With the Tiger

Published by ARCADIA, an imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd., in association with Press On.

ISBN: 978 1 921509 57 5

Available from all good bookshops or direct from the publisher at 7 Little Lothian Street North, North Melbourne, Vic 3051

tel: (+61) 03 9329 6963.  fax: (+61) 03 9329 5452

www.scholarly.info

Email: aspic@ozemail.com.au

Watch the 2010 Newsblog for reviews and coverage of this edition.

Published by HarperCollins India 2008

ISBN: 978-81-7223-717-2

http://harpercollins.co.in

How to buy With The Tiger

With The Tiger should be available in all good book shops in India.

HarperCollins India has an ordering service within India. Here is the link:

http://harpercollins.co.in

To order With The Tiger outside India, you could try Indiaplaza.com or firstandsecond.com. Here are the links:

http://www.indiaplaza.com

http://firstandsecond.com

With The Tiger is a contemporary re-writing of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge. It is a social history of the 1980’s and 90’s, and a story of one Westerner’s search for meaning in India. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham, a novel published in 1942, is said to have begun the craze for ‘Spiritual India.’

REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS

“I wanted to follow Maugham closely but set it in a new time and place”

interview in Indian Express/Sunday Pioneer with Swati Pal 8 March 2009

“Maugham’s the word”

interview in The Asian Age with Nawaid Anjum

25 March 2009

“Fast forwarding Mr Maugham”

interview in Bangalore Mirror with Nishanth S Coontoor

7 April 2009

“Spiritual India and other stories”

interview in Sakaal Times with Biswadip Mitra

Monday, April 20th, 2009

REVIEWS

“Through foreign eyes” review in Deccan Herald 10 August 2008

“Walking along the Razor’s Edge … Again“ review in DNA 7 September 2008

“If It Ain’t Broke?“ review in The Statesman 4 January 2009

“Chasing Dreams“ The Tribune 17 August 2008

“Off the shelf” Sahara Times 2 August 2008

12 - 14 January 06

Australian Studies conference Ajmer (Rajastan, India)

Set off on a freezing, dark, pre-dawn Delhi morning to get the train to Ajmer; Australian poet Les Murray and his wife were heading there too in the same compartment. (Thanks to Australian High Commission Delhi for the arrangements.)
I had been to Ajmer in Sept 03 on the occasion of the publication of Neem Dreams. It was great to see (academic) Pradeep Trikha again, to stay at the magnificently located Circuit House again, to attend sessions at Dayanand College again, to see old friends and students and meet others … I gave a talk and a reading somewhere in here, and, as usual in India, enjoyed stimulating conversations and heavenly food. Also staying at Circuit House was brilliant speaker and scholar Professor Pushpesh Pant (JNU), a connoisseur of Indian cuisines as well as literature, whose beautiful book (with Huma Mohsin) “Food Path: Cuisine alng the Grand Trunk Road from Kabul to Kolkata” i bought in Delhi the following week …

Booksource

Kathryn Johnson has her new Booksource website up (www.booksource.com.au).
She is the exclusive distributor for my in-print titles in Australia.
My visit to Writers Workshop Kolkata only strengthened my ideal of keeping works in print and of being able to publish ‘non-commercial’ works. The internet once more makes so much possible…

Dec 2005

Creative Writing Course at Queen Mary College,

Chennai (Madras) India

My old friend Eugenie Pinto is the headmistress here – I wrote about meeting her in “Letter from Madras” published in Australian Author back in … . As a result of our connection, i spent a couple of months as Writer in Residence at Madras University and have revisited this favourite city many times.

In December 05 I spent three weeks teaching daily classes after normal college hours.

Fifteen participants, three of them college teachers of whom two were already practicing writing, and the rest of them students who had never done anything like this. Total dedication. They were an absolute joy.

It was QUITE an experience. I have written about it at length for a forthcoming book … I will post my chapter here (promise).

Nov 2005

Writers Workshop Kolkata (India)

I spent three weeks in the astonishing city of Calutta and met several writers, booksellers and librarians.

