Where do stories come from? Where and how do they reach? How does the reader respond to the stories unknown, unheard and unwritten earlier? How do stories of the other become instrumental in understanding the interface between the self and the other? The twelve stories in Asprishya Ganga and Other Stories articulate the experience specific to identities such as community, class, occupation, region and language.
Pebble Monkey! What an enchanting title, you think. You open the novella to a quaint world–at 12,000 feet, on a snowy mountainous terrain, live ibexes. One ibex dislodges a pebble. The pebble is thrown up in the air, and when it falls it bounces into the tunnel. Soon afterwards, someone can be heard swimming in the water.
Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed is a lavish book, with a plethora of complex themes dealt with in a generous, benevolent way. The canvas is large. It straddles America and Chennai, misogyny and homophobia, Islam and Blackness in America, and a slice of time stretching from America’s attack on Iraq up to Obama’s victory in elections.
As the title itself suggests, childhood and memory are the two very important dramatis personae of this book. Deepa Agarwal is an accomplished writer of literature for children and young adults. It is this biozone that her reading and imagination have revealed and animated for her readers. And, when she uses this expertise to cross-pollinate her poetry, the result is as vibrant as a field of wildflowers in the bugyals of the Himalayas.
Written in lyrical prose, Sharanya Manivannan’s graphic novel, is a treat to read. It evokes emotions as does powerful poetry. The accompanying sketches by Manivannan recreate a magical world under water. Page colours include multiple shades of blue, red, and yellow, while doodles and writing are in white. The book explores stories and lore about merfolk.
…when, as a consequence of the growing age of human society, the swaddling cloth of its infancy starts oppressing its body, would it not be better at that time to create for it an extensive cloth of new ideas? Must we constrain its body such that it fits within its old limits?’—these words are a part of the introduction by the writer Yashpal for his seminal political novel that was considered a pioneer in the world of Hindi literature and was published in the early 1940s.