Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

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“Plant one bamboo shoot — cut bamboo for the rest of your life.” This Chinese saying seemed an apt epigraph for this enterprise and the bamboo shoot of the first properly published review that I wrote for the New Review in 1978 has, like the plant does itself, multiplied exponentially. Surveying the totality of my non-fiction writing over the last quarter of a century as it was gathered in for this volume has provoked several reactions: astonishment, curiosity, incredulity. When did I find the time to write these hundreds of thousands of words alongside the main business of my writing life: novels and screenplays?

In any event, here is a judicious selection, perhaps 30 percent of the total, covering six broad subjects: Life, Literature, Art, Africa, Film and Television, and People and Places. The various articles, prefaces, profiles, reviews and introductions amount to a form of intellectual portrait, I suppose. These subjects, and their subdivisions, represent what interests me, infuriates me, obsesses me, fascinates me. It’s one reason why, when the invitation to write comes from an editor, I find it so hard to say “no.”

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