How does Indian fiction imagine urban transformation? India's cities were once maligned as places of economic stasis and deprivation but in the era of the so-called New India (2000-present) centres like Delhi and Mumbai have been recast as 'engines of economic growth' and reshaped by prestige infrastructure. Yet the provision of core infrastructures for all remains a major challenge for urban governance. City Fictions is the first study of its kind to read anglophone Indian writin...

In this book, leading scholars working on urban South Asia chart new forms of literature about contemporary Delhi.Incorporating original contributions by Delhi-based commentators and covering significant new themes and genres, it updates current critical understanding of how contemporary literature has registered the momentous economic and social forces reshaping India’s major cities. This timely volume responds not only to the contextual challenge of a Delhi transformed by economi...

On publication Arundhati Roy's first novel The God of Small Things (1997) rapidly became an international bestseller, winning the Booker Prize and creating a new space for Indian literature and culture within the arts, even as it courted controversy and divided critical opinion.This guide to Roy’s ground-breaking novel offers:an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of The God of Small Thingsa critical history, surveying the many...

This collection offers an essential, structured survey of contemporary fictions of South Asia in English, and includes specially commissioned chapters on each of the national traditions of the region. It covers less well known writings from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well as the more firmly established canon of contemporary Indian literature, and features chapters on important new and emergent forms such as the graphic novel, genre fiction and the short story. It also contextual...

In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of terrorism, insurgency and the literature of colonial India, Alex Tickell re-envisages the political aesthetics of empire. Organized around key crisis moments in the history of British colonial rule such as the ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta, the anti-thug campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 Rebellion, anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London and the Amritsar massacre in 1919, this timely book reveals how the terrorizing threat of violence mutual...

This edition of The Jungle Book (Illustrated) is a fully differentiated version enriched with more than 15 newly created, high-quality black-and-white illustrations.Designed to revive the magic of Rudyard Kipling's timeless classic, this edition combines faithful reproduction of the original public-domain text with exclusive artwork inspired by traditional 19th-century engraving techniques.Discover - or rediscover ...

First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan's finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu.The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally "rain-moon tales") alludes to the belief that mysterious be...

The Indian bestseller. "A delightful pot-pourri of a book . . . far more than just a beauty book for women, it is also a repository of Indian culture." —Charles Allen, internationally bestselling author of Plain Tales from the RajAlmond Eyes, Lotus Feet is the fictional memoir of a wise Indian princess, who recalls the ways the women of the Indian court found friendship, faith, and love through their beauty traditions. We journey with her as she recounts a ...

From the preeminent writer of Taiwanese nativist fiction and the leading translator of Chinese literature come these poignant accounts of everyday life in rural and small-town Taiwan. Huang is frequently cited as one of the most original and gifted storytellers in the Chinese language, and these selections reveal his genius.In "The Two Sign Painters," TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. "His Son's Big Doll" introd...

Chu T'ien-hsin's The Old Capital is a brilliant evocation of Taiwan's literature of nostalgia and remembrance. The novel is centered on the question, "Is it possible that none of your memories count?" and explores the reliability of remembrances and the thin line that separates fact from fantasy.Comprised of four thematically linked stories and a novella, The Old Capital focuses on the cultural and psychological realities of contemporary Taiwan. The stories are na...

Kamasutra 2.0 condenses the expertise of the core parts of Vatsyayana's Kamasutra, the famous two thousand year old Sanskrit treatise which has dominated the erotic love traditions of India, into a simple, essential guide book.This book describes all the sexual postures and methods -- embraces, kisses, nail marks, bites, strikes, and moans – enumerated in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra (as well as some added in the later kamasastras) and connects them to classification of women and men.

The classic story of a woman in post-World War II China. "[A] complex and penetrating portrayal . . . that best displays [Anyi's] gifts as a novelist."— The New York TimesInfatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao—a girl born of the longtang, the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods—seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant. This fleeting moment of...