Any historical account of modern UP has to inevitably confront the question: Is there still a need for yet another work on UP? Haven’t all the things worth saying already been said about the polity, economy and society of UP in the 20th century? For an exhaustive answer to the question readers are advised to go through Region,
Sivakami’s first novel Pazhiyana Kazhidalum was published in Tamil in 1989. It was the first novel by a dalit woman writer in Tamil. Although Bama is a more familiar name to non-Tamil readers, Sivakami is a highly respected writer in Tamil Nadu. Her first novel was a milestone in Tamil literary domain.
Every now and then one comes across a first novel that makes one sit up and wonder why you had not heard about the writer before–this is one such wonderful debut. Letters for Paul, which despite its title is not an epistolatory novel,
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Quite right. The bland title and cover picture of The Top of the Raintree signal nothing of its brilliance. It is witty, vivid, evocative and informed. And the writing is sharp and compelling.
Perhaps it is inevitable that anthologies on Goa always tend to sound like they are addressed and written for an ‘outside’ world, an outside that can be found close to home, on Goa’s beachfront. Any region that in popular stereotype is ‘not like India’ is in danger of being condemned to permanent ethnography,
This exotically produced hardback is the kind of book one would not wish to waste much papyrus on. Filled with large size colour pictures of erotic art, presumably done in the miniature art format of the Mughal and Rajasthani schools, the reader-spectator who wishes for more academic information is left clueless about the time of composition and the regions to which these belong (there is only a list of collections from which these have been taken on p. 189).