Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems | versions by Robert Bly and Jane Hirschfield, afterword by John Stratton Hawley [in AsianWeek]
Contemporary American poets Bly and Hirschfield present English versions of works by the legendary Mirabai. Born in India in 1498, Mirabai is one of the original independent women of history, eschewing social morés to live a...
Nobel Prize-winner Naipaul continues Willie Chandran’s life story from
A touching, slim coming-of-age novel about young Maya who travels one summer to Chennai, India, with her mother. Both mother and daughter are still stinging from a year-old divorce. There in the folds of...
The final installation in Mehta’s 11-title series, Continents of Exile, explores his father’s love affair with another woman, documented through their love letters – the eponymous Red Letters. Written without judgment following the deaths...
The first-ever comprehensive anthology in the West of Indian writing, represented in prose, poems, and memoirs by 38 writers from the 1850s to the 1990s.
Review: <a...
Calling himself "quite an ordinary man" even as he tops his country's List of Shame, Vikram Lall recounts four decades of his "in-between" life in...
Bombay plays the starring role in this entertaining (at times disturbing) epic memoir by a South Asian American writer who returns to the world’s largest city – now called Mumbai – with his London-raised...
What begins as an arranged marriage between a legendary beauty and a dashing doctor is anything but a happily-ever-after tale. But it is a sweeping love story that will stay...
Oh, wow!! What a compelling debut novel: Lonely, orphaned Ramchand, cheated out of any inheritance, works in a small sari shop. His quiet existence is challenged by two extremes: the overindulged, hypocritical life of...
From the author of the devastating
The Tree Bride picks up where
Oooh, this one would make a sweeping epic film for sure – Bollywood’s even got a starring role already! An innocent underage girl is seduced by a smoothtalking Bollywood star and gives birth to...
If you don’t feel like dealing with planes, trains, and automobiles this summer, grab a lawn chair and this book instead. Head to far-flung areas around the globe and experience the surreal...
A lyrical debut novel about a young Muslim Indian woman, who returns to her ancestral home to fulfill her destiny of marrying her betrothed. But from the very beginning, the...
The paperback edition of an important title that explores the frontline news happening in a complicated, troubled, often misunderstood part of the world where war, terrorism and endless ethnic conflict have ravaged...
A striking, original collection of multi-layered short stories about life caught between the old and modern, between expectations and hopes, between dreams and reality. The opening story, “Gopal’s Kitchen,” is especially poignant about a...
Eleven essays capture almost a half-century of Nobel Prize-winning Naipaul’s literary life. The final essay, “Two Worlds,” which he begins and ends by invoking Proust, is the lecture he gave when accepting the Nobel...
Capturing her rollicking journey through India’s phenomenal Bollywood industry, journalist Hardy recounts the glitz and glitter of stars, their starlets, directors and various groupies as she searches for elusive pretty-boy, mega heartthrob Hrithik Roshan.
Review:...
Born Hiranyagabha Chakraborti in 1857 during the time of the Indian Mutiny (when Indians rebelled against the ruling British) on the same day of his father’s death, Hiran (as he comes to be called)...
The woman who inspired the Taj Mahal had all but been lost to history until Sundaresan recreated her in her historical novel The Twentieth Wife, released earlier this year in paperback. Sundaresan...