Are writers also performers? Amitav Ghosh doesn't agree. In a recent blog, he argues against this notion: 'Writers and readers have not always stared each other in the face. Until quite recently most writers shrank from the notion of publicly embracing their readership.' He goes on to mention William Gaddis and Coetzee as examples of authors who refuse to read from their works, and suggests that doing readings is largely a twenty-first century phenomenon, 'Through the last century the relationship between readers and writers was largely impersonal.