The New Republic

Joseph Anton: A Memoir By Salman Rushdie (Random House, 636 pp., $30)   I. READ MORE >>

Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire By C. A. Bayly (Cambridge University Press, 383 pp., $29.99) Democracy and Its Institutions  By André Béteille (Oxford University Press India, 228 pp., £27.50) I. READ MORE >>

Wowy, zowy, Obama is doing his own thinking on the Middle East and here’s the even worse news: He’s taking advice from Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria. READ MORE >>

Counterfactuals are the inventions of logic or misery. The interest in an altered world is not born of contentment. But when the imagined improvement turns out also to be real—well, here is the most unlikely true story about Jews in modernity that I ever heard. It was told to me many years ago by a Jew, an American judge, who grew up in the Jewish community of Goa, in India. It happened during the partition riots in 1947. He related that rampaging gangs sometimes broke into his family’s house, armed with pistols and axes and torches, and of course with anger. READ MORE >>

Christopher Hitchens writes:  READ MORE >>

People interested in the latest coverage of a truly horrible day in Mumbai (Bombay) should probably visit The Times of India's website. (The New York Times, too, has good, extensive coverage). A group by the name of Deccan Mujahedeen has claimed credit for the attacks, but nothing has been confirmed. READ MORE >>

Campo Santo By W.G. Sebald Translated by Anthea Bell (Random House, 221 pp., $24.95) Unrecounted Poems by W.G. Sebald Lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp Translated by Michael Hamburger (New Directions, 109 pp., $22.95)   I. READ MORE >>

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad By Fareed Zakaria (W.W. Norton, 286 pp., $24.95) I. READ MORE >>

Tax free TO THE EDITORS: READ MORE >>

Half a Life By V.S. Naipaul (Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pp., $24) READ MORE >>