Following My Heart is published by Dhauli Books—a cherished homegrown publishing house known for nurturing and supporting local literary initiatives. It is befitting that Joardar’s Manua, deeply entrenched in the vivid tapestry of the sights and sounds of Cuttack, should find a place for its English avatar in Dhauli Books.
Varavara Rao: A Life in Poetry—Is it a life in Poetry or A Livewire of Poetry? ‘Livewire is Better than a Poet’ is the title of an early poem and ‘Birds like my urge for freedom/ Waiting on the power line’ are lines from another poem titled ‘Companion’.
Enoch’s Ananta Jeevanam describes the life of Anantpur city caught in incessant rains in a drought-prone region. He portrays how the lives of the people of the town were overwhelmed by the devastating downpour. The book reminds one of James Joyce whose work Dubliners captured the essence of Dublin. It also unearths stories of the unwept and the unsung many, along with the fortunes of the feudal family of Nelagallu Zamindar.
While raising her concerns over calculated cultural coercion and divisive politics, Maninder Sidhu presents Sahgal as a crusader whose literary writings caution against the thinly disguised hegemonic practices to dismantle the social-cultural fabric of India.
The novel is premised on the inner lives of three eponymous and devoted women on the Coromandel Coast during British imperialism. Their intertwined lives along the Coromandel coast aim to recover and reframe the personal and public lives of women in the subcontinent, especially during the British colonial period.
Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I’d never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles here and reminiscing about my own.