India, April 19 -- It is a risky business, this genre of literary self-exegesis. Writers, notorious for their evasions, do not always make the best explicators of their own art. Sonia Faleiro's new book How I Write attempts to extract this very clarity from this haze of the creative process. The book is a series of interviews with South Asian writers who, according to Falerio, in their respective ways, are grappling with the business of storytelling in a world increasingly hostile to truth.

The interview is a strange animal. One might call it a kind of cultural taxidermy which holds writers at their most self-conscious and pins them to a board so we may examine their method, their motivations.

This book is made of conversations, but it ...