The Pulse of Our Times is a rigourous selection from more than four hundred poems published over fifteen years in the leading newspapers and journals of the country. Wit, satire and humour are their defining features. These pieces give a synoptic overview of the socio – political scene of the country today. The subjects are treated here with subtle irony and humour. Beside satirical pieces, the collection has heart – warming poems of love and on personal relations, as also peoms of inspiration and about people who have made a mark and won our love and admiration: I stand up sky – high and salute the human spirit. Its limitlessness, its might, its grit, The mind of man I sing As I salute Stephen Hawking.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Cross Your Heart, Take My Name: Take a plunge into Romantic Suspense, a Must Read Thriller & Mystery by Novoneel Chakraborty
Garv Roy Gill and Yahvi Kothari meet at an airport lounge by chance. Six months later they find themselves consumed by the proverbial once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. Bored with their mundane daily routine, their adventurous streak makes them decide, one day, to escape the present and begin a new reality somewhere far, far away. Just that the day they are supposed to meet and escape, Yahvi doesn’t turn up. Then she doesn’t respond to Garv’s phone calls or messages. And mysteriously Yahvi vanishes altogether.
Days later, as a grieving Garv stumbles upon her Instagram profile, which he didn’t know existed, he is shocked to realize that her every post is probably a clue to the truth behind her disappearance. Except, the more he unearths the meandering truth, the more he learns about a certain side of Yahvi which changes the way he saw her. And the way he understood love.
Cross Your Heart, Take My Name is a beguiling tale about urban loneliness, fickle relationships and our need for companionship as depicted by the twisted journey of two individuals, caught up in their own emotional plight, blurring the lines between crime and sin.
Don’t Look Down
Alia may be turning eighteen, but (epic birthday parties aside) age is just a number to her now. Now that she’s been Changed, she knows no hunger, needs no sleep and has no human limitations. But it’s now that she’s trying desperately to hold on to her humanity. And the people she loves. When a haunting darkness returns to the family villa she is forced to confront old ghosts, chilling secrets and ultimately-herself. Everything has a price, after all and by striking a deal with the devil, you risk giving up the one thing you were never meant to lose. This poignant and unputdownable sequel to I See You reveals that of all the demons we face, the most terrifying are the ones we own.
Upendranath Ashk Ki Sarvshreshth Kahaniyan
The forage cutting machine is the story of the Partition of India. Sardaar Lahna Singh went to Pakistan from his village, capture a house of a person and he puts forage cutting machine as her wealth. Then what does his fortune?
Malavi the heroine of Gokhuru loves her own gold gokhuru. But what happened that Malavi donated the newly weds of poor panditine in the darkness of Gokhuru. Similarly, this compilation of 15 best stories with variety of topics and skills is a collectible book to seriously understand the heart of Premchand post fiction.
The Magicians of Madh (Meandering Magicians Series Book I)
Something strange is afoot at the Royal Academy of Science, Magic and the Arts …
A standing statue sits down with a meditative smile …
A demigod is caught smuggling the Nectar of Immortality into the Mortal Realm …
Traders in Madh find their goods have been turned into djinn gold …
An illegal portal into the Inter-Realm has opened and no one knows who has done it …
A strange creature has been sighted in the vaults under the Academy …
Will Meenakshi and Kalban be able to get to the bottom of it all before the creature in the vault gets too powerful to control? Or is this a cover for something much more sinister-something that will destroy the city of Madh?
Singing in the Dark
“The range and depth of this amazing anthology convey the conflicted and conflicting emotions of our times. It provides the consolations of poetry and the solace of art as balm to troubled souls.” NAMITA GOKHALE, author, and director, Jaipur Literature Festival
“…Although it may seem that devoting poetic energy to an invisible enemy that is pushing the world towards a terrifying future is too closely tied to social duty, the truth is entirely different: it is not death that the poets are celebrating, it is life.” EVALD FLISAR, Slovenian author and playwright
While the benumbed world is struggling to combat the apocalyptic devastation it has wreaked, a choral spectrum of poetry has emerged to rekindle the spirit of hope. Has poetry not always spelt hope in dark times? Over a hundred voices of unparalleled resilience have gathered here to speak… It is a word of love, solace and bonding; the word the world today is sorely in need of hearing. GULAMMOHAMMED SHEIKH, artist and author
Singing in the Dark brings together the finest of poetic responses to the coronavirus pandemic. More than a hundred of the world’s most esteemed poets reflect upon a crisis that has dramatically altered our lives, and laid bare our vulnerabilities. The poems capture all its dimensions: the trauma of solitude, the unexpected transformation in the expression of interpersonal relationships, the even sharper visibility of the class divide, the marvellous revival of nature and the profound realization of the transience of human existence. The moods vary from quiet contemplation and choking anguish to suppressed rage and cautious celebration in an anthology that serves as an aesthetic archive of a strange era in human history.
