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Fighting hard — and losing — the gender discrimination battle in the tech world

For most of her life, Ellen Pao did what you’re supposed to do to succeed. In her new book, “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change,” Pao describes herself as a “dutiful daughter” of immigrants who excelled at Princeton and Harvard, where she picked up law and business degrees, and then headed west for the tech gold rush. Sure, she encountered some creeps along the way, and at times she felt underappreciated. But as she tells it, it wasn’t until landing at blue-chip venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — which she famously, and unsuccessfully, sued for gender discrimination and retaliation — that she began to question whether she had been set up to fail.

“The culture, I began to realize, is designed to keep out people who aren’t white men,” she writes early on in “Reset.” That sort of systemic critique is heretical in Silicon Valley, where wealthy men talk a big game about a meritocracy and transforming the world through technology. Never mind that a 2015 survey of 200 women at tech companies found that 60 percent had experienced sexual harassment, twice the rate of a separate study across industries. As Pao’s book persuasively shows, men in the tech industry love to exalt the notion of “disruption,” but those at her venture capital firm chafed at a woman disturbing their comfort. She paid the price.

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Pao’s book is most astute when it portrays a subtler form of discrimination. Pao writes, “When venture capitalists say — and they do say — ‘We think it’s young white men, ideally Ivy League dropouts, who are the safest bets,’ and then only invest in young white men with Ivy League backgrounds, of course young white men with Ivy League backgrounds are the only ones who make money for them (they are also the only ones who lose money for them, but who’s keeping track of that?)”

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Celeste Ng: By the Book

“I try to read omnivorously, because I never know what’s going to spark a new idea. Often the things that I least expect to seize my imagination end up being the most productive.”

The author of, most recently, “Little Fires Everywhere,” often returns to “The Count of Monte Cristo”: “Right now, I see it as an exploration of the complexities of good and evil and how easily one shifts into the other.”

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What influences your decisions about which books to read? Word of mouth, reviews, a trusted friend?

Friends. Taste is idiosyncratic, so I don’t love everything people recommend me, and I don’t love everything my friends love. But if a friend adores a book or thinks I will, there’s always something in there that’s interesting and worth thinking about and discussing.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

I was reading about life in the Soviet Union, looking for information about samizdat for novel research, and learned that people shared banned music by cutting old X-ray film into circles and making records out of them. They called them “ribs” or “bones.” I’m fascinated by the ways people under repressive regimes still manage to share information — and joy.

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What kinds of books bring you the most reading pleasure these days?

I read with my 6-year-old son every night, and frankly, with the state of the world, it’s a relief to turn to children’s literature. We’ve been enjoying some classics like “The BFG” and some new books like Abby Hanlon’s “Dory Fantasmagory” and Shannon and Dean Hale’s “The Princess in Black” series, which make both of us laugh. And picture books — especially really thoughtful, beautiful ones like Aaron Becker’s “Journey” trilogy, Carson Ellis’s “Du Iz Tak?” and everything by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen — are a balm for the soul. They give me hope for the next generation.

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Asymptote’s Blockbuster Summer Edition

Asymptote’s Summer issue presents new writing from 27 countries. An exciting journey through stories and poems with master story-tellers and contest winners.

Asymptote’s blockbuster Summer edition features new fiction by master story-teller Finalized_Summer_2017_FB_announcementMercè Rodoreda, interviews with Kafka translator Michael Hofmann and 2017 Prix Net Art winner Bogosi Sekhukhuni, as well as the first love poems by Nobel front-runner Ko Un, who poignantly captures the longing of “the world…in want of the world.”

Asymptote also announces — and showcases — the 2017 Close Approximations contest winners, picked from a total of 343 entries by David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu.

Find out which six emerging translators walk away with a total of 3,000 USD in prizes by reading the judges’ citations here.

Watch out for the journals’ fabulous content on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Discover new work from 27 countries + contest winners at http://asymptotejournal.com

 


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Modern Burmese Literature — Its Background in the Independence Movement

FLASHBACK

A look at the history of modern Burmese literature from The Atlantic‘s February 1958 issue.

It was only in the 1920’s, when agitation for independence led to a national awakening, that Burmese classical literature came into the curricula of the schools and Rangoon University, and serious writing in Burmese was supported by the cultural leaders of the country.

We find the earliest examples of literature in the Burmese language in hundreds of inscriptions carved on stone which still survive from the kingdom of Pagan dating back to the eleventh century. Next we have books written on dried palm leaves, such as the Maniratanapum, a fifteenth-century collection of ancient traditions, or Bhikkhu Ratthasara’s Hatthipala Pyo, a long poem based on Jataka stories of the lives of the Buddha.

Nawadegyi and Natshinnaung were our great poets of the Toungoo dynasties, and the pandit Binnyadala has left us an exciting prose chronicle of the long struggle between the Burmese King of Ava and the Mon King of Pegu. Much of our history comes down to us from the Egyins, historical ballads that were sung at the cradle ceremony of a new-born prince or princess. Dramatic literature flourished at the courts of Ava and Shwebo, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, with the themes for poetic plays drawn first from the Jatakas and later, through contact with Siam, from Hindu sources such as the Ramayana.

Our last dynasty had its court at Mandalay (1857-1885) and here were gathered poets, dramatists, and writers of chronicle. Their works were inscribed on heavy paper folios, folded in pleats, called parabaiks, and often were very beautifully illustrated in vivid color. (See Training Elephants, Plate 38 in the art section.) With the British annexation of Burma in 1885 came new forces which were completely to change the patterns of Burmese writing: the printing press and the influence of Western education and literature. Our classical dramas in court style gave way to plays for a less refined audience, and these, in turn, to popular novels based on Western models.

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The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with Keki N Daruwala

 

keki

By Aminah Sheikh

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Why do you write?

