From the highly acclaimed author of Atlas of Unknowns (“Dazzling . . . One of the most exciting debut novels since Zadie Smith’s White Teeth”—San Francisco Chronicle; “An astonishment of a debut”—Junot Díaz), a bravura collection of short stories set in locales as varied as London, Sierra Leone, and the American Midwest that captures the yearning and dislocation of young men and women around the world.
In “Lion and Panther in London,” a turn-of-the-century Indian wrestler arrives in London desperate to prove himself champion of the world, only to find the city mysteriously absent of challengers. In “Light & Luminous,” a gifted dance instructor falls victim to her own vanity when a student competition allows her a final encore. In “The Scriptological Review: A Last Letter from the Editor,” a young man obsessively studies his father’s handwriting in the hope of making sense of his death. And in the marvelous “What to Do with Henry,” a white woman from Ohio takes in the illegitimate child her husband left behind in Sierra Leone, as well as an orphaned chimpanzee who comes to anchor this strange new family.
With exuberance and compassion, Tania James once again draws us into the lives of damaged, driven, and beautifully complicated characters who quietly strive for human connection.
Archives: Books
Zero to Zenith
Kurian John’s helplessness in the face of his father’s sudden death due to cardiac arrest spurred him on to help those without access to proper medical care, leading to the establishment of the Melam Foundation in 1986. As the number of poor patients who approached him increased, he dealt with the issue of fundraising by creating his own source of income, which resulted in the institution of the Melam Group of Companies in 1992.
Though Kurian John’s spices and curry-powder business began with zero capital-a classic yet unique and innovative example of bootstrapping-it enjoyed spectacular growth and rose to become the largest exporting spice brand in India.
In Zero to Zenith, Kurian John retraces his entrepreneurial journey, detailing how the Melam Foundation has helped innumerable poor patients through a strong network of over 1000 hospitals, and elucidates on the lessons that life taught him and the various business skills he picked up along the way. This heartwarming account of a man with a clear vision-as a businessman and a philanthropist-and a business venture with a difference is sure to instruct and inspire.
Speaking For Myself
This anthology of stories and poems challenges the stereotypical image of women, particularly Asian women, as passive and submissive. While the women in these stories come from diverse cultural backgrounds, their voices give poignant expression to many issues which are common-motherhood, family dynamics, economic deprivation, sexuality-questioning the patriarchal authority under which they lead their lives. Drawing upon the work of over sixty authors-from China, Mongolia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Macau, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and many others-the book offers a filigree of existential concerns and overlapping cultural patterns reflected in the literatures of these nations, transcending political boundaries.
The creativity of the women writers represented in Speaking for Myself poses an alternative image of the Asian woman-strong, innovative and inspiring-and opens possibilities for dialogue across borders through literature.
Mind Warriors:
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is powerful system that enables you to perform more effectively. This book provides business executives, enthusiasts and practitioners with a powerful yet simple set of practices to increase their Emotional Intelligence. Through this powerful approach you will be able to manage your own lives and interact with others better, forging magically meaningful relationships with integrity and excellence to improve your professional and personal lives, quickly!
Written in an easy-to-understand way, Mind Warriors presents NLP exercises and practices as they are taught and practised in the West, lucidly and authentically, with stories, anecdotes and philosophical connectors from both NLP and Eastern philosophy.
Master these techniques today and get ready to make some fabulous and dramatic changes in your life!
Bombay, Meri Jaan
One of the Guardian‘s 10 Best Books set in Mumbai
An invaluable literary guide to the mercurial city of Mumbai
A heady potpourri of ethnic, linguistic and religious subcultures, Bombay, renamed Mumbai after the goddess Mumbadevi, defies definition. But through a remarkable collection of poems and prose pieces by giants of literature, in addition to cartoons, photographs, a song and a Bombay Duck recipe, Bombay, Meri Jaan tries to capture the spirit of this great metropolis.
Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Dilip Chitre, Saadat Hasan Manto, V.S. Naipaul and Khushwant Singh, among others, write about aspects of the city: the high-rise apartments and the slums; camaraderie and isolation in the crowded chawls; bhelpuri on the beach and cricket in the gully; the women’s compartment of a local train; encounter cops who battle the underworld; the jazz culture of the sixties; the monsoon floods; the Shiv Sena; the cinema halls; the sea.
Vibrant, engaging and provocative, this is an anthology as rich and varied as the city it celebrates.
Unheard Voices
The Bhopal gas tragedy, the communal carnage of 1984 and 1989 in Delhi and Bhagalpur, the Orissa super cyclone, among others, are part of collective memory, But, often forgotten are those who actually were affected by thee happenings, and others like them, street children, sex workers, dalits, HIV and leprosy patients, the homeless and the famine-stricken. These are people who in many ways are pushed to the outermost, most hopeless margins of society in the name of development and progress.
In Unheard Voices, civil servant and social activist Harsh Mander draws on his own and his colleagues’ experiences to explore the lives of twenty such people who have survived and coped despite all odds. In Bangalore, for instance, a onetime street child now counsels other such children seeking education and self-employment; in Bhopal, and eleven year-old has brought up two of his siblings after they were orphaned in the gas leak, at great emotional cost. A young sex worker fights for the rights of her HIV positive sister-workers when their ‘home’ in Hyderabad’s red-light area is demolished. A patient combats the stigma of leprosy by helping to establish a leprosy colony in Ashagram. In Tenali, Andhra Pradesh, a blind musician couple struggles to get land from the government to set up a colony for the blind.
Going beyond mere survival, these stories are a testimony of how people have overcome their condition with humbling courage, resilience, and humanism, Marked by understatement and rare warmth, they bring out their determination to seek a better life in the face of enormous suffering. Reaffirming people’s creativity and indomitable spirit, this book challenges all those who despair about India.
Fit To Fight
Crimes against women have increased by 7.1 percent in the last three years.
Child rape cases have increased 336 percent in and in the last 10 years.
Crimes against women are increasing day by day and it can happen to you tomorrow. There is a spine-chilling rape or molestation case in the news almost everyday and many more that we don’t get to hear about but not much seems to have changed about this scenario. So what can you do to prepare and protect yourself? As a woman in today’s unsafe world, you can empower yourself, be alert, get fit, learn self defense techniques, equip yourself with vital information, anything little thing that can get you out of a dangerous situation and save your life.
Vesna Jacob’s Fit to Fight is a timely book that is packed with real life survivor stories, life-saving information, and vital tips that every woman must know. So what are you waiting for, get fit to fight.
Our Story Ends Here
Sarmad was trained as a terrorist to be ruthless, to be fearless and to take away innocent lives. He has caused pain that he can’t undo. For years, he has been living without a heart, without a soul, without her.
Mehar is an army general’s daughter. After losing a loved one she decides to go to the Swat valley with her college friends to revisit the place that holds all her childhood memories.
While Mehar is looking forward to her adventurous trip, Sarmad is working on his upcoming deadly mission.
Unwittingly, their paths cross and they are forced to stay together in the same room for eleven days. Fate brings them together, but destiny has planned something else.
Does their story end here? Or has it just begun?
The Mahabharata
This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations of full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvelously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins-the Pandavas and the Kouravas-but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination.
In this superb and widely acclaimed translation of the complete Mahabharata, Bibek Debroy takes on a great journey with incredible ease. This is the fifth volume in the series.
The Mahabharata
This is the sixth book in the definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation of one of the rare English translations of the full epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins-the Pandavas and the Kouravas-but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination. In this superb and widely acclaimed translation of the complete Mahabharata, Bibek Debroy takes on a great journey with incredible ease.