Keshava Guha

Read/Watched/Listened/Ate 7: February 2026

Things I enjoyed and/or found thought provoking, edition 7, featuring @keshavaguha.bsky.social @zonal-marking.bsky.social @soumayakeynes.ft.com

aveekbhattacharya.substack.com/p/readwatche...

Paperback of the week: The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha Against the backdrop of a stifling polluted Delhi, two sets of siblings go to war over family inheritances

Paperback of the week: The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha bit.ly/45mQezw

Publication day (paperback @pantheonbooks.bsky.social):

Matthew Aucoin: "[A]n outsize percentage of classical musicians who write especially well about music are pianists: Charles Rosen, Jeremy Denk, Ethan Iverson, Timo Andres, Vijay Iyer, Jonathan Biss—the list goes on. Might virtuosity at one keyboard translate, somehow, into fluency at the other?"

Julian Barnes · Ouvriers de luxe: Author v. Publisher Gustave Flaubert’s first three novels, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale, were all published by...

Delightful piece in the next LRB by Julian Barnes about Flaubert and his publisher, Michel Lévy: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Keshava Guha Talks Observation, Imagination and Walking in Delhi

Really enjoyed discussing THE TIGER'S SHARE with @jbhattacharjirose.bsky.social on the #TOIBookmark podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/6LIF...

The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem | The Walrus Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it

While this piece makes a number of valuable points, the pernicious focus on "track" is ultimately just another symptom of publishing's structural problem, which is one of a declining ratio. Too many writers, not enough readers.
thewalrus.ca/the-publishi...

(Anthropic, not OpenAI, but the principle still applies).

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Not just (typically) parochial, also a liberal version of birtherism, implying that Nguyen, who arrived in the US at the age of four, *fifty* years ago, isn't a proper American writer.

Funny notion of something "that isn't British or American"..

The Expansion Project by Ben Pester review – surreal workplace satire A father searches for his missing daughter at a business park, only to become a living ghost in a corporate nightmare

I wrote about Ben Pester's THE EXPANSION PROJECT: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

So glad you drew attention to Sanshiro – such a fascinating novel that captures Japan at perhaps its moment of most rapid modernisation.

Tom Crewe · My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s Failure This language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm. Vuong...

on earth we're finally free from pretending this is good writing

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Tom Crewe · My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s Failure This language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm. Vuong...

The reviewer really took one for the team here (via @questingvole.bsky.social) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal review – an ambitious Indian panorama In the first novel from the author of We Move, descendants of a proscribed intercaste marriage are connected across continents and centuries

I wrote about Gurnaik Johal's SARASWATI, and what I call "connection novels", in @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha review – hopeless sons vs brilliant daughters Families are at war in the new India, in a novel raising complex questions about patriotism, nationalism and how the country is changing

The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha review – hopeless sons vs brilliant daughters.

Review of @keshavaguha.bsky.social ‘s novel

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Most debut novels are ho-hum, but this one is gosh-wow A literary star is born: The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst is a dazzling coming-of-age story about a sensitive boy

"With The Boyhood of Cain, a star is born." 📖 ⭐

Me on Michael Amherst's debut novel of exceptional poise and confidence.👇 It has the surface calmness, inner turbulence, understated emotion and muted wit of JM Coetzee, and the most affecting ending I've read in ages.