I write to express myself, and there is a hell of a lot in me to express.

Tell us about your most recent book or writing project. What were you trying to say or achieve with it?

Am trying to say many things in my book. Firstly what a short story can do and achieve. The title story “Daniell comes to Judgement” is about how fate conspires to deal with a corporate honcho who is trying to exploit a brave girl. The second story about Garima is about a divorce, the wife returning to her mother’s house and after all the dejection, the garden getting watered and suddenly the fragrance from the buried bulbs revives her. And the passages at the end of the story simply have to turn lyrical — language always has to keep pace with the twists and turns of a story. And don’t forget the story “Bars”, based on my experience in the National Commission for Minorities – pastors being arrested for converting a corpse! Hey Prabhu, the Hindutva police under a Hindutva regime in MP can do anything.

Describe your writing aesthetic.

Writing aesthetic. Koi aesthetic vesthetic nahin Madam. Jo dil mein aya likh diya.

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Coming soon from Kitaab: The Librarian by Kavitha Rao

“The Librarian” is a dark, powerful novel that will appeal to everybody who has ever loved a book, or found happiness in a library.

Kitaab Singapore is pleased to announce its upcoming fiction title, The Librarian by Indian author Kavitha Rao. This is her first work of fiction.

The novel is slated to be launched at the Singapore Writers Festival 2017 in November.

Synopsis of the novel

“That was the beginning of my great love affair with the Macmillan, and my journey through the tangled, knotty forest of literature, with Shekhar, that most kindly and yet intimidating of guides.”

Ever since she could read, Vidya Patel realised that she preferred books to humans. Her family disapproves, but Vidya meanders through life with her nose in a book. When she is ten, she visits the Macmillan, a struggling heritage library in Mumbai. It is in the Macmillan that Vidya truly, finally, feels whole.

Vidya befriends Shekhar Raghavan, the brilliant, eccentric librarian, who becomes her mentor. As soon as she is old enough, she joins the library as a junior librarian, and throws herself into keeping the Macmillan going, with consequences she could never have foreseen. She also learns the destructive power of obsession, and what it does to people. Will Vidya be able to save the Macmillan? And at what cost?

“The Librarian” is a dark, powerful novel that will appeal to everybody who has ever loved a book, or found happiness in a library. Continue reading →


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‘There is no language in the world which is pristine and pure.’

Interview with Professor David Shulman, Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of “Tamil: A Biography”. By A.S. PANNEERSELVAN

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His Tamil: A Biography (published by Harvard University Press) has an important but rare trait, rare in the documentation of Indian languages: retaining a critical distance despite the writer’s love for the language. The threat of linguistic hegemony posed by the pan-Indian nature of Sanskrit and the role of Tamil in wresting a space for heterogeneity are political realities. The perch from which Shulman looks at Tamil gives him the space to negotiate this minefield with erudition. Probably, at a deeper level, his peace work in Israel, which exposed the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing the human dimension of the occupation, helps him look at linguistic traditions in an organic manner rather than in political silos generated by colonial and the postcolonial politics.

The Tablet magazine captured well the nature of Shulman’s journey when it wrote: “Scholar David Shulman has made an improbable journey, geographically and academically: from small-town Iowa to Jerusalem, where the Hebrew University professor received the Israel Prize in 2016 for his research on southern India. The rigour in Shulman’s erudition is tempered by a deep pathos and love for his subject.” Shulman is an expert in Hebrew, English, Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam, and has an abiding interest in Carnatic music and in the Kutiyattam dance form.

Excerpts from an interview he gave Frontline.

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Kitaab, Singapore Publishes Literary Selfies edited by Professor A R Kidwai and Dr Sherin Sherwani

An edited volume of articles entitled Literary Selfies: Self Identity in Indian Muslim English Fiction edited by Professor A R Kidwai, Director, UGC Human Resource Development Centre of Aligarh Muslim University and Dr Sherin Sherwani has been published by the reputed Singapore based Kitaab Publishers.

This collection of critical essays on Indian English Writing by Muslim authors published since 1940s is a study of Muslim identity across changing times. As perceived by authors such as Ahmed Ali, Shama Futehally, Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and Attia Hussain, the volume explores their depiction of Indian Muslim life in their times. Continue reading →


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Women I Am: A Poem by Ranjini Rao

Women I Am

Ranjini RaoRanjini Rao is a writer from India and wears many hats: mom, teacher, head-hasher, bibliophile, travel-fanatic. She has had her poetry published in an anthology called Mosaic by Unisun Publications, and has had stories, columns and features out in various publications across the world. She co-authored two books, and many more are in the coming. She runs a food blog called Tadka Pasta with a partner.


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LiterASIAN, North America’s First Asian Literature Festival, Celebrates Asian Canadian Culture, History, Storytelling

On the weekend of September 21, the streets of Chinatown will play host to a literary feast. On the menu is a collection of stories exploring the Canadian experience. Yet this isn’t the stereotypical western spread — attendees will be diving into an often-untold side of Canadian culture and history: the Asian Canadian experience.

LiterASIAN, an annual festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian writing, is the first Asian literature festival in North America. Founded by the late Jim Wong-Chu — his 1986 poetry book, Chinatown Ghosts, was one of the first published by an Asian Canadian — the four day-long festival is packed with panel discussions, workshops, and a variety of book launches from acclaimed writers like Jen Sookfong Lee.

“LiterASIAN is a grassroots festival that celebrates Canadian diversity,” says co-founder and Festival Director Allan Cho. “For a long time, literature has presented the Canadian experience as the British experience. This means that many of us have not seen the other side of Canada. Part of the festival is to showcase unique stories, stories that find their inspiration in Chinatown, Japantown, and Little India. It intends to give a full-bodied Canadian experience.”

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