Women, Dreaming
‘Salma’s novel takes you into a world of women. It is writing that describes the inner universe of women who do not know the outside world. Salma deftly shows [how] these women navigate their sad, emotional landscape, holding time in their hands, gradually stepping outside their sorrows. Everything here is fresh, including their feminine language. Traditionalist mindsets may not be taken in by this novel where stories emerge from under the blanket of tradition, revealing that a break with the old order is inevitable’
–Perumal Murugan, Indian author, scholar and literary chronicler who writes in Tamil
‘Women, Dreaming is an evocative double bill of fierce feminine lifescapes, with the iconic Salma’s searing Tamil narrative rendered in translucent English by the hugely gifted Meena Kandasamy’
–Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and festival director
‘Women grapple with life in a universe constructed by men, for men[,] in this moving story set in a tiny village in Tamil Nadu. Despite the claustrophobic trappings of religious patriarchy, they chart their own course and find their own voice. In Salma’s splendid telling, even those who appear to remain static resist through words and silence. Meena Kandasamy’s effortless translation is imbued with the fragrance of Tamil’
–T.M. Krishna, Carnatic vocalist, writer, activist and author
Mehar dreams of freedom and a life with her children. Asiya dreams of her daughter’s happiness. Sajida dreams of becoming a doctor. Subaida dreams of the day when her family will become free of woes. Parveen dreams of a little independence, a little space for herself in the world. Mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, neighbours . . .
In a tiny Muslim village in Tamil Nadu, the lives of these women are sustained by the faith they have in themselves, in each other, and the everyday compromises they make. Salma’s storytelling-crystalline in its simplicity, patient in its unravelling-enters this interior world of women, held together by love, demarcated by religion, comforted by the courage in dreaming of better futures.
Women, Dreaming is a beautiful novel by writer and activist Salma, translated exquisitely from the Tamil by Meena Kandasamy.
Missing A Magnificent Superdog
The Orange Marmaladies are back!
This time they have captured Rousseau, the timetelling superdog, and taken him to Marmaland, to find out what makes him tick.
The Ghosh family are frantic, but before they know it, matters take a turn for the worse. Two happy Marmaladies, who had come to Earth to see their favourite Bollywood star, have been captured and declared terrorists. How will the Ghoshes get Rousseau back? Will he return in time to save the poor Marmaladies?
The Penguin Book of Classical Indian Love Stories and Lyrics
Set in regions of great natural beauty where Kamadeva, the god of love, picks his victims with consummate ease, these stories and lyrics celebrate the myriad aspects of love. In addition to relatively well-known works like Kalidasa’s Meghadutam and Prince Ilango Adigal’s Shilappadikaram, the collection features lesser-known writers of ancient India like Damodaragupta (eighth century AD), whose ‘Loves of Haralata and Dundarasena’ is about a high-born man’s doomed affair with a courtesan; Janna (twelfth century), whose Tale of the Glory-Bearer is extracted here for the story of a queen who betrays her handsome husband for a mahout, reputed to be the ugliest man in the kingdom; and the Sanskrit poets Amaru and Mayaru (seventh century), whose lyrics display an astonishing perspective on the tenderness, the fierce passion and the playful savagery of physical love. Also featured are charming stories of Hindu gods and goddesses in love, and nineteenth-century retellings of folk tales from different regions of the country like Kashmir, Punjab, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Both passionate and sensuous in its content, this book is sure to appeal to the romantic in all of us.
The Demon Seed
A representative selection from one of India’s leading fiction writers
The most versatile writer in Malayalam today, M.T. Vasudevan Nair has published short stories, novels, screenplays, as well as articles on the state of literature and cinema in India. At the heart of this collection is The Demon Seed, a fresh translation of Asuravithu, arguably one of his best novels. Published in Malayalam in 1962, it is an uncompromising look at the crumbling matrilineal order, and the breakdown of the joint family system.
The novel tells the story of Govindankutty, a young unemployed Nair boy. When his wealthy brother-in-law takes him on as the manager of his property, and a marriage is arranged for him, Govindankutty dares to dream for the first time in his life. He brings his bride home, eager to start life afresh, but discovers to his horror that she is already pregnant by another man-his urbane lawyer-cousin Krishnettan. Shattered by the knowledge that his family had connived to betray him, Govindankutty goes berserk. Finally, estranged from home and village, he converts to Islam in the ultimate gesture of defiance. Tautly written and brilliantly characterized, The Demon Seed is a powerful novel about a society in transition.
The collection also brings together six of MT’s best stories, including ‘Vanaprastham’, The Jackal’s Wedding’ and ‘Sherlock’. Also included are ‘The Era of Ramanan’, an essay on the impact of the first modem verse romance in Malayalam, and a beautifully crafted piece on contemporary cinema. Taken together, these writings are testimony to the remarkable range and depth of M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s work.