Sharmistha Jha: The narrator, a 40-something-year-old poet is suddenly faced with the possibility of death. He is isolated because of the 2020 Covid pandemic but art doesn’t leave him – a stanza from a poem, songs or the vision for art. I came to realise only after writing the book that it is structured like nesting dolls of brokenness, that …
On the Shelf Scandalous Women: A Novel of Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann By Gill Paul William Morrow & Co.: 384 pages, $19 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. “They gave women permission to write about sex,” Gill Paul says about Jacqueline Susann and Jackie …
Well, it may be too late in the day to play with dolls but certainly not too late to write about them. In 1997, she had a song dedicated to her, which was being sung shamelessly: “I’m a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world/ Life in plastic, It’s fantastic/ You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere.” Well, this size-zero …
