Novel Hasinabad covers a long socio-political span from the 1960s to the first decade of the new millennium—a journey from ‘Hasinabad’ to ‘Hussainabad’. While the writer has a firm grip on the representation of Hasinabad, a colony of concubines set up by the zamindars of Bihar, she loses that hold when the place gets transformed to Hussainabad, under pressure of democracy finally making inroads into the interiors.
As a fellow writer, the fifth novel of Geetanjali Shree leaves you wonderstruck with its sweeping imagination and the sheer power of language, unprecedented and uninhibited. She is known for her experiments with content and form, but this novel keeps you in its grip with the storyline as well, which had not really been her forte earlier.
Main Jab Tak Aai Bahar is Gagan Gill’s fifth collection of poems. She established her poetic self with the publication of her first collection itself, Ek Din Lautegi Ladki (The Girl will Return One Day) published in 1983. It was unusual to publish an entire collection of poems around the theme of a girl’s journey. Gagan Gill has never claimed to be a feminist poet, but in the center of her poetic self, the journey of this female self is recognized as epistemologically valid.
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).