And notably, I met Prof P Lal (through a poet he had published); I attened his riveting 303rd and 304th lecture in his series on the Mahabharata which he has also “transcreated” to use his word. (He refers to current newspapers for examples of the Mahabharata’s continuing contemporary relevance.) And I visited him and his wife at his home, from which he has run Writers Workshop for 30 years. The books he produces are beautiful, each covered with hand-spun saree cloth, printed on hand-made paper and their titles inscribed with his own calligraphy. He keeps every book in print, even though they might sell very few copies; big sales is not the point. You can read all about it at the website. I went down to the kiosk and also over to the warehouse to pick out a small selection of the hundreds of books available, many of them enticing; I’m going to order some more online. I think of P. Lal as a kind of ideal publisher… both v old fashioned and way ahead of his time…

From P.Lal’s “Credo”
“Alternative publishing is desperately needed wherever commercial publication rules. WW is not a professional publishing house. It does not print well-known names; it makes names known and well known, and then leaves them in the loving clutches of the so-called “free” market (which can be and is very cut-throat and very expensive). It is not sad, it is obnoxious, to plead, as publishers do, “I will not publish poetry because it does not sell.” Most English book publishing today in boom-time India and outside is book-dumping. There is a nexus between high-profile PR-conscious book publishers, semi-literate booksellers, moribund public and state libraries, poorly informed and nepotistic underlings in charge of book review pages and supplements of most national newspapers and magazines, and biased bulk purchases of near worthless books by bureaucratic institutions set up–believe it or not!–to inform, educate and elevate the reading public.
Because WW goes in for serious creative writing, and because there is no satisfactory distribution network for such writing, its terms of publication are unique. I must be the only publisher in the world who knows when and where every book is sold;…”

go to:
http://www.writersworkshopindia.com/

6-9 November 2005

Beyond Borders conference Melbourne

“Beyond Borders – creative strategies for global harmony”
inaugural conference of the Asia Pacific Writers Network

I went travelling in India for 3 months after attending this, and felt I never had the time to really contemplate all that happened here. But - given my renewed commitment to this blog noting my literary-related activities, and given how wonderful this conference was, I must also belatedly and briefly note its occasion. This meeting was the brainchild of the indomitable berni m janssen, a poet, performer and literary activist who managed to get a mob of writers from Asia, the Pacific and Australia to give papers and readings and discuss many issues of moment to us all – freedom and censorship, translation and access, peace and boundaries, and what we might do in the future. The new website will include many of the papers presented here [will add url when I find it].
APWN is related to PEN :
http://www.pen.org.au
As a non-Indigenous Australian who can write and speak with relative freedom (even while our freedom is under threat) I was reminded of how much writers in far more repressive countries continue to suffer for practicing their calling. I met old friends, I met people whose work I knew or who knew mine, and I met lots of new people. Everyone here was a committed writer also engaged in politics. I am particularly interested in new hybrid identities, cross-cultural expressions and readings. In fact I called for a “mongrel” movement which appealed to some but not all.

Saturday November 5, 2005

Yoga and writing workshop

Held at Victorian Writers Centre
Am WAY late posting this but wanted to note how stimulating it was to give this workshop in Melbourne. All the participants already practiced in both writing and yoga. I prepare this workshop fresh every time, but always start with some yoga asana practice in a sequence designed to bring stillness and awareness, then a writing exercise, then on to various discussions, processes and other exercises. Everyone has lives full of other demands and sometimes, no matter how much commitment and love there is for our practices, both writing and yoga, we need to deepen and renew that, and that’s one of things this workshop is for.
Giving this workshop always deepens my appreciation of yoga and writing as ways to self knowledge and as disciplines that can be related. And there is also the issue of using yoga to balance and correct the misalignment caused by prolonged acts of writing.

Monday, October 31, 2005

New book: sun square moon has arrived

Now that I’ve got a blog I’ve had to decide what to write here. No book reviews, literary journalism, political comment, personal diary, links to cool sites, reports on the culture. Plenty of that already out there. This will only be about my writing and publishing. Naturally I’ll reply to any questions that come up here.

Today, finally, boxes of my new book arrived. I self-published an edition of sun square moon: writings on yoga and writing – this has been ready to publish for over two years. The Indian edition, contracted to Rupa (publisher of my last novel Neem Dreams) has been endlessly delayed. I’ll be selling these through my new distributor Kathryn Johnson, who will offer online ordering as well as supplying bookshops (listed on the site). Am glad for the completion; I expect to do more writing in this area – looking at yoga from a writer’s point of view and at writing from a yoga student’s.

Meanwhile, and relevantly, I’ve been looking at the final edits on a chapter on Self Publishing I wrote for a book on academic publishing. Not that my publishing is academic. I’ll put the piece up on my site after the book is out. Another article I’ve been writing is on the casualisation of academic work in Australian universities.

On Friday I’m off to Melbourne, to give a workshop on yoga and writing at the Victorian Writers Centre. In the following days I’ll be attending the “Beyond Borders – strategies for global harmony meeting” (“an event of the Asia Pacific Writers Network, dedicated to writing, conversations and freedom of speech in the region”).

A week later I fly to Calcutta – my ninth trip to India but the first time to Calcutta. Kolkata, I should say.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

Not crazy any more

Elise is over helping me update my website. She said it was crazy to be a writer and not have a blog. To my astonishment i found myself ready to blog.
I’ve called it after my new book, sun square moon.