Dear Colleagues and Fellow Writers from Around the World, After a quick update on the cover for my next book, My Saddest Pleasures, I’ll provide my take on the growing cost of war and what we can do about it in Culture Watch. What We’re Reading and Why will be a twofer— with a recent article How Scammers Impact Writers as well as the latest book I reviewed and then What Others Are Saying, plus an updated Calendar. While we wait for the Library of Congress Number for Peace Corps Writers to begin publishing my book, here’s the first draft […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: May 2026
Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents by Paul Theroux, Reviewed by Mark D. Walker
One of the joys of reviewing books is getting to know fellow writers, which is why I selected this book, as I admire both writers. Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow is one of the most intimate, unsettling, and revealing portraits of a literary friendship. It is a study in mentorship, ambition, ego, and the corrosive effects of genius on human relationships. The book traces Theroux’s thirty‑one‑year relationship with V. S. Naipaul—beginning in a University in Kampala in the mid‑1960s, when Theroux was a young Peace Corps teacher, and Naipaul was already a rising star—and follows its evolution through admiration, dependence, […]
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