There is a certain caricature of Mumbai that is constantly evoked in popular representations—‘the city of dreams’ that came up from the sea, doting on the city’s unique heritage that remains severed from a history of its origin, where a rich sensation of the present prevails over…
Angshu Dasgupta’s Fern Road is far removed from the leafy promise of its title. It’s a tender tough novel which records the growing up years of Orko, a sensitive child, who has an extraordinary sense of empathy. Listening to the story of the Titanic, he finds himself plunging headlong into the ocean in his imagination…
Thadangal is the second novel by MA Susila who has published several collections of short stories and critical essays. In addition, she is an acclaimed translator. Her Tamil renderings of the legendary Fyodor Dostoevsky earned her many prestigious awards. She was a former Professor of Tamil and a committed activist for women’s issues in Madurai…
Leesa Gazi’s Hellfire originally came out in 2010 as Rourob, marking her debut as a bold voice in the tradition of women’s writing from the subcontinent. Hellfire engages with certain tropes that remain relevant and persistent contexts in conversations about gender and the complex legacies of patriarchy…
Throughout the arts, the human state of loneliness has been a theme that has been explored, analysed and taken refuge in, recurring throughout cinema, fiction and art. In Arupa Patangia Kalita’s collection of fifteen short stories, which is the English translation of her 2014 Sahitya Akademi winning…
‘Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.’—Hannah ArendtPerhaps the greatest achievement of Bitan Chakaborty’s collection of short stories The Mark (Chinha–in Bengali) is that it reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it…