A look at some books that may be on your future reading lists, and how historians are the public intellectuals of our time
Stuart proffitt, publishing director of Penguin Press in the UK, has commissioned and published some of the biggest authors of recent times: Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Bill Emmott, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Friedman. In India, to “sniff the air” of a market that is growing at 25 per cent annually (“anybody, internationally, has to be interested in what is going on here”), he talks about the era of non-fiction, the currency of ideas and what we can expect from China.

A major trend has been the worldwide popularity of non-fiction writers like Joseph Stiglitz, Alan Greenspan and Thomas Friedman who have articulated the ideas of our time.
I think that as the world becomes more globalised, we are, as a global community, more interested in ideas and more interested in the ideas that travel the world. One of the interesting things is to see the degree to which that is true in Indian publishing and to think about how ideas spread out from India to the world and how much this country absorbs ideas originating in other places. And now these connections are being made all the time. One of the most interesting books which Penguin is publishing this year is Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India, which is being published in November. It is really a book about ideas, an extremely thoughtful book.

What are the new trends in reading that you have spotted? How have they changed?
Certainly, in the UK, there has been an enormous boom in people’s appetite for history. When I came into publishing 25 years ago, the great cultural arbiters of the age were literary critics, Raymond Williams, F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards and their inheritors. Now, it’s very difficult to interest anybody outside academia in literary criticism. I think it may partly have been the influence of the structuralists which turned literary critics in on themselves. Instead, that role of the public intellectual has been taken over by historians and, increasingly, economists. Both those groups of people have worked out ways of addressing the general public in intelligent, but accessible ways. They now appear on television, write books which are popular but at the same time scholarly. And they have something to say which is grounded in their own discipline but is relevant and of interest to the way we live now. One of the ways this manifests itself is in that category of books that I call “books that make you smarter”: Freakonomics, The World is Flat, Blink, The Black Swan. All these books give people a slightly new way of looking at the world. There is also a growing interest in big global thinkers like Amartya Sen.
In terms of fiction, 10 years ago, the rage was for what is patronisingly called “chick-lit”. The writers who have emerged, and prospered from that category are writing really intelligent books that are mostly read by women, but it would be misleading to call them chick-lit. A writer like Elizabeth Noble, for instance. The days when popular fiction was all frippery or for men, guns and action, are… (over). People are demanding more intelligent and thoughtful reading.

... contd.