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Jayanti Naik says in the preface to the book: ‘This English translation will of- fer a glimpse into the true nature of Goansociety … different from the prevailing ste- reotyped and touristic images of Goa.’ The eleven stories in the collection are about ‘the salt of the earth’, that is, good and decent people who inhabit the villages in and around Quepem in South Goa. These people mainly belong to the ‘Bahujan Samaj’, as people of non-elite castes describe themselves. The 55- year old author and folklorist Jayanti Naik knows them well and her stories celebrate their myths, superstitions and folklore. Al- though the day-to-day lives of her charac- ters may be mundane what impressed me were the psychological insights extracted from them with her narrative skills.

Kiranmayi Indraganti’s book Her Majestic Voice gives us a broad socio-cultural study of the evolution of South Indian women playback singers of the mid-twentieth century. The book presents this vast but relatively unexplored field through the lives and careers of four important women playback singers, namely: P. Bhanumati, Ravu Balasaraswati Devi, Jikki Krishnaveni and K. Jamuna Rani, apart from a study of Lata Mangeshkar, whose career and choices are often set as a benchmark of comparison.

Books on performing arts in India have   either been of the coffee table variety or dense and too theoretical. Books on classical dance in particular have often reiterated the existing primers and treatises like the Natya Shastra or the Abhinaya Darpana. Dance photography of course is a visual delight and some books on classical dance try to get by with a profusion of glamorous images. For too long, not much was written about the performing arts, for the tradition was sceptical of the written word and relied mostly on oral narrative accounts.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a prolific writer, social activist and a teacher of creative writing skills. In her latest work Before We Visit the Goddess she has deftly chronicled the diasporic enigmas spanning three generations and showcasing the agglutination of Indian and American cultural identities.

Here’s a real bonanza of stories! That’s what strikes one at first glance. Thirty-one short stories by well-known children’s authors … stories about school life-urban and rural, stories about dating and falling in love, futuristic stories that take one back to the crude past—that is, the present, strange stories about ghosts in boarding schools and school reunions, stories about stories that help make friends … it’s a lavish spread!

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.—Italo CalvinoThis is how Sudeep Sen introduces his book Ero Text to us. He brings together texts set in five sections—‘desire, disease, delusion, dream and downpour’. These pieces cross genres and boundaries of short prose, experimental fiction and poetry.