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.
Life in an ‘edgy’ city is more a cause for dread than for wonder in our part of the world. The violent underside of ‘developing’ neo-colonial/globalizing urban spaces has had its share of steady gazes, for instance, Mumbai, Maximum City or even Calcutta: City of Joy. So, the immersive experience of Karachi that Samina Shackle offers us echoes and resonates with the subcontinental reader in a way that goes beyond exoticization of a culturally and economically distant land.
Tales of Hazaribagh is much more than the exploratory travelogue its title promises: along with a rich, complex narrative of Vatsa’s discoveries of the Chhotanagpur Plateau, it has autobiography, stories of suspense and the supernatural in the best tradition of ghost stories, social critique, historiography, and an intimate introduction to his roads, his waterfalls, his friends and family.