What happens when words begin to constitute worlds that are far more desirable than the ones that we find ourselves in everyday? When the overwhelming presence of social media and digital platforms virtually threatens to create an alternative reality that seems both promising as well as indisputable? These are some of the most pressing issues of post-millennial India…
Radhakrishna Prakashan has brought out the second edition (the first edition was published in 2009) of Mannu Bhandari’s Sampurna Upanyas. As the title suggests, the book comprises Bhandari’s limited but highly significant oeuvre of novel writing—Ek Inch Muskan (1963), an experimental novel, written in collaboration with the famous writer and her husband Rajendra Yadav, Apka Bunty (1971), Mahabhoj (1979), and Swami (1982).
This edited book is a collection of sixteen essays and speeches of Namvar Singh on his guru, the scholar and writer, Hazariprasad Dwivedi. It also contains a small separate section of references on Dwivedi that are scattered in Namvar Singh’s other writings and interviews. The book begins with the assertion that it embodies the joint wisdom of this pair of writer-critic-scholars in which each illuminates the writing of the other.
When ‘Hindi Crime King’ Surendra Mohan Pathak took the dais at the third annual Noir Literature Festival at the Oxford Book Store in Delhi’s Connaught Place in January 2017, he faced a rapt audience of fans tightly packed into and spilling out beyond the rows of folding chairs set up at the back of the store. Pathak grinned alongside festival organizer Namita Gokhale as the two unwrapped and posed with the hot-off-the presses release from HarperCollins India…
Dreams and reality merge in this 2016 dystopian novel by the well-known Hindi satirist and writer Purushottam Agrawal. The novel begins when a crocodile leisurely walks down a small street and begins to chew on the leg of an elephant who happens to be lying there. No one seems to notice. Then Suket, our protagonist, wakes from this disturbing dream, reaching for a glass of water. It is 3 a.m. In the next scene, over two hundred students are protesting Professor Suket for being ‘anti-national’.
Kunwar Narain was one of the few Hindi poets who believed in the universality of all indegenous poetic experiences and thought of himself as an integral part of the great brotherhood of world poets. His poetry stands as a testimony to this. Apart from poetry and literature, his concerns ranged from world cinema, music, theatre to various branches of knowledge.