I am an Indian wannabe, I admit it. I long to look in the mirror and see dewy caramel skin, jet black hair, and raven eyes. Instead what I see reflected are the freckles passed on from my Irish ancestors, a petite frame and green eyes from my German grandmother, and perhaps more than your average amount of chutzpah from my paternal Russian-Jewish grandparents. I am quite a sight in a sari.

It’s a malady with me: I regularly fall in love with dead people. Right now, it's Melville. Last year there was Graves and Bulgakov; before that it was Kipling, Ismat Chugtai, Parker and Mohammed Vaikom Basheer. But that’s giving away too much.

My mother temporarily moved into my apartment the other week, quite without warning. She had just rented out our old house. I hesitate to call it our ancestral home because the only ancestry it bears goes back to my parents, who bought the lot in the mid-1970s. Back then it was a bit of a risk, buying property in a suburb way north of Makati, then Manila’s financial and chief commercial district.

In her book Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine, Boston-based food writer, Chitrita Banerji, roams India in a quest for authentic Indian food. REVIEW Deputy Editor Colum Murphy spoke with Ms. Banerji at a book launch at Crosswords bookstore in Kolkata on 12 Feb. 2008.

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." So wrote Virginia Woolf in her groundbreaking 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own." As a single mother and a writer living in South Korea, I would love to tell you, dear reader, how wonderful this essay is line by line. But having neither the time nor the space, I will concentrate on my own journey as a writer and how I came to have a room of my own-indeed an entire house of my own, something very rare for a woman even in today's relatively wealthy South Korea.

Earlier this month, REVIEW deputy editor Colum Murphy spoke with Gothom Arya, secretary-general of Thailands National Reconciliation Commission.