Subcontinental divide

By Jan Gardner  |  August 12, 2007

Nalini Jones was born in Newport, R.I., to a father from Boston and mother from Bombay (now Mumbai). She grew up in the United States and frequently visited her grandparents in India.

She loved sleeping underneath mosquito netting and playing with the curtains hanging in the doorways of her grandparents' bungalow. Her fascination with India inspired the stories in her debut collection, "What You Call Winter" (Knopf), published this week. The stories take place in Santa Clara, a fictional town in India that, like Jones's grandparents' neighborhood, is largely Catholic. A little girl home alone finds her birthday gift hidden in the closet, a man sees his long-dead father riding a bicycle around town, a woman becomes absorbed in a soap opera called "The Bold and the Beautiful."

Jones, now living in Norwalk, Conn., will read from her collection at 7 p.m. Sept. 13 at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge.

More than 200 writers will gather this week for the storied Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, at Middlebury College. Willa Cather and Robert Frost taught at the conference, founded in 1926, and Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty attended Bread Loaf early in their careers.

Among this year's students is Paul Austin, 52, an emergency-room doctor in North Carolina who is returning for the fifth time. Last year at Bread Loaf, he met an editor from W. W. Norton who offered him a book contract. His collection of nonfiction stories, due out next year, has the working title "Something for the Pain: An ER Doctor's Story."

New York Times reporter John Leland is a student of the 120-foot scroll on which Jack Kerouac typed "On the Road." Later this month, Viking, the publisher of Kerouac's Beat novel, is releasing Leland's book, "Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of 'On the Road' (They're Not What You Think)." Leland details how Viking toned down the sex in "Road" and reports that Lucien Carr's dog chomped on the end of the scroll.

The scroll, valued at $2.43 million, is on display at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, in Lowell, through Oct. 14. It has drawn widespread interest, recently attracting coverage by the Italian, Dutch, and Danish press. The BBC plans to film a marathon reading of the novel beginning on Sept. 5, the date of publication 50 years ago.

The date for a talk at the Boston Public Library by historian Stephen Fox about his new book, "Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama," has been changed to Sept. 13 at 6 p.m. The Alabama destroyed Union ocean shipping and took more prizes than any other raider in naval history.

"New Stories From the South: 2007 -- The Year's Best," edited by Edward P. Jones (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

"Loving Frank," by Nancy Horan (Ballantine)

"The Careful Use of Compliments," by Alexander McCall Smith (Pantheon)

Erik Barnum of Northshire Books in Manchester Center, Vt., recommends "Mister Pip," by Lloyd Jones (Dial): "A lovely and yet harrowing story that will charm and break your heart simultaneously, this brilliant novel is told from the point of view of a young girl whose island home is disrupted by civil war. Into her life comes Mr. Watts, an eccentric and mysterious man who introduces the children of the island to Victorian England through Charles Dickens's novel 'Great Expectations.' "

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.