In 2019, the Aleph Book Company brought out an imprint of Fatima Bhutto’s freshly penned book New Kings of the World: The Rise and Rise of Eastern Pop Culture. They decided to wrap the hardcover meant for Indian audiences in a shocking bubblegum pink. And placed a smirking Shah Rukh Khan top centre…
Loss is a set of essays and the first work of non-fiction and memoirs written by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. The book engages with the universal and rhetorical question of death and grief, based on a string of the author’s personal losses—the death of his father, mother and his dog…
The Covid-19 pandemic appears not just as a background in Zadie Smith’s collection of essays titled Intimations. Rather, it infects and pervades every subject matter that the author addresses. The book begins with a seemingly unpremeditated and light-hearted observation on tulips and the author’s fondness for peonies instead…
Ways of Dying: Stories & Essays is the sixth publication in the Aleph Olio series. Much like other works in the series such as Love and Lust, Notes from Hinterland, In a Violent Land, Ways of Dying is an ‘olio’ or miscellany of remarkable works of fiction and non-fiction, all of which harp on the sure companion of life: death…
Victory Colony, 1950 is the story of Amala and Manas, whose lives intersect in a post-Partition relief camp, unfolding multiple other refugee stories with them as the novel progresses. Bhaswati Ghosh’s novel begins with the tragic event of forced migration of people from East Pakistan, across the borders of India…
The memoir is a winner of Nine Dots Prize that is given for ‘innovative thinking as a means of tackling pressing problems facing the modern world’. The entrants were supposed to respond to the question, ‘Is there still no place like home?’ in a 3000-word essay…