Venu Gopalakrishna

A painting could be worth a thousand words but a picture book is worth much more, since the illustrations contribute much more to the story than the text. A series of ten Telugu picture books was published by Manchi Pustakam in association with Telugu Association of North America (TANA) in November 2021. Each of these books, adorned with colourful illustrations, is twenty-four pages long. Here is a sneak peek into what the books have in store for the readers.


Reviewed by: Pavithra VS

If I recall my childhood, we grew up surrounded by books, books of all kinds. Many of them had beautiful illustrations. Children and books were as if integrated.There were many authors in Bangla who used to write for children and all were among the established ones such as Upendra Kishore Roy Choudhury, Leela Majumdar, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Tarasankar Bandopadhyay, Sukumar Ray, Sharad Chandra Chattopadhyay.


Editorial
Malini Mukherjee

A few months ago, I watched the film Back to the Future, an American science fiction film made in three parts. There, the protagonist, Marty, and his friend move across time and space, to the future to save lives and to the past for solving scientific experiments that have gone askew. Science fiction has been a part of various art forms in the West for centuries.


Reviewed by: Proma Basu Roy
Jaya Mitra

This is a ‘novel for adolescents’, a thing that is hard to define.  But the necessary condition for an adult writing a ‘novel for the adolescents’ is that the writer must return to her own adolescence, because years of growing up alter the life of the writer significantly as compared to the life projected in the story. Yet, the writer retains a flow of perspective on the world and life, and on the philosophical outlook.


Reviewed by: Priyatosh Dutta
Dipanwita Roy

True to the genre of science fiction, this volume is teeming with aliens and spaceships, time travel, robots, the future world and amazing scientific inventions that tempt wrong-doers and children alike. A wonderful collection of sci-fi short stories that will tantalize young minds.The stories are told from the perspective of a child-hero who interacts with the adult world or even aliens on his own terms.


Reviewed by: Indrani Barua

Konkani is spoken in four States—Goa and the coastal regions of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. There are 40 lakh speakers, of which about 16 lakhs are in Goa. There are five scripts used for writing Konkani—Malayalam, Kannada, Devnagari, Roman and Arabic. Recently, the Konkani community from Kerala decided to switch the script from Malayalam to Devnagari. With such diversity, an apparent challenge that one may encounter in Konkani literature is of transliteration.


Editorial