“We ask our amiable readers to kindly disregard the present, and climb into the boat of imagination, that we may take a little journey across time, unmarred by beginnings and endings.”
—Kalki Krishnamurthy, Ponniyin Selvan Volume 1: Fresh Floods (translated by Pavithra Srinivasan)
Dear Believers, come gather ‘round the flames of the hearth as I spin the adventurous tale of Kalki Krishnamurthy—shamelessly adopting his intimately omniscient tone in order to illuminate his prodigious life and work. Ramaswamy “Kalki” Krishnamurthy was an Indian freedom fighter who was imprisoned three times by the British, a journalist who founded a long-running weekly magazine, and a phenomenally popular author whose serialized historical epic Ponniyin Selvan (1950-1954)is one of the best-selling Tamil novels of all time. For his centenary in 1998, the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu nationalized Kalki’s works, freeing them from copyright restrictions, so they remain continually in print. And in 2022, after decades of doomed film adaptation attempts, director Mani Ratnam brought Ponniyin Selvan to the screen.
The Varieties of Cinematic Experience, March/April 2009 (co-written with Andrea Janes)
Attending a double bill these days is an act of devotion, a genuflection before an eye-patched auteur or blood-spattered genre. These two-barreled day-wasters are now the preserve of repertory houses, but at one time they were everywhere, when the weekly dose of B-movie pulp, newsreel, and high-toned prestige pic was the studio-mandated regulation.
Opera Jawa: The Discover of a Secret Indonesian Musical Masterpiece, March/April 2008
At first I only had a photo of Opera Jawa, a high-res production still of a bejeweled female dancer imprisoned in a cone of billowing gold lace. Ignoring the floral-patterned glitz of the praying statue beside her, she points her fine-tuned eyebrows downward, resigned to the fate that resides just outside of the frame. Agitating my degenerate cinephilia, the uncanny beauty of the image spurred me to mount a shimmering masterpiece in my mind, the brief festival raves crystallizing my obsession with this cinematic coquette, too shy to unspool in New York City theaters.
Review of David Marusek’s Getting To Know You, September 2007
Ensconced in his cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska, David Marusek sweats out the details of the next century. He has published ten of his “everyday science fiction” stories in thirteen years, most of them an elaboration of the world that would make up his sole novel, Counting Heads (2005). It took him a year to deliver “The Wedding Album”(1999), an investigation into the future of memory and the opening salvo of Getting to Know You, a wonderful collection of his short SF work since 1993.
Review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, October 2006 [PRINT ONLY]
In The Road, the title is the story: an unnamed father and son travel south on a state road years after nuclear explosions have ended life as we know it. Pulp material, but ground down to its essence: the search for food. It is Cormac McCarthy’s most lucid novel since Child of God in 1974. Like its darkly comic predecessor, The Road is structured around a series of vignettes, the drama tightly compressed. They walk until they see a house, watch it for signs of life, and enter to search for anything edible. This, with few variations, is the entirety of the book.
R. Emmet Sweeney 