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...latest novel available in English, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, is a wry coming-of-age account of a young woman's struggle to carve out a place for herself in the wider world. Set in contemporary Beijing, it peeks into the mind of Fenfang, a plucky dreamer who left her provincial sweet-potato-farming village in south China for the distant capital at the age of 17. Her youth, she tells us in the novel's first lines, began several years and odd jobs after that, when she finally succeeded in parting from her "peasant" mentality and realizing...
...This is a short, spry, slangy novel, but it speaks about the conundrums of identity and individuality with gestures that remain long in the mind. The germ for the story emerged from Guo's first book, published in China when she was just 19. Guo reworked that in English, with the aid of a translation by Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey. Now she has written in English again. Chinese critics may moan, as they have over Ha Jin, about linguistic "betrayal." Let them. Literature is about a place beyond the provincial, and wherever writers like...
...often seemed one of chaos and dissipation. Things don't look much better up close in Rodge Glass' Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, which variously paints him as garrulous, self-centered and a "bloody devious old bastard" to boot. That's probably not the picture Gray had in mind when he agreed to let Glass, his factotum and former student, be his biographer and shouted, "Be my Boswell ... Tell the world of my genius...
...student, sees the turkey in a different light. “The first time I saw the turkey was during my second week of school,” he said. “I’m from California, so seeing a turkey roaming the campus blew my mind. I remember stopping a girl who was a year ahead of me to bring her attention to the fact that there was a turkey a few feet away from us. She looked at me like I was five years old.” To make matters even more confusing, Fredrickson pointed...
Former colleagues and friends also paint a picture of Rajaram as a dedicated family man, a gentle-hearted, friendly and charismatic person unafraid to speak his mind. He was extremely bright, they say, scoring virtually perfect scores on the GMAT and possessing a keen business sense. Yet there was another side to him. Karns, who lived next door to the Rajarams for eight years, says he was a "very high-strung, very intense man, very tightly wound. I would hear things. Our bedrooms were right next to each other." (The master bedrooms of their respective houses are across a fence...