendered in panels and speech bubbles — an Indian publisher's illustrated biography made the billionaire's story accessible to young readers.

May 1, 2012 · 3 min read

Brain scans show novels light up more than the language centers — fiction trains empathy, simulates experience, and rewires how we understand others.

April 26, 2012 · 1 min read

An Ohio State study found preschoolers whose teachers pointed out letters and words during storybook reading read better one and two years later.

April 17, 2012 · 2 min read

Chatto and Windus published Khushwant Singh’s novel “Train to Pakistan” in 1956. It’s a 181-page novel and is available in both paperback and hardback. It’s…

March 22, 2012 · 3 min read

In 2012 the full Hogwarts castle model — hand-sculpted, 1:24 scale, filmed in every Harry Potter movie — went public at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour.

March 2, 2012 · 1 min read