Sarabjit Sen, Debkumar Mitra, Sekhar Mukherjee and Pinaki De

Four years after the publication of their first anthology of graphic narratives, Longform returns with this eagerly awaited second outing, with eighteen texts from India and abroad. This visually and textually provocative collection of stories breaks boundaries and exposes fault lines of the ‘invisible India’ and the world at large, with an unflinching honesty and empathy for all those who fall off the map or are erased from it.


Reviewed by: Anjana Neira Dev
Sonnet Mondal

Sonnet Mondal’s fifth collection of poetry, An Afternoon in My Mind, is a compelling portrayal of contemporary times, when personal grief merges with pandemic loss and loneliness. The book consumes readers and makes them believe that Mondal’s sorrow is their own. It is evident that the poems in this collection are written as a cathartic release, and hence they become an exercise for readers in collective healing.


Reviewed by: Shamayita Sen
Vinayan Bhaskaran

Having perused Vinayan Bhaskaran’s previous books, such as Beyond the Blue River and The Grand Story of Ikli Chokli (Tulika Books), both children’s books, it was (pleasantly) startling to come across his debut poetry collection, The Quiet Archway within Words. The fantastical story-telling, lush hyperboles and leaps of imagination of the former two, understandably, give way to a very different voice in the latter—a voice which is by turns lonely, rebellious, sardonic, and empathetic to what it perceives to be fundamentally apathetic world.


Reviewed by: Ankush Banerjee
Girish Karnad. Translated from the original Kannada by Girish Karnad and Srinath Perur

The publication of Girish Karnad’s aadatha aayushya, aptly translated as this life at play was a much-awaited event among Kannada reading public. The first two chapters published initially in a literary magazine and later serialized in a leading Kannada daily, had created tremendous expectations.  When the book finally arrived in 2011, it was a rare feast not just for its richly textured narrative, but also for its language replete with local idioms soaked in Dharwad dialect which we rarely get to see in his plays.


Reviewed by: V S Sreedhara
Surendranath S. Translated from the original Kannada by Prathibha Nandakumar

And what is more generous than a window?’ So wondered Pat Schneider in her poem, ‘The Patience of Ordinary Things’. Indeed, for a certain unnamed special boy in an unnamed town, the generosity of a window in his parents’ room that overlooks the road is his daily act of joy, his succour, even nearly the entirety of his world. 


Reviewed by: Deepa Bhasthi
Edited by E. Annamalai, C. T. Indra, Christina Muru and T. Sriraman

S Ramakrishnan (1944–2020) wrote thus in an article presented at a seminar held by the National Book Trust in 1977.  He had just founded a small publishing house called CreA in 1974 along with his partner and colleague V. Jayalakshmi (1930–1987). From 1974 to 2020 till he passed on, Ramakrishnan lived his dream of creating a book culture by small publishers


Reviewed by: V Arasu