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...

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...

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...

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Mother Mary Comes to Me“[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that haunting.”—USA TodayCo...

In 9 Gold Bullets, the twelfth novel in Christopher G. Moore's Shamus Award-winning Vincent Calvino noir detective series, a priceless collection of gold bullet coins from the reign of Rama V has vanished—along with a prominent Thai collector. When Bangkok police trace a link to Calvino's childhood friend Josh Stein, now ensnared by a ruthless Russian client, the case draws Calvino into a web of international intrigue.As the private eye pursues the trail of the missing coi...

In September 1996, fourteen-year-old Fatima Bhutto hid in a windowless dressing room, shielding her baby brother, while shots rang out in the dark outside the family home in Karachi. This was the night her father Murtaza was murdered. It was the latest in a long line of tragedies for one of the world's best-known political dynasties.Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of a family of feudal landlords who became powerbrokers. It is an epic tale of intrigue, the making o...

The Jungle Book is a collection of stories by British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–4. The original publications contain illustrations, some by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After about ten years in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six-and-half years. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Verm...

“Among many recent books on Pakistan, Mr. Akbar’s stands out….A fine and detailed history of Indian Muslim anger and insecurity.”—The EconomistIn Tinderbox, India’s leading journalist delivers a fascinating narrative history of Pakistan, chronicling the conflict between Muslim and Hindu cultures in South Asia and describing the role that their relationship has played in defining both the country and the region. Editorial director of India Today and editor of the Sunday Guar...

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 ...

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...