Authors

Literature: The Mahabharata; the Yogavasistha; A Passage To India; Midnight’s Children; Hamlet; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

Dogs and horses. I’ve always had a dog, and now have a 5-year-old golden retriever named Kim, after Kipling’s Kim, because he is ‘the little friend of all the world’ and golden retrievers are hopelessly friendly with everyone. I rode Arabian horses all of my adult life until I had double knee replacement surgery in 1996; my horse Babur, whom I broke in as a 3 year old in 1980, lived on until 2009, when he was 32 years old.

Other interests: Old movies; opera [my grandmother was an opera singer]; ballet [I trained as a ballet dancer with George Balanchine until I went to college]; Shakespeare [I write some of the program notes for the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre]; photography [I take a lot of landscapes with my iPhone camera].

I’ve taught at the University of Chicago since 1978; I don’t sleep much, watch old films instead; I spend summers on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, where I do most of my writing.